Innovations

The Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory (HASTAC) is the world’s first and oldest academic social network.  Cathy N. Davidson is cofounder and director of this network of humanists, artists, social scientists, scientists and technologists working together to transform the future of learning for the 21st century. Since 2002, HASTAC (“haystack”) has served … Co-Founder HASTAC, Changing the Way We Teach and Learn 2002-present

The Digital Media and Learning Competition is an effort designed to find and to inspire the most novel uses of new media in support of learning. Over the past 5 years, the Competition has awarded $10 million to more than 100 projects in 20 countries that explore how technologies—including games, mobile phone applications, virtual worlds, … HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition

In 1998, President Nannerl Keohane and Provost John Strobehn appointed Cathy Davidson as the first full-time Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University (and the first in the nation).  The mission, defined broadly, was to underline Duke’s commitment to increasing academic and administrative effectiveness in interdisciplinary teaching and research and create new cost, administrative, … First Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies

In 2003, there was not a single known educational use for the iPod. Apple approached Duke University about giving laptops or multimedia suites to students as part of an Apple Digital Campus initiative. Cathy Davidson recommended that Duke select iPods because students loved them and it would challenge students to  think about pedagogical uses of … iPod Experiment

Duke Professors Cathy N. Davidson and David F. Bell co-created the Duke PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge in 2012 to supplement the education of PhD and MFA students, primarily but not exclusive in the human and social sciences, with a range of digital technologies, workshops on digital self-presentation and publication, and multimodal and multimedia scholarly … PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge

The mission of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University is to encourage and enable serious humanistic inquiry, and to promote a heightened awareness of the centrality of the humanities to the quality of human life, social interaction, and scholarship in all fields. To these ends, we emphasize a broad conception of interdisciplinarity … Co-Founding Director, John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute

Digital badges are a powerful new tool for identifying and validating the rich array of peoples’ skills, knowledge, accomplishments and competencies. The world is changing fast and, today more than ever, traditional modes of assessment fail to capture the learning that happens everywhere and at every age.   Digital badges inspire new pathways to learning and … Badging

In 2006, Davidson began teaching classes where students work in teams of two or four (depending on the class size) and set the syllabus and assignments for the other students.   All assignments are conducted in public online, with students using pseudonyms to comply with FERPA rulings, except in two “public contributions to knowledge,” where students … Peer-taught classes

Instead of a conventional graduate class on “21st Century Literacies:  Digital Knowledge, Digital Humanities,” Davidson and her class collaborated on a book that would guide others trying to adapt the methods of open source programming to open source learning, Field Notes for 21st Century Literacies A Guide to New Theories, Methods, and Practices for Open … Students write book together instead of term paper

Davidson has been a national leader in proposing, exploring, designing, and utilizing new forms of assessment, ranging from badging to contract grading to peer-to-peer assessments (gaining notoriety with a blog “How To Crowdsource Grading”). http://hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/how-crowdsource-grading Erica Hendry, “Duke Professor Uses ‘Crowdsourcing’ to Grade,” Wired Campus, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 30, 2009. http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/duke-professor-uses-crowdsourcing-to-grade/7538