Cathy N. Davidson

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…