ProfHacker proposes that humanities scholars should learn digital tools. I disagree.

I like the idea proposed on this site for "The Humanities and Technology Camp", otherwise titled "Project "Develop Self-Paced Open Access DH Curriculum for Mid-Career Scholars Otherwise Untrained"". And I'm still thinking about it even though I already posted a comment disagreeing with it (which contained a typo, which according to academic blogosphere etiquette automatically disqualifies my thoughts).

It's my personal belief that faculty for the most part should spend more time on figuring out HOW they will change their teaching (or for that matter their research) than WITH WHAT. The "with what" changes so frequently and faculty who are interested usually can pick up the "with what" with minimal help, or on their own, once they know why they should bother.

This proposed camp sort of posits the opposite idea: that mid-career scholars are being held back by their lack of knowledge in FTP, HTML or CSS, and web server administration.

I have a strong prejudice against turning faculty into low-grade web designers or server administrators. A light gloss of technology skills doesn't necessarily help you really understand the technologies you're working with, or how to spot the revolutionary ones. In my opinion, RSS is revolutionary as it changes how people get information and travel the web and interact; CSS is not because it doesn't really affect any of those things (in fact almost by definition RSS supersedes it). Without a doubt there should be scholars prepared to argue such things; but I don't think the question pertains to most of us who just want to teach and research and survive. I think universities should provide technology specialists to work WITH the faculty and help support their interrogation, but I don't see that a lot of faculty themselves need to have (or be able to fake) those technology skills.

I also have a prejudice against this because faculty who do know how to modify a style sheet or install a PHP app with a pushbutton GUI think that's all we technologists do. There are huge differences between near-consumer-level technology skills and the skills of a professional technologist. But faculty who know enough to serve themselves in this area often don't want to understand how different it is to provide tools or services for 15,000 people instead of just one.

If I show a faculty member three ways they can integrate electronic discussion into their class, and some ways in which that can achieve some specific pedagogical goal (getting the quiet students to talk, increasing time spent on homework outside of class, or increasing time spent on critical thinking writing), that idea is going to be the same down through generations of technologies. I've used electronic discussion in my classes since 1992, and I have weathered VMS discussion boards, mailing lists, Blackboard and blogs. The basic idea is the same and as a teacher I only want to know about the technologies to the extent that they do or don't facilitate my teaching goals.

But I could be wrong. We could certainly offer more classes for faculty at Hofstra in such topics as web server administration. It's a skill that is certainly useful, and it's easier than ever now, when hosting solutions make everything push-button and hardly technical at all. Is that something we should be teaching our faculty? Do people who don't have those skills want to gain them?