Digital Humanities covers a wide breadth of disciplines, methodologies, and interests, but one thing all DHers seem to have in common is a set of digital tools, apps, and websites that help us in our work.  While we may have discovered these tools from reading about them on sites like Lifehacker or Profhacker or by trolling the Internet on our own search, I suspect we mostly learn about them through conversation with colleagues.  What if we could speed up the serendipity by having a tool kit exchange where we share some of our technology tools for doing our work?

Categories we might consider include:

• If you were stranded on a desert island, what two or three tools would you most want with you?  What can you absolutely not do without?
• What are your favorite tools for pedagogy and to engage students?  Why do you like them?
• What do you use for your own research?
• Do you have a favorite repository site for images, digital texts, maps, etc.?
• What do you wish someone would develop?

Here’s the catch:  the tools must be free.

We could have a lightning exchange where we share the tools, how we’ve used them, and why we like them. In the tradition of “open mike” time, we could have a laptop connected to a projector (if the room allows) and let anyone step up to the computer and show the site, subject to a 5 minute limit.

It would be a quick and fun way to learn if there are a standard set of utilities that form the core of our collective tool kit and well as to discover that new tool we might have been looking for all along but didn’t know existed.

The flip-side to the Digital Aliens? session… Our students are digital natives, but not consciously aware of how to learn from, leverage or be critical of the technology they’ve grown up with. Often they perceive only the social and entertainment value of the web, mobile devices and digital services. What techniques can we use to engage students in a meaningful dialogue about the power and pitfalls of technology?

The term “digital native” often does not seem a particularly apt description of contemporary students, implying that they are comfortable or proficient with a variety of digital tools and formats. I’ve often thought that the term is really a polite way of saying something about older generations of faculty and administrators, that our students are comfortable with digital media by comparison. I’d like to hear about what kinds of best practices have been used in liberal arts institutions to develop general faculty and administrative familiarity and proficiency with digital practices and social media–not on the level of “How to Use Moodle” but aiming for the more abstract, intellectual understandings that inform our work with other media and other competencies or skills.