Whether you are leading a full-year overseas program or a course community project, the IG site offers your students resources and a space for documenting their scholarly experiences. Here are basic steps for you in using the IG website for your program.
- Familiarize yourself with student instructions. Basic student info on the IG initiative and related themes, how to access IG readings via Zotero, and how to post on this IG site is available here.
- Make sure you are comfortable with this information, and feel free to contact us if questions.
- Complete a brief IG program record (currently limited to overseas programs; others possible in future). You have editor status on this site (login at bottom of any page): some basic program information you provide will prepare a page in which this information and related posts will be displayed.
- Recommended: Add related student scholarly projects. If your students are doing scholarly projects (e.g., as part of an independent study), they’ll typically document these projects on their own sites. You will quickly list their project title (in Post Title field), name(s), and a link to their project landing page (as requested of students); this student project information will then display in summary, linked form at the bottom of your IG program record. (ENVS note: Students doing ENVS 499 independent study projects also complete a brief project record on the ENVS group site.)
- Add readings to your IG program Zotero collection. We’ll provide you admin status on our IG group library, and you can readily add readings you’d like your students to do. Feel free to contact us if questions.
- Remember that the IG group library is private: only people whom we invite can join or view, so this keeps your publications secure.
- Consider how to integrate IG themes into your program. Here is quick background and a list current IG themes. Utilizing them may offer benefits to your program, and will provide an opportunity for students participating in other IG programs to compare their experiences to those of your students.
- Remember that we would appreciate recommended additions (i.e., specific text and references) to our themes.
- …and thank you in advance! We know these themes are broad and adventurous, and appreciate your contributions.
- Start using IG field tools and the IG site! Here is documentation on using the DS multisite and related computer and mobile device-based tools. Your students can document their experiences via regular IG posts on this site; those doing their own scholarly projects will usually post on their own sites, with a quick link post here. These posts may include text, still and motion images, maps, and other resources, including those collected in the field via mobile device apps. Students can draw upon one or more IG themes to help them interpret their experiences. By clicking the appropriate post categories (consider adding subcategories to your program as desired!), all posts related to your IG program and/or an IG theme will be grouped; thus you and others can readily find them. You can also quickly view all posts for a particular user.
- Note: This site is public, but all student posts reflect their contributor status, thus you’ll need to approve each post for it to display publicly. This gives you the opportunity to exercise quality control, and to help your students develop good public digital scholarship skills. One way to do this is go to all posts on the IG dashboard, then edit (i.e., view in edit window) each and click Publish; or select quick edit and change status from Pending Review to Published.
- Another note: If you’d like to work with images as a group, you can create one or more albums on our IG Flickr account; this makes it easy for your students to add images to their posts, for you to display collective slideshows, etc. For students doing their own projects, we encourage them to get their own Flickr accounts. Please contact us for details.
- Finally, in addition to your program page we can add other pages for your program, summarizing specific posts, adding a slideshow or map, etc.; just ask!