This semester several of us in the Ryerson Library (librarians, developers, co-ordinator of our Digital Media Experience Lab) are contributing to a course, HIS500 being taught to upper-year students at Ryerson by Art Blake.  Many of these students are history majors, but there are also students who come from other disciplines across campus.  Library staff will be assisting with this course by drawing on our previous experiences with various digital media tools and, in particular, with a tool called RULA Maps. RULA Maps  was developed by the Library in conjunction with the Ryerson Department of Architectural Science for use one of its courses.   The plan is to build upon the RULA Maps app for a class project tentatively called Feeling Ryerson, Feeling Toronto.  The app was initially designed with buildings as the focal points, but with this project we hope to incorporate emotions and narratives into the app.

As part of this class we are also exploring using Slack for communication.  Slack is a team collaboration tool that allows for communication between individuals and groups and is available for use on desktop, laptop and via downloadable apps for iOs and Android.  Use of this app for communication was slow to start, but now that we have started working on the class project, Slack is getting much more use.  Several groups have been set up in Slack to facilitate communication within and between the various teams.

Also of interest in this course is the use of an Open Access textbook, Writing History in the Digital Age that is distributed under a distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 United States license.  Students are commenting on the readings from this text in the blogs that they have set up for this class.  These blogs are aggregated on the History and New Media Fall 2015 blog.