Mining History with Steem & Temple University

Steem with Graduate Students

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This month marks the beginning of History. History 5151 that is. @sndbox will be in Philadelphia for a Steemit workshop at Temple University later this month. Our incubator will be onboarding approximately 15 graduate students who plan to use Steemit as a empowering sounding board for their historical research throughout the Spring 2018 semester. The course is being led by @phillyhistory.

@sndbox will help generate new accounts for students (and any curious professors) using @jesta’s Vessel application. Vessel has become a fantastic resource for us during Steemit meetups and workshops. It allows us to quickly generate accounts for new users and illustrate the many benefits of Steem’s blockchain in the process.

Student Goals

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Each student will use their blog as a resource to document, archive, research and ask for feedback. This community account - @phillyhistory - will be used to share course resources with the broader Steemit public while simultaneously curating student posts and evaluate them through upvotes and metrics of engagement. With the Steem earned, the class will collectively be able to fund educational programming for the Philadelphia History Museum and surrounding community. You can read the full mission here.

The class has until May 2018 to blog and earn, afterwards a portion of their earnings (+100% of @phillyhistory’s) will be withdrawn to support Philadelphia History Museum programming and serve as a powerful proof of concept for utilizing Steemit. The whole of the class will decide what exact Steem-powered programming will look like. This is all of course very dependent on market conditions, but luckily @phillyhistory has been busy accumulating Steem to give the class a healthy head start.

We are thrilled to have such a rare opportunity, connecting Steem to two prestigious international institutions. Our goal is to showcase Steemit as a powerful resource to empower education while simultaneously providing a mechanism to fund additional research.

The Philadelphia History Museum collection consists of more than 130,000 artifacts including furniture, paintings, prints, photographs, books, signage, tools, clothing, maps, architectural models, scrapbooks, clocks, carts, etc. In teaming up with Temple, the PHM is exploring new strategies to enliven and enrich its massive holdings, a collection that is largely curated behind closed doors and locked drawers. Source.

How You Can Get Involved!

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Next week we’ll be launching a contest under the tag #explore1918. With this contest we’ll be asking the broader Steemit public to mine the history of their hometowns. Specifically, we’ll be exploring the year 1918. Why 1918? (Learn more here.) This year served as a special and important time for Philadelphia and the world as a whole. History is full of intertwined narratives and hidden stories. Our goal with this #explore1918 tag is to have students and Steemians alike dig into the past to perhaps discover some unique similarities.

Don’t blog about 1918 just yet! We’ll officially announce the challenge next week.

More to Explore

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Professor @kenfinkel is wrapping up the course syllabus as we speak (a little peak below). So stay tuned for the challenge next week and the beginning of the course this month! We’re excited to introduce a bunch of new academics and experiment with the potential of Steem + Education! Share your ideas below, we want your opinions, ideas, critiques, and suggestions of how to make this the most unique semester, the first to be fundamentally motivated by decentralized technologies.

Here's a sneak peak of a Steem-powered Syllabus. @phillyhistory's draft below:

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@phillyhistory will be a platform for a graduate level course at Temple University: “Nonprofit Management for Historians” (History 5151) with Professor Kenneth Finkel, @kenfinkel in the College of Liberal Arts at Temple University (Philadelphia, US). Show your support by following the account and taking part beginning January 2018!

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