A worsening problem I am having is an overall decline in basic digital literacy in my students. Since many of my classes turn on interrogating humanities materials with digital tools, or interrogating the digital from a humanities perspective (ie, DH!) this means I am spending ever more frustrating amounts of time just trying to get people up and running. Nothing is more tedious/maddening that trying to configure several different versions of (rapidly enshittfying) windows, a few chromebooks, some older macs, and the one person who turns up with a linux box. Oh, there’s usually an older ipad or a microsoft surface too.
So I built something to help with that – a dh tutorial platform built on top of pyodide so that my dh students can grapple with the ‘why’ of things first, and leave the nuts-and-bolts for their own machine later, once they’ve worked out what matters. (Benefits of pyodide: everything stays in the local browser.)