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Neil Ferguson‘s mis-adventures in gaming are highlighted on Richard Mehlinger’s blog on HASTAC in a a post which reinforces the dangers of non-gamers getting swept up by the gee-whiz of digital games. I’ve always been wary of digital games for teaching, which is why I’ve always used old fashion non-digital game play and design in my history courses. Continue reading Theory=Model=Game There has been a great deal of excitement this week about the National Archives publication of images of selected documents on the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921; the full text of most of those documents has been available online for many years as part of the CELT collection at UCC. The online exhibit is good, and will draw attention to the original sources, but personally I find the transcriptions more useful. To my mind, taken together the entire range of documents shows DeValera in a fairly poor light – it highlights that he must have known that he would not get his fanciful dream of “External Association”. Continue reading End of Empire, Enter the Commonwealth? Teaching contemporary International Relations with in-class simulations is sometimes challenging when the simulation scenario may be radically changed by what is happening in the real world, but that is the challenge my HI3112 International Organisations students are dealing with this week in this terms conference game on the Horn Of Africa/Arab Spring. “Upstairs” literally as well as figuratively, the MA class are dealing with the problems of designing a game which bridges the gap between IR theory and contemporary crises for their assignment. Continue reading Gaming Reality History For a couple of years now, the question of fixing our creaking Arts degree has been floating round, and there is to be another round of “review” this year. Based on previous experience of reforms and new programmes, I think it is an impossible task, and we are better off starting with a clean sheet and designing a new degree from scratch, and rolling it out in parallel to the old BA degree. I think the old BA will continue to draw students for quite a few years, but I would love the chance to teach in a radically new kind of degree, with an interdisciplinary core, full credit accumulation and no lectures. If I had a blank sheet, here are some of the things I would have in a 21st Century degree:
First week of full term, and I am installed in my new office and dealing with changed and new courses – changes to Hi3112 International Organisations, and a new course Hi0090, Personal Development, which is basically a leadership course which I am looking forward to. Until it gets a Blackboard site, the introduction and materials will be here on my blog under Courses. Continue reading First Week..new courses, changed courses… August is often a quiet month, as people straggle back from beach to desk and and the new academic year, but this month has produced a fine crop of early autumnal fruit from the blog tree. This months History Canrival is a mixed bag of riots, roadways, building walls and observatories, executions, and playing games. Continue reading Flights, Riots and Anniversaries I had to explain why “Fourth Generation Warfare” is important for organizations last weekend at the Burren Slow Food Fleadh, and I thought I might set down a quick version of it here . We are all familiar with the old model of hierarchical organizations, but we are lagging a bit at moving to understanding and using the sort of networked models now emerging. Continue reading Fourth Generation Warfare & Organisations
Quoting O’Bama is a cheap trick this week, but it is a good headline to address the issue of the plethora of campaigns for reform that have spring up as a result of our current economic woes. Most focus on constitutional reform, or on fixing our banking laws, in the hope that we can find language for our laws which will make our society better. Without a long-term vision, textual editing of laws is deceptive and useless. Back when I was young, we were offered a vision of a brave new world driven by technology which would make all our lives better in the year 2000. Well, that was 11 years ago, and I still don’t have my personal jetpack. It seems to me that we need to improve our foresight process as we look towards 2050 Continue reading Imagining a better future..
I’ve just seen more evidence that academic publishing, and the research assessment mechanisms based on it, are fatally broken – yet another over priced journal on a narrow field and three books I should read priced at $180 each. I don’t agree with burning books, but I’ll happily torch some publishers Continue reading Academic Publishing Rip-Offs, Part XVII?? |
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All views expressed here are personal, and do not reflect the offical policies of the School of History, College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences, or University College, Cork. Copyright © 2012 Mike Cosgrave - All Rights Reserved |
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