As this term moves on, my Digital History students are (mostly) making progress on their blogs. For the course, an MA option, I decided that the assessment would be based on 10-12 blog postings showing the use of digital tools for history, and discussing readings in the area. We did all of the practical sessions last term, and I let them run wild applying those skills this term. I haven’t graded anything yet, but I am keeping an eye on things, and these are some of the highlights so far
Shane McAuliffe’s blog has had a certain elegant simplicity right from that start – I imagine he would say it has something to do with Macs being better! He uses his blog to capture reflections on his thesis in progress in medieval history in posts like The Magi:Thesis Musings but what really impressed me was his carefully put together demonstration of how to use powerpoint for the medieval MA class – I’ve done presentations like this and I know how much work goes into doing them properly. (and I really can’t claim credit for teaching him how to do this sort of work – he knew it already, but he’ll get marks for applying it).
I’ve encouraged all my Digital History students to use Wordle for quick and pretty text analysis, and Shane has usefully fed some Magi-related text at it. Frances has wordled some of her writing in progress while a very different source was used by Jackie Fitzgibbon, who is working on US Foreign Policy. She ‘wordled’ Jimmy Carter’s inaugural and farewell speeches, and captured the resulting images using the screen clipper in Evernote in a post that note only shows good use of screen capture but also shows significant differences in language between those two speeches – the farewell speech is more nuanaced and less hopeful than the inaugural.
Jackie went on to delve deeper into text analysis, using the tools on the TAPOR portal. Using the same two speeches, she has begun to extract wordlists and move towards looking a Key Words in Context lists which will throw up more interesting linkages. I think I got everyone hooked on Zotero, although only some people have posted about it. Brendan has reflected on the nature of the blogging process itself with some useful insights.
This sample doesn’t cover all the dozen or so course blogs; but it gives an idea if what is going on at the moment. The other teaching related work that is ongoing this weekend is that my second year undergrads are finishing their wargame design assignment. Those are due tomorrow, and some of them should be very good indeed – once I get them in, I may post a few images to show off their brilliance as well.
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