Major changes in my teaching this year include the new Digital History MA Module, Hi6018, and that I’m teaching my section of Hi2002 entirely online. Links to those course pages and others are here. Course handouts will all be on the Blackboard or Moodle, but until you enroll in those courses, I’ll put copies of the introductory materials here as well.
Digital History in our MA programme now appears as HI6018, on Tuesday mornings. The content is developing slightly, as is the normal with an area of work which is evolving as the state of the art matures. A great deal of emphasis this year will be placed on using online tools for effective collaborative research, analysis and writing as professional historians in the age of ‘Web 2.0′ Some of the students from previous years did some interesting work on digitsing primary sources, some of which I should be able to post here shortly, but some is tied up by copyright restrictions. We have a nice electronic edition of a primer written for Elizabeth I by Lord Delvin. The original belongs to the library at Farmleigh, and we hope to develope a version for the web for them to use. Other interesting material from previous years includes newspaper articles about the Ladies Land League, an account of the Jacobite Wars and some work on the UN unit histories. There is also a substantial body of text from Wolfe Tone and the Drennan letters.
I am changing my contribution to the second year case study course. Formerly it was based on John Lynn’s book Battle, but I also used sections from Keegan’s Face of Battle and Ambrose’ Band of Brothers. However, this coming year I plan to use MacGregor Burns’ classic Transforming Leadership as a hanger to look at the issue of leadership in history which will bring back the ‘Great men in History’ debate, and some other favourite readings. The reason for the change is that leadership in history is a broader topic, and I wanted that as I plan to revert to my previous practice of teaching the case study entirely online. I did this in the past quite successfully with The Face of Battle but I let it slip for a few years. I think our students should have some experience of online learning to complement the traditional face to face model.
Next year it looks like the old favourites will be back – the Second year ‘War, State and Society’ option (HI2007), with the wargame design coursework exercise which worked very well over the past few years and which I have presetned papers on at several conferences on the Scholarship of Teaching and Leanring. My Third year ‘International Organisations’ option (HI3112) which is heavily simulation based will also be back on. I redesigned the major simulation for last year to make it more evenly balanced for all the ‘players’, and this worked very well so we will once again be simulating the diplomacy of the Lost Continent.
As well as my regular core teaching in Hi2001, the Third year Seminar, on ‘World War II’ will be back.
Right now, this is a minimal starter page, but I will be adding to it over the coming months. Students interested in planning for next year should feel free to look up my email on the UCC History Dept Website, and email me with queries.
Some of my courses in 2009-10 will use an Open Source learning system, Moodle. I’ll add a link here to that for ease of access once term gets underway properly. All of my course materials will be there, but from here you can also access the initial course handouts for my courses from the course pages listed in the menu on the right. (No, not that right, the other right)
These handouts are important, you should read them if you plan on taking my case study or my option next semester.
The handouts are in Adobe Acrobat format – if your computer does not have Acrobat reader installed, you can download it from Adobe.