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I found a really old post on bit.listerv.history from 1992 which shows I’ve been saying the same stuff for almost 20 years (and still can’t type properly) “I agree that many people end up in humanities undergrad courses due to a lack of direction, or failure to get into other faculties; and I accept there are very few jos for history graduates as historians. I can’t accept the “no practical use” point though. Continue reading Back on Bitnet.. Yes, the iPad is here and it is pretty and it is a game changing device but only in some ways. I was impressed with the Course Notes app which goes a long way to fixing some of the common problems of disorganisation that bedevil students, but not all – apps like that on the iPad won’t be a magic bullet to make us all smarter – and they may just confirm some folks in their dumbness. Continue reading iBut 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 Continue reading Digital History Class Harold Jarche is one of the most popular bloggers dealing with social networking, and for good reason – he is insightful. His blog post from yesterday gathers ideas which prompt me to wonder why I haven’t already made twitter a requirement in my courses, and how I can overcome the obstacles to using it in teaching. Continue reading Can I make Twitter a requirement for my students? An interesting question is posed over at Do You SoTL – how do you structure courses to encourage atudents to take responsibilty for their own learning? I think there is no quick fix, and given the pavlovian response of many students to grades, I think one of our tutorial programmes this term (in HI2001) goes some way towards answering the question. Continue reading Collateral learning Action research in any form has a funny – or not funny – way of running away on you. I’ve been doing a bit of SOTL work on the wargame design task in my Hi2007 class, and next term I thought I would have a research plan to finish of my Masters in Teaching & Learning using that class. However, next term the Hi2001 tutors and I plan to roll out a new set of tutorials for Hi2001, a class which includes all the Hi2007 students, and which will change how they look on group work. I think I have a solution – read on while I think it aloud Continue reading Expanding SOTL problem I’m looking for some (moderately) radical students to help subvert the top-down model that dominates the Irish university sector. I do a quite a bit of research in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, and I have a couple of things going on which I am keen to open up a bit and get some active inputs. I’m actually looking out for students who might be interested in collaborating on two projects, from offering comments all the way to co-authoring papers. One is on how history teaching in universities differs from culture to culture; the other is my ongoing work on group and team based learning using games in my military history option, HI2007. I’m making my Digital History students (Hi6018) create and use a blog as the anchor for their assessment portfolio in the the course, and I was hunting around for other courses using blogs, but cannot find as many as I used to be able to see. Bill Turkel’s class at UWO are doing it, and are about three weeks ahead of mine, but many others have disappeared or closed off. Continue reading Blogging as a Personal Learning Environment Are elements of those silly Facebook quizzes and games potentially useful for teaching, at some level? I tend to ignore them, but a comment just now started me thinking about the possibilties. Sam, one of my students, took “What mode of production are are you?” and came out as Feudalism (which some people would think is apt for him!). Like all FB quizzes, it is an extended multi-choice quiz, with a series of questions to match you to something. The games – or at least the one I joined before I discovered the ‘ignore’ button, are repetative quest games in which you churn through oppnents to gain experience and unlock new abilities. While I find them boring, they are addictive, people play them a lot and you could adapt the basic model from grinding monsters/enemies/whatever to grinding useful skills. Continue reading Facebookedu? I’m playing round with Adobe Captivate, moving slides from 3 old powerpoints on UN Peacekeeping into one Captivate presentation which I’ll use today as a flash movie, and also make available to my class as a .avi movie and an audio only podcast. I’m fining it a lot of work, but I think the extra flexibility of Captivate will be worth it in the long run. This version is very basic, and does not yet take advantage of all the possibilities like quizzes, or branching navigation. You can theoretically do all of those in Powerpoint, but it is much more work – I found my way round the workspace in Captivate very quickly, and find it faster for more advanced work. Continue reading Captivating |
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Copyright © 2010 Mike Cosgrave - All Rights Reserved |
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