blog posts

A very partial curated list for #THATCampNE

Or: why I send my freshman students to Wikipedia first thing in the semester. Shocking, I know. Irresponsible? No, I promise: my students are better for it.

So I teach on a small campus. There are only 3 buildings that have classrooms, and one also houses about half of the departments. Among many of my colleagues there’s a strong bias against teaching in a building where your…

This morning was the initial class in the Fall 2011 historical methods course, made up of undergraduate history majors/minors. It will be an interesting mix this term; some are double majors with education heading for public school classrooms, and I…

Just posting here to call attention to a new page of mine elsewhere on the site, a small project of mine this morning (like I have nothing better to do, 2 days before classes start – but this is more…

Last semester’s methods class students had to keep a weekly journal and I decided to have them do it electronically, using Google Sites which comes standard with their Gmail accounts – you can blog on a Google Site using the…

One of our last discussions in the methods class concerned professionalism and integrity in the history profession. There are probably many useful case studies, but I used two that had come across my desk recently.

I really enjoyed reading and thinking about Cathy Davidson’s brilliant cover story for Times Higher Education last month, “So Last Century.” I read it on my iPhone, captured via Read It Later, which was perhaps ironic given that it was…

So, this is partially a plug for one of the best little under-attended regional history conferences out there, the New England Historical Association. What? You don’t know of it? It’s affordable (nay, even cheap) to join. It loves new faces…

Following on our week about historiography and before our week on public history, we looked at history and film. This was really three discussions in one, so I’m not sure how well it all meshed together: film as a historical…