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Getting ready
Aug 30, 2008 productivity 1 Comment
Chatting with one of my profs the other day, I realized that to finish my dissertation this year and do all the other things I want to do (i.e. teach, organize events, work on crrs website, committee work, go to the gym, socialize, learn Hebrew, etc), I’ll need to start getting up at 4 in the morning. I can see myself waking up that early and working only on my dissertation before the day begins. I’ll start with 5 am this coming week and see how it goes.
The uses and abuses of history
Aug 6, 2008 public history Leave a comment
I’ve just finished reading Margaret MacMillan’s The uses and abuses of history (2008), based on the lecture series she delivered recently at the University of Western Ontario. The book makes a strong case for handling history with care. As MacMillan points out in her opening paragraph, “history is something we all do, even if, like the man who discovered he was writing prose, we do not always realize it.” We use it to understand who we are (who are my parents? where does my family come from?), and we use our knowledge or ignorance of it to win arguments (you always do that! or you never told me that! I never knew that about you!). Often our memory of history is selective or we choose to ignore the lessons we might be able to draw from it. The same applies to communities, cities, nations, peoples to increasingly momentous consequences.
MacMillan’s surveys the uses and abuses of history in many significant events in the past century as well as the way nations choose to portray its own history and the pitfalls of how it chooses to commemorate events in its past and the debates these commemorations spark. The veritable wars over commemorations and remembrance make a very fascinating part of the book. An example close to home was the fierce debate caused by the decision of the Canadian War Museum to have a plaque on an exhibition on the bombing campaign against Germany during World War II entitled “An Enduring Controversy” presenting current debates among scholars on the efficacy and the morality of the strategy to bring Germany down by carpet bombing civilian targets. Since about 20,000 Canadians flew with the RAF’s Bomber Command, the veterans’ associations in Canada went up in arms protesting that they found the plaque offensive because it led people to question the morality of what they did. MacMillan was one of four historians invited to give their opinion on the exhibit. She concluded, quite rightfully in my opinion, that “history should not be written to make the present generation feel good but to remind us that human affairs are complicated.” The panel, nevertheless, remained divided and the public outcry was such that the museum announced it would revise the wording on the plaque in consultation with the veterans.
That was only one of many examples of disputes and controversies that can arise out of the use of history. Others include the role of history, or its manipulation, in the formation (and defense) of Israeli and Palestinian identities and claims over land, over the origins of the Second World War, current disputes between China and Japan, the Cold War, to cite only a few. In the end, MacMillan asks the important question: “history, as we have seen, is much used, but is it much use?” After citing a few notable historians who sceptical of how much we can learn from history, she enumerates strong points for its importance. For once, it helps us to understand not only ourselves but those we have to deal with and, as she put so eloquently, “if you do not know the history of another people, you will not understand their values, their fears, and their hopes or how they are likely to react to something you do.” That was certainly one of the things that struck me when I lived in Barcelona. I was much less likely to get annoyed at Catalan attitudes and values than foreigners that simply expected them to be the same as what they conceived as “Spanish”. Other positive effects include avoiding “lazy generalizations” and helping in our “self-knowledge” (it would do us good to remember not only our moments of glory but also our more shady past). In the end, if it teaches us some humility and scepticism, as MacMillan concludes, it does a good thing.
History and videogames
Apr 19, 2008 digital media 3 Comments
I’ll be giving a workshop on El Cid next week and while working on it I discovered he is in a videogame – The Age of Empires II, Conquerors Expansion. In order to grab students’ attention I included images from the videogame in the powerpoint lecture I prepared. During a practice-run of the lecture to a group of friends, one faculty member asked about the context in the videogame. We were discussing how later legends about El Cid refashioned him as the ultimate Christian Knight whose mission it was to fight the Muslim hordes when in fact, he was a mercenary ready to fight for anyone willing to pay, whether Christian or Muslim. So the question came up about the angle taken in the videogame – who is the enemy in the game? Does the player have a choice? Or is the enemy always Muslim? Not having played the game myself, I wasn’t sure but the question got me thinking about how popular videogames with a historical component are these days and how little historians have paid attention to them.
As videogames become more and more sophisticated, there’s increasingly more room for narrative within the game. I wonder who writes those and what role these narratives play in popular perception of historical events and characters. On the videogame Total War: Medieval II, the synopsis is telling: “Leadership on and off the battlefield is paramount. With the turn-based campaign map, you’ll control everything from building and improving cities to recruiting and training armies. Employ diplomacy to manipulate allies and enemies, outsmart the dreaded Inquisition, and influence the Pope. Lead the fight in the Crusades and bring victory to Islam or Christianity in the Holy War.”
As historians, we are always discussing the extent to which historical films shape popular perceptions and there is a huge scholarly literature on the topic of film & history. I have found nothing comparable that discusses videogames & history.
In The Age of Empires III, the focus switches from the Crusades in the previous installment of the game to Native Americans. In an interview, Sandy Peterson, the lead designer, argues that their aim was to focus on the Native point of view: ” In effect we are now giving the native nations full control of history. So in some ways we’re empowering them.” In other words, these games are also seen as venues in which history can be not only reshaped but to some extent, rebalanced. In that interview she also mentions that in the Crusades segment of the videogame, they aimed to show it from Saladin’s point of view. It would be interesting to see how that is done.
I’m going to start collecting these snapshots. It might be worth engaging with students about these issues…
Wikipedia
Mar 23, 2008 Sources, Teaching, digital media 2 Comments
Like most TAs, I tell my students to stay away from Wikipedia when writing their essays. To be fair, I don’t simply condemn it as the source of all evil, I merely point out how problematic it is to rely on information posted anonymously unless it can be checked elsewhere and that encyclopedias and dictionaries, while very useful to get started, do not provide enough information to support the kind of essays they need to write in history courses.
A friend of mine argues that better than blankly forbidding the use of Wikipedia, we would do the students a better service by teaching them how to use Wikipedia effectively. She talks about creating an assignment that would require the students to do extensive research on a given topic and either create a Wikipedia entry for it, if that doesn’t exist, or edit the existing entry with the information they gathered. That would teach them that anybody can create a Wikipedia entry and perhaps help them use it more critically in the future.
While Wikipedia has a big no-no in many academic circles – and historians are perhaps the most critical of it – some articles suggest it’s not all bad:
David Parry, “Wikipedia and the new curriculum: digital literacy is knowing how we store what we know” in Science Progress, 11 Feb 2008.
Nicholson Baker, “The Charms of Wikipedia,” review of Wikipedia: The Missing Journal by John Broughton, in The New York Review of Books, 55 (4), published 20 March 2008.
Michael Booth, “Grading Wikipedia“, in The Dever Post, 30 March 2007.
All the articles above suggest we need not dismiss Wikipedia completely, that it can be very useful and its dynamic nature means that many subjects in it reflect some of the latest developments in a given field. An example is the entry on global warming, considered by specialists in the field to be “a great primer on the subject, suitable for just the kinds of use one might put to a traditional encyclopedia. Following the links takes the interested reader into greater and greater depth, probably further than any traditional encyclopedia…”(Scott Denning, Monfort Professor of Atomespheric Science).
I confess I have no prejudice against Wikipedia as I often find myself using it for general information and if I tell my students no to use it, it is simply because I don’t want them relying on either encyclopedias or textbooks to write their essays. But maybe we need to discuss more the reasons behind that.
Teaching evaluations in
Feb 12, 2008 Teaching Leave a comment
Wow, I knew I had neglected this blog but not quite this long! The previous post was about getting ready for my first day leading tutorials and today’s post is about my teaching evaluation results. But before I get into that maybe I should say a few words about my general experience last term.
I had five groups, totaling about 60 students, and there were enough keen students in each group to make all of them enjoyable in their own way. I started each meeting by going around the room and having each student say what they liked/disliked about the readings, what baffled them, what was interesting and I took note of their main points. I felt the exercise to be very helpful for me since it gave me a good glimpse of their reactions and the kinds of issues they had trouble with and what interested them. It also put on the spot those who hadn’t read anything but gave an occasion for the shy ones to participate. That was my impression of the whole thing but I had no idea whether the students liked it or felt it was a pain. The evaluations definitely validated the approach. Nobody said anything negative about it; in fact a lot of students mentioned it as a really good way of starting the tutorial.
The comments were all similar and positive and I won’t go into details here because I want to spare you too much self-congratulations. The only thing semi-negative that they mentioned was my soft-spokenness. Some mentioned it casually, as a positive thing, others mentioned it as something I should work on. I do feel I need some lessons on voice-projection. I can project but often I’m not aware when I’m not doing it.
Since these will be the only teaching evaluations I’ll have if I go on the market next year, I’m very happy that the comments are consistent, deal with various elements of teaching, and are positive. What a relief!!
First teaching day
Sep 25, 2007 Teaching, Uncategorized 4 Comments
Tomorrow I’ll lead my first set of tutorials. In history, a tutorial (aka a conference session at Concordia) is dedicated mostly to discussing primary sources and teaching students how to read critically and how to get their points across. If done properly, I see it as also a venue where the students will learn most of the skills we expect of history students – the ability to write a variety of assignments based on secondary or primary sources and to question those sources with good analytical skills.
Teaching was precisely what first attracted me into a degree in history. Ironically, however, my career so far has been heavily focused on research and I have had no opportunity to teach so far. It’s only now, in my fifth year, that I’m finally getting to do what I came here to do: to teach university students. Although I haven’t taught, I’ve certainly never stopped thinking and preparing myself. I have taken a number of teaching workshops, I have had endless discussions with colleagues and professors about their teaching experiences, I have even helped organize a series of teaching history workshops in my department. But now the time of truth approaches: tomorrow at 9AM I’ll hold my first tutorial. I hope it goes well… I’ll come back and tell you about it…
Update…
Well, it’s done. I had two tutorials this morning, one from 9-10 and another from 10-11. Both of them were great! From the 19 students that showed up today, only one hadn’t done the readings . I guess things will change once the semester gets busier and they start having midterms in other classes. It was a very good introduction to teaching since both groups were made mostly of good, eager students. I still need to work on my general pacing – parts of the first tutorial went a little faster than I anticipated – but I can say that I got every single student to participate today. So I think I fulfilled my duty 
I’m curious to see what the groups I’ll have on thursday are like…
I'm stuck….
Jul 6, 2007 General interest, productivity Leave a comment
It’s been a month since I moved back to Toronto and I’m still not quite into working mode yet. I need to get back into reading my sources and jotting down ideas and outlines. I just haven’t been able to make myself do that yet. I’m still putting away the thousands of photocopies I brought back from Spain and getting a little afraid of the next stage… I did have one breakthrough – I got ideas for at least four (possibly five) chapters! Two I’m not looking forward to since they’ll be boring to write but necessary. The other two should be very interesting so I think I’ll start with the interesting ones to get the ball rolling Anyways, these ideas just came to me as I sat in a café the other day… love when that happens…
Some interesting links:
Using a blog as a course website.
Shall we teach Canadian history?
Jul 1, 2007 public history 2 Comments
This discussion was in the Globe and Mail this past saturday. I don’t know how long the Globe will maintain it online, so I made a pdf copy for you here:Should we can Canadian history?. I’m still agast at the first piece in the discussion – I didn’t think anybody still spoke out loud about history as a western-led progress, the “advancement of civilization” led by our male, white, European forefathers. I think my eyebrows glued to my hairline at that… How can someone even suggest that “music, science and political philosophy are all largely Western achievements”???
One thing from the article that I found VERY interesting and that wasn’t reproduced in the online version is what students are expected to walk out of school with, if they take all their history courses. This is according to Ken Osborne, a professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba, who has spent his career training history teachers. Here is his list of the core points:
- Canada has a long aboriginal history predating Europeans’ arrival and aboriginal peoples occupy a key place in our history
- Canada was once a colony of France, then of Britain – and French-English duality is a defining characteristic of the country
- Bilingualism, multiculturalism, regional diversity, federalism and parliamentary democracy are defining characteristics of Canada
- US relations have been a formative element of our evolution
- Immigration is a major factor in Canada’s development
- International events play an important role in our past
- History as a subject is characterized by ongoing debate and interpretation
Those are all VERY important points and certainly things I learned in my Canadian history classes at university. Hats off to any high school teacher who has been able to pass on these core points to their students.
Improving productivity on your Mac
Jun 24, 2007 productivity Leave a comment
I’m an Internet junkie. I admit it. I honestly should be attending Internet anonymous meetings.
One of my biggest problems is how to get away from checking my email, rss feeds and other distracting internet sites, long enough to be able to get work done. This post has some very helpful suggestions for those of us working on a Mac but some of its advices could be easily applied to Windows machines as well. I particularly like these points:
“Put an away message up on iChat and stick to it. Better yet: turn off iChat all together. No point in being online if you can’t talk anyway, right? Lower the refresh rates on Mail, your RSS reader and Twitterrific from, say, one to five minutes to a less eventful thirty minutes. If you think your task is going to take a bit longer than the norm, then lower the refresh rates closer to an hour. If everything stops beeping and bouncing in your dock and desktop, I’m sure you’ll be less tempted to break away from your work and be sucked back into your social life.
(…)
The portability of a laptop allows you to take it almost anywhere and some places you go may be distracting, such as Starbucks, the park or even your own living room. Even if you have a laptop computer, it is still useful to have an area set aside as your workspace in which you can focus and begin to work on what you need. After all, if you aren’t in a calm and comfortable place, how will those creative juices begin flowing?
(…)
After a long period of time, you may grow irritable and unmotivated to continue your work. So, give yourself a break. All work and no play is never the answer. Even the biggest corporate geniuses take a lunch hour. If you give yourself a break each time your pump out a few paragraphs to your research paper or each time you complete a chapter of the family vacation DVD you’re creating, you will begin to feel motivated to do it again so that you can get the same reward.”
All these advices are very good. I do need a workspace to be able to feel motivated to work and that’s what my carrel has become. I also need breaks and I have no trouble in taking them, particularly for lunch. I never thought of lowering the refresh rates on my email though, and that certainly would help with the Internet addiction!!
Update
Jun 20, 2007 productivity 2 Comments
[this was originally posted at my main blog]
We got our iMac and my iPod yesterday. More on that later… all I can say is… Holy cow, the screen is HUGE! I guess 24 inches was a bit of an overkill, but hey, we do lots of graphic work…
On another note, I’ve discovered I really can’t do much academic work at home. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the messiness of all the moving boxes that distract me, all I know is that I’ve been procrastinating writing a report about my research for the past two weeks. I finally decided to go out to the local coffee shop and write there. In one hour I had written two reports and a newsletter blurb! This morning I came to the library and in a couple of hours I typed my reports, edited them, sent emails to my committee, fellow conference-organizer JP, the administrator of CRRS about a possible fellowship, and my department about a misplaced tax form… Suddenly, after a month and a half in limbo, I feel productive again!!
Hope the feeling lasts because I just received notice that my abstract was accepted for an international conference in Chicago next April. It will be my first big conference and I’m not even sure my paper is do-able… Hope so…
