It’s the end of another insanely busy academic year and only recently have I found a few minutes to spare comment here about a few new tools that I discovered thanks to Rochelle Mazar, the emerging technologies librarian at UTM. One such tools is VoiceThread, a tool that allows conversations around images, texts, or videos. This video illustrates the many features of this tool.

I was immediately taken by the pedagogical potential of this tool. It could be an interesting way to foster discussion around an image or video before class, for example, or even to continue in-class discussion. In that sense, it would allow for more inclusive teaching as it would allow students who are shy to express their views as well as allowing students to express their views not only in written form but also in spoken form (allowing perhaps for more in-depth comments). The interface itself is very clean and intuitive and hopefully wouldn’t scare the computer illiterate students.

At the very least, it could be a cool way of going through the class syllabus. To test the system, I uploaded a pdf of the syllabus for my recent course and had Rochelle add comments (both types and spoken comments). The comments took a few minutes to appear on my end, but I liked the way the system works, allowing comments to be placed near points in the text. This might actually be a better tool than wikis, for example, for allowing students to comment on each other’s work. The good thing is that it can also be embedded on webpages – so one could embed it on blackboard, for instance, or in a wiki page. The example below is the syllabus example I mentioned above. What do you think?

I taught my first lecture course this past summer. Entitled The Margins of Medieval Society, the course explored the way medieval people defined and dealt with heretics, Jews, Muslims, slaves, the poor, prostitutes, homosexuals, lepers, witches, and criminals. The structure of the course lent itself well for the intensive, six-week, summer schedule and the students seem to have enjoyed it as much as I did.

I had wanted to teach this course since I took an independent reading course on the topic as an undergraduate, about seven years ago. I proposed it to the history department last Fall, and to my great excitement, they took the course. I was to give two-hour lectures, twice a week for six weeks. Since I believe that the best way to learn is through a conversation, I split each two-hour block into a one hour lecture, followed by a 50-minute discussion after a few minutes break. Students were assigned a mixture of primary and secondary sources to read for each class, and were required to come to class prepared. Twenty percent of their mark was based on participation.

Such an emphasis on participation can be daunting, of course, since it shifts some responsibility for the course to the students. If the class doesn’t co-operate or students don’t come to class prepared, the instructor is faced with a wall of staring faces and an uncomfortable silence. In order to get the ball rolling and get a sense of what students got out of the assigned readings, I created a wiki page for the course. Each topic we covered had a wiki page and students had until noon on class days (we met at 5 pm) to post their reactions to the readings on the wiki site. I would then log on to the site at some point in the afternoon and bold passages that were particularly interesting or problematic to guide in-class discussions. I got the idea from Jeff McClurken, an American history professor at the University of Mary Washington who used it as discussion starter in many of his courses and wrote about it in his blog. He had had success in promoting engagement with the course material and interaction among students by using a wiki page. That encouraged me to give it a try despite the fact that I had never used a wiki before.

I have to say the wiki surpassed my expectations. I’ll know more when I get the students’ evaluations but several students told me they enjoyed it. One student told me she checked the site on her cellphone a few minutes before each class to see what I had marked off and felt it was useful for preparing for discussion. After the course was over she thanked me for introducing her to the wiki. She is currently using it at work to collaborate on a large project with several co-workers.

Having to post on the wiki led students to read more carefully and organize their thoughts about the topic covered before each class. They also began the discussion before class. Some students posted more than once as they often responded to each other’s posts. By the time we began discussion in class, they had been exposed to many different takes on the same readings. That allowed our discussions to reach a deeper level in the short time we had at our disposal.

Why I chose a wiki instead of a discussion forum
Although Blackboard offers a discussion forum tool, I felt setting up a wiki through pbworks was much easier than creating an effective forum, and the layout encouraged more interaction among the students. Despite commonly-held assumptions about younger generations, many students are not that tech savvy so I felt a forum structure would be more cumbersome. At the very least, students might simply post their individual thoughts without consulting other posts. I wanted a simpler structure, where each student’s reactions were easily available to the rest of the class. I also wanted a tool that would be simple to set up and maintain.

After seeing Jeff McClurken’s site, I knew a wiki could be the answer. I had recently started using a wiki when I joined a committee that is putting together an online portal of resources on the early modern Mediterranean. The group uses a wiki on pbworks to manage information and collaborate on developing the site. Having had to use it for that work showed me how easy it was from the user perspective.

After seeing how the wiki worked in my class, one of my friends implemented it in her summer courses at the University of Texas. After getting similar results, she decided to use it in all her classes. I’m now in the process of setting up a wiki for the class I’m TA’ing this year. In that class, however, I’m not requiring students to post at the wiki ahead of time. I’m basically going to use it to post guiding questions ahead of time and assignment instructions.  I’m basically interested in creating a course website that is more interactive than blackboard, where students can comment anything I post and ask questions publicly. After I finished setting up the wiki, I started having second thoughts. Perhaps in that case, a blog might be a better option. I’ll design one and compare the results.

Nothing like combining my love for new technology with my love for teaching!

Fast foward to minute 4:30

Educause is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the application of information technology to higher education. At a conference in October 2008, Educause members began to work on a list of the top challenges in teaching and learning. Their main focus is not so much in highlighting the issues, but

to be an experiment in community interaction and participation, in organizing peers to develop solutions and approaches that can be shared across geographic boundaries and institutions. The list of challenges is merely the agenda, set by the community. The true focus of the Challenges project is on knowledge-building: challenging higher education not only to list the issues but also to put the power of collective intelligence into action to address those issues.

The Challenges project thus represents a shift in member engagement. Instead of “pushing out” content through webcasts, white papers, or articles, the Challenges project “invites in” content from members, asking the community to contribute ideas and solutions or to participate in “lightning-round” presentations. This is a shift reflected in the growing Web 2.0 culture. Whereas Web 1.0 was characterized by the ability to search for information, Web 2.0 has focused on the ability to contribute information and add to dialogues through rich tools like wikis, blogs, and social networks. [full text]

They have now narrowed it down to the top 5 challenges for 2009:

• Creating learning environments that promote active learning, critical thinking, collaborative learning, and knowledge creation
• Developing 21st-century literacies (information, digital, and visual) among students and faculty
• Reaching and engaging today’s learners
• Encouraging faculty adoption and innovation in teaching and learning with IT
• Advancing innovation in teaching and learning with technology in an era of budget cuts

It’s definitely worth a read. I’m applying some of the principles in my class next month and I’ll reflect here on how successful it was at the end.

As most historians, I have thousands of images of documents that I use on my research. Some are photographs of manuscripts and others are scans of photocopies that I made from a microfilm at the archives. As I collected my documents, I entered information about them on a FileMaker Pro database so that in the future I could search for either a person or a keyword. I collected thousands of royal letters at the archives in Barcelona and my plan was to work on each chapter thematically. When I wrote a paper on conversion from Judaism to Christianity last summer, all I had to do was search for “converso” in my database. That gave me a list of the documents I had on that topic, I pulled them out or printed them, and used them for my paper. So the idea was to make a list of documents related to the larger theme of each chapter, pull all of the documents out (most I have in photocopies and I was willing to print the ones I had only in digital photographs), put them in a separate folder, and work on them. But once it was clear that the list of documents for my current chapter was in the hundreds and that with each document possibly reaching five pages, I needed a better system that didn’t involve shuffling around massive amounts of loose paper. That’s where Adobe Bridge comes in.

Since we have a 24″ iMac, I thought I could simply go through the documents on the screen and take notes on my laptop. My favourite way to browse through images is to use Bridge, which allows me to easily mark files, move them, rename them, etc. It soon became clear that I could be using Bridge for more than simply displaying the images and perhaps moving them to a separate folder dedicated to the theme of the chapter. You see, Bridge allows for tagging. You can add keywords to any file through it. Better yet, you don’t need Bridge to access those keywords. They get embedded onto the file itself so I can actually search for keywords on Spotlight on Mac OS X and the images would come up. Within a folder, it gives me a list of the all th keywords I have assigned in that folder, which allows me to quickly get to the document I want by clicking on the keyword.

Here’s the setup (click on the images for larger size):

These are some of my Bridge Screen shots, notice the keywords on the left bottom side:

Another neat thing about Bridge. Notice the film strip on the bottom of the page where it displays the images I’m working on. You’ll notice on the picture above that some of them have a number “2″ superimposed. Those are two-documents. I can select all the pages that go together and group them. They still display the same way but it means they don’t get separated and count only as one file on Bridge, which gives me a more accurate sense of how many documents I’m dealing with and how many documents relate to a specific keyword.

For my notes, I’ve been using DevonThink Pro, which is simple, allows you to create files of all kinds within it and has very powerful searching capabilities:

You’ll notice that some files are labeled green and some are yellow. Since one of the objectives is to compare Catalunya with Aragon, I decided to assign a colour to each. Catalunya is yellow and Aragon is green. Looks like this might be a system that will work for me. By the way, for those of you who need printed notes to be able to write, DevonThink allows for easy export of all the files you select as word documents or text files (or even PDF). But I think I’ll try to minimize the printing. When it comes time to write, I’ll go to my carrel, where I have a second monitor (just a 17″ flat screen, those can be had for very little money these days) and I can display the notes on one screen while I write on the other.

It looks like I’ll be teaching my very first course next summer. This will be my chance to experiment a bit and get some practice on what kind of teacher I want to become. I have my role models but ultimately, to be successful, our teaching has to agree with our personalities. I have an inclusive personality so I tend to focus on giving everybody a chance to participate and get engaged. The key is to get students to participate. And as I’ve mentioned before, this is where I think blogging can be useful. Blogging has made me not only more aware of my surroundings but also more politically and socially engaged. If that sort of dynamics can be reproduced in the classroom some real learning can be achieved.

But how to do that? How exactly do I get 45 students to actively participate in a course blog? Do I make it an assignment? Do each student has to post something? How often? Under what criteria? How do I integrate it to the curriculum and what goes on in the classroom?

In order to get some ideas, I registered to a workshop last week on blogging offered by the Resource Centre of Academic Techonology, at U of T. I was very excited but unfortunately, unable to attend. A more urgent academic engagement came up and I had to miss it. So today I went by RCAT to ask if there were any handouts from the talk. They gave me not only a copy of the ppt presentation but also the presenter’s blog address where I could find further resources.

Her name is Michelle Mazar and her blog is subtitled Diary of a Subversive Librarian, which I think it’s quite brilliant. She wrote a very inspiring reflection about blogging and academia on the day of the workshop.In it she says:

(…)Which leads me to something that bonked me on the head yesterday while reviewing for Learning Inquiry. I read this fantastic article that used some extremely bang-on terminology: productive failure, and unproductive success.

Here’s what I’m currently considering: we tend to reward unproductive success more than anything. If a student walks into a class knowing the subject material, that student will probably do extremely well. If a student spends 3/4ths of the class struggling with the material and getting things wrong, not understanding, struggling with concepts, and then really gets it, that student will probably not do as well. But that student is actually learning, and demonstrating learning. We don’t have an effective way of rewarding real learning.

Which is the key reason why I object to switching out the word “student” with the word “learner”, though I know it’s trying to get at the same idea. We don’t know whether we have “learners” or not, on a grand scale. Often we have a group of already-knowledgeable students who will unproductively get As and we feel good about it the learning experience. How do we measure learning? Real learning? Going from confusion to understanding? How do we even see it when undergrads often don’t even open their mouths in class? Do we really have a “Learning Management System”? Really? How do we really support and reward learning rather than merely unproductive success?

So I think blogging done well, set up with good expectations and with a fostered honesty, can reveal the actual learning going on, and can give students the option of displaying the learning they’re doing. And we can reward it that way. If a student struggles for the first half of the course and demonstrates that struggle, and then suddenly GETS IT, you’ll have evidence of their learning. You can reward that, you can grade them according to how they learned and how articulate they can be about the way in which they learned and why. At the moment we grade them based on whether or not they get it fast enough, for the most part. So you can use these tools to support and encourage productive failure as a means toward productive success. I’m not saying it’s enough to just try. Unproductive failure isn’t the goal either. Failure that builds into understanding is productive.

I’ve began to consider this very process lately. I’ve had students who have clearly benefited from the class and through informal interaction with me showed me they “got it” at the end of the course. Yet, I could not reward their learning since these didn’t translate into their first assignments. I think there should be some room for that.

In her powerpoint presentation, Michelle gives some useful tips on using blogs effectively. My favourites are blogs as reflection paper and blogging as conversation. She suggests four possible ways to use a blog as a reflection paper:

• Pick a quotation from the reading and relate it to the lecture
• Pick a CC-licensed picture from flickr and relate it to the readings, lecture
• Pick a comment from a fellow student, agree or disagree with its content
• Ask a question that remains after the lecture and the reading

I think these could be easy to implement and would create a connection between readings and lecture as well as conversation among the students.

Her powerpoint doesn’t specify what she means by blogging as conversation but I’ll definitely ask her directly. This is very exciting stuff.

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…

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.

I found a neat article at Digital History Hack about how to easily and quickly be up-to-date with the current literature in your field. Check it out here. I set a site to keep track on Jewish history and it’s pretty neat although there aren’t as many online resources (particularly on the form of RSS feeds) for medieval Jewish history or medieval Spanish history as I would like…

Hmmm, seems I’m not the only one to think it could be useful. Check this out.