Today was the last methods course class session, and the topic was History on the Internet. Williams’s The Historian’s Toolbox, which was published in 2007, was our reading for today. Williams tacks on a chapter at the tail end about history on the web. For the most part, he’s talking about ways to access digital archives and electronic versions of published scholarship. He spends a good chunk of the chapter disparaging Wikipedia, picking up on Stephen Colbert’s notion of Wikiality and “truthiness.” And at the very end, he tosses in something about blogs written by historians as yet another format for scholarship.

It strikes me that Williams’s perspective is so, so 2007.

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So I’ve been looking forward to going to a THATCamp since I narrowly missed the first one, by being lame enough to go home after the 2009 Omeka playdate (which was great, by the way, and completely worth the trip). If I’d stayed one more day in my hometown of Fairfax, Virginia, that June, I would have been an inaugural THATCamp participant, and MAN! That would have been major bragging rights at this point, since it has gone from being a small one-time nerd camp for historians and developers, to being an international franchise with its own czarina and replicating itself in different regions faster than H1N1 in a college dormitory (67 meetings in 3 years, and they’re just getting started). I also had to miss the first THATCamp New England in 2010, so I was pretty happy to clear my calendar to attend this one

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Tonight (Friday, Oct 21, 2011) I’m one of the three “Bootcamp” instructors for #THATCampNE, The Humanities And Technology Camp New England, at the Mandel Center at Brandeis University, my graduate alma mater. It isn’t really a formal presentation, because those aren’t what THATCamps are about, but it’s got a title: “Digital Humanities in the Classroom: Simple Steps.”

Here’s what I’ll be featuring, if you’d like to play along

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A very partial curated list for #THATCampNE

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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.

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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 department is not housed. I think some of them deem it a punishment to have to travel too far from one’s own office to teach a class. I guess I can understand that sentiment but I definitely don’t share it – I think “crossing the tracks” is a good thing.

This semester, for the first time, I ended up with one of the classrooms inside our multi-use library building for my US History II survey class. In fact the classroom is inside the library itself, so that the stacks are right outside its door. The possibilities in this didn’t occur to me right away. I had deliberately left parts of the syllabus unplanned and in the first week had the class vote from a list of topics the things they’d like to cover in greater depth for each time-period unit. This gave me 5 days on the syllabus I had sketched as “workshop” days with only the vaguest idea of what that was going to mean. As I sat down to work on planning out the first one (topic: Native Americans in the West, late 19th century), I suddenly realized what a gift it was that we were IN THE LIBRARY. Aha moment!

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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 have a handful of students with plans to go to graduate school in history. A few are older than traditional college age. I can already sense that this will be a good group for discussions, that’s a good sign.

My Day One activity looks like this: divide the class into three groups (I have about 15 students in the class; if it were going to be bigger, I’d create more groups). One group has people who have brought laptops to class. I give each group a set of documents or artifacts and a series of questions to start them off, and then I stand back and observe for about half an hour. I’m looking to see how they approach an unfamiliar set of sources, and I’m trying to get to know them as learners. What kinds of questions do they ask? How do they begin to make sense of what’s in front of them? Who emerges as a natural leader? How well are they listening to each other’s ideas?
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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 fun). The “vernacular web” is a term coined/promoted by Dan Cohen, director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. As opposed to the “official web” of government, higher education, and big business (typically made by professional web designers), the vernacular web is everything else out there online: “the web that is out there,” as he puts it.

In my daily blogroll on Google Reader, I’ve got some sites that occasionally pop up something I think would be useful for myself or my students. Many of these come from Chris Wild’s fascinating “old stuff” content aggregator called “How to Be A Retronaut,” others from the well-written blog of the Encyclopedia Britannica staff, and a few from other sources. I’m calling these vernacular web because they’re often not well sourced, or they’re uploaded onto YouTube from dubious/unknown sources, or they might be a simple capsule of appealing images without any metadata. I curate these in an ongoing way by starring them or sharing them in Google Reader (feel free to follow my shared items), but thought I’d also make a simple list of some of my favorites just to keep them all in one place. Read the rest of this entry »

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 “Announcements” page feature (although that’s not at all obvious from the name “Announcements”).

Here’s how my reasoning went: Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »