blog posts

(originally posted at Juvenile Instructor 5/18/2013) This post is part of my occasional postings that try to make academia’s processes more transparent, especially to benefit prospective & junior faculty. So this public service announcement brought to you by the merrie…

Usually pre-semester dreams are full of dread and stress, but this morning I woke up feeling like I might actually have gotten something good from my brain’s nocturnal wanderings. At the risk of subjecting myself to armchair psychotherapy by revealing…

I have just begun a semester-long sabbatical (huzzah!) and so I suddenly have a great deal more discretionary time, including, let’s hope, for blogging now and then. As a breather from my hitting the books, I had the very cheerful…

[Cross-posted to Teaching United States History] In the spirit of continuing my week of post-conference active learning to stave off end-of-term slacking (theirs AND mine)… here’s another one that worked especially well this past week. I should explain – many of my…

[Cross-posted to Teaching United States History] Last weekend I attended a conference, which had two consequences: returning to campus invigorated with a renewed willingness to experiment BUT having had very little prep time before Monday morning’s classes. So I turned to something I…

This weekend I was part of a panel for the OAH in Atlanta with the zippy title “The Future of Teaching History: Using Technology to Make Teaching More Fun and Effective.” Fellow panelists David Trowbridge (Marshall University), Russell Jones (Eastern…

I had the chance to be part of a lively panel at the American Historical Association in Washington DC on January 4th, 2014, on the subject of doing digital history with undergraduates. Since it was a roundtable, the presentations from…

At the AHA 2014 meeting this week, I was part of a panel on doing digital history with undergraduates (more on that later) and read the statement I stick into the methods and capstone syllabi to help explain why I…

A broken iPhone took my graduating HS son and me to Harvard Square today, one of my favorite places on earth. And darn, we had a whole hour and a half to wait, what will we do? After lunch at…

Last week, the Worcester Art Museum held a forum on the future of libraries. It is a lovely medium-sized urban art museum with a visionary new director who has been hiring, acquiring, and innovating ever since he arrived about a…