I am in Paris for #HISPinParis22. It’s my first time back since 2019, the longest I’ve been away from my native city. As usual, one assignment for the class is that students have to blog about their experience. Personally, I haven’t blogged since < checks website for first time in months > April 2021. Yikes. […]
Tag Archives: teaching
The new normal
I spent over a decade pouring my heart and soul in this site. I perfected the pages for my classes, constantly updated to new plugins, read up on WordPress changes, and generally spent lots and lots of time making the site as useable and pretty as possible. And then COVID.UMW required that all courses be […]
back to the drawing board
I’ve now spent over a decade railing against the use of LMS. I’ve put my money where my mouth is, too, developing my materials on this site, keeping them available without a paywall, and making interfaces as easy as possible. My ethical objections to the LMS hasn’t changed, and I still hate the way it […]
It’s all fun and games (until you build a city)
I posted semi-recently about the convergence of my nerdery and work interests with the Urban Design Alignment Chart. That was a fun little project, but last fall I joined those two interests more seamlessly. So seamlessly, in fact, that I didn’t even think twice about it until just now. Last semester, I taught HISP471VV: Urban […]
Remixing an OER textbook
This is a 12-ish minute long episode of History in 5-or-so Minutes, in vlog format this time, in which I talk about beginning to rewrite the Openstax US History textbook. I’m going to use this as the basis of a US History I class this spring, but not before I revise it sunstantially. I’ll discuss those revisions chapter by chapter as I rewrite or as I create PowerPoint lectures and videos using the content.
Zotero Groups & Fair Use
As I’m beginning to prepare for my American Environmental History course next semester, I’ve started a Zotero Group containing a bibliography of some of the books that contain chapter readings and some journal articles I’m going to assign, or that are available for students working on term papers. So far, these are just books that are in BSU’s Library (I’ve given them a list of a few more I’d like them to get). This is a public list, so if other people start joining the Group and contributing titles, I’ll probably add tags that will indicate for my students which books are available locally and which they have to order via ILL, or in the case of articles where they can get hold of them. I normally attach pdfs to my own Zotero entries, but I can replace them with stable link URLs in the public lists.
Does anybody else use Zotero Groups? I believe if you click on this link (https://www.zotero.org/groups/2242171/envhist_oer ) you should be able to see the bibliography, but please correct me if I’m wrong?
I’m thinking about the additional readings I may assign in this class. Many of them are chapters in monographs, which I believe I can assign and students can go to the Library and read or scan the chapter. We have a really cool, fast scanner, so I may put the texts on course reserve. I’m curious about how other people doing OER deal with content from copyrighted (all rights reserved) sources. I’ll be talking with a Librarian later today about the Minnesota State University system’s fair use guidelines, but if anybody has experience they’re willing to share, I’d love to hear about it. My thought was there ought to be a way to replace the printed course-pack with some type of digital one, but I realize there may be objections to that because it’s easy to limit the printed course-pack to a finite set of students in a particular class during a particular semester…but even so, there’s got to be a way to update this idea for the 21st century. I guess making these types of pointers available in Zotero is a first step, for people who have access to an academic library. It’s not ideal for folks who don’t, however; but maybe that’s a battle for another day.
OER EnvHist!
In addition to the Creative Commons course I’m taking this semester, I’m also involved in a project to turn my American Environmental History textbook into an OER (Open Educational Resource) prior to using it to teach a course called “People In the Environment: Environmental History” in the Spring semester. “People In the Environment” is a required course for all Bemidji State University undergrads, and it is usually taught in interdisciplinary teams. It has been ages (literally between 5 and 10 years!) since a historian has been on one of these teams, so I’m going to rectify that in the Spring. I’m going to trach a survey of American Environmental History this Spring, and then I’m putting in a request to teach a more in-depth version of it, with readings from some of the major works in the field, this summer.
As part of that process, I’m going to turn my American Environmental History textbook, which is already a very cheap alternative to the other textbooks available from academic presses, into a fully OER production. I may continue to sell copies of it on Amazon, since that seems like one of the lowest-cost ways to get a decently-printed paperback into peoples’ hands. Currently the book is $25 and the Kindle is either ten bucks or free (if you have Kindle Unlimited or if you buy the paperback you get a free Kindle copy). It will probably come down a bit from there. I’ll also probably be making audio and my course videos available online in a more permanent form. Maybe discussion prompts and quizzes and exam questions, as I put together the course material.
Hopefully turning this authoring project into an OER authoring project may give other Environmental History teachers an incentive to not only use the material but contribute to it and add their own content and perspectives. I don’t claim to have any type of unique insight into Environmental History — except maybe my feeling that it should be much more available to students and that opening this project up a bit might help make that happen!
Prepping for Paris
Leaving for France in two weeks exactly. You think after having taught this course three times already, it would all be routine by now. And mostly, it is. Still, lots and lots to get done. Teaching a course abroad is an interesting experience. Some of it is just like teaching a regular class: syllabus prep, …
Reflections on #OpenLearning17
How will your experience in #OpenLearning affect your teaching practice or scholarship? Why? #OpenLearning17 has provided lots of inspiration for making my teaching practices more open and accessible. The course has also helped me better understand some of the choices I’ve made about the learning environment I want to create with my students. I have …
The (medium) Hard Work of Open
My what a couple of weeks it’s been….So much anticipation, trepidation, incredulity, outrage, sorrow….resolve…
No, I’m not talking about #OpenLearning17. The course launch last week provided a wonderfully affirming forum for engaging with the forces of enlightenment. Laura Gogia’s masterful facilitation of a Twitter Journal Club (#TJC17) on Friday brought folks together around a close reading of Jeffrey Pomerantz’ and Robin Peek’s Fifty Shades of Open, and through Twitter magic and generosity Jeffrey Pomerantz was able to participate in the discussion. Some of us even carried the conversation further by annotating it on Hypothes.is . And because the #TJC17was open and coincided with the annual AAC&U conference in San Francisco, conference participants could join the fun and those of us who were not physically in attendance could share in some of the buzz generated by the big gathering.
But locally, last week was a time when I was reminded, rather brutally, that teaching collaboratively and in the open takes time, is messy, and is totally worth it.
First of all, there’s just the time commitment to building out the digital spaces where my courses grow. While I was working on my book last semester I seem to have remembered how cool it is when you get a website tricked out and looking nice, but forgotten just how time consuming it is to:
Create the motherblog, choose a template, add feedwordpress, hook up JetPack, pick out fonts, and colors and other design features, customize the template so it will be easy to update the front end as new content comes in, create a shadow blog for the comments and feed that through an RSS feed on the main site…..
None of that’s hard, but it all takes time. And then you have to get the students hooked up and ready to roll (ah yes, add form to site that they can fill out so you can harvest the URL..)
You see where this is going — there’s lots of set up work to do before the first class session.
And then there are the human factors — they include a couple of outstanding GTAs for the grad course and an editorial team for my undergrad course (two peer-editors, veterans of the course who comment on posts and help identify content to feature in the weekly edition, plus a WordPress savvy grad student who handles a lot of the weekly maintenance). So that’s really two “teaching teams” for these learner-centered hybrid courses.
And figuring out how we are going to best facilitate learning in the course and establishing a weekly work flow, with time built in for dialogue and troubleshooting, can be pretty messy. We need to figure out which affordances to use for what kinds of interaction (Slack for sure, also a shared Drive folder….e-mail only when smoke signals fail). We all have different strengths and intersecting but not 100% overlapping domains of expertise. Like everyone else, we are busy. And like everyone else we learn by doing. So, the first couple of weeks can be pretty bumpy, as we coordinate our individual tasks with our other time commitments, learn (or remember) some new tricks (how do you get the sleeping dogs to be in the center of the photo in the slider?), and figure out how to best work together to help leverage the students’ contributions into a robust and interesting place that showcases and enables “acts of cognition” (focused either on Soviet History of contemporary pedagogy in higher ed):
And to me, that’s why working in the open — in a medium where we can all create and engage collaboratively with the content — is not just worth it, but necessary. I did spend less time on my classes before the 2.0 version of my teaching — I think we are all familiar with that feeling that sometimes it’s just plain easier to do something by yourself or the way you’ve always done it. But I do see real (positive) differences in the way we learn (students, course assistants and instructor) in these networked, open learning spaces. And the takeaways for the students, in the form of the critical thinking, writing and research skills they develop by working on the open web, the insights they gain about the course content and their own learning, as well as the digital portfolio that they create, make the extra time and effort well worth the investment on my part.
In an era of Alt-Facts and gathering storms around the ethical tenets of our democracy, learning together in the open seems especially important. (I know I’m being hyperbolic and I hope I’m wrong about the storm clouds, but I’m still going to throw down behind open pedagogies.)