I just revised my teaching page, simplifying it and adding some new resources. One of the assignments I included was a new one, which I called — for lack of a better name — a “Use of History” Essay. The assignment asked students in my introductory, general education Modern Europe survey to choose a news article or opinion piece from a mainstream magazine or newspaper and evaluate the ways it used history. I was impressed by the quality of the work even though I was concerned that I had not done enough to prepare them for the task. It’s relative success means that I might be on to something and with some greater scaffolding and revision have a nice way of introducing some more advanced concepts into this course.
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Digital History and Early Modern Europe
The major assignment in my survey of Early Modern Europe this past semester required that students work in groups to construct guides to digital history on any topic within the period. Each guide was to comprise of an introduction to the topic using “traditional” research and a list and description of relevant online resources, databases, and/or projects. Those guides have been placed online via the course website and are available here. Topics ranged from the Reformation to French Colonialism to interactions between Western Europe and the Ottoman Empire. I chose to ask students to complete this assignment in this particular course after attending the Digital Humanities Summer School at the University of Bern, Switzerland this past summer where, among other things, I was introduced to the sheer volume of digital work being done on early modern material. My students’ guides, I think, give a fairly diverse entry point to the field; materials range from basic primary source databases to complex digital mapping projects.
Most of my work in the digital humanities has involved these kinds of assignments and they pose particular difficulties, especially in a survey course. First, students often have very little preexisting experience using web publishing platforms such as WordPress, programming or markup languages, or digital humanities more broadly. This means that class time must be devoted to introducing students to at least some of these areas in order for them to be able to complete the project. Second, topics that may be very prominent in the historiography — the Reformation, say — may not be as represented online. This creates a unique tension when helping students choose their topics; while we’d prefer to see digital work on topics of digital interest, students also need to be able to locate relevant analog sources as well. The guides themselves demonstrate this difficulty. While some feature a great deal of secondary source research in the introductions and much less by way of digital history work, others show the complete opposite. Third, grading projects that can — and should be — continually in progress poses problems not simply because of the time it takes in a survey course, but also because the projects are never really finished. Students continue to have access to their projects and can edit them freely; others can comment on them and offer advice and new resources can be added. I attempted to solve this problem by having two due dates: first, the initial draft had to be put online, then two weeks later I would download whatever was available online and grade that version (I used Evernote and Skitch to mark up the pages).
Digital history in the classroom, put simply, must be much more than just another assignment. Rather, it adds an entirely new layer of inquiry to any given course. In the future, I will probably devote even more in-class time to the assignment, a task made easier by the fact that almost everyday there is a new, relevant digital source available for us to work with. How would our reading of Candide have changed had I had the time to prepare to work with the Bibliothèque nationale’s Candide app? Perhaps it would be worth considering ways that the survey itself could turn more fully around the theme of the digital without losing the narrative such a course is designed to provide.
New GradeBook Pro Features
I use the iOS app GradeBook Pro to take attendance and keep track of grades through the course of the semester. I was pleased, therefore, to see two new features appear after I upgraded to the latest version: letter grade assignments and behavior tracking. The first simply allows you to assign letter grades to percentage scores by recording the lowest valid numerical score per letter grade (so, 93% as A, 90% as A-, 88% as B+, etc). It’s also extremely easy to copy grade scales from courses, which means you really only have to input the scale once.
The second new feature allows you to quickly note student “behavior” (read: participation) in class. In small seminars, I tend to take notes and am able to assess student participation fairly consistently. In larger classes, where I still ask students questions and hold discussions, but which also tend to go a bit faster and involve more students participating (and more students not participating), this will be a useful tool for quickly noting who has and has not participated.
The screenshot shows the default labels for behavior. They can be customized in the GradeBook Pro tab of the iOS settings app.
GradeBookPro can be downloaded from the iTunes store for $9.99.
Mary Louise Roberts on Entering the Digital Age
One of my favorite historians discusses her newfound enthusiasm for utilizing forms of social media in the classroom:
Somewhere along the way, I realized this is how they learn—this juxtaposition and making of connections, this linking of yesterday and today. What the technologies of the digital age have done for my classroom is to let in the outside world in new and valuable ways, so that more than ever the past is viewed through the lens of the present. This strikes me as a brilliant way to do our work and to make history matter in students’ lives.
History of Sexuality Lecture
I just delivered a guest lecture/seminar to a class called “Body Politics.” It was essentially an introduction to the history of sexuality, Foucault, and early sexology with an eye towards the week’s reading by Joanne Meyerowitz from her fantastic book, How Sex Changed
Teaching Carnival
Profhacker is hosting a new teaching carnival, with useful links for teachers and students alike.
Use Scrible to Grade Web Based Assignments
I wish I had known about this when one of my classes was putting up their Wikipedia pages this semester, but in the course of searching for a better way of grading my blogging assignment for Modern Europe, I came across a nifty tool called Scrible. Scrible allows you to annotate webpages without converting them to a clunky pdf version (I tried to do this using Adobe Acrobat Pro and the resulting file was just huge). Basic annotation tools — notes, highlights, you can even change the text formatting — are all I need for grading, though the alignment between a note and its relevant text on the page could use some work. Scrible is in beta and comes with a free library of 125 MB for storing marked up pages, which is perfect for saving graded blogs to e-mail to students once they’re all done (which you can do straight from the Scrible toolbar). For any more research-oriented needs, Instapaper (for ease of access on the go) and Evernote (for keeping everything in one place) are clearly better solutions, but for this particular purpose it’s everything I could ask for.
Lessons of the Holocaust
Two of my courses are in the midst of World War II, a moment I mostly hate teaching, but will almost certainly find myself doing so for the rest of my life. I hate teaching it not simply because of the morbid fascination it always seems to evoke in people — and certainly not just in undergraduates — but because it’s so often cited as the reason to study history in the first place. Learn from the past, so we never repeat it. The Holocaust has come to stand in for the lessons of the past as a whole.
This conviction, propagated by memorials and memoirs, is one I try to challenge as I lecture and as we talk about the Holocaust. And it’s why I’ve assigned Ruth Kluger’s absolutely brutal Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered
When I tell people…that I feel no compunction about citing examples of my mother’s petty cruelties towards me, my hearers act surprised, assume a stance of virtuous indignation, and tell me that, given the hardships we had to endure during the Hitler period, the victims should have come closer together and formed strong bonds. Particularly young people should have done so, say the elderly. But this is sentimental rubbish and depends on a false concept of suffering as a source of moral education (52).
I hate teaching the Holocaust because every time I return to this beautifully, scandalously, brutal book, I can’t help but agree. Primo Levi depicted Auschwitz as a giant laboratory in which one could see how men and women functioned when placed in the most dire of situations. In doing so, he assumes that there is something, however, horrible to learn there. Kluger implies, as Lore Segal’s wonderful introduction notes, that in fact Levi “died of his knowledge” (10). I don’t think that the student of the Holocaust should come away with a newfound appreciation of the resiliency of the human spirit because doing so simply fits the event into a preconceived narrative that allows us to forget what the Holocaust actually was. Instead, the study of the Holocaust is an opportunity to question received ideas and ask whether we’ve been listening effectively to the voices of the past in the first place.
Blogging History
My Modern Europe students begin blogging history using historical newspapers and periodicals today. A list of topics and links to their pseudonymous blogs can be found here: http://aiross.wordpress.com/teaching/modern-europe-winter-2012/modern-europe-winter-2012-student-blogs/.
Adam Smith on the Social Contract
Although they had read the exact same text I had, my students in Modern Europe seemed skeptical about my interpretation of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Smith’s notion of the “Invisible Hand” of the market may be his most famous contribution to modern economic thought, but he also elaborates a role for the state in providing the necessary conditions for those free markets to emerge. In order to bring the point to our own time, I related what he said in our excerpt (from our primary source reader Perspectives from the Past
Smith:
The expence [sic] of defending the society, and that of supporting the dignity of the chief magistrate, are both laid out for the general benefit of the whole society. It is reasonable, therefore, that they should be defrayed by the general contribution of the whole society, all the different members contributing, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities (425).
Warren:
There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there – good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory… Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea – God Bless! Keep a Big Hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.
Smith actually mentions everything Warren does, but, then again, Adam Smith was a well known socialist.
P.S. Students, by the by, should feel free to comment.