Keeping track of resources

SO MANY things online about how to teach online. Why did my team bother to try to make something??? Seriously – there are so many available. The biggest problem is keeping track of them and curating them into a sensible organization.

So – here’s a running blog of resources I need to track.

ACUE’s Online Teaching Toolkit

The ACUE’s Online Teaching Toolkit

Good resources and videos about:

• organizing a course
  • create a predictable weekly rhythm
• being welcoming
• microlectures
• providing rubrics
  • Make the first formative quiz, discussion worth less points so they learn what you expect
• holding online discussions
• assigning self-reflection assignments (I am a BIG believer in these)

 

How to Be a Better Online Teacher

Blog post, How to Be a Better Online Teacher,  by Flower Darby in the Chronicle. Read the full post, but here are her 10 basic points:

1. Show Up to Class
2. Be Yourself
3. Put Yourself in Their Shoes
4. Organize Course Content (think like a student) – don’t make it hard to find things! Be consistent
5. Add Visual Appeal – we don’t have to do this in a classroom, but you do online
6. Explain your Expectations – be really clear about what students are supposed to do, especially with into level courses. Have the first dicussion/quiz worth less so they learn what you want
7. Scaffold assignments – build up to the big assignment
8. Lots of examples. Convey content in several ways
9. Make Class a nice place to be. Set class behavior norms
10. Continuous improvement – be open to suggestions, get feedback from students

 

Mountain View College’s Best Practice for Online Teaching

An open Canvas course with solid concrete, practical information about how to teach online. Good use of student videos talking about the different points.

Grading Participation

Interesting conversation about how and why (if!!) we should grade student participation.  Participation is usually graded by how much the student speaks up in class and how many days the student attends class.

My opinion: this is a skewed way of looking at participation.

I don’t feel comfortable in discussions if I might be thought to be wrong, or if there’s someone who is dominant.  I don’t like to speak up in large groups even to ask a question unless I know the people well.

So many students have reasons not to participate in discussions we can’t even list them here.

First point: if you are going to use participation as a place of grading, then you need to have several options. It cannot just be how many times a student speaks up in class. You are grading on behavior and personality, not on growth. We’ve seen in this era of emergency remote learning that students who were otherwise reluctant to speak up in class may be communication more in written discussions. That should be rewarded as much as the student who speaks up in class.

Second point: reconsider rewarding participation by using a self-assessment. Have it be growth, not some predefined rubric. This concept comes from an article about a new way to conceptualize how instructors grade participation by Alanna Gillis, Reconceptualizing Participation Grading as Skill Building.

Third: is participation really something to grade? Shouldn’t achieving course objectives be the point? If a student has already mastered the material, should they really have to come to class every day? Here’s another article about using student contribution to the collective knowledge as a way to measure participation: Assessing Student Participation  by Sritama Chatterjee

Humanities Matter!

Ran across this powerful statement by Cathy Davidson and Christina Katopodis about why humanities is essential to higher education, and what faculty can do you ensure students come tot he humanities classroom, and leave better prepared.

Changing Our Classrooms to Prepare Students for a Challenging World – Profession

A couple of thoughts about this:

• Much of my job includes supporting faculty who are doing digital projects with their students. They see the value, or are at least willing to try it out! Davidson  and Katopodis have a quote that rings so true to me: “Students need to unlearn years of being taught that they aren’t experts or innovators.” I see this nearly everyday. Students want clear, specific, rubrics and goals. They want to know exactly what the professor expects. While I don’t disagree with the need for clear goals, what I see is students doing exactly what the professor wants, not knowing/wanting/caring to decide on their own what needs to happen. This isn’t the students’ fault. It’s a problem with grades and with an education system that rewards sitting in a seat and spitting back what you’re told.
• Skills mentioned in the article are exactly what we do in these projects:
  

  “working effectively in groups to solve problems together; reading and interpreting complicated data, events, and texts; undertaking original research; and understanding and making sense of ambiguity (the gray areas).”

• Students struggle in these areas, as I mentioned above. Students frequently dislike doing group projects, and they definitely struggle with gray areas. I am surprised how difficult it can be for them to work with primary sources — the staple of historians.
• We often hear how students would prefer to write a paper/essay. They know that drill and it’s easy. Working through primary sources and data is complicated. Digital projects also mean a non-linear method of writing, and this can be difficult to learn.
• The authors’ suggestions of ways that humanities courses can foster these skills. Techniques like letting students talk at the beginning of class as opposed to the professor starting can be so effective in shifting the learning responsibility.
• I welcome the idea of having students help set the agenda of the course. What do they want to learn?
• Often, when I do evaluations of digital projects, students feel like they “learn more” through tests and papers. I find this fascinating, and we are digging deeper into this. Professors feel the opposite about the same projects. My hypothesis is that students are looking at content learning as the value, rather than the skills.
• I will also more carefully incorporate the technique of reflection at the end of a course. Ask students what they’ll remember, what they learned, what questions they might have.

 

More skills mentioned by Davidson and Katopodis:

• people skills,
• communication skills,
• critical and interpretive skills,
• collaboration and
• project management skills

Inclusive History

Ran across this new publication, The Inclusive Historians Handbook, from the National Council on Public History and the American Association for State and Local History. This looks like a great resource for any upcoming public history courses I might work with….

The entry on Digital History is high level, but has good points in how digital tools unlock patterns.

Maps that Speak Volumes

I’m teaching a short workshop on the use of digital maps/GIS in history classrooms. I have a usual song and dance that I do, talking about spatial thinking, how mapping is such a powerful tool for students, and how mapping lets students dig into primary sources in ways that other tools don’t. I still believe all of this, and will discuss it, as it is amazing what we can do with maps. Perhaps that is a blog post of its own soon.

However, for the last couple of weeks, and this weekend in particular, I find myself wanting to use maps to make real change. How can we use digital maps to better illuminate problems, amplify hidden voices, and search for solutions?

I’m pulling together a list of maps that may start me on this path… feel free to explore.

• Minnesota Treaties
• Mapping Prejudice
• Mapping Inequality
• Early Washington DC
• Tribal Story Maps
• Dakota Wild Rice
• Cherokee Trail Map
• Washington D.C. 1968 Riots
• Mapping Police Violence

What is Learning?

Found a fantastic TED talk…. George learning how to go down the steps is how learning should be.

History Communication

A friend posted a link to this article about a course on History Communication put together by the National Council on Public History. Here’s the syllabus they proposed. So many thoughts about this article.

Timing

I haven’t spent much time looking at the syllabus yet, but apparently this all came about four years ago. FOUR YEARS????? Where have they been? Seriously? I’ve been doing “History Communication” for thirty years. The “National Council on Public History” just decided four years ago that this skill should be included in undergraduate education. Wow. Frankly, that seems far too late. We’ve done an amazing disservice to our young people.

Sharing

The syllabus has a byline, “Sharing Historical Scholarship with Non-Experts Across Multiple Media.”

I find this attitude incredibly hard to stomach. Just because someone isn’t an academic does not mean they aren’t an expert. It may be hard to believe, but there are people in the world who know a great deal about a topic, even history, but they do not work in in the field. And, really, who is to say the academic or museum professional view is the “expert” view? It’s one perspective, one knowledge base.

The other implied piece in this sentence: the academic “expert” is “sharing” their expertise and wisdom. Wow. Thanks. Did anyone ask for it? Does anyone care? This attitude is what gives academics and museums a bad rap. It’s this self-importance that knowledge comes from the institution. That the museum/university knows everything and legitimizes the content.

Experts sharing with “non-experts” feels an awful lot like dead white man history. Photo by Giammarco Boscaro on Unsplash

This is far from true. In both museums and universities, the materials in collections are biased by the institution that collected them. Who’s stories are we telling? Who’s stories are we not telling? Why isn’t the community telling their own story?

I’m not saying the historian/professor/museum professional isn’t incredibly knowledgeable. They clearly are steeped in content, background, context. This doesn’t deny that. But this statement above just strongly implies that the academic/museum professional is better than those “non-experts.”

Course Content

I’ve just glanced through the syllabus but I will say it is still incredibly heavy on the academic and theoretical. I would love to design my own syllabus for this…. The concept of “History Communication” is brilliant, actually, and is a great way to frame the course.

Here are some of my points of confusion:

• One activity is “Create a Department/Faculty Portfolio for non-Historian Audience.” What in the world does that mean? If I am even close to thinking what that is, why would you ever do that?
• One activity has students writing a script for a podcast. This is an excellent activity. However….. they use the term, “Brevitizes”. OK – that’s obnoxious. It’s writing in a way that anyone can understand. It means taking out jargon that only a few people know. It means using terms and words that make sense to people who don’t spend their life studying these things. If you’re a historian, think about how you’d want to read something about, oh, nuclear physics, Russian literature, anatomy, auto mechanics, whatever. Don’t be condescending. Make it so people can understand what you’re saying.
• One week on Digital Humanities? Oh please. That needs to be at least half the course.

My course would have the following:

• a maximum of two “journal articles.” If even. Probably zero, except to compare/contrast language and writing styles.
• no papers as assignments.
• projects: grading would be on minimum of two major projects, at least one digital and one non-digital.
• writing to analyze: social media from museums and other historians, newspaper articles, magazine articles, press releases, blogs, films and novels.
• writing to produce: marketing materials, tweets and other social media, newspaper articles, mini-web exhibits
• audience: every project would be for an audience outside of the instructor.
• visuals: every single project would include visuals of some sort: maps, photos, infographics, objects, something.
• teaching technology: the term “digital native” is a myth. Not everyone under 30 knows how to use technology, and we need to teach them.

I better get busy! More to come.

Digital Distraction

Per my previous post about laptops/phones in the classroom, here’s an interesting article from the Chronicle of Higher Ed, “Digital Distraction is a Problem Far Beyond the Classroom. But Professors Can Still Help”

In a nutshell, the article posits that digital distraction is everywhere, even the classroom. It’s not just the classroom. ”

“They’re digitally distracted in class because they happen to be in class.”

So many good reasons why banning laptops/phones in class is a bad idea. The better idea is to promote active learning. I see that every time I’m in a class.

 

Can Laptops in class be used for Good? YES!

Thoughts prompted by this excellent tweet and conversation:

I’ve been working as an academic technologist at a university for almost two years. I could retire if I got a dollar for every time I’ve heard complaining about how students can’t handle having computers/laptops in the classroom.

Thankfully, there are people like Rebecca Wingo to make me feel all better. Look at this productive, pedagogically appropriate use of laptops in a classroom. Encouraging students to validate what they’re hearing, to confirm facts, to find additional resources. THAT is what technology can do when used appropriately.

Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash

I was teaching in a class recently. Students were assigned to do research and develop a digital project in the space of three class periods. They had class time to do this. They were in small groups of 2 to 3. For an entire class period (75 minutes), these students were focused, productive and above all, learning. What types of learning did I see?

• Content: they learned essential content about their chosen topic of interest
• Group work: they were working in small groups, they had to divide tasks, resolve any disagreements
• Time management: they only had two class periods to do this project. The weren’t supposed to work on it outside of class. They couldn’t be distracted
• Digital literacy: they learned how to find information and decide if it was valid, reliable, useful
• Digital skills: they had to try a new digital tool and master it in a short period of time. It was not complex, but did require them to create and share a Google Sheet (this was new to some); learn a template and publish it within the other tool.
• Writing: they had to quickly find, digest and communicate information. This was done through digital appropriate writing (much different than academic!)
• Visual communication: they were required to use visuals and possibly spatial data. Using these different types of media can be challenging. Copyright, interpretation, technical skills all come into play.

I sat in and helped as needed for all three sessions. I did not see a single student “distracted” by the technology. They were on task, they were focused and they created something. They looked at content differently. They discussed. I saw a few kids send a few texts. but they got right back to work. Did they create something like a 10-page final paper? No. And I bet they’ll remember it far longer than the 10-page paper they wrote for another class.

What made this a such a successful project? In my mind, it was a few things:

• Students were actively engaged in their learning.
• Students produced something, not just absorbed information.
• Students were learning about something of their choice.
• Students were helping each other learn new things.
• Students were given permission to fail, or to not be as perfect as an A usually requires.
• Learning was more about the process than the final product.

While my example is quite different than the one Rebecca Wingo shared in her tweet, it’s fresh in my mind.

For my next lecture, however, I am going to purposefully toss a few things in to have students engage. I do love the look on students’ faces when you tell them to get out their phone/laptop. It’s even more rewarding when the “students” are faculty/instructors. I often present to faculty/instructors about incorporating technology into classes, whether it’s the learning management system, Google, GIS  or something else. I usually do incorporate some sort of hands on tech thing, since that what I’m teaching, but after Rebecca’s post, I am going to be even more deliberate to model what they can do with students in class.

 

Cred

I almost forgot — I wanted to address the thought that forgetting names/dates and having students look up things calls into question her credibility. I think it’s quite the opposite. She’s teaching them so much more about how to be a historian, how to study history and how to be a student. I hope our credibility as historians (or other subject matter experts) isn’t on how much we can memorize and spit back. It should be on how we can find information, analyze, conceptualize, and more. I’m even more impressed in her credibility!

 

Story Maps

I’m doing a little research on the use of Story Maps, and finding so much great stuff I need a place to document it….

Background

I was introduced to GIS about four years ago, and it changed how I feel we can study and deliver history. I’ve been dabbling in it, slowly learning more and producing a few things. Mostly, I have been teaching others about it — I call myself an expert on entry GIS and introducing its power to others.

Why GIS?

GIS and Story Maps are amazing tools that let us see content and data in new ways. I really can’t write it any better than Allan Carroll, the ESRI Story Maps guru who defines digital humanities as:

• The creative application of digital technology to humanities questions and data.
• The use of computational techniques in the humanities that would allow research that is otherwise impossible.
• The democratization of knowledge through the application of digital technologies to the advancement of discourse in the humanities, broadly defined (and not restricted to the academy!).

Lauren Drakopulos and Shefali Juneja Lakhina make a very compelling argument for Story Maps:

What digital mapping tools like Google Maps or Citymapper generally don’t tell us is how a certain street got its name, or what issues are of critical cultural importance to a community.

But “story maps” – an interactive form of drawing the world around us and an increasingly popular form of mapping – can do all this and more.

This is why I have been doing so many presentations and sessions about Story Maps. I am grateful to have yet another set of good quotes to use when I talk about it.

In my words:

• Story Maps and GIS completely changes how we can study history. So much of history has a spatial component. Maps have always been used to teach and study history, but using the GIS tools available, we can interpret the data in ways we never could before.
• GIS visualizes patterns and relationships that let us see something in a quick glance or closer look that would’ve taken much longer in print. For example, I recently showed a group of teachers the two maps of where Japanese Americans lived in 1940 and 1945. Nothing could have gotten the point across about the impact of the internment camps faster than those two maps. It’s one thing to read a sentence about this in a book; it’s quite another to see it on the maps.
   
  

  People of Japanese Ancestry by County, 1940

  

  Resettled Japanese-American detainees by city, 1945
• GIS enables analysis of data. If you have the right kind of data (for example, the location of shipwrecks in Lake Superior), simple — yet powerful — geoanalysis tools can show a variety of different ways of looking at the data.
   
  

  Shipwrecks on Lake Superior

  

  Shipwreck data using a Cluster Analysis
• Story Maps bring content to a broader audience. Instead of just a paper that a professor reads, Story Maps and GIS tools can deliver content to others.
• Context: Story Maps allow us to provide context, story, background and additional information about a map.