Carnival!
Ladies and Gentleman, citizens of the internet, I present to you, the 32nd edition of the History Carnival. Unlike past hosts, I am not currently a practicing historian, (although I am a published historian) but I am very much interested in academic technology. And so I approached this rather extensive list (you can see the full list of nominations here ) with an eye towards posts that demonstrate exceptional use of the medium. The nominations represent the widest possible reach of historical writings and to give them their proper due, I’ve divided them up into a two part carnival, today’s piece will feature few distinctly academic pieces, a nod to collaborative learning and finally, posts that contribute to a community of best practices.
I’ll be back on Monday, June 5th with some wonderful found objects, several WWII era posts and a museum review or two.
Jonathan Dresner and Brian Ulrich both nominated Jews and Muslims in the Middle East posted at Brian’s Study Breaks and Jonathan Wilson and Sharon both nominated The colored expatriates of the American Revolution posted at Mode for Caleb. I will use both posts in future presentations to reluctant administrators to demonstrate that high quality, content driven research, writing and publishing can be done well in a blog format and that failure to recognize that reflects more poorly on the critic than it does on the growing body of literature.
When preaching to the converted, I’ll be sure to show off a post that Alan Baumler presented more on MIT and visualizing cultures posted at Frog In A Well ~ China, and another that Sharon nominated, Subsidizing Public/State Education posted at crooked timber. Both comment threads define the type of collaborative learning community instructional designers dream of.
There were two complementary posts I would require any young graduate student to read, and would nudge any veteran of the archives to consider, Hacking the Archive posted at The Rhine River and Evan Roberts presents Amateur digitization for historians posted at coffee grounds.
I am not sure how I have gone most of my adult life without reading historical true crime stories, but now that I’ve been turned onto Laura James’s writing at CLEWS The Historic True Crime Blog, I may be catching up on my fill of human depravity. Several of Laura’s posts were nominated, and when reading through her archive, I thought I could nominate more. Rather than give you links to each of them, I encourage you to visit the site and pick your own favorite.
The bloggers at Holocaust Controversies also received several nominations for their series of posts, and rather than highlight one to the exclusion of others, I encourage you to begin with this post: Sergey Romanov presents Carlo Mattogno on Belzec Archaeological Research.
The term “best practices” has become the “out of the box” of the decade, especially in academic technology. I repeatedly reject the term “best” and replace it with “community of” because I think when it comes to talking about how we choose to do our jobs, we acknowledge there are differences and disagreements, that there is no best practice. The following posts each address that in different ways. Shot out of the canon posted at The Little Professor takes on teaching controversial subjects (make sure you follow up with the comments) while Life lessons at Kalamazoo posted at Quod She writes about being a faculty member with clear expectations, the kind of expectations for assessment that students appreciate in the classroom. Speaking of classrooms, I was thrilled to receive this next nomination. Miland Brown presents So Who Was Our First President? posted at American Presidents Blog. (The best practice connection in this one is subtle and those not familiar with collaborative learning might not have noticed the author’s strategic use of the bell, but for those in the know, this is code for “I’m one of them.”)
And to leave you on a light note, Jonathan Wilson spotted holyoffice: The Internet Theologian Explains The Da Vinci Code posted at The Medicine Box.
Thanks to everyone who nominated a post, congratulations to the authors and check back on Monday for Part II.
Submit your blog article to the next edition of history carnival at (15 June, host Jenni Weber at American Presidents Blog, http://american-presidents.blogspot.com/ (email coppertop67[AT]hotmail.com)) using the carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on the blog carnival index page.
Thinking of hosting? I recommend it! This has been a wonderful experience and I highly recommend it.
Celebrity Death Match?
It isn’t that I actually want to see Cathy Young and Bitch, Ph.D. in a MTV animated boxing ring, but I would love to see them enter a forum, shake hands, sit down in their seats and talk about meaningful gender issues. Cathy Young’s post today about attempts to lower the standards for women in science so that more women can participate highlights, for me, one of feminisms failings. Yet I would imagine Bitch would present the other side in such a way that I could atleast listen and understand her perspective, if not totally agree with it.
Green School
I am moving ahead on my capstone project. I finished drafting the first two phases and have just begun work on the heart of the project - the instructional design. I am working off partial content, and will be using a bit of backwards design - as I have a quiz that is used at the end of the class to assess student learning. I’m not a big fan of quizzes, and since my plan is to design this for a Blackberry and I would rather students improve their verbal reasoning skills and not their quiz taking abilities, I am going to be spending day working on verbal assessments. To help manage this project, I am using a site called Backpack (www.backpackit.com) which is put out by a group called 37 signals. This may be the easiest project management tool I have found - certainly much easier than Microsoft Entourage - which I will most likely end up switching from in the next few weeks.
Carnival is coming …
In just a few more days. My inbox is filling up with fantastic nominations. Make sure you get yours in soon. You can email me at amy [at] amystevensonline.com or use this handy dandy form.
We’re over here, you are welcome to join us.
- I read a post recently asking where all the women bloggers were. What a dumb question. We are everywhere, here are a few I stop by occasionally, or links to specific posts.
- Shirky: Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality
- Early Modern Notes » Teaching
- Bitch Ph.D.
- The Academic Self Discussion Group: A belated welcome (and introduction)
- ACADEMIC SPLAT!
- Dissertation Tips
- academom
- Weblogg-ed - The Read/Write Web in the Classroom :
- The Little Professor
- The Truth Laid Bear
- http://www.truthlaidbear.com/ubercarnival.php
- Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs: Women and Children Last: The Discursive Construction of Weblogs
moving on up
goodbye this house:
hello this house:
Life is good - I got the job I wanted, we got a better house than we imagined possible, things are moving fast. I won’t be updating this site again for a while, but be posting about academic type stuff at www.amystevensonline.com/blog - I’ll ask my prettyposies host for a redirect till the end of my contract.
See you in the Berkshires!
Growing a Green E-School
Capstones are the final project requirement for my Master’s program at Marlboro College Graduate Center. My sponsor is The University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Department of Continuing Education and Outreach, specifically their Green School. The Green School is offered once every two years. It is a 60-hour program taught at a hotel easily assessable to people from all over Massachusetts. Students come from the nurseries and grounds departments and there are two tracks - horticulture and turf grass studies.
Successful capstone projects are ones that attempt to solve a real world problem - rather than just create interesting products or demonstrations. The problem I am trying to solve is how do you take a 60-hour, face-to-face program and redesign it to be online? What defines online? This is a content rich course where student achievement is assessed solely by quizzes which are not returned to the student, where students do not tend to be highly technically literate, and where cheating is a primary concern for the instructors. The instructors themselves, even the most technically literate ones, are resistant to a program that doesn’t have face-to-face interaction and are suspicious about what going online means.
I will use this space to work through some of the challenges I face and document the process as I go.
A few more days …
to get your nominations to me for the History Carnival! I’m loving the nominations but am sure I am missing some, so please if you have read something you like, let me know!
Streamlining
I’ve sorted through my stash, keeping only the most precious items, reducing the collection to a medium sized blue tub. I’ve traded my spinning wheel for a massage, shortly before binding off my one attempt at knitting up my homespun — a large and rather hideous pi shawl. Spinning can not co-exist with my children and my life right now. When the kids are gone off to college, and if my interest is still there, I’ll pick it up again. In the mean time, I will appreciate others handspun wool.
DH and I also unloaded ourselves of over 500 books - a process that reflected our identities back to ourselves better than any photo album could. I am trying to write about it over at aqueduct, my other blog. Check back there later today to see if I finished my essay.
On the needles - a lace shrug I lost interest in, sock a palooza socks that need some grafting, and a couple of swatches.
School starts again this weekend. By August, I should have both a Ph.D. and a M.A. in hand, and can safely say I will never, ever, enroll in another graduate program again. Lets see if we can turn any of those letters into a real job!
A life with books.
My husband and I recently purged our home of over 500 books. We hauled them from boxes in the basement to our living room floor, and then turned our eyes to the busting bookshelves that lined the house. My dear, amazing husband, went through them individually, sorting, selecting and labeling them. I liked to think of myself as someone who collected books, I had all of Tom Robbins and Douglas Coupland hidden among my shelves, but suddenly my two boxes of feminist historiography was nothing compared with his many boxes on trout fishing. And as we laid them out on our driveway, postmodernism next to early Christian theology, lesbian detective stories co mingling with gun manuals, the tale of the American left was clearly under threat.
The local yard sale circuit was unprepared for what was in those boxes. More than one person asked for Danielle Steele, many more commenting, “You sure like to read” with one eyebrow raised. Our garage sale acquired copy of “The Joy Of Sex” went of with another lucky couple, and I only had to put up with one SNAG (sensitive new age guy) who pontificated about the summer he lived with two radical lesbian Maoist feminists who made him read all of Mary Daly. [I swear, I’ve heard this story a few times and if I ever find those women I’m going to burn their copies of Gyn/Ecology, and report them to the UN for torturous crimes under the Geneva Convention].
Looking through those boxes of books was more a reflection of my life than any photo album could be – each one had a memory associated with it, one that I could recall more vividly than the contents of the book. Our save criteria was simple: if we saw it at a used book store, would we buy it again? It was amazing how many fair books we owned and how many we were holding onto with no plans to revisit them. I was ok giving up my book about Black Communists in Alabama during the depression, or the oral history of working class lesbians in Buffalo during the 1950s – I didn’t need to the book in my possession to remember the heated exchange from my social history class where one less than enthusiastic student balked at the idea of having to read about “dirty rug munchers.” I found a new voice that day, and was actually able to sound more like a historian than a loopy feminist in my defense of that book.
I was glad to see Ahab’s Wife go off with a woman who chose some of my best contemporary fiction. Nobody took the Tom Robbins, or Douglas Coupland and at the end of the day, despite considerable marketing efforts, we sold maybe 50 books and the rest were carted off to Goodwill, who took them in exchange for a tax receipt.
Some couples golf together, others take tropical vacations. My husband and I look for used bookstores and libraries. And while he is off looking for classic gardening titles, I’ll be digging through the poetry section for a copy of Longfellow’s translation of Dante. I don’t know how long it will take us to build back our collection, with new genres we have yet to discover, but I am sure, in 15 years, when it is time to cull the stacks again, the collection will again provide more memories than a photo album.