Category Archives: pedagogy

No comments

Update on the US History Survey

  October 12, 2014 ,

Late last week, I observed a session, devoted to the topic of secession, of the hybrid U.S. history survey. It made me more than a little nostalgic for the classroom, in all its gritty and chaotic glory. And, it reminded me of the madness that is the one-semester U.S. history survey — the first week of October, and you have already reached the mid-point of the survey, the Civil War. Absolutely crazy, and a strong argument for GSU to adopt the standard version of the U.S. history survey, which is generally broken into 2 semester length classes. But that is another topic entirely. If my last post focused on the risk of the hybrid course, my experience watching the class served to remind me of the potential rewards of the hybrid structure. I have taught the survey several times, and the biggest problem I always face is the necessity of providing context. This is, in part, a coverage issue common to any classroom, but I think in history it is particularly important because as history teachers, the main skill we are trying to teach our students is to place events into historical contexts, to see things through the lens of the past. This is really only possible if you know enough about the past to create a context for it. For this reason, depth and breadth are super important to historical understanding. When I teach say Tom Paine or Harriet Jacobs, I am less interested in the kinds of questions … Continue reading

5 Comments

You can lead a horse to water

  October 6, 2014 , ,

Taking risks in education is, well, risky. As I have mentioned in several previous posts, one of my SIF assignments is to work on the hybrid U.S. history sections being offered at GSU this fall. The course is innovative in a number of ways: it takes full advantage of the D2L platform, it has it’s own, custom made (and free!) textbook, and it uses video segments, essentially little documentaries, to supplement instruction and to create a class that meets in-person once a week, and in a virtual classroom on the other. The film segments, in combination with reading from both the textbook and from primary sources, become the material on which Thursday class is based. So, the classroom is also flipped, meaning that it replaces time often spent in lecturing for time spent on discussion or other types of activities that usually get little time in survey courses. As great as this sounds, there is a little bug in the system so far – very few students are watching the video. Because they are accessed through D2L, the number of students accessing each video can be tracked, and the results to date have been discouraging. This is frustrating – not only because of the many hours that go into producing each video segment but also because the videos are an attempt to engage learners who are supposedly visual, and who will tell you that they don’t keep up with reading because of the medium, not because they are averse to … Continue reading

No comments

Getting more from images in the classroom

  October 2, 2014 ,

As I mentioned last week, one of my main tasks as a SIF fellow is to help generate video segments, essentially small documentaries, for GSU’s hybrid U.S. History survey course. Over the last week, I have been learning Adobe Premier Pro, so that I can transform a-roll footage of historians talking with each other about important historic events and phenomena into more engaging film. One of the questions I have been mulling over as I have been leaning the mechanics of video editing is how to maximize the pedagogical value of the films we are making. There is a kind of tension, hopefully a creative one over the long term, between the teacher in me (I have taught non-hybrid versions of the course several times), who thinks above all in terms of exposing students to important material, and to the complexity of historical circumstance, and the novice film-maker who is under the understandable mandate of producing a video that students will actually watch. All of the complexities of the discussion, which is a kind of wonderful dialectical back and forth between two historians trying to make sense of a complicated era, are lost if the audience for the film isn’t listening while watching. So, Ameer and I have been grappling with this question of how to use video as an engagement point, not a distraction, to produce videos that are as meaty as the lectures they are intended to replace, but hopefully will hold the attention of students in a … Continue reading

No comments

A Sifendipity that turned into an activity

  September 28, 2014 , ,

This week I have been quite busy conducting interviews for my hybrid pedagogy promotion project, and one aspect that came up frequently during those interviews was my interviewee’s particular reservation against using the microblogging platform Twitter for pedagogical purposes. Most interviewees said they don’t (like to) use Twitter because it would sent their teaching into a tailspin, thereby making it more difficult to administer the students’ learning experience. I can certainly understand the attitude. Once we go hybrid with our pedagogy, we introduce additional spaces into the learning experience and it can become quite overwhelming not only to administer the content that students produce on Twitter, but also to use that content for assessment, not to mention that in every class there will be students who don’t use social media tools at all (at least that has been my experience so far). So, from that angle, I can surely understand how Twitter can be quite intimidating at first. However, a couple of days ago I found an email in my inbox from a research-sharing website which contained a paper on the rhetoric of hashtags by Daer, Hoffman, and Goodman, titled “Rhetorical functions of hashtag forms across social media applications,” and here I can certainly see the merit of using Twitter in the classroom for critical thinking exercises as well as for practicing analytical skills. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Twitter, hashtags are used to connect Twitter messages to larger conversations. Hashtags are words or unspaced phrases that … Continue reading

No comments

Progress at CURVE

  September 28, 2014 , ,

As my second week of working at CURVE ends, I begin to reflect on my time spent there, the progress made, and its overall usefulness in the name of research. Working at CURVE has truly made my lasts jobs seem so mundane and unbearable. Honestly to me working at CURVE no longer feels like a job, let me explain. The room is a high-tech visual and research oasis. As a computer science major, I am continuously at awe with all that the space can do for students at GSU, especially those dedicated research students. The workstations each have either a pc or a mac of incredible quality. The PCs have 12 core processors and 128 GB of RAM (making them extremely fast and capable of loading things with a lot of data), while the macs 1 TB of hard drive making them able to store a significant amount of data and files. These workstations are all set up with high resolution samsung screens making the visuals great and are arranged for groups with multiple seats all around the station. The interact wall is immense. The wall of screens seems to stretch over more than half of the space.  This screen has recently been used to display medical models of the human body to allow a class of students with  medical related majors to clearly examine all that they can. The 4k screen adds to this high-tech lineup of equipment allowing for an area for viewing detailed images. Although the room … Continue reading