Posts Tagged ‘teaching’

As some of you might guess, I get mixed reactions whenever I reveal that I use Wikipedia in my history classes. And not just for reading; I actually assign my students to research and write an article for Wikipedia. And it has consistently been one of my most successful assignments. It shows students the difference between fact-only writing and analytical writing, it provides an introduction to research methods, and it gives them more insight into the working of Wikipedia, so they understand why they should or shouldn’t use it for various circumstances.

Jeff McClurken’s recent post, “Writing a Strategic Plan for Academic Technologies and Libraries,” asks a really great question: If given the task of writing a strategic plan for a small institution, what would your top academic technology goals be? After teaching several undergraduate courses, and while currently teaching a graduate course, I’ve thought about my own goals at a classroom-level, and I think these goals could be applied to a broader strategic plan for a university.

Last Friday, Mills Kelly gave a wonderful presentation on his use of weblogs in his history courses in a forum organized by the Center for Teaching Excellence at GMU. If you ever get a chance to listen to Mills talk about teaching, drop whatever you’re doing and go listen. Though they in no way do justice to Mills’s presentation, here are a few notes I took.