This blog started as a requirement for a requirement for my digital history tool of research (TOR). Using it to post responses to the weekly reading assignments and comment on other students’ posts, I started to appreciate the role of an academic blog as a sort of middle ground between researching/thinking and a final, written product. Mark Grimsley’s “Custer and the Art of the Blog” series of posts at his blog, Blog Them Out of the Stone Age, really helped change my mind about blogging and academia.
After the class ended, I found myself thinking of new blog posts — most for myself than for an audience — and decided to continue using this blog to explore some of the ideas and issues tied to my TOR. So, the tags to the right of the screen link to different aspects of either the digital history class (weekly writing, web review, final project), as well as other parts of the TOR including wikis, blogs, teaching, Scribe, research, and how I see the internet and digital technology changing academia.
The odds and ends category covers things that I found interesting and tangentially relevant, but that didn’t fit into any of the other categories — from a picture of my car accident to a Washington Post article about Wikipedia.
My ideas about blogs in history classes are pretty similar to my thoughts on wikis in educational settings. There’s a lot of potential, but I’m still not sure how things will work out. That said, I do have some ideas about how I’d like to at least try to use blogs in my classes in the future.
I really like the idea of having a structured, moderated course blog. I would be able to post readings and know they wouldn’t change while the students would have the freedom to express themselves and engage their classmates in the comments section of the blog. I also really like the idea of breaking the class into groups — possibly by research interests — and having each group create a blog about their subject as well as the research process.
Similarly, individual students or groups of students could be responsible for leading discussion every couple weeks. The students would be in charge of finding, posting, and contextualizing the readings as well as moderating the comments. They would then structure a class discussion building on the blog comments and after class, post a final summation of the topic and the class discussion.
But, maybe that’s too much information to make available to the world as well as too much to expect?
I started to correct the very flawed Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl entry in Wikipedia, but decided not to since I didn’t want my edits to somehow influence the plagarism investigation into one of my students. But, let it be know that it is a terrible entry! instead, I added a brief overview of Project Renew to the Unexploded U.S. Explosives section of the Wikipedia entry on the Vietnam War.
With some hesitation, I do appreciate Wikipedia for what it is. I agree with Rosenzweig that it is a useful research starting point, but I will probably tell my students not to quote/cite it for research papers. Of course, I am still quite suspicious on online research, so my objections to Wikipedia are not personal, per se. However, it is frustrating to me that so many students see Wikipedia as the final arbiter of history — or maybe they’re just lazy?
Rosenzweig’s article convinced me that my innate distrust of Wikipedia is a bit of an overreaction and misplaced as the online encyclopedia compares quite favorably with professional publications such as Encarta and the American National Biography Online. Additionally, the ability to track changes and respond to errors/vandalism is a clear strength of Wikipedia. (see an earlier post about politics and Wikipedia here)
This week’s readings have given me an idea for a potentially interesting assignment for the class I’m teaching this summer: either in class or an outside paper, I will have students critically evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of a Wikipedia entry. I have to think about this a bit more, but it might be a very useful way to convince students to question all sources, particularly unauthored, internet sources. What do you think about this potential assignment? Would you, if you were a freshman or sophomore at AU, take away something useful from such a project or would you feel insulted and belittled?
I sincerely enjoyed poking around the blogs and carnivals, but had to cut myself off because the midterms refused to grade themselves. I thought Mark Grimsley made a number of excellent points about the potential usefulness of blogging for academics — I particularly like the idea of making my work into a form of procrastination! What did you find most useful/interesting in the readings for this week?