For the first time in a good two years, the beginning of the semester is bringing with it that rush of excitement tinged with uncertainty that only comes when you’re teaching a class for the first time. In this case, a colleague referred me to the folks over at American University’s Department of History, and tomorrow I start teaching a seminar for them titled “History in the Digital Age.”
Syllabus is online, if you’re curious – it’s a kludge of Bob Griffith’s earlier incarnation of the course, Roy Rosenzweig’s “Clio Wired” and the Digital History workshops that I’ve been designing and running for the past year. I’ve got the first few weeks pretty fleshed out, but I’ve held off on pinning down too many details after that until I better know the capabilities of my students; one of the awkward things about teaching digital history is that you never know the range of skills and expertise that’ll show up in the room.
As an aside, one fringe benefit of teaching this class is that it’ll spur me to a lot more blogging – if I’m expecting it of my students, I suppose that I’d better be willing to step up as well.
Comments
One Comment so far. Leave a comment below.Thanks for assigning my post on spidering and scraping … I enjoyed reading the students’ comments about the article in their blogs. It gave me some sense of what I might want to make more clear in my future writing. The great thing about blog posts is that one puts more effort into them than e-mail, but not as much as an article, and the feedback is instantaneous. (Their comments also gave me some ideas for future hacks involving SIPs.)
Our public history students are also blogging this term, as they go about their business of creating a museum exhibit, website and technology-enabled walking tour (http://londonoldeast.blogspot.com)