The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

Teaching Thursday: How to introduce the M.A. in History?

Over the past semester, we've re-conceived our M.A. program in History here at the University of North Dakota.  As part of this process we've added another required M.A. level course.  Traditionally, we've required that the students take a graduate historiography course; in our new program we will require our students also to take a an introduction to historical methods course.  This course will involve a "refresher" (let's call it that!) on advanced research techniques.  This means an introduction to both library and online resources for doing independent historical research as well as basic refresher on note-taking, outline-writing, and thesis-formulating.  This work will likely culminate in the student's writing a feasibility study for their proposed M.A. research.  In a two year program, it is never too early to start working on research.

The second part of the class will be the so-called parade of scholars.  This will involve at least part of our graduate faculty presenting their research interests and methods.  Our department has a nice range of scholarly approaches; several of use work on material culture (albeit in different ways), we have an oral historians, a quantitative historian, a biographer, a few archival guys, and a clever, philological Medievalist.  So, if even half of the graduate faculty in our department come through the seminar, we'll provide a nice introduction to historical approaches present in our department.

The only other issue is how does the historical methods course work together with it's trailing course in historiography.  The methods, approaches, and techniques of history are closely related to both the history of the discipline (particularly the process of professionalization) and the theoretical and epistemological assumptions that we rely upon to understand the past.  While separating methods from theory (or theory from practice) has long been a practical and pedagogical expectation, it also enables student to take unreflective approach to how they understand their own discipline.  In short, we preach that understanding the past is vital for understanding the present, but then offer courses that separate the two making it appear that present practice is sustainable without a sophisticated understanding of the history and theory of what we do.  It could be hypocritical at best, and at worse, perpetuate the a kind of theoretical complacency that is not uncommon in history department and among graduate students.

On the other hand, you can't teach everything at once.  And the division between theory and practice does allow for a rather neat pedagogical division.  The practical techniques of historical research are best learned through going and doing historical research, whereas the theoretical and historical foundations for the discipline are perhaps better introduced through a directed readings type environment where a group of scholars wrestle with challenging ideas a group.  The challenge of re-writing the curriculum is how to accommodate these two different, yet nevertheless fundamental aspects the process of learning how to conduct historical research and analysis.  The key issue is whether we should structure our curriculum around pedagogical issues or around the conceptual links that unite theory and technique in the practice of history.

Teaching Thursday: A Year in Review

Crossposted to Teaching Thursday

We interrupt your regularly scheduled Teaching Thursday, for a brief effort to summarize its first year in existence. Teaching Thursday emerged from a conversation between me and Anne Kelsch. The idea of Teaching Thursday began on my blog as an online extension of his regular teaching journal.  The idea was to take time each week to reflect on some issue either in the media or in practice that influences the way in which he taught. As with blogging in general, the reflective writing soon became addictive and this addiction (as they often do) led to changes in behavior.  I found that I became more aware (and, indeed, interested) in how changing approaches to my classroom practice produced different results, created different environments, and reflected changing attitudes toward teaching more broadly.  I thought it would be a great idea to supplement the regular discussions organized by the Office of Instructional Development with a weekly teaching blog where folks across campus (and perhaps even outside of campus) could reflect on the things that they do that influence how they teach.

SInce those first conversations, Teaching Thursday has seen 63 posts and 66 comments.  The most common categories (and we divided the post into many, probably too many categories) and those related to online teaching (5), technology (7), cheating (4), student expectations (6), graduate instruction (6), and the future of teaching (6), and summer teaching (4).  These posts were written by over 20 authors representing 15 departments or divisions on campus and several off-campus bloggers to add some diversity to our perspective here.  The posts featured the full range of faculty (both tenure track and non-tenure track, from full professors to assistant professors), staff, and administrators who are all committed to teaching in some way on the University of North Dakota campus.

Below is a list of the 25 most popular posts from the past year.  One of the great things about blogs is that you can track, to some extent, the number of times your pages were viewed.  Of course, any kind of web statistic must be taken with a grain of salt, but the ability to say something about what your audience found interesting, compelling, or timely.  The list below ranks the most popular posts based on the number of page views per day. The diversity among these popular posts is remarkable to me.  They range from very traditional blog posts which merely point toward an article of interest on the web, to inspirational essays, to thoughtful critiques and practice teaching advice. 

1. 2.4. Howard Zinn and Teaching, R. Kahn
2. 1.80. The Recruiting Paradox: Recruiting and Teaching a New Generation of Graduate Students, E. Nelson
3. 1.75. Online Teaching, the Panopticon, and the unequal gaze, M. Beltz
4. 1.59. On the habit of cheating, M. Beltz
5. 1.39. How to spot a bad professor, W. Caraher
6. 1.38. The Cost of Cheap Education, A. Kelsch
7. 1.28. The English Department and Beyond: the UND Writers Conference, C. Alberts
8. 0.95. Technology and Pedagogy. W. Caraher
9. 0.87. Teaching Thursday: Critiquing the Three Year Solution, J. Hawthorne
10. 0.70. The New Future of Teaching: Graduate Student Mentoring/Deconstructing Framework J. Benoit
11. 0.67. Teaching Thursdays: Boundaries and Manners, C. Prescott
12. 0.63. The New Future of Teaching: Social Networking, Changing Expectations, and the Perils of Access, W. Caraher. B. Weber
13. 0.57. Teaching Thursday: Some Thoughtful Tips , M. Beltz,W. Caraher, T. Prescott, B. Weber
14. 0.57. The Panopticon and Online Teaching, W. Caraher
15. 0.47. Mentoring Graduate Students, C. Prescott
16. 0.42. The Cost of Cheap Education: Another Perspective , M. Beltz
17. 0.41. Three Thursday Thoughts on Teaching: 1. Lexical Analysis , D. Perkins
18. 0.40. Reflecting on Teaching: An All-Campus Colloquium on Teaching and Learning, W. Caraher
19. 0.39. Call me Edupunk, C. Alberts
20. 0.38. Using Models to Teach, C. Barkdull, B. Weber
21. 0.37. Cheating, W. Caraher
22. 0.31. Reflecting on Teaching Colloquium: On Spurring Self-Reflection in Decision Making, D. Sauerwein
23. 0.30. Online Cheating, C. Prescott
24. 0.26. Another View on Teaching Graduate Students, A. Kitzes
25. 0.24. Making the Most of a Month in China: The Role of a Direct Journal, C. Berry

Over the first year, the blog has enjoyed over 7500 page views (and this does not count views via its RSS feed in Google Reader and the like).  The chart below shows that the trend over the past 12 months is clearly a positive one especially when you consider that December and January are typically slow blog months (both in terms of posts and visits) and March still has a week left and is showing exceptional traffic. In short, I am optimistic that the upward trend will continue.

While we do not collect a full set of analytics data, we can say a few things about how people got to our blog.  The biggest referrer is und.edu, followed by und.edu/dept/oid (the home page of the office of instructional development). My personal blog -- The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World provided some traffic as did the Official Blog of the Graduate School , but more important perhaps are various social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter which drove a considerable quantity of traffic to the site.  Finally, several other sites picked up our blog and linked to it.  The most exciting link came from the the New York Times, but we also attracted links from India, South America, and several blogs in the US.  The most exciting thing is that every day, every week, and every month we see more and more traffic coming to Teaching Thursday to discover what our faculty and friend have to say about teaching.

Without sounding sappy, I've been very pleased to discover so many people on campus willing to write critical, reflective, and practical posts on aspects of their teaching.  As we look ahead to our 10,000 visit and 100th post, I am excited to continue to work to develop content and participation on the blog. In particular, I'd like to get more participation from across campus, and extend invitations to my colleagues in the College of Engineering, Nursing, the Law School, and Medical School (I'm already working on ways to draw in colleagues in Aerospace!) to contribute what you do that is inspirational, practical, and exciting to the conversation.  With the recent emphasis on the STEM disciplines, I think that this forum can become a useful place for teachers both within and outside of the STEM fields to  exchange ideas that will enrich all of our classroom experiences.

I'd like to thank all the contributors over the past year -- especially those who wrote multiple posts or took the time to write about teaching during busiest parts of the semester -- and thank Anne Kelsch's for all her hard work to keep the blog in the campus eye.

Teaching Tuesday: Readings for History 240: The Historians Craft

Over the past two semesters, I've been teaching a revised version of our department's required undergraduate methods course -- the historian's craft.  I split the course into two parts: the first part is a historiographical survey of the development of the discipline. The class time is divided between a formal lecture and readings of primary sources central to the development of history.  Fortunately, most of these primary sources are easily found on the interwebs.  In fact, I've been able to teach the class without requiring a textbook or a primary source reader.

Here's the basic reading list:

Homer, Iliad, Book 1-2
Herodotus, Book 1
Thucydides, Book 1
Plutarch, Life of Alexander, excerpts
Euseubus, Life of Constantine, excerpts
Bede, Ecclesiastical History of England, Book 1, excerpts
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, excerpts
L. Valla, Discourse on the Forgery of the Alleged Donation of Constantine, excerpts
L. von Ranke, History of the Reformation, excerpts
T. Mommsen, "Rectoral Address," University of Berlin (1874).
J. Michelet, The People (1846), excerpts
J.B. Bury, "The Science of History" (1903).
E. Emerton, "The Requirements for the Historical Doctorate in America," American Historical Association Annual Report 1893
H.B. Adams, "Special Methods for the Study of History," in G. Stanley Hall ed., Methods of Teaching History. 2nd ed. (1902), 113-148.
C. Beard, "That Noble Dream," AHR 41 (1935), 74-87.
F. Braudel, The Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II, excerpts.
E. Said, Orientalism, "Introduction" (New York 1978).
H. K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, excerpt.

This past semester, however, I detected some fatigue with the sources.  Some were too long and the students did not read them carefully.  Others were too difficult to digest during a busy semester.  One of the key points of emphasis in our recent revisions of this class is to make it easier for students and more like other 200 level classes.  Students were enrolling in the class, finding it difficult, and dropping it and this made it difficult to move our majors through this course in a timely and efficient manner.  So, while the subject matter is demanding, we have discovered that the course itself cannot be.  As an added benefit to this more "realistic" approach to the course, I've discovered the more non-majors have enrolled and some of these are students who like history, but have been attracted into other majors. In other words, keeping this course accessible has the potential to attract prodigal students who have wandered from their one true love.

So, as I look ahead to teaching it next fall and spring, I am wondering whether there are some classics in the European or American historical tradition that are (1) accessible online and (2) easily excerpted into a 10-15 page section appropriate for a lower level history course.  The goal of the readings is to spur discussion of principles central to history as a discipline in either the past or present or to show some particular watershed in the development of history as a professional, academic, and intellectual pursuit. Any thoughts?

Teaching Thursday: Grading and Resistance

I just finished grading two stacks of midterm essays for lower division courses (in the interest of full disclosure my graduate assistant also graded a third stack). I noticed certain trends that were so pronounced and consistent across almost all of the essays in these stacks that they are worthy of remark.

First, the students will not articulate a specific thesis. They might offer a number of closely related specific and focused arguments over the course of the paper, but they will not tie themselves down with a specific thesis. I ask them to do this. I provide myriad examples in class, and I have critiqued earlier works from these same students pointing out how a vague thesis undermines the overall structure of a paper and argument. All of this is to no avail. And it's not like these are bad students. In fact, they are good students who can write good arguments. The main concern about writing a strong, focused thesis may be that these students feel like they are going to give alway their "good material" too early in the paper. In other words, they may be following a narrative style more common to the "popular" media like television where arguments are revealed slowly, layer-by-layer, over the course of the program.

On Wednesday, Richard Kahn gave a fantastic talk entitled "Education as the Avatar of Sustainability". While I'll leave you to suss out the specifics of the talk, one thing that I came away from is the role of education is fomenting resistance. In Kahn's talk education provided a way to resist "Big Coal", but this was clearly meant as a metaphor for any source of oppression or iniquity in the world. After the talk, I pointed out that universities, generally speaking, were in league with Big Coal. Universities oppress as much as they liberate when it comes to the production of knowledge. I've blogged before about the industrial roots of the system of disciplines that continue to form the foundation of the university system. If at least part of the institutional goal of universities is to create the kind of docile bodies that serve modern, industrialized society, then how do we understand the steadfast refusal of our students to follow certain simple procedures in their work.

Here's an example: I tell my students not to use contractions in formal writing. I even tell them that the so-called "word processors" can be set up to automatically convert contractions to proper, complete words. No matter how many times I tell students not to use contractions, they use contractions flagrantly throughout their papers. Is it possible to regard this practice as a kind of resistance not only to my expectations, but to the institution that supports such formal diction.

I have my doubts about any one episode or manifestation, but when the pattern of resistance appears consistently across so many student behaviors (and we should not fall into the easy route of just condemning students as "lazy". There is no reason to expect students are any more lazy than faculty to enforce rules and procedures in an uncritical way), I find myself wonder whether students have successfully framed me as the oppressor.

A New Table

To be honest, I have nothing today. I've been working on departmental paper work all week, writing letters of recommendation, preparing tests, grading papers, giving a talk, and going to meetings. It's odd that for such a busy week, I have almost nothing to report. Well, almost nothing:

1. Go and read Evan Nelson's post over at Teaching Thursday. He does a great job reminding us that teaching often begins before a student ever sets foot on campus. He's a recruitment specialist for The Graduate School here at the University of North Dakota and reminds us that success as a teacher is often dependent upon a good match between a student, a program, and a faculty member.

2. The second thing I'll offer is a photograph of the new table that I found orphaned in a hallway and that I squeezed into my office. It's pretty sweet and seems very happy there.

Teaching Thursday Redirect

We have a great blog over at Teaching Thursday today, and I am not in the mood to compete with it. Richard Kahn, explores Howard Zinn's attitudes toward teaching in a provocative blog post that should generate some conversation regarding our responsibilities as university educators.

Some of the main points of the argument reflect Zinn and Kahn's commitment to ideologically aware teaching. That is, to teaching from a particular perspective (and being explicit and open about it) rather than attempting to impart a fixed body of knowledge (Kahn refers here to Paulo Freire's idea of "pedagogical banking") to our students. The former involves being honest and open with our students and in an effort to both model and promote the same kind of honest and open discourse that exists at the heart of the humanities and, perhaps, our experiences as individuals. The latter, however, has roots in foundational notions of the university's disciplinary structure where each discipline contributes a fixed quantity of content toward the production of a "well-round" citizen.

Both perspectives on teaching have powerful advocates both within and outside of the academy. For example, few faculty members would regard teaching content -- whether we identify content as "methodology", "method", or "facts" -- as a value-free position. Nevertheless, this willful deception has strategic advantages; namely, it creates rhetorical space that preserves the disciplinary integrity that many scholars value as an institutional counterweight to the potential abuses of the university. Kahn's (and others') view of the ecology of teaching:

For students, like all people, are actively constructing their reality and placing new experience in the contexts of how they have come to understand and identify with their world. Thus, to teach in this way is to deny the human agency that students bring to the pedagogical encounter. Further, the zone of university teaching does not take place in a void, but is the complex ecological space constructed out of the myriad histories of the people inhabiting the campus, the institution’s own policy and disciplinary histories, the regional history in which a college is situated, the political history of the nation, and the social history of the planet (i.e., globalization). Thus, there is no value-free perspective from which to impart objective knowledge, but only the dynamic landscape that is the actively evolving history of ideas as articulated by various groups occupying a highly diverse array of social locations.

While this can be liberating and, frankly, appealing, admitting it explicitly has consequences.

Audit Culture and History as Craft

If you read this blog regularly, you know that I am fond of E. P. Thompson and I have found in some of his works useful ways to articulate not only scholarly work, but also the way in which I teach history as a discipline. In particular, I've found his notion of artisanal work useful to explaining how academic work is different from, say, the stereotypical corporate workplace. Artisans work on their own time and produced according the principles of what Thompson called the "moral economy" in contrast to the market economy which becomes the dominant force within capitalism. Two weeks ago, I returned to this analysis and considered how the panopticon and online teaching served the market economy. In particular, I suggested (almost argued) that the transparency of student behavior to the gaze of the instructor conditioned them to participate in the so-call "information economy" where every aspect of an individual's identity is observed, recorded, and redeployed (typically to encourage consumption or the production of goods).

While ruminating on these things, I stumbled upon an article by M. Herzfeld entitled, "Deskilling, 'Dumbing Down', and the Auditing of Knowledge in the Practical Mastery of Artisans and Academics: An Ethnographers Response to a Global Problem," in M. Harris ed, Ways of knowing (Berghahn Books, 2007), 91-112. Characteristic of Herzfeld's work, this article is dense and significant, so I found myself more mesmerized than necessarily comprehending. From what I can distill, he argues (among other things) that academic work is under the same pressures the ultimately undermined artisanal modes of production (p. 91). The emergence of a culture where administrators (if not fellow academics) expect quantifiable results and by doing so anticipate a kind of "replicability" that runs counter to the fundamental intellectual premises of disciplines like anthropology (p. 97). To Herzfeld, the way in which students acquire the kind of knowledge available through anthropology is parallel to way that apprentices learned from master craft men. Of course, artisanal ways of work have ultimately collapsed in the face of the pressures of the market economy which put greater pressure on the consistency of production and less value on the unique abilities of the individual artisan. As a result, in the place of artisans, we now have deskilled and marginalized labor. The need to maintain this pool of deskilled labor depends upon a kind of "prefabricated knowledge design" which ensures that workers have docile bodies and minds, capable of accommodating market forces (p. 93). In other words, the irregular and creative outcomes of artisanal methods of producing knowledge are undesirable in the market economy which looks toward consistency in production. The goal in education then is to produce consistent outcomes at the expense of creativity (and we must assume with Herzfeld that these two potential outcomes are mutually exclusive).

The discipline of history, like anthropology, often finds itself in a nervous place when faced with this philosophy of education. I'd contend that it is exceedingly difficult to demonstrate that students understand the notoriously ill-defined "historical method" through quantitative means. Thus scientific (or, better, scientistic) means of judging the success or failure -- the consistency -- of the educational process are ill-suited to evaluate the discipline of history as it currently stands. It is possible, of course, to make sure that students know some basic historical facts, but few within the discipline would accept this "prefabricated knowledge" to be a particularly significant indication of one's ability to be a historian. We acknowledge the central place of method in the historical discourse by calling the one required class in the historical curriculum here at the University of North Dakota, The Historians Craft. We explicitly situate history within the tradition of craft -- that is artisanal -- production (pp. 98-99). The outcomes in this class, and in historical research more generally, are uneven, unpredictable, almost impossible to quantify and to replicate. The reasons for this are rooted in the varying nature of historical source material as well as variation in students' (and historians') ability to grasp any particular body of historical source material. Experience plays a key role in our abilities as historians and, as the saying goes, you can't teach experience.

Lest we think that Herzfeld's paralleling artisans and anthropologists predicts the ultimate collapse of academic disciplines that embrace knowledge over skills, he concludes with an optimistic vision. Anthropologists, like historians, trained through experience are quick to realize the flaws in any form of assessment that endeavors to reduce actual learning to numerical or structural models (pp. 106-107). In fact, the sensitivity among historians and anthropologists to the irregularities present in any form of data (and to the power structures that create these data sets) put them in a position to reject assessments that undermine their devotion to knowledge production. I'd add to this that our understanding of the context of audit culture allows us to subvert it goals by forms of passive resistance which range from mimicking successful outcomes through the deft manipulation of scientistic language to intentional misrepresentation of the audit culture's expectations for the discipline. How long these strategies can sustain the discipline speaks as much to the health of the discipline and its continued ability to produce knowledge as it does the strength of the powers that seek to de-skill academic artisans in the name of scholarly production.   

Teaching (with Technology) Thursday

Technology is all over the news this week with both Apple's announcement yesterday and the official publication of the 2010 Horizon Report; so I thought it might be a good time to talk a bit about some of the high-tech new and its potential impact on teaching and some of my own efforts to use technology in the classroom. This will also set up today's contribution to the Teaching Thursday blog. It might be a bit later than usual, but it will certainly be worth it!

1. Apple iPad. Every other blogger is talking about so, I would feel left out. As much as I love my MacBook Pro, I am deeply skeptical about claims that the iPad will have a significant impact in the classroom. Having said this, at least one school, Abiliene Christian, is already talking about the possibility of requiring the iPad for all of its students and Steve Jobs' consistently linked the iPad with Apple's goal to position itself at the "intersection of technology and the liberal arts". So, it seems clear that Apple conceives of the iPad as being at home in a university environment and at places like Abiliene Christian, where a significant relationship with Apple already exists -- they require their students to have either iPhones or the iPod Touch -- the iPad will certainly provide an appealing upgrade to the hardware that they are already using. Moreover, the prospect of students being able to bring their digital textbooks (or most online content) to class with them will be hugely appealing.

From the perspective of someone who teaches at a school that occupies the trailing edge of tech trends in higher education, I think that the iPad will struggle at places without a consistent equipment to Apple products. First, there will be interoperability issues with the existing technology infrastructure. Basically, the iPad which is built around Apples iPhone OS, will require students and tech folks to accommodate a new operating system. At a place like UND, there is only minimal support for OS X and very little support for Linux, so I can't imagine their being sufficient technical support for integrating the iPad into the day-to-day classroom environment. This isn't to suggest that the iPad would not function splendidly in those environments or that I can't imagine it's potential, but like a slow moving ship, large, underfunded, university's change courses slowly and if the iPad can not function within the existing technological infrastructure which, for better or for worse, is focused around Microsoft and Windows (XP!), there will be real barriers to its systematic adoption.

Next, I suspect that it's inability to handle Adobe Flash applications and its inability to run multiple programs simultaneously will be series drawbacks. On a phone or smaller and more simple mobile device, the lack of Flash is an acceptable annoyance -- after all you're surfing the web on a tiny screen that fits in your pocket; it's not whether the horse can ride the motorcycle well, it's that it can ride it at all. But on a full screen table, the inability to run flash will be a significant draw back. As an example, the iPad will not be able to run the BBC's spectacular History of the World website or the proper web version of the UND homepage. Since Flash remains an economical way for universities, museums, and the media to produce content rich web experiences, the incompatibility with Flash on the iPad will limit some of its popularity among a group who relies heavily on Flash to make their web go. The inability to run multiple applications simultaneously will make it hard to ask the students to jump back and forth from a digital textbook, to an online interface, to a Twitter application and these are the kinds of expectations that we already have with analog media in the classroom. We expect students to be able to "run multiple applications simultaneously" (take notes, annotate a text, and participate in a classroom discussion) and we need to expect our teaching technology to follow suite.

Finally, I have to agree with Jim Groom -- the noted and notorious semi-underground higher ed tech guru -- who told the Chronicle's Wired Blog that Apple control over the application approval process may be jarring to those in higher education who want to develop specific applications for the iPad. On the one hand, there are universities like Stanford, who have embraced the iPhone apps as a development challenge and teach courses in app development; many more schools, I suspect, will be wary of having to partner with Apple to navigate what most developers claim to be an mysterious and opaque process.

Update: Groom (and others via links) really nails some key concerns in this post.

The reason for this wariness, of course, is that the iPad will not be the only player in the high-end tablet market for vary long. Google's Android operating system should soon be powering alternatives to the iPad which will likely suffer many of the same problems with interoperability, but at least represent a more open source alternative to the iPad restricted development model. At the same time, Windows has long powered tablets and these tablet have not caught on the classroom. This probably reflects hardware issues as much as anything, but its hard to imagine that Windows based developers will not soon offer similar products to the iPad with the advantage of being more clearly interoperable with the existing technological infrastructure on a university campus.

2. Twitter and the Wave in the Classroom. Over the last four weeks, I've be experimenting with both Twitter and Google Wave in a classroom setting. Here are some quick updates:

Twitter. I use Twitter in a large, lower division, night class that meets once a week. So far, it has not produced much in the way of immediate results. Students are still unsure how to use Twitter in the classroom. Most of the in-class Tweets are silly comments about the Viking's loss this past weekend (the football Vikings, not the Scandinavian kind) or remarks about how cool they think Sparta is or was. They seem to have forgotten that I know who they are on Twitter because they have provided me with a concordance that connects their Twitter alias with their real names. Outside the classroom, that is during the week between classes, Twitter seems to have at least made the students somewhat more engaged in the material. I ask questions related to the course material in the form of trivia (everything seems more fun if it's called trivia) and get regular responses. I've also had some nice responses to reflection questions: e.g. Would you rather live the Athens of Perikles or Sparta of the Classical Age? (More preferred Sparta, um, largely because the movie made it seem real cool.) At present probably 15%-20% of those in class who have signed up for Twitter have used it in some way. For more on my Twitter experiment see here.

Google Wave. I've been using Google's latest and greatest web-based collaborative platform in a small graduate class this semester. So far, it works brilliantly. Even my most technologically challenged graduate student has embraced (reluctantly at first) the wave and has contributed to a wide range of spontaneous, threaded discussions. We have not been as successful using Google Wave to actually collaborate on a specific document, but this aspect of its operability is less refined. More on this as the semester progresses, but I already feel confident in saying that Google Wave has real potential in a graduate level class.

3. As I said in my little introduction, we are excited to have a guest blogger over at Teaching Thursday. The blog post will be a bit later than usual, but it drop a Tweet when it is posted

Teaching Thursday: The Panopticon and Online Teaching

Crossposted to Teaching Thursday

In a blog post a few months back dedicated to the topic of online teaching, I mentioned an observation by Mick Beltz, a regular contributor to Teaching Thursday. He suggested that teaching online captured some of the essential characteristics of M. Foucault's panopticon as outlined in his Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this metaphor, Foucault used Jeremy Bentham's vision of the panopticon to describe modern society. The panopticon is an architectural form, most famously used for prisons, where an observer stationed at a central point can see into a series of cells. The people in these cells can always see the observation post (although they do not know whether they are being observed), but cannot see into any of the other cells. In this way they are together, yet isolated from one another In practical application, this means that a warden can observe the behavior of all the inmates almost simultaneously while the inmate cannot observe each other's behavior.

For Foucault, the pressure of constant observations implied specifically in the panoticon, but functioning elsewhere formed the ideal environment for maintaining the kind of discipline introduced in the prison, the factory, and even the modern school. For Foucault, this kind of internalized discipline produced by the fear of being constantly observed, ensured that society maintained a degree of conformity sufficient to keep the engines of capitalism moving. The panopticon and its culture of observation were part of Foucault's analysis of discipline in modern times and part of a greater goal of the modern state to produce "docile" bodies .

The parallel between the panopticon as a physical building and the experience of teaching (and presumably taking) an online course are quite striking. First the observer, in this case the faculty member, can observe student behavior through a comprehensive array of statistics as well as submitted work. The individual student, on the other hand, has almost no view of the faculty member, except for when their work is evaluated. At the same time, they have only limited abilities to observe the work of other students and rarely would know when another student is being particular successful in the class or struggling. In a classroom setting, of course, students can interact freely with one another both before and after class and encode their behavior in ways that make it difficult for a faculty member to observe, much less understand. Even during class, verbal and non-verbal cues from the blatant -- like laughter at a particularly innane comment by a fellow student -- or subtle, like glances at one another or eye-rolling or even the frustrated figiting that occurs when a class runs over, provide clear modes of communication between students. Moreover, students can use these techniques to force a dialog with even a reluctant faculty member. The classroom dynamic presents a formidable and almost irresistible check on unfettered faculty authority.

The removal of this opportunity for spontaneous, collective action certainly removes a key aspect of the faculty-student dialog from the classroom setting. Moreover, the realization that one is being constantly observed initiates and conditions the student for a world where companies like Google see everything from your mundane search patterns to your house to your financial, personal, and religious identities. The conditioning of students to be observed in an online environment prepares them for a world where companies and governments constantly gather information and construct identities for individuals which are so subtle, varied, and complex that they exceed the individual's ability to understand or realize them.

The impact of this environment on teaching as a profession is significant. While the "teacherly" gaze has always been one of any number of treasured weapon in the teacher's arsenal (able, when deployed successfully, to bring to order even the most disruptive student), it now has the potential to become the single most powerful tool for conditioning behavior. We can observe when a student comes online, how long they stay for, what they look at, as well as the what they produce. With only a little exaggeration, we can say that the student study habits, reading behavior, and analytical practices are de-mystified and can be placed in direct correlation to student performance on evaluated work. In effect, the barrier that has long separated the mystical process of learning from the work of evaluation has come down.

The advantage, then, of online education is that it conditions students to become the docile bodies in our information age and to accept our individuality as a commodity in the information economy. The documented life is the commodified life.

Public History: An Introduction to an Experiment

So, we're two weeks into my public history internship program and we are slowing putting together the public face of our project. This past week, we set up the project's blog here. The following post explaining the role the blog will play in the project is as follows:

Welcome to an experiment blog for an experimental class! This blog will detail the adventures of an intrepid group of public history interns as they work on several online and real life public history projects in the Department of History at the University of North Dakota. The goal of this blog is to make our efforts to create an online museum, manage an online complement to a gallery show, digitize analog data, prepare analog data for formal archiving, and create an online companion to a paper article. I have no idea how many of these projects this team will succeed in completing this semester or what realizations and limitations the team will encounter. The primary method of instruction, which this blog will reflect, is hands-on learning and like the best kind of hands on learning experiments, the results are not predetermined, but will depend on the success, energy, and abilities of the participants.

The hope is that this blog will make the process of learning and creating a range of public history experiments transparent to anyone who is interested and attract some positive (and maybe even critical!) attention to our high quality graduate students and their creativity. Above all,however, the idea is to make the process of public history as visible as the products of public history itself. In other words, I want to make sure that the process of producing public history (of all descriptions) is as important to how we think about the past as the product is.

So, stop back to the blog, three times a week to follow the trials and accomplishments of the public history team! And feel free to contribute in the comments line.

It has been interesting to participate in the discussions surrounding the public face of the various projects that we plan to undertake and get a clearer understanding of how different people view the potential of the internet as well as how the technology gaps between someone like me, who spends much of their day online in some way, and students who consume online information, but have little experience producing online content. So the learning curve will be steep at times, but I expect that the results will show how much is possible in a short time.