Category Archives: Teaching

Teaching- this turned into kind of a longish thing…

by AJ Gulyas Posted on April 9, 2013

The recently ended 2013 Day of Digital Humanities was a great opportunity for me to take a quick look at what I do in a typical day and how “the digital” intersects with my work.

Being a full-time faculty member at a large community college, my work is first and foremost teaching.  This semester, I’ve got five sections (3 “traditional”, 2 online) and in all of them, I’ve been thinking of ways to change up what I’m doing.  Many of these potential changes involve digital things.  Since the next classes I’m teaching will be compressed 7 1/2 week classes, a rethink is in order, regardless.  Here are some things I’m thinking about (subject to change–few of these ideas will be set in stone before the first day of classes and, maybe, not even then).

Visual Dynamism

I really enjoyed using Google Earth in the classroom (see below) and the students seemed to be more engaged with historical data mapped over satellite imagery than they usually are with the maps that I use.  This got me thinking about other, more visually dynamic ways to present information.  Prezi, of course, is popular, but I can’t afford the amount of Dramamine necessary for me to cope with using it.  There are a variety of interactive timeline tools which may be useful as well.

Get the students to talk more

I’ve been teaching, in one way or another, for around a decade at this point and the biggest weakness I have is–without a doubt–encouraging useful discussion in the classroom.  Whether it’s because I like the sound of my own voice too much (likely) or because the mass of students are intimidated (or annoyed) by the usual handful of students who do 90% of the talking, it’s something that I need to work on.  One key, clearly, is to find ways to ensure that students are familiar enough with material to usefully discuss it.

Exams are terrible

I hate grading them, students hate taking them, and my assurance that they’re the best (or even a good) way to assess students is decreasing every semester.  In my online classes, I’ve been experimenting with weekly cumulative assessment as a way to replace exams in a manner that is relatively low-stress, but “high-yield” (yes, I think of student learning as a field full of soy beans).  It needs tweaking, but I may be on to something.  Or not.

Students, in general, seem to like history, hate history classes

I am, however, teaching a history class, so…yeah.  Problem here.  Working on it.

BlackBoard

Over the past few years, I’ve used both BlackBoard and self-hosted websites as a means of digitally-disseminating information to students as well as for recording grades.  This semester, I’ve been using Bb exclusively and while there have been headaches, the students seem to engaged with the material there more than they do on non-Bb sites.  Despite my usability concern with Bb and my desire for more open tools, I also have a compelling need to consider the students.  I’m still thinking this one over.

Omnia Mutantur

Everything changes, all the time.  What works one semester may not work the next.  What works one day might not work the next.  We often have to adjust and adapt to the students to whatever degree that it is practical.  If it is the students who must adjust to us, then we must provide tools to support and guide that change.  Often, we are in the position of having to not only teach our subjects, but also the skills of being a student.  These skills change over time.

These are disconnected thoughts, rather than a solution or manifesto.  There are dozens of books about teaching “today’s” students.  Some of them are worth reading, if only to argue with.  

This ended up longer than I expected.  TIme to hit the publish button and get back to work.

 

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Crossing Things off Lists

by AJ Gulyas Posted on February 16, 2013

Nothing is more satisfying that completing a project (or, at the very least, a significant phase of a project).  Most of the things I’ve been working on have really long gestation periods, so it’s nice to see some forward momentum.

978-0-7864-7116-4Extraterrestrials and the American Zeitgeist is moving through the publisher’s pipeline.  I spent a shameful afternoon responding to copy edit queries and wondering why I never see mistakes the first (or second, or third, or fourth…) time.  That bit’s done now and it’s moving on to the final phases leading to publication.

978-0-7864-6549-1

Similarly, Doctor Who in Time and Space, to which I contributed a chapter, is due to be released soon. This was pretty fun to do, even if it involved me having to watch (and think deeply about) the 1996 Fox Doctor Who television movie.

OPERATION LEMURIA, which I can’t talk about because I’m deeply superstitious, is completed and in other people’s hands; I’m just waiting for feedback at this point.

RANDOM ANACONDA, a revision of course outcomes for MCC’s “History of the Holocaust” course, is done and the paperwork is moving through the bureaucracy.  The only remaining work is explaining the changes at a bunch of meetings.

In amongst all of this stuff, I’m implementing some changes in my online classes.  It’s been a busy Winter so far, but I’m hoping that the work I’m putting in this semester will, down the road, save me some time.

Now, to get some grading done.

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Games and History

by AJ Gulyas Posted on August 14, 2012

On the list of links to your right, you’ll find a new one.  It’s the final report for my 2012 Faculty Innovation Award.  Inspired by the posts on Play The Past, I explored how I could use games (and, more broadly, historically-based media) to enhance how I encourage my students to be better consumers of historical media.  I used the game Colonization as a starting point–because there’s just so much wrong with it–and tried to develop a writing assignment that will force students to begin examining historical media more critically.

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Teaching: Successes and Failures

by AJ Gulyas Posted on December 11, 2011
FAIL stamp by Flickr user hans.gerwitz

I’m one of a group of faculty taking part in a workshop at the beginning of the winter semester.  Part of our preparation for this is to come up with an example of a success and a challenge in our teaching.  I thought it would be useful to throw it out into the world and—possibly—get some feedback or ways to clarify.

A Success
One success I’ve had is encouraging students to have a hand in creating their assessment activities.  In my early world history class, I’ve put students into groups and asked them, for each chapter, to come up with 3 to 5 questions that would be good short answer exercises on an exam.  Then, as a class we discuss each question  discussing what makes that question a good or bad question

How do we determine a good versus bad question?

  • Does the question address what they need to know about the material covered in that particular section of the course?
  • Does the question make sense (grammatically, stylistically)?  Is it clear?
  • Is it answerable given the information to which students have access (Have I talked about it in class? Is it discussed in the textbook?  Did we read a document that covers the information?)?
  • Are potential answers concise enough for short answer questions or would it be more suited to a longer essay?

And rarely, but crucially:

  • Is the question based on an utter misunderstanding of the material?  If so, how do we fix it?

The end result of this is that students then have a section of their exams that are crowdsourced, giving them some ownership and removing some avenues for complaining about the content of the exam.

A Challenge

I’m going to be honest.  I’ve never liked using the euphemism “challenge” when we often mean “problem” or “screw-up”.  Thus, I’m going to discuss–not challenges–but rather failures for which I repent and for which I have been attempting to atone.  There’s a whole truckload, revolving around student assessment.

  • Assessments that build on previous ones–I would like to create a system of historical document analysis instruction that leads students to ask gradually more complex and nuanced questions of sources as we go further into the semester.  Failures result from poor planning, lack of time, and my failure to adjust projects to account for shifting class ability (a project that worked well in one section bombs in another and I, usually, don’t pick up on the warning signs until too late to adjust effectively).
  • Exam essays should be the result of a series of practice essays written and critiqued.  Failures resulted from poor time management in the classroom which, in turn resulted from poor scheduling at the top of the semester.

I want to do two things in my classes (regardless of the time period or place covered):

  1. Train students to think critically about the past.
  2. Train students to communicate their conclusions about the past.

I’ve got notions of how to do this more effectively, but developing ways to operationalize these notions continues to be a critical failure point.

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Weeks 1 & 2

by AJ Gulyas Posted on September 16, 2011

I’d been toying with the idea of keeping track of the semester in some sort of weekly/biweekly way.  Instead of doing further toying or thinking, I decided to just go ahead and do it.  This is for me to keep an eye on where I’ve been and what I’ve done in the classroom this semester.

Early World History: We’re through the human origins stuff and rapidly moving from archaeology to actual history.  River valley civilizations are up next and I’m excited about showing lots of pictures of Harappan ruins.  One new thing I’m trying in this class is a chapter-by-chapter opportunity for students to create their own exam questions.  They submit a question, and I shove it into a GoogleDoc and let them comment, forming a sort of interactive study guide.  We’ll see how this goes.

US to 1877: Behind already—rejigging this from the 6-hour a week spring session to a 3-hour a week system has, apparently, befuddled me.  Hitting New England witchcraft on Monday, which is always fun.

US since 1877: In the regular section, also a bit behind.  This section of the semester (gilded age to WW1) is my least favorite, with the notable exception of the Spanish-American war, which is awesome.  The honors section of this course is going well, I think.  The first dedicated discussion day was full of participation and student seem keen to come up with a topic for their “migration”-tinged research project.

Outside of the classroom, this week saw the unveiling of MCC’s 9/11 memorial, Constitution Day, a visit from some people representing the Aspen Institute and a couple of tech workshops.  In the end, I would be very surprised if there is a busier week than this the rest of the semester.

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Innovation Award Update

by AJ Gulyas Posted on June 13, 2011

Niftily, I was awarded a Faculty Innovation Award to work on some stuff involving maps, history, and assessment of student learning. One of the conditions of the award is to periodically provide some updates on progress. I thought, in the interest of sharing, to provide the updates here as well.

Below is a brief video I made with my progress so far–written description follows!

My Innovation Award project (which, according to my initial application, seeks to create “a series of mapping resources and assignments for students in my online and ground-based history classes using beginner-friendly satellite tools such as Google Earth”) is on schedule. As noted in my proposal, phase one involved integrating historical information—relevant to my classes—onto maps. This phase was completed when I submitted my application.

Phase two is now also completed.  This involved integrating maps/historical data with assessment exercises and creating a resource that could be embedded in websites or course management systems such as BlackBoard.  A brief video demonstrating this is viewable above.

Phase three, which will introduce students to historical mapping in an introductory way is on schedule to hit the ground running in my Honors US History course in the upcoming Fall semester.  One slight shift from my original plan is that there are now several great resources for individuals to add historical information to digital maps.  I plan to introduce students to sites such as http://www.historypin.com, http://whatwasthere.com, and http://www.broadcastr.com as well as creating an assessment activity which requires students to research some aspect of local history and share their research with the wider world through sites such as those listed.

The only setbacks I’ve encountered so far are technical in nature, as I battle the twin demons of learning new tech tools and developing effective pedagogy around those tools.  The learning curve for some of these tools can be steep, which is one of the reasons that I’m going to be focusing on ready-made solutions like historypin and whatwasthere for student use.  It’s very easy to allow the joy of tinkering and building overshadow the pedagogical value of a particular tool; I must be careful to keep the focus on student learning rather than the sheer coolness of shiny new things.

Overall, I’m very excited about the possibilities of these tools—both those I’ve cobbled together and ones created by others that I bend to my designs and purposes—in my classes.  If all goes close to the plan, students will develop traditional historical research skills as well as geographical knowledge, an understanding of how to construct historical narrative and argument for a public audience, and some practice with technology.

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What I like about BlackBoard (Really, no Foolin’)

by AJ Gulyas Posted on May 21, 2011

Robert Goddard and a Blackboard It’s no secret among those I talk to (colleagues, family, friends, passers-by) that’ I’m not a huge fan of BlackBoard, the behemoth Learning Management System (LMS) that my school and countless others use.  My list of complaints is brief, but impressive–I don’t like the walled-off aspect of it, I don’t like the massive cost my school pays, I don’t like the clumsiness of the interface, I don’t like playing tech support guy for students having trouble with it.  I feel bad for our hard-working staff people who maintain the system with little really support from BlackBoard, despite the (again) MASSIVE amounts of money this thing costs us every year.

But like I said, you’ve all heard this before; from me, from others.  In the interests of fairness and full disclosure, I’m going to talk a bit about what I like about BlackBoard.  Because I do use it–a shameful admission–to a certain degree.  I use it for my totally online classes (I don’t think I’m required to, but I’m not gonna step in front of that particular policy-bullet right now…) and partially for my on-ground classes.  What follows is a brief run of what’s not bad about Bb and how I use the system in my on-ground classes.

(more…)

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Great Lakes THATcamp 2011–Brief Thoughts

by AJ Gulyas Posted on May 2, 2011

Once again this year I was privileged to participate in Great Lakes THATcamp, held at MSU. Following are a few loosely organized thoughts about the experience.

  • If possible, things were even more friendly and collegial than last year. Great mix of scholars, teachers, librarians, archivists, and museum folks, as well as people whose duties straddled those lines.
  • There seems (to me) to be a reduction in the learning curve on a lot of really cool stuff. For example tools like Broadcastr and WhatWasThere will ease entry to using location-based tools in teaching–especially in getting students to participate in the creation of content. I’m certainly going to try and come up with ways to use these in class this fall.
  • The two bootcamps I attended, on WordPress and Omeka were great. In particular, I really valued learning about some of the guts of WP as well as being introduced to omeka.net accounts. Again, these are things that will have a direct impact on how I teach.
  • Speaking of teaching, Saturday morning was spent with others who were interested in digital pedagogy, particularly the concept of Massively Open Online Courses.

I’ll probably have more thoughts in time, but all in all, this was a great weekend with great people. I look forward to future such events!

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