Tag Archives: history

ET&tAZ Out–Media, etc.

by AJ Gulyas Posted on June 17, 2013

I don’t believe I’ve mentioned it here, but my first book, Extraterrestrials and the American Zeitgeist came out last month, and I’ve been doing some media appearances to promote it.  The best one, and most recent, was with Greg Bishop of Radio Misterioso.  I’ve also added a “Books” tab up at the top with information on my writing.  There’s a dedicated site for news on ET&tAZ at contacteebook.com and a Facebook establishment for my writing stuff (as opposed to my personal account) here.

The interview with Greg Bishop from last Sunday (June 9) is now available at the website or through the podcast feed on iTunes. 

It was a great two hour ramble through Contactees and other areas of the paranormal and conspiratorial.  It was great fun and I hope to be on the show again (probably when The Chaos Conundrum comes out, later this summer).  From Greg’s description of the episode:

We also went into a lengthy comparison of John Keel’s Mothman Prophecies as compared to Gray Barker’s The Silver Bridge and decided that Barker’s book is ultimately the hipper, cooler version of the Mothman story. We also talked about the strange book Trance Formation of America and its weird, hilarious and disturbing tales of personal abuse and intrigue by elements of the U.S. power structure. There was also a segment where we tried to top each other with vintage Contactee books that we have in our collections.

This was about the most fun I’ve ever had in front of a microphone.  Hope you enjoy it.

Finishing up Spring classes here–I made some changes in keeping with the teaching post below and I’ll be sort of thinking through how that went in the next few weeks.  Need to start keeping this up as the main site–I feel I’m too scattered, with regard to internet presences…

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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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My #DayofDH, coming in 12 hours or so…

by AJ Gulyas Posted on April 7, 2013

My day of Community College Digital History/Humanities will begin around 8:00 AM, Eastern time, tomorrow morning, provided that I make it into my office at Mott Community College when I plan to.

Day of DH is awkwardly placed this year– I’ll be teaching pretty much all day.  I’ll try to give some insight into how I use “the digital” in the classroom and out, as well as discuss some of my other digital activities, including my non-teaching work and my upcoming sabbatical project.

Expect pictures.

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Writing Stuff

by AJ Gulyas Posted on September 25, 2012

Working on a tiny part of a large project that someone other than me is running.  Mostly it involves editing historical documents and writing some (fairly substantial) introductory material.  Of course, my brain being empty for the day, I’m writing about the writing than actually doing the writing.  That’s probably because I’m not—deep down—a “writer’ as much as I am a teacher who likes to write; this stuff comes much harder than it probably does for more writerly writers.

So, this project (which has turned out to be a little more involved than I initially thought) has—regardless of anything else—provided me the opportunity to explore some additional sources to use in my classes.  This writing (and the other writing I did over the summer—not just the book, but more bureaucratic and procedural stuff) has done a few things for me that I didn’t expect.

First, I completely rewrote most of my writing assignments for my classes.  Nothing huge, just clarifying expectations and streamlining the words.  I’ll be interested to see if the changes result in different, improved work from students.

Second—and this was not unexpected—is that the connections between my teaching and my writing (including writing that doesn’t directly bear on the subjects I teach) improve my teaching and, especially, my creation assessment activities.

A ramble, this, but one that clarified some things in my mind.  Thanks for tagging along, if you have been.

Now, back to work.

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Hack and Slash

by AJ Gulyas Posted on July 12, 2012
271 Marked-up Pages

I’m about 2/3 of the way through the first major, full on edit of the Saucer Book Project and I’ve been pleasantly surprised so far.  More words stayed than I thought would and I’ve been able to add a few thousand here and there, making connections more explicit and strengthening the argument.

And, of course, adding in the section about Billy Meier, the Swiss Contactee whose story spans decades.  Whole lot of information to sort through there, but I think I have an approach that’s narrow enough that it doesn’t become the Billy Meier chapter (it’s in with the 1970s stuff).  One of the biggest issues with the Meier material is that the original translations of the 1970s notes are pretty heavily edited (editor Wendelle Stevens removed inflamatory statements about religion and politics.  I mean, what’s the point?  Oh, and I think I met Stevens once, back in ’96 at a UFO slideshow in a hotel conference room.  Not sure though…)  Still, I think it works for my over all approach and, besides, a book about Contactees without Billy Meier doesn’t really work…

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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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Halfway

by AJ Gulyas Posted on October 31, 2011

Halfway through the fall semester and I’m weighing in with my…what’s this?…second weekly entry?  Wow—really thought that I’d be able to keep pace better than that.

So…where are we?  Heading into the Cold War in my modern US classes and Rome/Han in World.  Early America is getting into the 1840s, so we’re well on our way to the Civil War. 

Most frustrating thing so far this semester is the constantly shifting due dates due to illness, confusion and other nonsense (nearly all my fault).  Strongly considering eliminated due dates per se, shifting to a system where essays are due at any time before the midterm and/or final.  Would provide more flexibility for students (which may lead to better results) and, of course, reduce huge piles of essays to grade.

Downside, of course, is losing track of how students are doing as a group.  Problems that I could address to the class will have to be addressed over and over to individual students.  Not a great solution.  Still, frustrating that after 7 years of doing this, I still misjudge schedules and workload.

In other news… signed a release for a thing I wrote, so that’s probably going to actually appear at some point (I think…it’s a chapter for an edited collection and I am so far out of the loop of how these things work that it’s just sad).  Project SMITH has passed phase one and is winging its way to people for feedback.  Really hope to be able to talk about SMITH at some point, but I strongly believe in the power of loose lips to jinx opportunities (plus, blabbing about potential cool things just makes me sound like a wannabe).

Must go now, watching the Star Wars Holiday Special and I’m missing the Jefferson Starship performance.

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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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Creating videos for online classes

by AJ Gulyas Posted on July 22, 2010

As much for my own record keeping as anything else, I thought I’d run down how I create video PowerPoints for my online classes.  I use these videos for course content and also to explain, through screen captures, how to accomplish various menial course tasks.

In general, these are some things I like to keep in mind:

  • Each presentation should be no more than 20 minutes–less if possible.  Sometimes this means doing 2 or three separate videos per chapter, broken up topically.  The way our World History text is structured, the individual chapters are pretty large.  For example, for the chapter on 1500-1600, I had three presentations: Exploration and Colonization, The Reformation, and East Asia.
  • Another thing I do is not cover every topic under the sun– the presentations are a supplement to the textbook, not a replacement.  I try to provide broad overviews and explanations to assist the students in comprehending the text.

This is what I do:

  1. Figure out what topics (usually 2 or 3) would be best explained by me talking about them.
  2. Work up a brief PowerPoint presentation on my Macbook with enough bullets to give me talking points as I record.  I try to include as many maps as possible as well, and I use the slide-show’s “pen” feature during recording to explain geographical stuff.
  3. Review the slide-show a few times, sketching out what I want to talk about, relating it to things I’m not talking about (that they’ll read in the book) and–hopefully–tie everything together.
  4. Record.  I use Techsmith’s Camtasia: Mac for recording.  It’s affordable ($99), made by a local company (Techsmith is down the road in Okemos, MI) and works incredibly well.  Although the mic built into the Macbook is pretty good, I added a Samson Go Mic ($50).
  5. HIT SAVE IN CAMTASIA BEFORE DOING ANYTHING ELSE!
  6. Edit. Camtasia’s editing functions are excellent and pretty intuitive.  Usually, I only need to trim the beginnings and endings of the video so students don’t have to sit through me switching between windows and such.
  7. Sometimes, when I’ve got some time or am bored, I make some goofy intro music with Garageband and my M-Audio O2 MIDI controller.
  8. Export.  We use Blackboard for our online course management, but uploading videos directly into the course shell can be a hassle.  One thing I like about Camtasia is that it will create ready-made webpages with your video embedded into them as Flash.  I use that feature to render the videos.
  9. Upload.  I upload the folders containing the video and associated HTML code to my school-supplied webspace using Flow.
  10. Link.  I provide a link to students in the chapter’s Blackboard folder.  So far, I haven’t had students running into tech problems with this.

That’s basically what I do.  It’s, clearly, not the only way to do it.  It might not even be the best way to do it.

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