Setting requirements for discussion

Plenty of professors teach online now.

Er, that is, plenty of professors have scanned an armload of articles into PDF and upload them to Blackboard or some other learning management system, and have students post a few times to a "discussion" board. You will note that there is no teaching involved in that exercise.

Let's assume you're after more than that, and that you want your students truly to discuss history as a part of the course requirements. How do you accomplish that? The answer is simply stated but difficult to execute: set clear requirements and stick with them, and model behavior. This post concerns the first part.

Sometimes when I tell a colleague that I require of my students three posts a week, the ol' eyebrow goes up. It's not said, but the thought is "only three"? Yep, only three. It's a matter of mathematics.

My expectation is that every student reads the posts of all the other students. If there is a class of thirty students, that means ninety messages a week (well, eighty-seven) to read. Add to this the posts from the teacher and the student is looking at 100 to 120 messages a week to read. No, I don't think they read all of them either. But they do read most!

Raise this to four messages a week and now you're at 150 or more messages a week. Cut it to two and it drops to eighty or so a week. Now, the real numbers are less because you can always count on the under-performers and those who drop the course. The point here is that the requirement is very much driven by how much it is reasonable to expect your students to read. If your class is larger, posts per week can go down; if smaller, the figure can increase. To put it another way, the requirement is driven not so much by what it is reasonable to expect the students to post, it's driven by what is reasonable to expect them to read.

Beyond this we have matters of form and content and other considerations. I'll leave those for another entry.

What's a Syllabus?

Every semester I get an email from the department asking me for my syllabus. What the devil do they want from me?

A syllabus used to be easy to define: it was that piece of paper, or stapled pieces of paper, that the professor handed out the first day of class. Typically a syllabus had certain information in it, but really there was little consistency between professors and across disciplines. The one really consistent thing about the syllabus is that it was the first thing handed out in the semester. Anything that came after was just a "handout". Curious terminology.

When I began teaching virtual classes two things quickly became evident. First, that the "syllabus" took its character in part because of the synchronous nature of f2f teaching. It was the sequence, not the content, that characterized the syllabus. This was rendered irrelevant in a virtual class where *everything* was available from the first day. This forced me to re-think what a syllabus might be.

The second thing I realized was that a traditional syllabus was bounded by the medium. There were only so many pages you could hand to a student on the first day without scaring them to death, so a syllabus tended to be brief and summary. The "handouts" that followed were often elaborations on the syllabus--guides to writing, resources, research, additional reading, and so on. These could have all been handed out the first day and indeed in some disciplines I've seen a whole packet handed out and called a syllabus.

Online, though, there are no real boundaries. A "syllabus" could be as many pages as you liked. I came to understand that students do want a single-page (web page) summary of assignments. They want to know when the due dates are and what is due. My syllabus therefore tends to be very brief but highly linked. The items that are due, those need explanation, right? And due dates should be supplemented by a statement about late assignments and make-up policy. The term paper assignment needs explanation about my expectations, maybe a list of possible paper topics, and so on.

How much of that is the "syllabus"?

All of it. None of it. I've had semesters where I didn't use the word at all. There was a Schedule of Assignments, list of Required Readings, a Study Guide, etc., each as its own page.

But I'm back to a Syllabus page for one simple reason: to keep the History Department off my back. It's not their fault; it's the fault of the accreditation people. They're the ones who require a syllabus for every course, every semester, every teacher.

Here's the amusing part: they want paper. Seriously. The accreditation body wants a piece (or pieces) of paper for every course. That piece of paper needs to be titled "Syllabus". What's on it ... eh.

So our poor secretary has to dun the faculty every semester. She has to have a table where pieces of paper collect which she dutifully files into boxes. And for that jerk Knox, she has to print out a page.

It's bad enough she has to do all this, she shouldn't have to print out multiple pages. She shouldn't have to follow links and figure out what constitutes a syllabus. So I cut her a break and I have a single page with the word Syllabus at the top in nice big letters so she can print it, file it, and forget about it.

And that's what a syllabus is, around here.

Sounds Like...

Bloopers in history essays abound. They have been collected by teachers and have found their way on to the Internet. Once upon a time I collected some myself, but several years ago my attitude changed ... without my noticing, as attitudes will sometimes. I can't pinpoint a date but I can pinpoint the change in perception and its cause: it was when I switched decidedly from teaching live to teaching online. This may appear at first to have nothing to do with laughing at student bloopers but bear with me.

One of the striking differences between teaching live and teaching online is the chalkboard. Okay, whiteboard. Whatever you wish to call it, they all serve the same purpose: to put words up for students to see, read and record.

In a live lecture I speak names and terms that often are quite literally foreign to my students--Greek, Latin, German, French, and so on. So, like every teacher for generations, I wrote those hard-to-spell words on the chalkboard. Some teachers even make handouts. Nowadays, maybe they even make web pages. Whatever the format, the purpose was the same: students could say the words, but they could not write them.

In a virtual class, though, I never speak the words, and the problem my students face is just the opposite. They can spell the words, but they have no idea how to pronounce them. As a consequence, I have audio files embedded in my essays pronouncing various words.

Which brings me back to student bloopers in essays. First off, I just admit, some people simply have trouble spelling. Let's leave that aside. Consider that for most student essays they are required to write on a topic about which they've had no advance notice, and must write for a fixed length of time without notes (aside: this is something professional historians never have to do, so one must wonder what skill is being tested here), so there is pressure on the student, which doesn't lead to meticulous thinking.

So now look at a typical student blooper:
"In the Olympic games they ran around and tossed the java.  The victors won a coral wreath."


It's funny, no doubt, but look closer. They tossed the java. Here, the student means "javelin" but has very likely encountered that word only rarely in his or her life. In the pressure of the moment, s/he grabs for the first word that comes close in sound. The second example is even clearer. The student has rarely heard of a laurel wreath, but s/he has heard of a coral reef.

In both cases, the auditory and the written are being muddled. I don't see this as a blooper so much as I see it as a commentary on the teaching medium. Students are told history but then are asked to write history. There are bound to be gaps in the translation. I have no doubt at all that if my students, taught exclusively via the written word, were asked to take an oral examination, they would come out with similar verbal mistakes. I can picture professors editing sound files to produce compilations of muddled pronunciations.

I'm not being dour. I still smile at a line like "Jesus was punished with thirty-nine lasses". But when I'm done smiling, I see the thing for what it is: a mistake in transcription from audio to text.

History Blogs

Shamelessly cribbed from "In the Middle" this list of medieval history blogs. Current as of this writing.

• Modern Medieval
• Unlocked Wordhoard
• Humanities Researcher
• Blogenspiel
• The Ruminate
• Quod She
• A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe

Each is well worth a visit. Each is well worth a long visit, especially if you are a student in the field, but also if you're an interested amateur or a working historian.

Why I don't put a single lecture into a single file

People ask me about this, so I'll answer. They want me to put all of a single essay into a single file.

I ask: why?

Because, they reply, it's easier to print. I also suspect an answer is: because it's easier to copy. I've never heard any argument that doing so would improve learning.

I have no interest in making the information on my sites easier to print. My essays are designed to be read online and take advantage of that environment. This includes ancillary tools such as sound files to help with pronunciation and images like maps that help with understanding, or even just pictures to help with visualization. While the images can be printed, they are never as clear, and in any case you can't zoom them; sound files, of course, don't exist on paper.

I actively discourage such habits as highlighting, which is how some students think studying happens, so that's another reason not to facilitate print.

I do suspect students, especially public school students, of copy/pasting entire passages. It's a near certainty. Putting everything in one file merely makes that job easier, and I have interest in doing that. Beyond that, however, I know for a fact that other sites duplicate my content without permission, and I want to make that task difficult for them as well.

Finally, there's an issue of scope here. If it makes sense to put all the pages of an essay into a single file, why stop there? Why not all the essays in the entire site into a single file? Heck, why not all my classes, just one great long file? On the contrary, if anything, I'm moving towards increasing the granularity of the information.

Are there any benefits to my approach? Well of course there are.

First is readability. I don't try to keep "above the fold" but I do try to keep pages relatively short. Within that very vague guideline, I try to make each page self-contained; in fact, my model comes from the very old-fashioned style of history books that would have inserted headings--not chapter titles nor even section headings, but indicators of a change in topic. Typically these would encompass only two or three paragraphs. I try to break each page at a logical point that would propel the reader on to the next page. Readability is, in other words, a consideration both in terms of screen reading but also in the rhythm of reading.

Second is ease of reference. Discussion is important in my pedagogy and by breaking an essay into many pages I facilitate references, both in discussion and in papers.

Third is findability. Search engines are happiest when each page is about a topic. By breaking an essay into many pages I can title each specifically and adjust keywords as needed.

Finally is performance. Because I make extensive use of media, an entire essay in a single file would actually be pretty hefty, even by modern standards. I try always to be cognizant that my work is on a world stage, so I try to keep the footprint of any single page as light as possible.

Why Study History?

Just about every textbook published feels compelled to say something about the uses of history and why (please oh please) students should study it. I'm here to let everyone off the hook. You don't need to study history. Society doesn't *need* history. My discipline has its merits, but it is a social luxury, adding value to society.

What about the need to learn from the past?

Not important. We don't need to learn from the past. In fact, in most places and most centuries, most people had only a dim and deeply confused idea about their past. And they did fine. They made us. Lacking historians, people simply make stuff up. In fact, even with historians around, they make stuff up, because what we have to say is too nuanced and doesn't fit with their stereotypes.

Now, if you should happen to want genuinely to understand the past, then you need to learn the discipline of history. Not, mind you, read a bunch of books, but to learn the discipline. This is no small task, but it has its rewards. Those rewards accrue to the profession and to the individual; it doesn't do much for "society".

Don't study it because it's "useful" in some way, because it isn't. A hammer is useful. History isn't a hammer.

History doesn't have utility; history has value. You know, like art or friends or travel. These have value because they enrich our lives.

With a hammer, once you get its utility out of it, that's all you get out of it—all you ever can get out of it. But with travel, friends, art and yes with history, you can return over and over. In fact, the more often you travel, the more often you turn to friends or art, and the more often you study history, the more you receive from it.

That's way better than mere usefulness.

Cologne Archive Collapses

What a bitter irony that I happen to have chosen a picture (months ago) of Cologne! Here is a link to an article in Der Spiegel (it's in English) about the collapse.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,613209,00.html

Two people died in the collapse. How much archival material is permanently lost is hard to say, but there's been extensive water damage, so there's no doubt losses will be significant.