Comments for edwired

Comment on Who’s Afraid of Anne Frank? by Jaynie

Jaynie — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 00:38:20 +0000

It depresses me a bit that sexuality and homosexuality is seen as irrevocably scarring, but the general concept of the holocaust, of all things, is fine. If anything should make us uncomfortable, you’d think it would be the systematic murder of millions of innocent people, rather than teenaged hormones.

Most people wouldn’t think twice about including the holocaust in the curriculum, and rightly so; we *should* learn about one of the most horrific things to happen in recent history, and we *should* learn how something like that can happen. But most importantly, we should learn about the people it hurt; how they were just like us, sexuality and all. Otherwise what is there to make us feel empathy?

Comment on Who’s Afraid of Anne Frank? by Tim

Tim — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 15:38:13 +0000

Where are the advocates for sanity in cases like this?

I recently tried explaining who Martin Luther King, Jr. was to my almost 5-year old son. I’m not sure he grasped the concept of segregation, but I saw no reason not to tell him about it in terms I thought he could understand. This book’s story on Rosa Parks was helpful:

http://www.amazon.com/American-Story-True-Tales-History/dp/0375812563

Comment on Who’s Afraid of Anne Frank? by Kelly Kreis

Kelly Kreis — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 18:04:15 +0000

Mills,
I think I would be amazed by this if I didn’t work in the school systems currently. Instead this doesn’t surprise me, sadden me yes but this is not surprising at all. What I have begun to find amazing is the number of parents now a days believe that public school should be soley dedicated to giving facts and nothing more. Opinions and primary sources be damned, heaven forbid that children actually get to hear about what happened full of emotion and honesty, because it is the emotions of the time that cause parents to be offended and notice it is the parents being offended not the students. I know that as a result of this many school systems no longer read any version of The Diary of Anne Frank, instead they read a portion of the play which has drastic changes to it and loses any sense of emotion that is given to us by Anne’s words. Night is also often left out of the curriculum, because it is seen as too graphic in nature for young minds now a days. But this has been a very recent change, 9 years ago when I was in middle school every student read one of those two stories, there was a whole unit dedicated to literature from the Holocaust. What I have to wonder is what is going to happen to this generation that has been given a censored history of the world when they reach the world of higher education. How do you fill in all the gaps that have been created by an education that has been more concered with not offending anyone than they have been about offering the truth?

Comment on Who’s Afraid of Anne Frank? by Sterling Fluharty

Sterling Fluharty — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 05:09:32 +0000

This is the Mills I remember. Thanks!

Comment on The Real #1 by Lynn Price

Lynn Price — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:02:59 +0000

Congratulations!

Comment on Making Digital Scholarship Count by Enseignement/Recherche (28/06/08) « pintiniblog

Enseignement/Recherche (28/06/08) « pintiniblog — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 15:11:08 +0000

[...] Making Digital Scholarship Count: [ un ] [ deux ] [ trois ] (source: edwired / via D. Cohen’s Digital Humanities Blog, [...]

Comment on Why Wolfram Alpha Won’t Work for Historians by Bob Weigel

Bob Weigel — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 15:07:25 +0000

I agree. And doing it right is just not something a single company can afford: http://computationalanddatascience.blogspot.com/2009/07/wolfram-alpha-review.html
unless you charge for it
http://products.wolframalpha.com/api/pricing.html
in which case the “volunteer data curators” that make it affordable will want a cut.

Comment on Digital Humanities Now by Knitting Clio

Knitting Clio — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 21:19:40 +0000

I change my mind — if I didn’t subscribe to DH I would not have known that Brittany Murphy passed away . . .

Comment on Why Assessment Gets a Bad Name by Derek Bruff

Derek Bruff — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 14:03:51 +0000

Wow, that’s a lot of assessment. I’m impressed that your department has developed its own process for assessing its majors (#1 above). From my experience with the SACS reaccreditation process (#3 above), I would think that your existing departmental assessment of historical thinking skills could be used for the SACS process. They’ll just want to know what you plan to do if you find out that your students aren’t learning the skills you’d like them to learn.

And since you already have a process in place to assess your majors’ historical thinking skills, adding a second rubric to assess their writing skills (#5 above) would be relatively easy to do, I think. I see your point about the difficulty of assessing writing skills with your existing rubric, but a second rubric could do the job well. You’ve already got a process for selecting and evaluating student work as well as, apparently, some faculty buy-in to that process. That’s the hard part of program-level assessment in my experience.

So with a little extra work, items 1, 3, and 5 above could be combined. I guess that’s a little better! Five initiatives does seem to be a little crazy-making.

Comment on Why Assessment Gets a Bad Name by Sterling Fluharty

Sterling Fluharty — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 16:54:52 +0000

I think it would be great if this county could tie assessment in higher education to the reforms that will be taking place next year in K-12 education. There is a lot to admire, for instance, in the goals outlined for this new federal grant program:

http://www.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/index.html