For several decades, two of the most popular buzzphrases in educational innovation have been “collaborative learning” and “cooperative learning.” The degree to which a course is more or less the sage on the stage dispensing information to students taking notes (and trying to stay awake) is often seen today as a measure of the quality…
Tag: Academic Commons
Best Practices?
In a couple of earlier posts (1) (2) I described a project I’ve been a consultant to that is examining best practices in the teaching of introductory college courses. We held our final meeting on Monday during which we reviewed the 15 top syllabi (out of something like 115) to determine what elements of “best…
The Historiographiki
My colleague Zach Schrag gave a presentation this morning on his Historigraphiki, a wiki he created for a graduate readings course in twentieth century American history. Zach created this wiki because he wanted to figure out a way that students could collaborate on the reviews of monographs. In the project, each student reads books from…
Changing History?
The other day I received an email from Randall Bytwerk at Calivin College asking me to unlink a website from the archive of one of my class blogs from last year. The site, the Adolf Hitler Historical Museum (Hitler.org), is the first site to come up if one types “Hitler” into Google. This is a…