Yesterday I had the good fortune to be the keynote speaker at the Winter Symposium on Digital Literacy in Higher Education at the University of Rhode Island. It was incredibly energizing to spend a day and a half with a diverse group of educators across disciplines, all of them committed to the idea that improving…
Tag: teaching
Maps, Walls, and Digital Public History
This coming fall I’m teaching a new course: History of the Appalachian Trail. As envisioned, the class is going to be many things at once (which is likely a structural problem). It is a conventional history of one of America’s longest national parks, it is a chance to introduce students to the basics of digital…
My Students’ Take on PowerPoint
As I do every semester in my course The Digital Past, yesterday I asked my students what drives them crazy about how their faculty members use PowerPoint and other slideware in class. Herewith, their litany of complaint: The inclusion of random slides that don’t seem to pertain to what the professor is discussing Slides with…
More Than a Few Tough Things (3)
In my second post in this series I took on my colleague Steve Pearlstein‘s argument that “universities” should engage in less research, more teaching. In this final post in the series, I want to take up his argument about general education. Cheaper, better general education. The reform of general education is something I’ve had a…