Tag: Teaching & Learning
-
War, State, Society Game
I’m looking again at some sort of simulation game framework for my War, State and Society course which I teach in the spring semester. It needs to be simple so students grasp it quickly, but easily scalable from tactics to grand strategy. It also needs to allow me to set up short scenarios which are…
-
A few of my favourite things
Moodle is now a ‘one click install’ on Dreamhost, where mikecosgrave.com is hosted. Moodle is an excellent OpenSource Learning Management System which I like because it has a built in wiki which is handy for collaborative writing exercises. Having it as a one-click install ( and therefore a one-click update ) is very convenient. It…
-
Yes, I have a Bebo Page
..but I hardly ever bother to update it. I signed up for it because so many of my students have Bebo pages, and I figured I better know what I was talking about. Mostly, It just points to here – I find Bebo flat, and prefer to be able to work with style sheets and…
-
Windows Free OCR
Did you know that XP has built in OCR? And it is actually good? I scan some books, but I also use my digital camera to capture a lot of books and archival research , which I can carry on my laptop as .jpgs. Using the Portable Apps version of Gimp, I can convert those…
-
Taxonomies
I wonder if one of the problems humanities students have with mind mapping and essay planning is due to not knowing about taxonomy. It seems to me that in planning to cover an entire question, students often do poorly because they omit several ‘top level’ categories from the question. They are also unable to organise…
-
Chasing Gaolposts
One of the problems of planning research on history and the new media in teaching is that you have to run to keep up. I’m finishing a research methods chapter for next years work, and this morning I find an article whoch requires adding another layer to the questions
-
Write yourself into existence
“….students learn when they are allowed the freedom to use their blogs in order to write themselves into existence as individuals.” Wow. Pure genius from Konrad Glogowski on his ‘Blog of Proximal Developement’
-
It Came from Wikipedia…
It is the week before dissertation submissions, and all through the house not a sound is heard save the frantic scurrying of students trying to finish their 10 credit major papers. I have had some draft papers that are painstakingly footnoted to perfection, and others, well, they are a bit footnote-lite because they were hoping…
-
Bebo v Blackboard
Web 2.0 may hold out great promise for social networking and personal learning environments as tools to emppower student centred learning, but my first reaction to looking at Bebo this morning is that it a cross between a tabloid rag and a graffiti wall.
-
Learning Contracts?
I like the article in todays Guardian by Germaine Greer criticising the plan by Oxford to force students to sign contracts and attend lectures. Greer has some points I agree with : “Lectures are a misshapen survival of medieval pedagogy, which took authority as absolute and understood the teacher’s sole duty to be that of…
