Buzzfeed recently reported that a new service will transform Wikipedia entries into “real” academic papers so that students can cite them in their work without getting penalized by their teachers. Read More
Category: Teaching
Long-term Goals and Teaching History that Matters
I’ve talked before about the biggest problem I see in my field – that we don’t know what History is and so we don’t know how to teach it. I’ve been thinking recently about how this also hurts the image of History as a field – it just doesn’t seem welcoming, useful, or enjoyable to most people. The first thing most people say to me when I tell them I’m a historian is either Oh I hated history in school, there were too many facts to memorize! or I love history, I’m great at remembering stuff! Isn’t it a huge problem that the popular conception of this field – memorizing facts – actually has nothing to do with it? Read More
Why plagiarism is so hard to understand: the skill of original thinking [UPDATE at end: IGN reviewer]
https://jezebel.com/after-publishing-largely-plagiarized-story-bust-magazi-1827909190
Everyone knows what plagiarism is – you claim work that isn’t yours. It’s simple. It’s stealing, and we all know what that looks like, right? Strangely, not so much. Read More
How should we teach sources to aspiring historians and laypeople?
Thanks to my rapidly growing pregnant belly, I’ve been spending a lot of time lately watching the PBS series “Finding your Roots” and it’s got me thinking about how historians use sources and what the average person knows about them (and a lot about genealogy, which you can read my extended thoughts on here). Read More
How to apply for grad school
Graduate school is a tightly-kept gate, and frankly it shouldn’t be that way. I’ve gathered some wisdom about how to succeed in making it past the gatekeepers from my own experiences as well as those of my friends in various fields. Read More
Historians have too many learning objectives and it’s because we don’t know pedagogy – or even what we are
Recently, my medievalist cohort and I got together for a few sessions with the Center for Teaching and Learning to talk about how to write a syllabus, and all my frustrations about TAing came crashing down on me at once. Read More
Robin Writes 