After nine years on Blogger, I've ported all my posts to http://techist.mcclurken.org/. I moved because I'm working to consolidate my digital identity (as part of UMW's Domain of One's Own project) and because almost all of my blogging in the classroom has been oriented around WordPress.
So, if you're still following me here, please switch your feed to the new site (http://techist.mcclurken.org/feed). [And look for a new post there with some news in the near future.]
Sunday, March 30, 2014
Friday, November 15, 2013
My Contribution to the James Farmer Lecture Hall Dedication
I was honored to be asked to be part of the dedication of the large lecture room in Monroe Hall at UMW in honor of Civil Rights icon James Farmer, who taught in that room for nearly 15 years. Here is the text of my remarks with some of the clips I shared with the audience.
---------------------------------------------------------------
James Farmer Lecture Hall Dedication, November 15, 2013
Thank you all for coming. It is indeed an honor for me to be here today, to be part of this ceremony. And it’s certainly appropriate for me, as chair of UMW’s department of History and American Studies, the department that James Farmer taught in for many years, to say a few words here today.
But I have another perspective on Dr. Farmer as well. Twenty years ago this fall, I was starting my senior year at Mary Washington College, and, once a week, for nearly three hours, I had the privilege of sitting in this very room, listening to James Farmer tell nearly 100 of us about the Civil Rights movement and about his role in it as part of his Introduction to Civil Rights course. As a history major I had heard about the movement in several of my classes, but there was something fundamentally different in hearing those stories come to life from someone who had been there, someone who had physically and emotionally suffered for the cause in which he believed.
As a history major who had every plan of going on to graduate school to become a professor, a scholar, an historian, a teacher there was something deeply powerful about hearing from a living legend who was simultaneously, clearly human as well. He was self-deprecating and open about his personal struggles: discussing, for example, how he dealt with his jealousy of “Martin’s” fame (that first-name reference itself a casual, not ostentatious, but constant reminder to us of his ties to the other leaders of the movement) or his wondering whether he made the right decision to stay in jail with other protesters arrested in Plaquemine, Louisiana instead of paying the fees and being at the 1963 March on Washington.
Even if I hadn’t already been aware of the unique experience that I and my classmates were going through, it would have been brought home to me when I got my paper back with his comments on it. My paper was on Lyndon Johnson’s varied stances on Civil Rights over the years. I won’t bore you with the details now, but I was proud of the nuanced story that I had written, working in many primary sources, but especially using LBJ’s autobiography, written after he had stepped down as president. [In retrospect, given what I know now of primary sources and about Lyndon Johnson, I bought into LBJ’s retellings of his own story more than I should have.] When I got the paper back, Dr. Farmer had simply written, “Interesting. This is not the version President Johnson told me when I was in the Oval Office.” Now, I’d had professors tell me that I needed to think more critically about my sources before, but none of them could cite actual interactions with the people in question to make me do so.
For this and so many other reasons, my time in James Farmer’s class, my time in this very room with him, was transformative, so much so, that when I had the chance to come back to teach at Mary Washington I jumped at the opportunity to find ways to remember and honor him, for his service to the Civil Rights Movement and for his service to nearly a generation of students at this school. I’m not alone in that. Tim O’Donnell taught a First-Year Seminar on James Farmer, as do an interdisciplinary group of faculty led by Craig Vasey; my colleague Jess Rigelhaupt taught an oral history class in which the students interviewed many of Farmer’s colleagues during his time at MWC.
But I’ve been asked to show you a bit of work that students in my digital history courses have done to honor James Farmer. Now, in talking with my students who were working on these projects, I told them about my own experiences in Farmer’s class and about his many gifts as an orator. They decided that they wanted to make it possible for others to not just read Dr. Farmer’s words but to be able to hear him as well. The 2008 iteration of my digital history course found and digitized Farmer’s 1994 appearance before the Federal Election Commission. There are many excerpts of that testimony with him talking about his first exposure to racism in 1923, him discussing his views on affirmative action, him revealing the ways in which Gandhi’s non-violent approach was an inspiration to him. But I want to share this clip of a poem that Farmer himself wrote.
In the mid-1980s television station WNVT came and recorded 13 of James Farmer’s class lectures. In 2012, working with our Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies, students digitized those lectures, transcribed them, and made them available for anyone to see.
In the second clip Farmer talks about what he saw as the successes of the Freedom Summer.
Please check out these two sites for more videos of Dr. Farmer's FEC testimony and class lectures.
So you can see that through the work of UMW students everyone can hear James Farmer’s words, can hear him tell his stories, can come to understand why we honor James Farmer today with a room in which people will regularly gather to hear from faculty, from guest speakers, from politicians debating the issues of the day, and from students presenting on their own research, perhaps on the Civil Rights Movement.
It is indeed right and appropriate that today we honor James Farmer in this way, in this room in which he touched so many Mary Washington students’ lives.
It is indeed right and appropriate that we designate, that we consecrate this place where the Civil Rights movement came to life through the resonant voice, the wry humor, the deep intelligence, and the raw emotion of a man who had lived through the movement, had changed the movement, and had been changed by it
It is indeed right and appropriate that we celebrate and recognize the life and teaching of James Leonard Farmer, Civil Rights leader, hero, and educator.
Thank you.
---------------------------------------------------------------
James Farmer Lecture Hall Dedication, November 15, 2013
Thank you all for coming. It is indeed an honor for me to be here today, to be part of this ceremony. And it’s certainly appropriate for me, as chair of UMW’s department of History and American Studies, the department that James Farmer taught in for many years, to say a few words here today.
But I have another perspective on Dr. Farmer as well. Twenty years ago this fall, I was starting my senior year at Mary Washington College, and, once a week, for nearly three hours, I had the privilege of sitting in this very room, listening to James Farmer tell nearly 100 of us about the Civil Rights movement and about his role in it as part of his Introduction to Civil Rights course. As a history major I had heard about the movement in several of my classes, but there was something fundamentally different in hearing those stories come to life from someone who had been there, someone who had physically and emotionally suffered for the cause in which he believed.
As a history major who had every plan of going on to graduate school to become a professor, a scholar, an historian, a teacher there was something deeply powerful about hearing from a living legend who was simultaneously, clearly human as well. He was self-deprecating and open about his personal struggles: discussing, for example, how he dealt with his jealousy of “Martin’s” fame (that first-name reference itself a casual, not ostentatious, but constant reminder to us of his ties to the other leaders of the movement) or his wondering whether he made the right decision to stay in jail with other protesters arrested in Plaquemine, Louisiana instead of paying the fees and being at the 1963 March on Washington.
Even if I hadn’t already been aware of the unique experience that I and my classmates were going through, it would have been brought home to me when I got my paper back with his comments on it. My paper was on Lyndon Johnson’s varied stances on Civil Rights over the years. I won’t bore you with the details now, but I was proud of the nuanced story that I had written, working in many primary sources, but especially using LBJ’s autobiography, written after he had stepped down as president. [In retrospect, given what I know now of primary sources and about Lyndon Johnson, I bought into LBJ’s retellings of his own story more than I should have.] When I got the paper back, Dr. Farmer had simply written, “Interesting. This is not the version President Johnson told me when I was in the Oval Office.” Now, I’d had professors tell me that I needed to think more critically about my sources before, but none of them could cite actual interactions with the people in question to make me do so.
For this and so many other reasons, my time in James Farmer’s class, my time in this very room with him, was transformative, so much so, that when I had the chance to come back to teach at Mary Washington I jumped at the opportunity to find ways to remember and honor him, for his service to the Civil Rights Movement and for his service to nearly a generation of students at this school. I’m not alone in that. Tim O’Donnell taught a First-Year Seminar on James Farmer, as do an interdisciplinary group of faculty led by Craig Vasey; my colleague Jess Rigelhaupt taught an oral history class in which the students interviewed many of Farmer’s colleagues during his time at MWC.
But I’ve been asked to show you a bit of work that students in my digital history courses have done to honor James Farmer. Now, in talking with my students who were working on these projects, I told them about my own experiences in Farmer’s class and about his many gifts as an orator. They decided that they wanted to make it possible for others to not just read Dr. Farmer’s words but to be able to hear him as well. The 2008 iteration of my digital history course found and digitized Farmer’s 1994 appearance before the Federal Election Commission. There are many excerpts of that testimony with him talking about his first exposure to racism in 1923, him discussing his views on affirmative action, him revealing the ways in which Gandhi’s non-violent approach was an inspiration to him. But I want to share this clip of a poem that Farmer himself wrote.
"When I Stand Tall"
I want to share two clips here.
The first clip is actually a trailer made for the site by the students in the class to draw people in to watching the full lectures.
Please check out these two sites for more videos of Dr. Farmer's FEC testimony and class lectures.
So you can see that through the work of UMW students everyone can hear James Farmer’s words, can hear him tell his stories, can come to understand why we honor James Farmer today with a room in which people will regularly gather to hear from faculty, from guest speakers, from politicians debating the issues of the day, and from students presenting on their own research, perhaps on the Civil Rights Movement.
It is indeed right and appropriate that today we honor James Farmer in this way, in this room in which he touched so many Mary Washington students’ lives.
It is indeed right and appropriate that we designate, that we consecrate this place where the Civil Rights movement came to life through the resonant voice, the wry humor, the deep intelligence, and the raw emotion of a man who had lived through the movement, had changed the movement, and had been changed by it
It is indeed right and appropriate that we celebrate and recognize the life and teaching of James Leonard Farmer, Civil Rights leader, hero, and educator.
Thank you.
Thursday, September 19, 2013
C-SPAN Lets Me Talk about My Last Project
C-SPAN's BookTV did a short interview with me about my book as part of their C-SPAN Cities Tour of Fredericksburg that appears this weekend.
Considering that the book came out four years ago now, I'm glad I remembered as much as I did about it. The interviewer from C-SPAN, Christy Hinton, did a nice job framing the parts of my office that were clean and the nice cover of my book in the background. More importantly, she edited my responses down to a reasonable summary of what the book is about.
Wednesday, February 06, 2013
Sharing my teaching and learning
I've been fortunate lately to have a number of things come out recently featuring my teaching and research.
1) In October my US History in Film class was recorded by C-SPAN's American History TV as we discussed the 1939 movie Gone with the Wind. It was a wide-ranging discussion of the movie as a flawed secondary source about the Antebellum, Civil War, Reconstruction eras in the South, as well as its role as a primary source for the 1930s perspectives on that past.
I did an introduction and conclusion, but the bulk of the class was the students delving deeply into the interpretations, implications, and lessons of the film. They did a terrific job.
[I've gotten a number of nice responses from people who watched it, but the best was from an 87-year old Holocaust survivor who wrote me that GWTW had been her first exposure to American History. She then told me that she was inspired to learn about the actual historical background of the time.]
You can watch the whole class here.
2) A couple weeks later, I did a talk for the Fredericksburg Area Museum on the Coming of the Battle of Fredericksburg as part of the celebration C-SPAN came to that as well and you can see that talk here.
3) A few weeks after that, I was the moderator for a great series of talks about the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Fredericksburg by George Rable, Susannah Ural, and Frank O'Reilly. They put up with my unorthodox introductions and gave great talks which can be found here.
4) Finally, UMW did a nice profile of me and my teaching for the main page of the website. It's overly generous, but I appreciate it just the same.
1) In October my US History in Film class was recorded by C-SPAN's American History TV as we discussed the 1939 movie Gone with the Wind. It was a wide-ranging discussion of the movie as a flawed secondary source about the Antebellum, Civil War, Reconstruction eras in the South, as well as its role as a primary source for the 1930s perspectives on that past.
I did an introduction and conclusion, but the bulk of the class was the students delving deeply into the interpretations, implications, and lessons of the film. They did a terrific job.
[I've gotten a number of nice responses from people who watched it, but the best was from an 87-year old Holocaust survivor who wrote me that GWTW had been her first exposure to American History. She then told me that she was inspired to learn about the actual historical background of the time.]
You can watch the whole class here.
2) A couple weeks later, I did a talk for the Fredericksburg Area Museum on the Coming of the Battle of Fredericksburg as part of the celebration C-SPAN came to that as well and you can see that talk here.
3) A few weeks after that, I was the moderator for a great series of talks about the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Fredericksburg by George Rable, Susannah Ural, and Frank O'Reilly. They put up with my unorthodox introductions and gave great talks which can be found here.
4) Finally, UMW did a nice profile of me and my teaching for the main page of the website. It's overly generous, but I appreciate it just the same.
Wednesday, September 05, 2012
Incorporating Digital Literacy into History Methods Courses
In the History and American Studies 2009 Departmental Strategic Plan my department said that, in
addition to other skills and literacies, we wanted all majors to develop the
following abilities:
n Digital Literacy
o
The
ability to find reliable, scholarly, information on topics:
§ Within gated,
subscription databases and in the larger, disorganized online world.
§ In online archives,
museums and institutions of higher education.
o
The
ability to assess and evaluate the reliability of online sources bringing to
this newer source of information the skills of judicious, critical skepticism
that have long been an indispensable historical tool.
o
The
ability to produce creative, scholarly materials for the digital world that
require the same level of rigor historians have applied to writing and
publishing traditional papers, presentations, and monographs
When we developed learning outcomes for the history major, we incorporated these concepts into 8 of the 14 objectives, including
the most obvious one:
- Ability to utilize
technological resources in research, data analysis, and presentation.
Now, we are looking at revising our department's long standing methods course, HIST 299, into a two semester class (HIST 297 -- Colloquium and HIST 298 -- Practicum) for a number of reasons, among them the desire to be able to fully integrate all of the aspects we believe necessary to be a successful history major in our upper-level classes, in graduate school, and beyond.
At our last department meeting, the department agreed to include the following ideas, concepts, and assignments into the two classes:
HIST 297
n Finding and evaluating
sources online
o
How
do we find and evaluate online materials for scholarly uses? How does one begin
to sift through the massive content that is available in a systematic and/or
creative way? What are the pitfalls and perils, the promises and potentialities
of the online information experience?
§ Learn library databases
§ Advanced scholarly
searching
§ Evaluating sources
online
n Discuss new forms of
scholarly communication and methodology, including digital history projects, collaborative
writing, blogs, text-mining/topic modeling, mapping/GIS [1]
n Digital identity
n Digital identity
o
How
should we present ourselves to the online world (personally, professionally,
and intellectually)?
n Potential assignments
for HIST 297:
o
E-portfolio/digital
resume
o
Public
writing (reflective blogs or individual/group resource sites on historical
topics)
o
Some
kind of public history assignment
HIST 298
n Review,
as needed, concepts of source location and evaluation (focusing on primary
sources), digital identity, and new forms of scholarly methods and communication.
n Potential
assignments
o
Minimum level:
§ Public
writing (Research log or resource site on topic)
o
Innovative level:
§ Multimedia
version of their research project.
§ Contribute
to a larger digital project in a small way
· Partnered
with James Monroe Papers, James Monroe Museum, and/or Library’s Special
Collections, students could make small contributions to larger projects,
getting a sense for what goes on behind the scenes and contributing to a larger
good.
· Or
students could participate in crowd-sourced transcription projects, such as the
War Department Papers or Jeremy Bentham’s papers.
We'll have to see how it actually plays out in classes, but I'm glad to see our department working on practical ways to implement digital fluency into the core classes of our curriculum.
[1]
Here I’m talking about, at minimum, exposure to the complex new approaches to research
in the some exposure to the complex new approaches to
research in the discipline offered by recent advancements in computing,
including text-mining or GIS (if only because that those methods are
influencing a new generation of scholarship that students will need to
understand to assess). As they become more accessible and widely used, there
will be more opportunities for students to also engage in the application of
these tools in their own work.
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
Confirmation for "Uncomfortable, but Not Paralyzed"?
Since my first Digital History class in 2008, I've been telling students that I wanted them to be "uncomfortable, but not paralyzed" based on my sense that it was only when one struggled a bit that deep learning occurred. The concept has explicitly shaped much of my teaching since then. Now the Mindshift blog at KQED is reporting that there are several studies that back up my reasoning.
In one study, published in Learning and Instruction, psychologists Sidney D'Mello and Art Graesser found "that even negative emotions can play a productive role in learning."
On a related note, Stephen Ramsey at the University of Nebraska has a wonderful post that eloquently makes the case that attitude is more important than (initial) aptitude in learning programming.
In one study, published in Learning and Instruction, psychologists Sidney D'Mello and Art Graesser found "that even negative emotions can play a productive role in learning."
Confusion, D’Mello explains, is a state of “cognitive disequilbrium”; we are mentally thrown off balance when we encounter information that doesn’t make sense. This uneasy feeling motivates us to restore our equilibrium through thought, reflection, and problem solving, and deeper learning is the result. According to D’Mello, engaged learners repeatedly experience “two-step episodesalternating between confusion and insight.” Back and forth, between perplexity and understanding: this is how the learning of complex material happens.
In fact, deep learning may be unlikely to happen without the experience of confusion, suggests a study conducted by another researcher, Arizona State’s Kurt VanLehn. The students in his experiment were not able to grasp the physics concepts they were learning until they had encountered, and surmounted, an intellectual “impasse.”
Still another study, this one led by Harvard physicist Eric Mazur, found that students who observed a demonstration in science class understood the relevant concept no better than before—unless the students were asked to predict the outcome of the demonstration in advance. When their predictions turned out to be wrong, the resulting confusion motivated them to consider the concept more deeply, and they learned more.
On a related note, Stephen Ramsey at the University of Nebraska has a wonderful post that eloquently makes the case that attitude is more important than (initial) aptitude in learning programming.
Nearly every programmer I know – and I know some great ones – started out not with a course, or a book, or a teacher, but with a problem that was irritating them. Something in their computational world didn’t seem right. Maybe it was broken, or maybe just missing. But being comfortable with not-knowing-what-the-hell-they’re-doing, they decided that getting a computer to do something new was more-or-less like figuring out how to get the chain back on the bike. They weren’t trying to “be programmers” any more than the parent determined to fix the kid’s bike is trying to be a “bicycle mechanic.”All of these suggest that cultivating mental habits among our students (and ourselves) where we are okay with being unfamiliar with a subject, okay with struggling to master a concept or tool or problem, okay with working in new formats, okay with failure and trying again is important for intellectual and academic development in school and with the work done outside of school.
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Pushing Boundaries
I'll make this public here, partly to keep myself honest, partly to explain why there may be fewer* posts here.
I often say that one of my goals in teaching is to push students beyond their comfort zones, that discomfort is where real learning occurs, and that I want students to become comfortable with being uncomfortable. One of the parallels to that, however, that I've also made clear in the teaching presentations I've made to faculty is that the concept applies to us as well. We need to get outside of what we are comfortable with and to learn new skills while remembering what it is like to be a student.
In that vein, and because I've really always wanted to join in the fun that many of my students and my good friends at UMW's DTLT are having, I'm going to participate in DS106 this summer as a student. The course (phenomenon?) that began at UMW a few years ago had its origins as a face-to-face course in Digital Storytelling in Computer Science. DS106 has become much more than that, and runs at various points throughout the year with both students taking a formal class with grades and credits and a host of open, online only participants (like me).
I've created a separate site for my various projects to come out of the 10 week course at http://ds106.mcclurken.org/.
*I'm aware that some of you are laughing right now at the idea of "fewer" posts here, given the sporadic nature of my blogging.
I often say that one of my goals in teaching is to push students beyond their comfort zones, that discomfort is where real learning occurs, and that I want students to become comfortable with being uncomfortable. One of the parallels to that, however, that I've also made clear in the teaching presentations I've made to faculty is that the concept applies to us as well. We need to get outside of what we are comfortable with and to learn new skills while remembering what it is like to be a student.
In that vein, and because I've really always wanted to join in the fun that many of my students and my good friends at UMW's DTLT are having, I'm going to participate in DS106 this summer as a student. The course (phenomenon?) that began at UMW a few years ago had its origins as a face-to-face course in Digital Storytelling in Computer Science. DS106 has become much more than that, and runs at various points throughout the year with both students taking a formal class with grades and credits and a host of open, online only participants (like me).
I've created a separate site for my various projects to come out of the 10 week course at http://ds106.mcclurken.org/.
*I'm aware that some of you are laughing right now at the idea of "fewer" posts here, given the sporadic nature of my blogging.
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