Students given so many choices aren’t likely to select what’s good for them. Given human nature, they’ll choose what’s fun, easy or cool — and not early in the morning or on Fridays. It’s up to universities to guide them away from the dessert tray to the vegetable courses they need to develop healthy minds.

Regular readers of this blog will know that this sort of “students can’t think for themselves” view of general education drives me crazy. I agree with Parker’s larger point, which is that colleges and universities have a responsibility to expose undergraduate students to a wide variety of educational experiences. But, as I have argued over and over in this space, “exposure” means expecting students to sample courses in a variety of fields, not requiring specific courses (as we do here at George Mason).

Parker, like so many who love to write about how higher education isn’t serving the needs of our students, cherry picks an absurd example to make her point. The university she’s chosen to pick on is Emory and the course she’s chosen to wave around as proof of how ridiculous curriculum has become is one titled “Gynecology in the Ancient World” — which students can take to fulfill their “History, Society, and Culture” requirement.

Let’s take a minute and try to follow the argument she’s making here. First, colleges have an obligation to prepare their graduates for “the real world.” Second, curricula should force students to be prepared for that real world. Third, colleges are offering students too many choices, many of which (in Parker’s view) are ridiculous. Fourth, our college students are so immature and vacuous that they will choose courses like Gynecology in the Ancient World over something that will better prepare them for the real world.

Parker and all those who want to snipe at college students from a distance need to spend a little more time on campus. I have been teaching full time for 14 years and have been working in higher education steadily since 1983. In all those years I have taught or met thousands or students and with a few exceptions, they have all struck me as smart, serious, and pretty clear headed when it comes to how their education — with an emphasis on their (as opposed to their parents’) — will help them prepare for what comes after college.

As a counterweight to Parker’s waving around Gynecology in the Ancient World as evidence of how silly our students must be if they sign up for such a course, I offer the following corrective. This semester I’m teaching a course on the history of human trafficking in the 20th and 21st centuries. I challenge anyone to argue that understanding the historical context of one of the great tragedies of the world we live in is not important. We’re not going to be smiling much in this course, but we will learn about something too many Americans would prefer to pretend doesn’t exist — slavery all around us.

What do we learn about our supposedly immature and vacuous students from the enrollment in my course? When registration opened the course had 45 seats. Within four days I had 45 registrants and 10 on a waiting list. I added 15 more seats and within a few more days had 60 students registered and another 10 or so on a waiting list. Now I have 80 students registered and have been receiving emails from more who want in.

Does anyone think 80 undergraduates have registered for such a course because they think it will be fun?

I just wish commentators who denigrate our students’ abilities to make informed choices about their own education would stop bashing our students from a distance. Instead, I’d suggest that the student-bashers come join me in advising sessions each week (goodness knows I could use the help given the budget cuts we’ve absorbed lately). If they spent a few hours in my office with my students — real students, not imaginary ones — I’ll just bet their opinions would change.

I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve been to New Orleans over the years — to visit family, for Mardi Gras, Jazz Fest, St. Patrick’s Day, and various conferences. But I think the best images I took were in June 1977 when I was there hanging out with my cousin Pat just after I graduated from high school.

In those days I was working hard at becoming a better photographer and I took many rolls of Kodak Plus-X and Tri-X film. I lost track of the negatives long ago, but after my parents died last year I found them in the boxes filled with all the negatives from their long careers as pretty serious amateur photographers.

I’ve finally gotten around to scanning selections from those images and posting them in Flickr (and in the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank). As you think about what happened in New Orleans this week, take a moment to look back at the city 33 years ago when Category 5 hurricanes were just one of those things people across the city did their best to not think about.

I’m pleased to say that the HDMB now includes almost 1,400 personal narratives and almost 14,000 images related to the hurricane season of 2005.

Last week the participants in CHNM’s One Week | One Tool workshop have created a WordPress plug-in called Anthologize that lets anyone using WordPress to create tangible publications from digital content. With Anthologize installed, you can grab text from your blog, your various feeds, other people’s blogs and feeds, and produce a book, a .pdf, or a variety of other formats for publication, whether digital or analog.

I got to participate in the live announcement on Digital Campus today and was not a participant in the process, so I’m coming to this as a new user. As I mentioned on the podcast, I can’t wait to get back from vacation and install this plugin on both this blog and on my class blog for the fall.

I’m especially excited about Anthologize as a tool for teaching. I’ve become increasingly dissatisfied with the work product we demand from our students — papers, exams, presentations, etc. — because that work product doesn’t really do much for our students once the class is over. This fall I’m teaching a new course (for me) on the history of human trafficking, and I had already planned to have my students produce a white paper on human trafficking that they could begin circulating into the policy discussions on the subject. With Anthologize I now have a tool I can use to help my students produce that final work product easily and quickly.

I’m also excited about this tool because for years I’ve wanted a good way to convert blog posts to a book format — I’m old school that way — and now I have one. Just imagine, Edwired, the book.

To read more on Anthologize read what Dan has to say on the subject, where you can also see a book he produced during the live podcast (just to give you an idea how easily this can work).

One more example of why historians shouldn’t predict the future…

And, irony of ironies, starting August 16 I will take over as Director of George Mason’s Global Affairs program–a multi-disciplinary program with 650 BA students and 25 MA students in a new graduate program. I’ve been running the MA program since it’s inception last year and have enjoyed it immensely, but am more than a little nervous about taking over our College’s fourth largest undergraduate major.

Why, you might ask? For one thing, I’m going to run a very large undergraduate program with no faculty. Such is the nature of multi-disciplinary studies in America. With no faculty, it will be difficult to plan a consistent curriculum for our students. For another, I’m not sure how one assesses the results of learning in a multi-disciplinary context. Regular readers of this blog know that learning is at the top of my list of concerns when it comes to our students and the curriculum they are following. I can already foresee a new reading list growing in front of me.

So if you have any good suggestions for books, articles, or whatever that will help me make sense of how to assess learning in a multi-disciplinary undergraduate program, please suggest them in the comment field below. I need all the help I can get…

I’ve been mulling this question over for the past week because about a week ago I received a somewhat testy email from someone who thought that an entry in a Zotero group library on an article she had published was, to use her words, “sloppily and misleadingly summarized on Zotero…even my name was misspelled.” She then asked, “If this is the way Zotero is going to operate, it simply isn’t good enough.  What must one do to see that it is corrected? Must authors look for such problems on Zotero?”

As it happened, the entry she objected to was written by a student in a class taught by a colleague, not by me, and so she was asking the wrong person for help (I pointed her to my colleague so she could engage with him over this issue). But her email–notwithstanding a misunderstanding about how “Zotero is going to operate”–raised the question I posed above.

Should we care that students are reading our work and then writing about it online for good or ill? One could take the position that any writing about our work is proof that our work is being assigned and read — a good thing. Or one could worry that negative commentary on our work from those who might be less qualified to comment on it that we would like might have negative consequences for us — a bad thing.

After thinking about it for a week, I’ve decided that I am completely unsympathetic to the latter argument for several reasons. First, it proceeds from a viewpoint that I reject, namely that student views of our scholarship don’t or shouldn’t count. In American higher education we are fond of describing our students as both students and partners in a learning enterprise and if that is really true, then we have to take seriously what our students have to say. Sure, a review of my book by someone who knows a lot about what I’m writing about is more useful in many ways, but that is not to say that a review of my book by an undergraduate student is not useful just because he or she hasn’t spent a decade or two studying the arcana of Czech history.

I read and re-read the summary of the article that sparked my thinking and there is no negative criticism of the author or her research methods to be found there. But what if the student had also said something like, “Unfortunately, the author’s findings are obscured by intensely boring academic prose.”? We’ve all wanted to say something like that from time to time about a book or article we are reading/reviewing, but professional courtesy holds us back (most of the time). Perhaps the unfettered voices of our students might just hold us to a higher standard when it comes to writing about our subjects in clear and compelling ways?

I also reject the  reviews by students are bad argument for a second reason. The purpose of the academic endeavor is to create and circulate new knowledge and the target audience for most of that endeavor is our students. We want them to engage with our work so that as they mature as scholars, business people, government employees, or whatever they chose to do, they can make better informed decisions about their own work and lives.

And the way this generation does that is online. Period. To argue that student work, flawed or perfect, should not be posted online is to argue for a return of the typewriter.

Finally, the whole point of the article in question was that more needed to be done to increase digital collaboration between scholars, librarians, and archivists. If limits are to be placed on that collaboration, then we might as well forget the entire effort. Digital media today are collaborative by their very nature, so I think it’s time we all get on that bus and accept that embracing digital technology means embracing it for all the good and all the less than good. So I guess I find it a little surprising that an author whose own work argued for more collaboration doesn’t like it when that collaboration isn’t up to a standard she has set.

Until efforts such as Deselaers’ bear fruit, we will remain dependent on the metadata added to images to help us locate what we want. Because the kind of metadata we want is generally added only to images posted online by libraries and archives, mining images posted online by the crowd will remain a difficult task for at least a few more years.

For just a minute though, let’s imagine what it will be like five years from now when our students can find images that they want or need through sophisticated image mining techniques. What will they do with those images once they’ve analyzed them?

I’ve always felt that writing about images was a bit like dancing about architecture (to paraphrase Elvis Costello, Frank Zappa, Martin Mull, or Steve Martin depending which Google hit you believe). Describing the content of an image is all well and good, but images are, well, visual, and so creating text about a visual medium removes us one full step (at least) from the thing itself. So why not ask our students to create history with the visual sources they find online?

Already many history teachers do just that by asking students to create history collages in the younger grades or poster presentations in later grades/college about their research. But even these, worthy as they may be, are static representations of the past and once created are difficult to alter. Each year more and more tools emerge online to let students begin to play with images and how they might present them. Just to give one example, our Object of History project here at CHNM lets students create a “visual presentation” drawn from material found on the site. For all its strengths, this particular module exemplifies what won’t work when we can begin to do real image mining–students using the Object of History project can only work with the material in the site, not with material they find elsewhere.

Often I find intriguing ideas from the world outside of academia that seem as though they might be ported over into what we are trying to do in education. Take just a minute and look at the website polyvore.com (thanks to my wife Susan for pointing this one out to me). This site, devoted to women’s fashion, lets its users create “sets” from a database of images that are aggregated from the websites of retailers. Information about each image (we might call it metadata) is embedded in the larger image (we might call it a poster) and to the right you find a fuller description of each item (we might call that an annotation). Creators of these sets can add content from their own images as well.

The image sets on this site then move up and down in popularity based on user feedback, are categorized in a wide variety of ways, and users interact with one another around the sets…a different spin on social networks than what we are used to thinking of in education.

Imagine a world where students can use a tool like polyvore.com and the images available to them are mined from the web (rather than from a discrete set of library or archival sites). What might they create when they are making history in this way? How might their presentation of visual information change the way we think about the past? How might their interactions with one another around such visual creations change the ways they think about the past? I for one am looking forward to such a world.

I know he’s a busy man and I’m sure he’s very tired of hearing about this or that false entry or false edit of an entry in Wikipedia, but Jimmy, if you are a reader, I’d suggest taking a look at both the discussion of the course on this blog (and elsewhere) and even more to the point the delete/save discussion on the Edward Owens entry itself. Both conversations expose the parameters of the conversation about the course, information literacy among young adults, and the nature of crowd sourced knowledge in general and quickly move away from the vandalism-is-annoying oversimplification.

In fact, I have to admit that I’ve become very, very, very bored with the entire conversation about whether or not Wikipedia (or any crowd sourced resource) is “valid” or not. Perhaps, instead it is time to simply accept crowd sourced information as a category of information with its own attributes and move on. For instance, we don’t seem to have the same level of discomfort with government reports that are the product of several, perhaps dozens or even hundreds of nameless government officials? If every author of the new health care law here in the States was listed, we’d probably have to add another pound or so of paper to each copy. I think it’s just time to move on to more interesting topics than whether we should accept crowd sourced information or not.

We can, of course, still offer the class (and probably will), because our College approved it. It just won’t count toward the university’s general education requirements. This means the class will only accomplish one of its goals — to introduce undergraduate history majors to the digital humanities in a rigorous way. The other goal — extending the reach of the course to the rest of the undergraduate population — will only be partially achieved because now the students outside our department who take the course will not be able to count the course toward their university general education requirements. Instead, they will have to choose from one of the following courses:

Anthropology 395: Work, Technology, and Society: An IT Perspective
Chemistry 350: Computer Techniques for Chemistry
Computer Science 130: Computing for Scientists
Criminology 300: Political Analysis
Engineering 117: Information Technology in Engineering
Government 300: Political Analysis
Information Technology 103: Introduction to Computing
Music 415: Music in Computer Technology

Each of these courses is, I’m sure, quite worthy in its own right, and our students will still have a reasonable variety to choose from. The sad part is that our own majors will now have to select one of these courses rather than a course taught by one of the faculty members who is part of the Center for History and New Media, arguably the most important digital humanities center in the world.

The chair of the General Education Committee did offer us the opportunity to revise the syllabus yet again. Given that it has taken one year, four months, and nine days to get to the point of a second rejection of the course syllabus, I am throwing in the towel and giving up. It’s possible that someone else in the department may take up the challenge. I don’t often admit defeat, but I am simply too busy with other responsibilities (finishing a book, running a grad program, raising my children) to keep fighting what appears to be a losing battle no matter which way I look at it.

[11:00] How can making or remaking things from the past help us to understand the past? What do the tactile experiences intrinsic to making objects or handling/manipulating objects have to do with thinking about the past? A number of the papers/projects here are about making and how the act of making opens up new ways to understand the past. As new and entrepreneurial as the games are, my own sense is that the work of the “makers” here is closer to something we might call the bleeding edge of digital humanities. In particular, I like the way using digital tools to make analog objects, thereby making the intangible tangible holds some real promise for finding new ways for our students to think about the past. How we might measure that, however, is the big issue all the “makers” are facing. We don’t yet know how to measure such things, but measure them we will.

[11:45] For the various authors one of the issues we need to confront is the degree to which the papers are analytical or encouraging. If they are only encouraging, then they aren’t scholarship (in my view anyway), but if they are only analytical, they will both be more than a little boring and will appeal less to the intended audience for the book, namely those who are both interested in the work we’re doing and in possibly doing something similar themselves. By being both encouraging and analytical we will help others see that this kind of fun/work is possible, but also — and I think this is critical — that it is scholarly work, not just fun.

[12:30] A theme that emerged during the two days is how much of this sort of techno-play in history requires the historian to be a technical expert (or semi-expert) and how much can be done with simple to use, off the shelf products like Google Earth, Google Sketchup, etc.? The more the latter are useful for this kind of work, the more likely we’ll be to find a wider audience.

[2:00] In the context of the Great Unsolved Mysteries of Canadian History site, we spent some time discussing the ways that really worthy projects like this one sustain themselves over time. This conversation, well known to everyone working in digital humanities, was not about play, making, or any of the other conversations in the conference, but still we needed to have it.

[2:30] How do you work with a million books? How do you teach students to think differently with such an embarrassment of riches? See Steve Ramsey’s paper (a Digital Campus Irregular) on the conference website. Steve makes some very important points about the value of teaching students to screw around as a research methodology. I like the fact that this idea is so completely the opposite of the standard notion of teaching students to be overly structured in their approach to browsing and searching. His conclusion is great: “There are so many books. There is so little time. Your ethical obligation is neither to read them all nor to pretend that you have read them all, but to understand each path through the vast archive as an important moment in the world’s duration—as an invitation to community, relationship, and play.” Read the paper when it comes out in the book. If you teach, you need to.

[3:00] What are the ethics of using “casual games” to get museum or archive visitors to help you classify materials in their collections (in the model of Recaptcha)?

[3:20] Another advantage of the small, informal, but still structured conference format is that we’ve formed a community of practice that is already interconnected in a whole variety of ways — digital and analog. The book project will keep us glued together for a while, but the links we’ve forged here the past two days will outlast that project. That these links are both transdisciplinary and transnational makes the experience that much more powerful. More unconferences please…

[4:10] A nice moment when we discussed Stephane Levesque’s paper in which he described students complaining about having to use a digital history module in a course — one of them said “Why can’t you just tell us?” — instead of just being lectured at. To what degree is that schoolish behavior? Are they just unhappy that they can’t use the techniques they’ve mastered already, i.e., taking notes, memorizing facts, passing tests? Or is there something about the digital that they don’t like. For a book like the one we’re envisioning, it’s important to keep in mind that digital doesn’t always work.