The Class Wiki

The class wiki has been an experiment in trying to get students to experience DOING history rather than just learning history. I like the line about math class: sitting there watching the teacher have all the fun on the blackboard. The point is they should do math and they should do history.

Typically this "doing history" means working with primary documents. Primary documents are great when the students have the background to understand them and make use of them. This is easier in, say, US History than in World History before 1500. But that's only one part of doing history, interpreting primary sources. There are two other parts. One is the detective work, usually done in an archive, but done in all kinds of other ways from oral history to data mining. The other is the midrash, the argument about the argument. (My friend Dave described the difference between being a history undergrad and a grad student: "As undergrads we argued about books; as grad students we argue about footnotes." So, how to get the students to argue about history when they have done, and perhaps can do, very little reading?

Enter the Blog. The idea is that they post blog entries in favor of any given historical event/thing/person. The key is in the comments. Students than comment on their classmates blog entries. For instance, once said Buddhism was important. Another agreed but said Buddhism should be characterized as a religion.

It is very bare bones and open ended. And giving them specific grades for it is time consuming. In the future, it could be more focused and the grading could be more flexible (participation grades, etc.).

The fun techno part is that I can feed all the blogs to my igoogle homepage.