[a short presentation to a Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning workshop on how teachers might deal with chatbots] I believe that ChatGPT is a new and useful tool and that we should try to teach students how to use it. But we should teach them to use it as a tool, not as a machine. That is, purposefully, thoughtfully, with skill, knowing its strengths and weaknesses, where it can help us do better work and where it does not….
A mashup of a course: book history, material and digital explorations, and making. This past semester (Summer, 2021) I taught a course titled “Books, Material and Digital,” a course that combined book history, hands-on making, and explorations of libraries, reading, and digital scholarship. (Kristen Iemma co-taught as TA.) Designed originally as a hands-on, special-collections intensive seminar for advanced undergraduates, pandemic rules changed it into a mostly remote first-year seminar with significant hands-on work, remote speakers Zooming in, and a final…
Remote teaching this fall meant figuring how to reduce in-class lectures, and so I recorded some of the talks I would normally give in class. And once recorded – why not share them? What you’ll find here are short talks about how to do exhibits. They are aimed at students interested in museum work, especially curatorial and education work. They are syncretic and idiosyncratic. That is, they provide a summary of different ways of approaching exhibit development, and also my…
Next year I will be teaching a new course on books that combines my interest in making with my new focus on digital scholarship. This summer I worked with three Brown undergraduates (Elena Newman, Malery Nguyen, and Mara Jovanovic) to invent the course, and especially to think about hands-on projects. Here’s a report on some of the work we’ve done. (First: A thank-you to the Dean of the College at Brown, who made this possible through the SPRINT program, designed…
In Fall semester 2019 I co-taught a course called Boatbuilding: Design, Making, and Culture, with Chris Bull and Shep Shapiro. Here’s the description: This course introduces the study of the design, engineering, work, material culture and history through the construction of a traditional workboat, a Maine peapod. As the class builds the boat we’ll gain a hands-on understanding of issues of engineering, design, skill, and workmanship. At the same time, we’ll do historical research and visit museums to gain insight…
It’s that more-than-half-way through the summer inflection point when suddenly it seems that school starts too soon. It’s time to think about fall semester. One of my courses this fall is my usual Introduction to Public Humanities, the seminar for new MA students in the public humanities program, along with a few others who seem to have interesting things to say. At the end of last year’s course I asked the students to fill out a survey on the course. They graded each…
Yesterday I participated in a roundtable discussion on “Student Work for Public Audiences” at Brown’s Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning. I talked about last year’s AMST1550, “Methods in Public Humanities.” I teach courses for students who want to learn how to work with the public. Many of my courses are for graduate students in a professional program, or more precisely, a program that’s a cross between professional and academic: the MA in public humanities program. The students in the class are graduate…
(written for the History@Work blog and published there September 4, 2012) Michel Rolph Trouillot, historian, anthropologist, Haitian intellectual and University of Chicago professor, died this July at age 63. I first learned of his death on Twitter, from the tweets by several of my students. They had read his Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History in my class, and it had stuck with them. Silencing the Past is the only book that has been on my syllabus every…
