Right now I only follow a handful of bloggers who are faculty or students in American Studies programs (including related fields), and I’d like to form a list that provides a cross-section of what they’re up to. If you are an AMST blogger, have a class that’s blogging or know of one (or 10!), leave comments and contact me with URLs. I’ll be sure to share the master list.
Dave,
I started blogging this past year about oral history, digital humanities, civic engagement, public history and teaching/learning using new media. I will be using blogs in two courses this fall. Students will blog for a course on narratives of immigration (journalism, oral history, memoirs, fiction). Taking up an idea about giving students more choices from Mills Kelly’s edwired blog, I’ve broken the course into five 2-week units. After the first of these units, students may individually opt for either an independent course of study connected to the group by their blogging or participation in the heavily discussion based face2face classes along with some blogging. Students may move back and forth between the individual and face2face courses of study. In the other class, ECE Social Studies students will meet in groups in class and blog collectively about ideas for teaching social studies at different grade levels (k-5). Students in this major also create online portfolios and I’m interested to learn more about that. A colleague and I are working together on a redesign of this course at our university.