Using ChatGPT in the U.S. History survey

Like many of my colleagues, I responded to the rise of ChatGPT with panic. But my blood pressure recovered after reading a few articles (especially this one but I’ll also point out this excellent later piece). I began to wonder if there was an alternative to my peer’s abstinence-only approach. The following is my experiment with…

Designing distance learning opportunities for the overachievers

Based on feedback from my students, and guidance from my university, I have decided to make the rest of my survey course entirely asynchronous. I will hold optional collaborative discussions, but everything that is graded or otherwise required can be completed independently and with limited technological requirements. I am erring on the side of accessibility…

Teaching Online

I, like most of you, will be teaching online for the rest of the semester. As part of my preparation, I read through the TUSH archive to steal ideas from some of our bloggers. Here’s a list of some of my favorite posts about teaching online. Teaching US History Online: Some Reflections by Kevin Gannon…

Interview with novelist Carol Goodman

Carol Goodman is the author of fourteen novels and the winner of many literary prizes. She teaches creative writing at The New School and SUNY New Paltz. Her work frequently engages the past, including her latest novel The Metropolitans. This winter, I sent her a handful of questions about how she understands and employs history…

Encouraging students to fail

My university’s Center for Teaching and Learning has created reading groups in each of the university’s eight schools. The reading group for the School of Arts and Humanities has decided to read Linda B. Nilson’s Specifications Grading: Restoring Rigor, Motivating Students, and Saving Faculty Time (2015). Nilson proposes a grading system called specs grading that…

Neoliberalism and DH in the classroom

A recent Los Angeles Book Review piece argues that the digital humanities’ “most significant contribution to academic politics may lie in its (perhaps unintentional) facilitation of the neoliberal takeover of the university.” The article has series flaws, and insightful reactions have come from Matthew Kirshbaum, Alan Liu, and (I have to acknowledge UTD graduate) Michele Rosen. I am participating this…

Evaluating Digital Humanities Projects

I am teaching introductory digital humanities courses this spring at both the undergraduate and graduate level. Both courses have three goals. Students will engage in scholarly conversation on the key issues in the field. Students will learn to critically evaluate works of digital scholarship. Students produce a piece of original digital scholarship. We recently pivoted…

Motivation and Community

A few months ago, someone invited me to a hidden Facebook group for college-level instructors to ask questions, share successes, and vent frustrations. I recently left this group after having enough of the unceasing student-bashing. The most common complaint among these instructors is similar to the one I hear most from friends and colleagues, “these…