"History of the Future" Course Portfolio
David Pace -- History Department -- Indiana University
Below you will find a prototype of a much more extensive course portfolio that will be constructed on this site. The web site for the course itself (http://www.indiana.edu/~futhist/) is password protected to restrict the copyrighted texts and images it contains to members of the class. However, if after examining the materials below, other instructors wish to see the entire site for legitimate pedagogical purposes, they may obtain the password by e-mailing me at dpace@indiana.edu.
Acknowledgments
A Brief History of This Course as a Pedagogical Experiment
Stage I: A Concern with Modeling Basic Learning Tasks
Stage 2: Refining Learning Tasks and Integrating Web and Collaborative Learning
The Basic Teaching/Learning Strategies Used in this Course
Examples of Weekly "Warm-up" Exercises
- Week 1 -- Students are presented with opportunities to practice and get feedback on reading selectively
- Week 3 -- Students are given practice at using relevant evidence and at identifying the assumptions that underlie a historical source
- Week 4-- Students get more practice at picking relevant evidence and at identifying assumptions.
- Week 5 -- New opportunities to practice the use of historical evidence are superimposed upon exercises that model how to answer essay questions in history.
- Week 6 -- This week serves to give them more practice on many of the learning tasks dealt with in previous weeks (e.g. identifying the position taken in a secondary work, finding appropriate evidence, and interpreting essay questions) in preparation for completing a take-home exam.
These "warm-ups" are coordinated with class discussions of the content of the course and group-work that reinforces both the mastery of learning tasks and the exploration of the intellectually interesting issues.
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