I’m currently teaching a section of HIST395, our department’s mandatory research methods course for History majors. We normally offer four or five sections a semester and use a shared syllabus. Over the summer, a colleague proposed that we add a new element: a required WordPress site. In addition to the usual research paper, exams, oral presentation, and other assignments, each student in each of the four sections will create his or her own domain–a place to post papers, a resume, photos, random musings, whatever. I’m familiar with WordPress, but I confess to feeling

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Image #47-1953, Azalea Festival Collection, New Hanover County Library  Digital Collections

This semester (Fall 2014), students in all four sections of HIST 395: Research Methods will participate in a pilot project. Each student will create an individual domain via WordPress that will serve as a portfolio site. Today they will make their first “real” posts, which should consist of a primary source used in their papers plus a brief analysis of said source. I’m posting this image from my own research to illustrate the goal. It is used in chapter four of a book manuscript titled, “Deep Currents: Race, Place, and Memory on Wilmington, North Carolina.”

Taken in 1953, it shows members of the Wilmington (NC) Kiwanis Club on their float in the city’s annual and much celebrated Azalea Festival. It clearly shows four men in blackface, the ‘Kiwanis Minstrels.’ One of them wears a top hat and a bold, golden-yellow plaid suit; the other three wear outlandish red-and-white striped suits with oversized red bow ties. In earlier chapters, I explore how and why minstrelsy became popular in the 1830s and 1840, why it appealed to white residents, and how its unique forms and tropes persisted into the twentieth century. Through their costumes and antics, the white men on this float deployed old stereotypes of blacks as ignorant buffoons tolerable only for their entertainment value. The Kiwanans’ own place in society, derived by way of cultural inversion, is as the community’s enlightened governors. That such a prominent organization represented its identity this public way confirms the prevalence of racist attitudes among white civic leaders in the 1950s and their conviction that the audience (which they imagined as white) shared their views. In these and other ways, I argue that the Azalea Festival helped perpetuate the ideal of white supremacy and the illusion of “harmonious” race relations.

 I’ve been thinking about student privacy a lot over the past two years. The digital exhibit site my students created, Madison in the 1970s, is somewhat like a blog. Blogging, of course, is a particular kind of writing and publishing. Blog posts tend to be informal, chatty, polemical, self-published, and footnote-free–all the things traditional academic writing is not. Blogs are also public. Anyone can find and read what has been posted, and the poster will likely never know who has read her work, let alone how different readers reacted. In another post, I will explore how and why I held my students to disciplinary standards of writing, research, and citation (despite the blog format). Here, I lay out why requiring an undergraduate to create or contribute to a blog (or other digital project) raises important ethical considerations, especially as related to questions about students privacy and students’ rights to their own work in a Web 2.0 environment. I remain committed to the benefits of digital projects, but recommend a cautious, thoughtful approach. Continue reading →

On Wednesday, I am co-presenting at May Symposium, an annual faculty development event, to help colleagues “get started” with digital technologies in the humanities and social sciences. Our session, organized by Chris Arndt, will feature hands-on opportunities to play with Google Drive, WordPress, and Google Earth. Many people on our campus are dabbling with digital projects, but others doubt the pedagogical effectiveness of certain applications or worry about the investment of time and energy needed. Our goal is to allay some of these concerns by demonstrating and discussing how we have successfully used digital technologies in our own classes. Other presenters are: Chris Arndt, Kevin Hegg, Andrew Witmer, and Kevin Borg.

Here are some links I will be using in my portion of the session:
http://people.jmu.edu/mulroomm/meghome/ (my old antiquated site from the early 2000s) and  http://sites.jmu.edu/mad70s/ (my new class project). Continue reading →