Teaching History

Music as a Gateway to Understanding Historical Practice

January 16, 2012

Popular culture serves as an easy way to capitalize on students’ everyday experience. Music can teach about the past in at least seven overlapping ways.

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Too Much Information: The Case for the Programming Historian

January 9, 2012

Depending on your vantage point, we have a looming opportunity – or a looming problem. Historical digital sources have reached a scale where they defy conventional analysis and now call out for computational analysis. The Internet Archive alone has 2.9 million texts, there are 2.6 million pages of historical newspapers archived at the Chronicling America [...]

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Announcement: Approaching the Past Workshop

November 27, 2011

Approaching the Past Workshop being held Nov. 29th at the Zion Schoolhouse in Toronto.

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Teacher-Students and Student-Historians: Discovering Constance Margaret Austin and the Value of Experiential Learning with Spadina Museum

October 18, 2011

Discovering Constance Margaret Austin and the Value of Experiential Learning with Spadina Museum

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New Paper: “Engagement and Struggle: A Response to Stuart Henderson”

September 13, 2011

By Fred Burrill, Concordia University “The monster they’ve engendered in me will return to torment its maker, from the grave, the pit, the profoundest pit. Hurl me into the next existence, the descent into hell won’t turn me. I’ll crawl back to dog his trail forever.” (George Jackson—Soledad Brother, Black Panther, movement martyr) The importance [...]

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What Do You Want to Know (about history)? Wolfram Alpha and the Computational Knowledge Engine.

August 22, 2011

Wolfram Alpha lets users interact with over 10 trillion pieces of information curated by a large research team. You just type in what you want to know, the engine tries to figure out what you’re asking it, and you’re presented with a remarkable array of information (as well as ways to refine your subsequent searches). This has tremendous historical applications, both for teaching and for historical research.

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Do you edit Wikipedia?

June 27, 2011

Podcast: Play in new window | Download I started editing a few Wikipedia articles lately. While I’ve been interested in the project for years, I never seemed to have the time to become involved. Before this past week, I had created an account and fixed a few small details on pages directly related to my [...]

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Using Word Clouds to Quickly See the Political Past

April 11, 2011

This is a demonstration by Ian Milligan of how word clouds can be used to visually display textual documents, with possible applications in the educational field, media field, and elsewhere. It also has lots of pretty pictures.

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Upcoming Approaching the Past Workshop: Teaching the War of 1812

April 9, 2011

The next Approaching the Past workshop will be held on Wednesday April 27th at 7:oo pm at Toronto’s historic Fort York.  The theme of this workshop is “Teaching the War of 1812,” and will feature a tour of Fort York and two short presentations by Karen Dearlove and Carolyn King.  Karen will be discussing the [...]

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Twitter in the Classroom

March 3, 2011

This post discusses the potential uses of Twitter in the classroom, from the position of somebody who was once a skeptic.

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