Jim Clifford In the lead-up to my take-home exam last April, I was trying to think of questions ChatGPT could not answer. I hoped that by focusing on details from my lectures that are not available on Wikipedia and other similar online sources, the large language model would fail to provide a strong answer. I was dead wrong:
By Sean GrahamThe Importance of the Past | RSS.com For as long as people have been doing history, there have been debates over how to best share the stories of the past. In recent years, this has revolved around discussions over teaching history and ways to better engage people with the history that shapes our daily lives. In this episode,… Read more »
Dale M. McCartney In 2014, Jonathan MacQuarrie told Active History readers that video games were increasingly teaching people about history in exciting and sometimes worrisome ways. In the years since, there has been an explosion of games that not only depict the past, but trade on historical accuracy as part of their appeal. They promise an extraordinary verisimilitude, allowing players… Read more »
Sara Wilmshurst Author, documentarian, and educator Adam Bunch met with one of our editors to talk about his work bringing Canadian history to the masses. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. SW: One of the things that is notable about your Canadian history documentary series, Canadiana, is how much of the country you visit to make it… Read more »
This is the introductory post to the series, Historians Confront the Climate Emergency, hosted by ActiveHistory.ca, NiCHE (Network in Canadian History & Environment), Historical Climatology and Climate History Network. By Edward Dunsworth and Daniel Macfarlane What a summer. In late June, a “heat dome” stalked the Pacific regions of Canada and the United States, pushing thermometers close to the 50-degree… Read more »
This post is part two of Donica Belisle’s three-part series, “Taking the ‘discipline’ out of History: moving beyond the limits of scholarly writing through a research creation assignment.” Part one was published last week. In Winter 2019 I devised an assignment in a second-year Canadian survey course (Canada From Confederation to World War II) that enabled students to choose their… Read more »
Paul Ward On a cold Monday morning in late autumn last year, nearly 30 first-year undergraduate History students from Edge Hill University visited the Playhouse Theatre in Williamson Square, Liverpool, UK. They delivered informal short presentations about major historical events including Napoleon at Waterloo, the rule of Margaret Thatcher, the suffragettes, and other historical figures such as Marie Curie. This… Read more »
Geoff Read, Tom Peace, and Tim Compeau As the most recent professors in Huron University College’s signature first-year course, History 1801E, “Controversies in Global History,” we have struggled for several years with an issue that appears to plague university instructors far and wide: many of our students are not doing the readings for their weekly tutorials. This poses quite a… Read more »
Andrew Nurse Last fall I had the good fortune to attend a regional workshop and conference on post-secondary teaching and learning, or as it now increasingly called: the scholarship of teaching and learning in higher education (STLHE). For me, the highlight of my weekend was watching a fawn walk in front of my car — seemingly without a care in… Read more »
By Frank Cogliano On a recent trip to Sweden I encountered an elderly gentleman out walking his dog. We engaged in a brief conversation. Hearing my accent, he detected that I was an Anglophone and asked me if I’m English. “No,” I replied, “American.” He broke into a smile, laughed, and made a Nazi salute and said, “Trump!” We continued… Read more »
