Joining Connected Courses

Looking forward to joining the Connected Courses discussion over the next few weeks.

Quick intro: I’m a Professor of History and American Studies at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia.  Recently I also took on a new role as the Special Assistant to the Provost for Teaching, Technology, and Innovation.  [Among other wonderful things, it also means that Jim Groom reports to me.]

I’ve been engaged in digitally-enabled pedagogy for many years (see my courses at http://mcclurken.org/, but I’ve increasingly been exploring hybrid, blended, and some forms of distance mentoring.  For example, last spring, I co-taught (with Ellen Holmes Pearson at UNC-Asheville) a new, cross-institutional class whose goal was to work with 13 students from 9 COPLAC institutions to create a digital history site that recounted the experiences of the schools and their towns from 1914 to 1919.  The 4 UMW students served as tech support for the course, and built the overarching site at http://centuryamerica.org/ and the Fredericksburg site at http://umw.centuryamerica.org/   We described the course this way for the presentation we did with 7 of those students at the COPLAC annual conference in June (and the Council for Undergraduate Research in July):  “Century America is an experiment that combined traditional archival research methods with digital history and distance education. The project contributes to our understandings of the American homefront experience during World War I as well as the ways in which we can facilitate high-impact undergraduate research through distance learning technologies.”

In any case, I’m excited to join in on these discussions.