Must Watch: John Fea’s Virtual Office Hours

Mutual admiration society: (idiomatic) A group of two or more people, in a workplace or other social environment, who routinely express considerable esteem and support for one another, sometimes to the point of exaggeration or pretense.   So says Wiktionary, and I fear that a picture of Messiah College history chair John Fea and I … More Must Watch: John Fea’s Virtual Office Hours

Student Blogging: A Report from a Modern European History Course

Earlier this year the New York Times ran a story about an English professor at Duke University named Cathy Davidson, who decided to replace more traditional term papers with a course blog for which students would regularly contribute 500-1500 word posts. While much of the Times article focused on the arguments for and against what … More Student Blogging: A Report from a Modern European History Course

Blogging: “Public Thinking” as “Digital Scholarship”?

If a scholar blogs, is it scholarship? When I started this enterprise in the summer of 2011, it never occurred to me to think of blogging as a form of scholarship. “A good way to cultivate the discipline of writing,” to implement the commonplace advice “that the best way to learn writing is to write”? … More Blogging: “Public Thinking” as “Digital Scholarship”?

Checking In with the Bethel History Department Blog

Over at AC 2nd, the blog of the Bethel University History Department, we’re in the middle of what my fellow blogger-department chair John Fea might call a “membership drive.” The blog’s been in business for about eight months now, and on the heels of Bethel’s Homecoming we just sent out an e-mail inviting all of … More Checking In with the Bethel History Department Blog

Guest Blogging at The Pietist Schoolman

8/1/12 – Earlier today Jim Rohrer became the first Pietist Schoolman reader to write a guest post. If you’d like to follow his lead, I’d certainly welcome proposals related to any of the main themes of this blog: Christianity (especially Pietism and my particular wing of that tradition, the Evangelical Covenant Church), History (book/film/museum reviews), … More Guest Blogging at The Pietist Schoolman

Education as “Infotainment”: or, The One Where I Become Part of the Problem

This fall a joint venture from Harvard and MIT, called edX, will make available free online courses from two of the world’s elite research universities. As the New York Times reported, the Harvard-MIT collaboration follows in the wake of a similar partnership involving Stanford, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Michigan (“Coursera“). … More Education as “Infotainment”: or, The One Where I Become Part of the Problem