A strange reason to start your own blog.

I’m starting this blog for what strikes me at least as a very strange reason. I have to do it for a class, and I’m not the student. I’m the professor. Last year, two of my colleagues and I took a group of 20+ teachers to Boston as part of a Teaching American History Grant awarded by the US Department of Education. I had been blogging at the Writing on the Wal (and will continue to do so in the future despite the opening of the blog you’re reading) for a year or two previously. I figured blogging would be a great way to get our teachers thinking about the historical sites we took them to in Boston.

The blogs from that trip are all linked from here. I thought the blogging went beautifully from an educational standpoint and I loved how students left comments for each other, but my problem was that I didn’t understand blog mechanics. My friend Jeff runs the Writing on the Wal. All I do is post. Therefore, I figured I need to learn to run my own blog well if I have to explain it to others. So I’m starting this blog so that I can do a better job this summer when we take 30 teachers to Philadelphia in the second year of the egrant (and Chicago the year after that). And heck, if I get good at assigning blogging as a class activity, maybe I’ll even try it with undergraduates at some point.

Since I’m a historian, my subject for this blog will be historical matters. [I'm a firm believer in only blogging about what you know. Everybody may have an opinion, but that doesn't make them informed.] My model is the only history blog I read with regularity, Cliopatria. When I organized the Writing on the Wal, I got co-authors in large part so that I wouldn’t feel the pressure to write every day. Since there are no co-authors here, posts will be irregular. Nevertheless, I hope it will be of interest to people other than the students who have to go here to complete their assignments