Madness.

I had no idea this was a cover until I went looking for it on iTunes:

The two academic technological generation gaps.

I got an e-mail from an academic friend of mine yesterday about my Teaching With YouTube article. The gist of it was “I’ll be sure to use YouTube as soon as I get my teenage daughter to explain it to me.” I laughed when I saw that, but not at her. I laughed because this joke is so old now that it must be on life support in a nursing home somewhere. We need or kids to work our cell phones and fix our DVD players for us because they were born with this stuff and we weren’t. I heard this all the time when I first forced the teachers in my graduate class to blog, and it gets replayed in my office every time I speak to the nice undergraduates who work at my university’s tech support hotline. However, this academic technological generation gap is not the primary focus of this post.

The academic technological generation gap I want to focus on here is the one between university professors: those who do tech and those who don’t. When I went to college every single professor I had taught with a piece of chalk, some notes and maybe a stand full of maps. The vast majority of them were very good at what they did and I learned a lot as a result.

Therefore, when I started teaching, I thought, “Well, if it was good enough for me, it’s good enough for my students.” But guess what? Times change. I have come to believe that it is educational malpractice to teach a survey course in American History (and probably World History too, but that’s not my field) without using pictures. And I don’t mean carting around an overhead projector so that you can show students those maps you got from your textbook company. I mean pictures. And don’t tell me this dumbs down the presentation. It improves it for many reasons, but especially because it allows you to analyze primary sources right there in the classroom.

The same thing goes for movies. As I wrote in my article, there are now countess primary source film clips readily available on the internet that I used to only talk about in lecture that I can now show students the class. Yes, it takes away from lecture time (if only to a limited extent if you pick the right clips), but more importantly it reinforces historical knowledge better than any single professor ever could. Your students don’t just hear history, they see it and to many of them only seeing is believing.

The generation gap I’m getting at here is the difference between those faculty who are willing to use technology to foster learning and those who aren’t. Of course, it doesn’t break down perfectly to an age differential. I know folks much older than me who are PowerPoint magicians (and yes, that’s not necessarily a good thing) and a guy much younger than me who doesn’t even have his own web site. However, I do think there are plenty of people who learned history in college the same way I did and who aren’t even willing to step into the late Twentieth Century.

Certainly I’ve read enough Margaret Soltan now to recognize that plenty of technologies hinder rather than help learning. [Clickers pop immediately to mind.] Nevertheless, for me there are a few minimum requirement that every professor in every discipline ought to have mastered.

E-mail and word processing go without saying. I’m a firm believer that everyone should post their syllabi on the web if for no other reason so that prospective students have some idea of what they’re getting into when they enroll in your courses. While I’ve seen too many PowerPoint presentations crash to champion that particular technology for everyone, history professors really ought to be able show pictures somehow. And for heaven’s sake, every professor doesn’t need to have their own blog, but by now they should at least know how one works.

If someone appointed you Dictator of Academia, what technologies would you require professors to know?

“How did he cheat during the ‘72 election?” Are you frickin’ kidding me?

I don’t want to turn this blog into an unofficial Rick Perlstein fan site, but if you have nine minutes to kill you really ought to see this. I’d say that Perlstein takes Pat Buchanan to school, but Buchanan’s ignorance here is a total put-on. The viewers of “Morning Joe,” however, might actually have learned something.

Matt is back!!!

I don’t know why, but I just love these videos:

Nixon w/o Watergate.

Here’s my review of Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland on Amazon.com (by request).

Live and learn.

Ever since this AHA Perspectives article that I wrote about teaching history with YouTube got published, I’ve been peppered with e-mails explaining that contrary to what I wrote in that article it is in fact possible to download videos from YouTube and play them back from your local computer. Now that I’ve had some time to play around with this concept, I can report definitively that my correspondents are right.

[In my own defense I was going off the YouTube FAQ. From its silence I surmise that Google doesn't want you to do this, the same way that record companies don't want you to download music onto your iPod. In any event, since this is a legal gray area, I'm not sure I could have written about this in Perspectives anyway.]

By far the easiest way to download video from anywhere (YouTube included) is to download the the latest version of Real Player. If Real Player is active a button will appear during every video you view asking you whether you want to download it. You click the button and that’s that. It is both quick and easy.

My problem is that my campus computer system is Microsoft exclusive so I can’t download Real Player anywhere else except the computer in my office. Therefore, I’ve started using one of many YouTube download programs that are available. My choice is aTube Catcher 1.0 [Available here.] With this I download from YouTube, convert it to an .mpg file and keep it in a folder on my desktop which I can access from classrooms across campus. By doing this, I can treat all the YouTube videos the same way I handle the files I get from the Library of Congress or the Prelinger Archives. It’s also easy to back them up this way.

Thanks again correspondents! I’m actually glad I made that mistake in print otherwise I never would have known what to do.

A daisy and some ice cream.

As you might expect, KC Johnson offers a good contextualization of Lyndon Johnson’s infamous daisy ad to mark the death of its creator, Tony Schwartz.

What nobody seems to remember is that many of Johnson’s other ads in 1964 were just as hard-hitting and they ran a lot more than once. To sample them all, visit the 1964 page at the Living Room Candidate. My favorite is called “Ice Cream.” It’s the seventh down on the Democratic side, and I’m told the narrator is Julie Andrews, but it doesn’t sound like her to me.

Can you plagiarize a recipe?

Cindy McCain, it seems, is passing other people’s recipes off as her own again. Let me be clear from the outset. This is stupid. This is dishonest. Under no circumstances will i vote for her husband. But is plagiarism the right word for this?

Plagiarism, of course, is passing other people’s words and/or ideas off as your own without attribution. But seriously, hasn’t every cookie recipe in the world been done somewhere else before? How many different ways can you possibly make oatmeal butterscotch cookies? According to David Weiner at the Huffington Post, where I found this story, she “managed to take the time to switch a few minor details in her version of the recipe.” If that’s the standard, wouldn’t all similar recipes be virtually identical?

I’ve only started examining old cook books (for my study of ice) and one of the first things I noticed is how modern recipes are so much more specific than ones from a hundred years ago or more. The earliest recipes are much more textual, more like a story than a set of instructions. I don’t know when this changed, but I suspect that the earlier cookbooks are more practical. After all, who follows recipes to the letter anyways? The best cooks put in dashes instead of measuring, make impromptu substitutions or just make stuff up as they go along. No two dishes are ever the like, even if the recipes used are identical.

So is Cindi McCain a terrible victim here? Of course not. She probably just doesn’t want to admit that she’s never cooked a day in her life. Nevertheless, I still think this story raises interesting philosophical questions.

That’s Robert McNamara, right?

Thanks, Ari. I’ve always just used the picture in class, but this is even more striking:

The Crisis of the Union Electronic Archives.

I spent a few hours this morning with my old undergraduate adviser, Bob Engs of the University of Pennsylvania. He should our teachers an on online document depository he helped put together, the Crisis of tth Union Electronic Archives, and it’s incredibly good.

Here’s just a few samples. An envelope about emancipation from during the Civil War:

Here’s an anti-feminist cartoon from the post-war era:

The caption reads “How it would be if some ladies got their own way.”

And lastly, how can we sample anything from this era and not include old Abe Lincoln:

It’s really an incredible resource for educators at all levels and deserves much more attention.