For the last five months or so I’ve been working from home. And like many of us, that work involves a lot of Zoom video meetings. Some days, I’m in Zoom meetings from 8:30am to 5:30pm. Recently, I started to polish my appearance in Zoom by adding some graphics. I […]
Teaching
The COVID-19 pandemic has thrust many university and college course instructors into the world of online teaching in relatively short order. Thousands of courses have had to make a rapid switch to online teaching and this coming summer the entire curriculum at my university will be offered online. Many course […]
Every August, my department puts out a call for print orders for course syllabi. All course instructors are asked to submit digital files to be printed for thousands of undergraduate and graduate students. On the first day of classes, professors and teaching assistants march through the halls with large stacks […]
This fall, I am excited to start teaching HIST 4530 The Development of Toronto. This is a six-credit upper-level research seminar course on the history of Toronto with a maximum enrollment of eighteen students. The course aims to cover a number of different aspects of Toronto’s history, including environmental, political, […]
In the second History and Computing Workshop held in the Department of History at York University, I took faculty and graduate students through an overview of the use of tablet computers for history teaching and research. The most common tablet computer is, of course, Apple’s iPad so I focused my […]
I was recently contacted by Joy Forbes, author of a local history book on one-room schoolhouses in Ontario called Perseverance, Pranks, and Pride: Tales of the One-Room Schoolhouse. Local historians, like Forbes, work all across Canada producing fascinating histories of their communities. This one, in particular, caught my eye because […]
Digital and online-based technologies have changed the historian’s craft. Within the past two decades, these technologies have enhanced our abilities to research, analyze, communicate, and teach history. While the current generation of students is commonly referred to as “digital natives” or the “net generation” the assumption that young people are […]
Online access to digitized historical primary sources and secondary source analysis has changed the way historians work and teach. For me, this week was an excellent reminder that these online resources have opened up many more possibilities for my teaching and my scholarship. Monday was the 135th anniversary of the […]
We’re back to school this week and I’ve started teaching my first classes for the Fall 2010 semester at Mount Royal University. MRU is now the sixth university where I have been an instructor and with each new university comes a new flavour of online course management software. I’ve seen […]