resourceGleb Tsipursky has introduced you to the general ideas behind class-sourcing and some of the media he uses. In this post I would like to introduce how I have adapted Gleb’s project to my Soviet history course.

Dickinson  College has long been known for fostering global education and study abroad. More recently, we have taken up the call to teach our students and ourselves to be better stewards through the study and practice of sustainability. To this end, many faculty have been creating and reworking, to varying degrees, courses so that we can highlight issues of sustainability in our fields. Given that most definitions of sustainability included not only environmental concerns, but also issues of human rights, access to political and economic power, and maintenance of cultures, the study of the Soviet Union seemed a logical course for me to begin with.

Following Gleb’s lead, I have changed my assignments in this course from a traditional research paper to a series of projects that will support students’ use of and contribution to our digitized knowledge base. In a series of steps, students will accumulate a bibliography on their topics, modify and annotate the bibliography, collect digitized sources (e.g. films, maps, timelines, photographs, etc.) that will help them tell their story, and then construct a lengthy multimedia blog post that will educate the broader public on their topics. Notes and bibliographies will be collected using Evernote so that students can easily sync their work between tablets and computers. Students will then share these Evernote assignments with classmates for peer review and with the wider world via the Twitter hashtag #h254 (the course number) and other social media. Final projects will be posted to our blog in December and will be promoted via this blog and numerous social media.

I will return every few weeks to update on the course’s progress and provide my thoughts on the pros and cons of each stage. Gleb will return tomorrow with his latest blog post.

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