Category Archives: Pedagogy

As an undergraduate student, I was most taken with professors who exuded poise and energy during lectures, and who kept student discussions interesting while maintaining control over them.  I wanted to teach college students because I liked being charismatic in front of a captive audience.  Of course, this has never been all pedagogy is, and the increasing popularity of online and blended courses suggests it will become less and less so.  Last fall, I got good marks from my students on the use of audio visual material, but this never went beyond the use of historic YouTube clips, which for a course on the 1960s was pretty much essential.  I’m hoping to learn some practical interactive uses of digital technology for the classroom, besides Blackboard, which I used even in my college years.

Around the same time I was teaching, I got access to hundreds of recorded speeches on reel-to-reel tapes.  Most of these speeches are by conservative activists connected with the John Birch Society, a major focus of my dissertation on anti-Communist conspiracy theory.   I digitized the tapes for MARBL and took notes on them.  I figured there was a great digital project to be done with them, too, but I didn’t have the background to propose one.  So I’m hoping to get some ideas for how I could make these tapes into a more useful, interactive archive for people who study the right wing of U.S. politics. Knowing how to create a scholarblog page seems like a good first step. I’ve also heard about audio recognition technology for use in transcription.