I'm beginning a new project in Lifelong Learners, which I hope will interest my friends who are working on Note-Making techniques and technologies. In the past, several people have told me it would be useful to see an actual academic working, to see what some of these ideas look like when they're applied. I agreed it would be helpful, but didn't have a short-term project I was really able to focus on, from soup to nuts. Now I do.
Next semester (Spring 2025) I will be teaching four distinct courses (multiple sections of one, for a total of six classes). One of these will be a new course that I have anticipated and planned on teaching for some time, but have never actually taught. That course will be World History 1, which covers prehistory through about the year 1500. This is a period I have studied pretty extensively, and I'm excited about reading and discovering even more. And also about the learning that always happens when I figure out how to present information and share and discuss it with students. I'm really looking forward to this.
Over the years, I've also been an advocate of reducing the cost of learning to students, largely by producing my own open textbooks they could use for free. The system that I work in, Minnesota State, supports this work and I'm considering joining a learning circle run by a friend of mine and producing an OER (open educational resource) textbook for the World 1 course. This would be a fairly big project, but I'll be doing a big chunk of the work anyway, just creating the course and lectures. A text is really only a short jump further.
Since I won't have an OER textbook going into the course, I'll be using one of the standard textbooks, Worlds Together Worlds Apart, part 1. The concise version of the textbook is about 542 pages long, plus about a hundred pages of appendices. There are several OERs available from a variety of sources, but I haven't had a chance to review them yet. Typically when I'm making my own textbook, I refer to others to remind myself of topics or elements I want to be sure I don't forget to include. There's so much in the past, but there are arguably some milestones that ought to be included in any student's exposure. I've become a bit less obsessed with this over the years, as my confidence in my own opinions has increased. But it's still useful to know when I'm diverging from what others teach. Especially because I enjoy taking students on a ride they wouldn't have in another class, so it's good to know where the traditional edges are located.
The project I'm planning on doing in December (beginning right now, actually) is to read through the textbook I'll be assigning to the students and build from there. This will involve first highlighting and annotating the text. Then making notes paraphrasing key points I want to focus my students' attention on. These will become the building blocks of lectures and ultimately of the OER textbook. There are also a collection of additional things I want to talk about, to supplement the traditional material and take the students on that ride. I've already brainstormed between fifteen and twenty; there will probably be a few more and they need to be integrated with the more traditional content. I've been imagining using different colored cards for these ideas, and putting it all up on a big pin-board.
This is the process I'll be writing and making videos about over the next month or so. It will probably be a bit repetitive and may be a bit informal and like working with the garage door open, but it will be a real demonstration of how I use the tools and techniques of Note-Making to complete a real project. It will also probably include my reactions to the choices the authors made in the text I'll actually be using with my students. So there will be some critique of the ways they organized and presented information, as well as probably the choices they made about what stories to tell and how. I hope people will find it interesting and useful.
