The following is connected to the Can’t Stop Thinking About Teaching post I made last week or so. It’s a scanned snapshot of a work in progress, namely my sketching out of new, interactive modules for my HST 102 Intro to European Civilizations course in the fall. This one focuses on the first module of the course, dealing with the Ancien Regime. The numbers (1.1, 2.3, etc) stand for, respectively, week and class session. Other shorthand comments and such may not make much sense to people other than me. Ask if you are curious.

The thinking behind this is fairly straightforward. I’m scaffolding the historical skills I want my students to be exposed to in an introductory module before we get into the full immersion experience of researching, aggregating, ordering, narrating, and “publishing” their own history (on their course wiki). As such, this first module needs, in a structured fashion, to introduce them to concepts and skills they will be using independently later on in the course while also setting the stage, so to speak, for engaging with the broad thematic scope of the course of modern European history (i.e. establishing the old order, which we will then blow the fuck up over the next few modules — French and Industrial Revolutions and all that).

Ultimately, I’m posting this for those interested in the method behind my teaching madness. Thoughts?

Organizational brainstorm notes for the Ancien Regime module in my HST 102 courses for the fall of 2011.