an apply these changes. If the owner comes to trust individual users enough, he or she can grant these specific users 'edit' access to the entry." This has the potential disadvantage of discouraging open participation and requir- ing more commitment from some participants, but it gives a much stronger place to ex- pertise by assuming that the "owner is the de facto expe

Of course, writing "without bias"--even in the circumscribed way that Wikipedia de- fines it-is, as Wikipedians concede, "difficult" since "all articles are edited by people" and "people are inherently biased."

The second key Wikipedian injunction is to "avoid bias." "Articles should be written from a neutral point of view [NPov]," they insist, "representing differing views on a sub- ject factually

y were not the first to think of a free Web-based encyclope- dia; in the earliest days of the Web, some had talked about creating a free "Interpedia"; in 1999 Richard Stallman, a ke

reedom denied by the scholarly journals in, say, JSTOR, which requires an expensive institutional subscription) but also-more remarkably-their freedom to use it. You can take Wikipedia's entry on Franklin D. Roosevelt and put it on your own Web site, you can hand out copies to your students, and you can publish it in a book-all with only one restriction: You may not impose any more restrictions on subsequent read- ers and users than have been imposed on you. And it has no authors in any conventional sense. Tens of thousa

st unimaginable in our professional culture. Yet, quite remarkably, that describes the online encyclopedia known as Wikipedia, which contains 3 million articles (1 million of them in English). History is probably the category encompassing the largest number of

ety interpretation of Progressivism."2 And if we use more than a limited number of words from Hofstadter, we need to send a check to his estate. To mingle Hofstadter's prose with your own and publish it would violate both copyright and professional norms. A historical work without owners and with multiple, anonymous authors is thus al- most unimaginable in our professional culture. Yet, quite remarkably,

It is about relating the past to the present.

The question for me with the Berkeley event is that its importance is only half understood unless we think carefully about historical perception, phenomenology, sensation, experience.

This is an archive dominated by photographs, yet it was first and foremost a sonic and musical event

t also, of course took place in a center of radical political and cultural activity—Berkeley and UC Berkeley in particular—so one central question is why has it largely been left out of the historical record.

Sample Postcard

n the “Golden Age” of postcards, the decades before World War I, postcards circulated with the same fervor, if not speed, of images on popular social media apps today.

The social media of the early twentieth-century, it could be argued, was postcards.

Those linked shifts in the possibilities of discovery are a sea change at the core ofour collective practice

It opens shortcuts that enable ignorance as well asknowledge

Be prepared to explain how these skills and knowledge make you a better candidate on both the academic and nonacademic job market

Figure out what sorts of digital skills you need and then pursue them deliberately

every aspect of their academic and professional lives to involve using networked digital tools of one kind or another, often in the most quotidian ways—using the university’s digital library catalog, sharing reports with managers and colleagues, working on draft chapters via email with a co-author, or doing keyword searches of newspapers online. 

Digital literacy means having a familiarity with and facility in navigating and using the Internet.

Online discussion on learning and management systems like Blackboard will acquaint students with one another in a digital setting and make them more comfortable with commenting on each other’s assignments later in the course

If possible, consider teaching your digital history course online

Grades don’t prepare children for the “real world” — unless one has in mind a world where interest in learning and quality of thinking are unimportant

“Like it or not, grading is here to stay”

It’s not enough to add narrative reports.  “When comments and grades coexist, the comments are written to justify the grade

It’s not enough to tell students in advance exactly what’s expected of them.  “When school is seen as a test, rather than an adventure in ideas,” teachers may persuade themselves they’re being fair “if they specify, in listlike fashion, exactly what must be learned to gain a satisfactory grade…[but] such schooling is unfair in the wider sense that it prepares students to pass other people’s tests without strengthening their capacity to set their own assignments in collaboration with their fellows” (Nicholls and Hazzard, 1993, p. 77).

But grading for learning is, to paraphrase a 1960’s-era slogan, rather like bombing for peace.  Rating and ranking students (and their efforts to figure things out) is inherently counterproductive.

There is certainly value in assessing the quality of learning and teaching, but that doesn’t mean it’s always necessary, or even possible, to measure those things

Extrinsic motivation, which includes a desire to get better grades, is not only different from, but often undermines, intrinsic motivation, a desire to learn for its own sake (Kohn 1999a). 

Grades create a preference for the easiest possible task.  Impress upon students that what they’re doing will count toward their grade, and their response will likely be to avoid taking any unnecessary intellectual risks.  They’ll choose a shorter book, or a project on a familiar topic, in order to minimize the chance of doing poorly — not because they’re “unmotivated” but because they’re rational.  They’re responding to adults who, by telling them the goal is to get a good mark, have sent the message that success matters more than learning.

 Grades tend to diminish students’ interest in whatever they’re learning.  A “grading orientation” and a “learning orientation” have been shown to be inversely related and, as far as I can tell, every study that has ever investigated the impact on intrinsic motivation of receiving grades (or instructions that emphasize the importance of getting good grades) has found a negative effect.

Most of the criticisms of grading you’ll hear today were laid out forcefully and eloquently anywhere from four to eight decades ago

:  Collecting information doesn’t require tests, and sharing that information doesn’t require grades.  In fact, students would be a lot better off without either of these relics from a less enlightened age.

“I remember the first time that a grading rubric was attached to a piece of my writing….Suddenly all the joy was taken away.  I was writing for a grade — I was no longer exploring for me.  I want to get that back.  Will I ever get that back?”