Originally published at Mike Cosgrave. You can comment here or there.

I’m looking for some (moderately) radical students to help subvert the top-down model that dominates the Irish university sector. I do a quite a bit of research in the Scholarship of  Teaching and Learning, and I have a couple of things going on which I am keen to open up a bit and get some active inputs. I’m actually looking out for students who might be interested in collaborating on two projects, from offering comments all the way to co-authoring papers. One is on how history teaching in universities differs from culture to culture; the other is my ongoing work on group and team based learning using games in my military history option, HI2007.

Originally published at Mike Cosgrave. You can comment here or there.

Cork city is back to it’s eighteenth century state this weekend, with the river reclaiming the old marshes and waterways that made up the city centre.  Driving through town in the past few months, I had reflected on how global warming would force us to rethink how we use the buildings in the city, but I had not thought the city would have to come to terms with the new reality so suddenly.

Originally published at Mike Cosgrave. You can comment here or there.

A national strike is planned for the 24th here in Ireland, which looks like it will shut down most of the public sector, and while everyone has a right to protest about the mess we are in, I have a right not to protest, a right to go into college and teach my scheduled classes on that day for those students who wish to attend.

Originally published at Mike Cosgrave. You can comment here or there.

I’m back from ISSTOL09 and unpacking my luggage, physical and mental. I had a great time in Bloomington, visited several great restaurants in good company, did my paper, talked a lot with the other historians in HistSoTL which led to a long list of future SoTL projects. That work will keep me and many others busy for several years to come, so you’ll be able to read about it as it emerges, but before I start feeding laundry into the machine, I wanted to note some of the other things I brought home with me about teaching and learning

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Geert Wilders is dangerously ill-informed about the developement of liberal democracy in the West, and while I winced at his description of Islam as a ‘retarded culture’ on Sky News yesterday, I’m also appalled  at his cavalier assertion that “”Our cultures, based on humanism, Judaism and Christianity, are far better than the Islamic culture.” This is to ignore how our modern freedoms were brought about by centuries of bloody struggle against the dead hand of theocracy in Europe.

Originally published at Mike Cosgrave. You can comment here or there.

Enda Kenny’s pledge to abolish the Seanad, reported in yesterdays Irish Times, is a cheap shot at populist politics which shows why he is no better than the current crowd. There are things which can be done to reform the Seanad, and some are very easy.

Originally published at Mike Cosgrave. You can comment here or there.

I’m making my Digital History students (Hi6018) create and use a blog as the anchor for their assessment portfolio in the the course, and I was hunting around for other courses using blogs, but cannot find as many as I used to be able to see.  Bill Turkel’s class at UWO are doing it, and are about three weeks ahead of mine, but many others have disappeared or closed off.

Originally published at Mike Cosgrave. You can comment here or there.

John A Murphy often advocated nationalising the land but somehow I don’t think he had in mind nationalising the speculative overbuilding of the property bubble.  However, barring major accidents, all of us who pay tax in Ireland are about to become part of the biggest landowning cartel in our history since Cromwell took it all to pay off his army.

Originally published at Mike Cosgrave. You can comment here or there.

NASA’s underfunding seems to be the only thing, apart from shuttle launches, that gets space in the news these days. People need a frontier to challenge them, which is why watching Discovery blast off into the night on Sky News while sipping a pint of the black stuff in the pub makes most blokes feel good. But NASA can’t keep this up, and while most other national space agencies deal in small change, putting them all together might actually result in a programme with enough resources to do the things we actually need done in space.

Originally published at Mike Cosgrave. You can comment here or there.

Rain in August!

The Battle of the Boyne was the largest single battle fought in Ireland, and I recently had the opportunity to walk the site with the Military History Society of Ireland on a typically wet Irish summer day. The walk was led by Dr Harman Murtagh, the society President, who played a key role in the development of the Interpretative Centre and the site, and whose commentary added a lot to our enjoyment of the day.

Originally published at Mike Cosgrave. You can comment here or there.

Good computer games should come in three parts. I don’t mean in terms of gameplay, I mean in terms of architecture. Well designed business client-server applications have three main parts, database, business rules and front end client, but many games are driven mainly by the graphical front end, and munge up the other two parts any old way.  This is a bad thing, and one which computer game designers need to fix.

Originally published at Mike Cosgrave. You can comment here or there.

but not because of net problems - the game has no challenge and there is no way to fail. At first I thought the model used might have interesting potential, but I quickly relaised the implementation is flat. However, if I could get my hands on a copy of the code, I could tweak it to make an interesting simulation of a medieval manor or an Eighteenth century estate.

Originally published at Mike Cosgrave. You can comment here or there.

Some people still cling to the idea that an academic department is a tight box on an organisation chart, but those days are fast dying, and now a department is more like a clump on a network diagram with an increasingly diverse range of connections to other disciplines and institutions. It is true that for a long time to come, most of our students will still come to a physical campus and sit in a lecture room for 24 hours of teaching, but that is just cultural inertia. A range of forces now mean that the academic units which prosper will be those which can survive best in the Bazaar rather than the Cathedral.

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How do we maintain teaching continuity through the coming winter of swine flu?  We’re assured that our university has a plan for the pandemic but we have not been told anything about it, which is unusual - our current President is very good about keeping everyone informed. Meanwhile, I’ve been looking at my own teaching, and what we do in our dept, to work out what the problems are likely to be , and how we might meet them. I think the biggest problem is that many students, even  if they don’t actually have swine flu, will opt to sit it out at home at the slightest sniffle.  Not surprisingly, I’m looking at how I can use technology to deliver my teaching if me or my students are quarantined, or just faking it.

Originally published at Mike Cosgrave. You can comment here or there.

It really takes a writer to show a vision of how new technologies can change our daily lives, and in Halting State, Charles Stross has done that for me with his version of augmented reality. Standing in my barn this morning, I realised I need CopSpace here, at home.

Originally published at Mike Cosgrave. You can comment here or there.

Shawn Day, of the DHO, showed some inspiring visualisations at last weeks digital humanities  seminar in the Boole Library which he’d done in his work on the brewing industry in Guelph in the nineteenth century. I have made several runs at turning all or parts of  my old MA thesis on the history of Beamish and Crawford but it keeps getting pushed down the list. However, I pulled up my old spreadsheets to have another go at them, and found they have been slightly Y2Ked. The brewery, of course, closed down a few weeks ago, having been in continous operation in South Main St since 1792.

Originally published at Mike Cosgrave. You can comment here or there.

Even if they recover enough to be the largest party in the Dail in 2012, and one can never rule that out, Fianna Fail may well have lost control of the Seanad as a result of their local election defeats. 43 of the 66 senators are elected by the outgoing members of the Oireachtas and the councillors, who are not overwhelmingly Fine Gael and Labour. Even with the 11 Taoiseach’s nominees, a putative FF taoiseach in 2012 might not be able to command a majority in the Seanad.

Originally published at Mike Cosgrave. You can comment here or there.

Nor will any other big company, which seems to me to be a compelling argument that copyright should die with the creator. If the law firm my Grandfather worked for doesn’t have to pay me every time they open one of his files, why should J.K. Rowling’s grandchildren keep getting cheques for the next  century?

Originally published at Mike Cosgrave. You can comment here or there.

I’m reading a piece in which Aliza Sherman recaps a ‘golden rule’ of online discussions - Listen before jumping in. Of course this is fine for joining ongoing discussions, but it is no good when you want a group of students to –start– talking!

Originally published at Mike Cosgrave. You can comment here or there.

Critics of Wikipedia will no doubt crow over the latest hoax in which a Dublin student inserted a faked quote into the article on Maurcie Jarre which was picked up by several papers. I’m not very concerned - history is full of faked quotes, and at least in Wikipedia we can see what user account inserted the unreferenced quote