Study Guide
This guide is still unfinished, but what's here is still worth reading.
Research
No encyclopedias, especially no Internet encyclopedias, unless specifically excepted. Right now, the only exception in any medium is the Catholic Encyclopedia. If you would like an exception, ask.
On Reading the Textbooks and Lectures
Order of Reading
Notes
You aren't just reading for the information; you are reading in order to take part in discussion.
No Highlighting!
Don't highlight. It's a lousy habit and I strongly encourage students to break themselves of it if they have it.
Why is highlighting bad? Because it tricks you into thinking you are learning. Here's how it works.
You read. You are (presumably) looking to identify "important" information, where "important" here usually means "stuff I think is going to be on an exam." Hey, I was a student once, too. Let's face it, nobody gets out their highlighter to read a novel.
So, when you find a part you think is important, you highlight it. Then you go on. You think you have done something significant, but you haven't.
First of all, the only way to recover this information is to thumb through your book again, scanning for yellow bits (or your color of choice--the fun part of highlighting is the colors!). This is wasteful of time, first of all.
Once you re-scan, what do you do? You just read it again, often just the highlighted part. What good is that? You often will either highlight a mere word or phrase, so it lacks context, or else you highlight entire paragraphs.
The entire-paragraph approach isn't so bad, but all you will do is re-read what you've already read. At best this means you will rehearse facts, but that's not what I want you to do.
What I want is for you to learn. The way you learn is you internalize information. The way you internalize is you re-cast information into your own words, into your own terms, into your own understanding.
That's why highlighting is bad - because ultimately the information remains outside, external to you, perhaps known but certainly not understood. In the end, you will be failing yourself, short-changing yourself.
There are other reasons highlighting is bad. One worth mentioning is that it marks up the book. Who cares, right? You're just going to sell it back. Okay, fair enough. But when you shop a used book, do you pick the one that's free of markings or the one with underlining and highlights? Right. Marking up a book devalues it for the next student. Book prices are too high already. Give the next student a break!
Even if you keep the book -- especially if you keep the book -- you should not mark it up. Why? Because any markings you make represent your current reading of that book. It will likely be years before you read it again. When a book has marks, your eye is naturally drawn to the highlighting. You have to fight past that to read the text a different way. Especially if you are simply reviewing a book at the end of the current semester, for an exam, you will tend to read it the way you highlighted it. Do you really think your first reading is the best reading?
Notes
Okay, enough with the rant. If I don't want you to highlight, what is it I want you to do?
Take notes. This is absolutely one of the most important study habits you can ever acquire, and it goes way beyond academic study. It's one of those life-habits that pay dividends repeatedly.
How you do this is up to you. There are many approaches. I'll name three, but before discussing the mechanics, I need to explain what goes into your notes.
Always remember: for this course, anyway, you are taking notes in order to participate in discussion. This means you will have three kinds of notes: comments, replies, and questions.
The comment note is one where you have read something and you want to make a comment on it. Perhaps you dispute what's said, or you have made a connection between this and some other information. Whatever the inspiration, summarize the passage and sketch out your comment. Do not copy the passage. Ever. Re-state it in your own words. And remember to at least sketch your comment, or else you'll forget what it was that motivated you to make the note in the first place.
A reply note is where someone has said something on the board and you wish to reply. Often this will simply be a question someone asked and you've found the answer, but it might also be an on-going discussion with differing points of view. Again, rephrase what is said, add your own comments, and note the source complete with page number or url.
A question note is the one most often neglected by students, but it's the easiest of all to do. If you don't understand something, make a note of it! The trouble is, we often believe we understand something when in fact we do not. If you can condition yourself to be ever critical, ever-questioning of your own understanding, you will find first that you will generate tons of questions (and will easily meet the participation requirements!) and second that you will learn a ton more than you would have otherwise.
Tools
One is what I call the journal approach. Here you use a notebook and devote it to a single book. I like to use those smaller ones with maybe 50 or 70 pages in them. I write the name of the work right on the outside. The ones with glue binding fit better in file drawers but don't open conveniently; the sprial notebooks open better but take up more space. The key to note-taking here is to use plenty of white space. You've got far more pages than you're likely to use, so space things out to make it easier to scan and review.
The second approach is to use file cards. This is recommended for use in whatever your major is, especially if you plan to do extended study. File cards are good because you can re-sort them in a variety of ways, flip through them very quickly, and find what you want. The basic rule of thumb with note cards is: one idea per card. Don't worry about using all the space. One idea per card. Size of the card is entirely up to you. I like 3x5 because it encourages me to be focused. Also, put author and at least a short title on each, and write the date you took the note. There's lots of information available on the subject of note cards and research.
The third approach is to use the computer. I put this last because I have never found this to be very convenient. There are note-taking programs: the best ones integrate with your word processor and can do cool stuff like generate your bibliography automatically. Pretty much for serious scholars only. Otherwise, just toss stuff into whatever tool is most convenient for you--probably your word processor. Organization is the great challenge here, and there are dozens of approaches.
On Reading the Primary Sources
Much of what was said about reading textbooks applies here: read critically, take notes, don't fall behind. The major difference is that the primary sources will generally be more difficult to read because of the language and the concepts, both of which will be rather foreign to us.
My advice is simple to give, difficult to implement: read even more critically, take even more notes, allow extra time.
Participation in Discussion
The Online Classroom
If our course can be said to "be" anywhere, it's in the discussion forum. Although we never meet physically, we will actually become more of a community than anything you will experience in a live course. In a physical classroom, we would meet for a mere fifty minutes three times a week. As you know, that's so limited that usually there's time only for the professor to impart information and for the students to take notes. Sometimes there's a little room for discussion, usually dominated by a handful of students.
The online classroom is much different. It's a place that is open 24x7. Its conversations are persistent, always available, and there's always time for everyone. No one can interrupt anyone. No one runs out of time. Although it may feel a little abstract and even intimidating at first, by the end of the semester I think you will find the class has acquired a real sense of identity. There aren't any parallels in the physical world; the virtual classroom is unique.
This also means that conversations here can behave differently than do live conversations. One difference is that I can make rules--over here conversation can be casual, while over there it must be formal. This will take a little getting used to, but you'll catch on quickly. In reality, conversations have multiple levels, and I have to take this into account when I grade your participation in discussion.
Types of Conversation
Even in live conversation, there are levels or types. For example, when one person is speaking, we keep the conversation going by a variety of small signals that let the other person know we are interested and paying attention. We nod our head, we say "uh-huh" or "I see". We give reactions, as in "I didn't know that!" or "really!" or "you don't say". While statements like this don't carry much substance, if you remove them, the conversation quickly falters.
So it is in online discussions. Sometimes you will write a message that does no more than agree with someone else. That's fine. It let's everyone know you are "in" the conversation, and in any case there's going to be lots of things you are going to learn that will be surprising and you'll want to express that.
That sort of message, though, is quite different from one where you've done some additional reading, have thought about a question, and post a thoughtful message expressing your interpretation. The first type of message keeps a conversation going, but it isn't doing history. The second type is. We need both types, but obviously the one is going to count for more than the other.
How much more? Well, it's not that easy. I do not assign X points to this and Y points to that. It would be too burdensome, but more importantly it would tend to constrict class discussion as everyone tries to apply the discussion formula to every posting. Instead, I look for patterns over time. If weeks go by and every one of your posts is nothing more than "uh-huh" or "I agree", then you'll not get a good progress report. If that forms the bulk of your participation for the whole semester, then you'll get a poor discussion grade, even though you posted above the minimum weekly requirements.
Similar, but more difficult for me to evaluate, is the behavior I call "talking to yourself". This is the student who posts the required messages every week, and the messages even have substance. But they have no context. Each message is on a new topic, or if it's on something already being discussed is unrelated to anything anyone else is saying and does not taking into account what anyone else is saying. In other words, it's the student who does his or her own reading, pays no attention to class discussion, logs in, posts four messages, and logs out. A week later, s/he does it again, week after week. Such a person is not participating in discussion, but rather is writing four independent short essays and is using the discussion forum as a way to submit them to the teacher.
That won't do either. If I wanted to make the class consist of nothing but a bunch of writing assignments, I would have constructed it that way. But learning how scholars discuss is a vital part of what this course (and all my courses) is about. Scholarly discussion is a particular form of discourse not found anywhere else. It's one of the vital contributions of the civilization of the West. Anyone graduating from an American university should understand what comprises scholarly discourse, should know how to engage in it, and should be able to recognize other forms of discourse that are not scholarly. If you only "talk to yourself", you cannot learn this and you certainly cannot demonstrate your level of competence in it.
Discussion is therefore central to this course. This discussion is not casual; it is more like the discussion that goes on in a history seminar, or among professional historians. That is, while it is acceptable to voice your opinion, that's not going to count for much. What counts in discussion is your interpretation rather than your opinion. The difference is simple: your interpretation represents your understanding of an issue or question based on actual research you have done and backed up with evidence. An opinion is how you feel about something, without supporting evidence. Anyone can have an opinion, whether or not they study a subject, but only a scholar has an interpretation. In this course, you are not only learning the actual material, you are being introduced to the profession of history: its tools, its standards, its scholarship.