History 660 will serve as a prerequisite to History 661, Introduction to SPSS, which deals more specifically with databases and quantitative research. Together, History 660 and History 661 fulfill the Alternative Skills requirement for history graduate students. Since the skills acquired will serve students well throughout their graduate education, and since this course is only offered during the Fall semester, we recommend that students take History 660 in their first semester of enrollment.

Due to the nature of computers and the Internet, this course is constantly changing. The pace of the course will be dictated by the relative computer skills of the participants and ongoing changes in the Internet. Some topics may take more time and others less than scheduled. Feel free to make suggestions, contribute your own expertise, and participate in the ongoing creation of the course.  In general, the first two hours of the course (4:10-6:00) will be devoted to lecture.  The final 45 minutes will be a laboratory session where students can apply the skills learned and work one-on-one with the instructor.  All students should have a Zip Disk or Memory Stick to store their files.

TEXTS: Since most books on the Internet are outdated as soon as they appear and since much of the work is either obvious or available on help screens, I have opted not to assign a formal text for this course. For those of you who are not familiar with using Microsoft Word for Windows, you might want to buy one of the many manuals available at the bookstore.  There are several articles available online.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS AND GRADING:

Each student will also be required to write a research paper from a web-based archive, create a personal web page,  compile a thorough (at least 100-source) bibliography on a topic of their choice using sources from various Internet locales, and create  interactive classes. Bibliographies must be sorted both alphabetically and by source. Instructions for the web pages, bibliographies and interactive classes will be provided in separate handouts.

Readings:  Michael O' Malley and Roy Rosenzweig, "Brave New World Or Blind Alley? American History on the World Wide Web"
David A. Bell, "The Bookless Future: What the Internet is Doing to Scholarship."
Carl Smith, "Can You Do Serious History on the Web?"

Reading: Wilkinson, Bennett, and Oliver, "Evaluation Criteria and Indicators of Quality for Internet Resources"
Kelly Schrum, "Surfing for the Past: How to Separate
the Good from the Bad."
Roy Rosenzweig "Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past."
 

Assignment: Access the Reagan.DOC file and make the assigned revisions to it. Complete Atomic Bomb assignment.

Assignment: Sign up to an H-Net list; forward a message that you have received to the instructor.

Searching for Articles: CD-Rom Databases

Assignment: Do a bibliographic search on any topic and E-mail results to instructor.

Creating Your Own Web Page
Paula Petrik, "Top Ten Mistakes in Academic Web Design"

Research Assignment Due

Using Computers in the Classroom

Michael O’Malley, “Building Effective Course Sites: Some Thoughts on Design for Academic Work”

Bibliography Assignment Due