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

My International Organisations course, which is heavily simulation based, has reached the end of another run, and the end of course discussion, I shared a few thoughts on it with my students, and some of their ideas are flowing back from that.While my reflections are fresh (and ( Read more... )

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

The Irish Food Bloggers came to the Milk Market Saturday, and as part of the day, I led a short discussion about building communities online.

There is at least one thing in common between lecturing and blogging In both forms, someone at the physical or virtual front of the room ( Read more... )

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

By happy accident, I followed a tweet to the walking papers project, which is a project to improve the data in the Open StreetMap project, and found myself looking at a map of part of Fremantle with a Parnell Rd slap bang in the middle, right off Clontarf St, and I immediately ( Read more... )

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

is coming up all my tweeterstream this morning after a  Canadian court threw out charges of non-academic misconduct against 2 Calgary students for criticizing their lecturer on Facebook. I’ve always felt students should be able to speak out about academics, but I don’t know if ( Read more... )

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

It may seem strange that a historian would argue that Wikileaks publication of the Afghan War Logs was a waste of time, but it was, and it was possibly harmful. Todays followup, the posting of a huge encrypted “insurance” file on the Wikileaks site, looks like a juvenile stunt ,  ( Read more... )

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

Peter Hart, the Canadian Historian whose work on the IRA in West Cork aroused such controversy, has died, aged 46. He will be most remembered in Ireland for his book “The IRA and its Enemies: Violence and Community in Cork 1916-1923,” which drew the ire of many in West Cork for ( Read more... )

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

I don’t think so. That quote popped up on my Twitter stream from George Siemens who is tweeting a conference in Valencia this morning.  His reaction is ‘Well tough’ but mine is no, actually they don’t hate complexity, they just hate poorly presented complexity
( Read the rest of this entry » )

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

I found a really old post on bit.listerv.history from 1992 which shows I’ve been saying the same stuff for almost 20 years (and still can’t type properly)

“I agree that many people end up in humanities undergrad courses due to a lack of direction, or failure to get into other ( Read more... )

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

Yes, the iPad is here and it is pretty and it is a game changing device but only in some ways. I was impressed with the Course Notes app which goes a long way to fixing some of the common problems of disorganisation that bedevil students, but not all - apps like that on the iPad ( Read more... )

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

Why are Greek and Latin ‘Classics’ and not Chinese? There is no real answer to this question, which popped out of some twittering I was doing just now with Dave Parry.  It is hard to argue with Dave’s position which is that this represents a European cultural bias. If we redefine ( Read more... )