| Introductory |
The Shaping of the Modern World
Introduction: Welcome to Virtual Core 4
Contents
- Welcome
- How the Course Web Site Works
- Course Description
- The Virtual Classroom: How We Work in this Course
- Information
- Discussion
- Communication
- The Course book
- Projects and Assessment
- Various Online Guides
Virtual Core 4 is a course in modern western and world history which requires you use this web site as a basic resource. The web site is organized as follows:
- The Contents Page is the overall entrance to the site. You can
access it from every other page on the website by "clicking" on the Shaping
of the Modern World logo at the top and bottom of every page.
The Contents page links to each of the major sections of the course. We will be studying one section per week.
- The Navigation Bar. In addition to the Contents
Page there are a series of other useful pages you can access from all other pages by using
the Navigation Bar at the top left of each screen. The navigation bar
will take you to a page which lists (and links to) all the source Readings
for the course; to the Caucus site we will be using for
discussion; to a Search page, for this site and the whole
Internet; to a Links page; to a Glossary
of important terms and ideas; and to a Portraits gallery for
many of the people we will be discussing.
- The best way to get to understand the layout of the site is to "click around it". Give it a try now.
This course is an introduction to the events, ideas, and developments that have shaped modernity since the 17th century.
In world historical terms this has been the period of the achievement and collapse of European political and cultural hegemony. Although we shall look at other areas, our concentration will be on the changes that took place in the European World in the 18th and 19th centuries, the rise of European powers to world domination, the crises of politics and culture in the late 19th and early 20th century, and the emergence of a bipolar world after 1945. Political and economic elites in America and Russia, the successor powers to European empires, have long been involved with, and contributed to, European developments. Accordingly we shall not ignore how developments in those countries have contributed to the modern world.
The Virtual Classroom: How We Work In this Course
This is probably the first online course your have taken, but we are not being that revolutionary - such courses are now offered by many colleges and are likely to become more common in the future.
What we are doing is replacing classroom learning time (where everybody has to be in the same room at the same time) with online learning time - which requires just as much effort, but where we don't all have to be together at once (the fancy word for this is asynchronous).
In a classroom session students do [at least] three things: you gather or learn information; you engage in discusssion about what you have learned; and you and your teacher communicate with each other. We are going to to exactly the same things in this online course.
Information:
You will learn about the Shaping of the Modern World by reading a number of different sorts of text.
- The course book: you will all have a textbook - with assigned readings for each section of the course. You need to read these (from a real book) as the course progresses. The text is:
Donald Kagan, Steven Ozment and Frank M. Turner: The Western Heritage: Volume II Since 1648, 6th ed. (Saddle River NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998)
It will be referred to as "Kagan" throughout the course.
- Online primary sources: reading primary sources is the key to college level history. For this course all your primary source readings are online as part of this web site. You can read these online, or (better) print them out and read them, or (best) save them to your computer and add your own notes. Read Why Study History Through Primary Sources to see why primary sources are so important.
The online primary sources for each section are listed and linked to in that section. All the primary readings, and some extra ones, can also be accessed from the Readings link on every page. [Note, however, that the links from the Readings page are to the original location of the document in the net. The links from each section page are to special versions for this course.]
- Online news sources: the themes we examine in this course are vital to undertsanding how the modern world works. Because of the Internet, it is now possible to read newspapers from all over the world on the day of publication. You will be asked to search out stories relevant to each week's theme, and I will send some I find to your mailboxes using a class mail list run by a program called Majordomo. There is a list of the main online news sources in the Search page.
To access an archive by thread of the mail list - core4virtual-l, go to:
http://146.245.100.143/core4virtual/threads.html
To access an archive by date posted of the mail list - core4virtual-l, go to:
http://146.245.100.143/core4virtual/maillist.html
- To help you make sense of these source readings, I will provide for each section online highly-structured outline notes. These are not simply more reading, but a way to help to highlight important points.
- Each week's Section Page will list the course book pages to read, link to the primary sources for that week, and contain the outline notes for the section. In addition for each section there will be links to related multimedia resources (photographs, diagrams, music, and video).
You will always find the following "menu" at the head of each week's Section Page
- Introduction: This Week's Goals
- A quick summary of what you should know by the end of the week.- Text
- The pages in the Kagan textbook- Multimedia
- Links to any multimdia materials for the section.- Sources
- A listing of the online sources you must read for the section. These sources are also linked to from the appropriate part of the Outline.- Outline
-A sketch set of notes for the subject matter of the week. These are not meant to replace the textbook, but to give you a set of notes about what is important in the textbook readings.- Web Exercise
- Each week there will be a web exercise realted to the issues discussed in that section.- Discussion Questions
- To be discussed in the Caucus conference.
- Test Yourself!
A link to another page which contains an online quiz for each section. These quizzes are self-grading, and are there so students may test themselves. They will not form part of the final grade for the course.Discussion:
A crucial part of the course is your participation in online discussion of each week's readings. We will using Caucus software to do this. For each class section a number of Caucus "threads" will be created: - one the major theme of the section; one or two on the main source readings; and one on a web information project for section [e.g. under "absolutism", you will be asked to locate and report on web sites established by and about modern monarchies, and to discuss what differs between the modern monarchies' claims and those of King Louis XIV].
Each student in the course has at least 5-6 sessions in the school learning cafes, and so will be required to make at least four 3-4 paragraph contributions to Caucus discussion each week (i.e at least one to each major caucus thread, plus one other follow-up). These contributions will be able to take a number of forms: arguments, explanations, challenges to others' views, etc.
You MUST post results of your web exercise each week. For other contributions, there are discussion questions at the end of each Section Page, and each source document also has some questions. You can choose what you use for your contribution to Caucus from among all the options. BUT, REPEAT, YOU MUST POST AT LEAST FOUR TIMES A WEEK. This means that posts must be made of four different days - you cannot wait until the end of the week and then post four messages, or our online discussion will not work.
Communication:
The Study Journal:
Each student in the course must send to me each week, by Friday, via private email [to halsall@bway.net] a non-graded study journal, documenting what they have read, and what problems have arisen. You can also write to me at any other time if you have problems with the course, the material. I will write to you if you seem to to be having problems.
Office Hours:
Although the course is online, many students live near Brooklyn college, so you will also be able to visit me during the regular office hours I will keep on Monday 5:50-6:20 pm and Wednesday 3:15-4:15 pm. My Office is Room 502S in Whitehead Hall.
IMPORTANT: As students taking this course you must must understand that you must be involved, must read, and must show that you are reading - otherwise you are invisible. In this course, there can be no "sitting in the back".
The book for the course is:
Donald Kagan, et al., The Western Heritage, Volume II: Since 1648, 6th Edition, (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998)
It must be emphasized that your main reading is to consist of the primary source texts linked to from each section page.
All class requirements must be met in order to earn a final grade.
Participation 30% of Overall Grade
Participation in the discussion sections of the course will count for 30 of the overall grade.
Examinations 40% of Overall Grade
There will be written midterm and final exams (to be proctored by teachers at each school). The exams will be in essay form, with some short answer quextions but with no multiple choice questions. The Final exam will be cumulative - it will cover the entire course.
- Midterm - 15% of total grade - [date TBA]
- Final exam - 25% of total grade - [date TBA]
Term Project 30% of Overall Grade
The Term Project will be a serious attempt (i.e. an essay) to deal with a historical problem chosen by each student. See the Term Project page for your options.
Note that the paper must be handed in on time. It must conform to a standard term paper style, preferably Turabian since this is a history class, but I will accept MLA style. Papers with D and F grades may be resubmitted if submitted on time.
Extra Credit - up to 10%
Students may earn extra credit in this course by posting a review in Caucus of one or more movies listed in the Core 4: Modern History in the Movies guide. See that page for details.
- Map Exercise
[This is a Microsoft Word document, it will not display on some browsers]. It's not required, but you might find it useful to work through if your grasp of geography is not that great!- Term Project
- Stylesheet
- How to Write a Paper
- How Papers Are Graded
| Contents Page |
Site Design: Paul Halsall |
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created 9/11/1998 : revised 2/3/1999