Author: Jack Norton

Background My community college has a faculty body of around 40% contingent faculty based on full-time equivalent. Before last year, these contingent faculty weren’t eligible for certain awards, including one given by my the state colleges board of trustees, which called their award Educator of the Year. If it sounds odd that you could win… Read more Our Faculty Union Created an Award for Contingent Faculty (and you can too)

Why the NY Times Vaccine Timeline is Bad I have three qualms with the Interactive Timeline titled "Find Your Place in the Vaccine Line." It’s factually misleading. The C.D.C has only voted on Tier 1a as of today (2020-12-4). The prose below the graphic includes this information, but telling people "this is where you are… Read more Why the NY Times Vaccine Timeline is Bad

After hearing from colleagues this spring who wished for an introduction to online courses for students, I spent the summer creating one. "Return to Enter: An Introduction to Digital Distance Higher Education," is a five-lesson module. Each lesson is designed to take 30-45 minutes, making all five suitable for the first week or weeks of… Read more Ever wish there were an introduction to distance digital college courses? I made one.

Much of what we do in higher education is out of the force of habit. Call it insitutional or pedaogical inertia. One of the reasons I like to change the theme for my websites is to make myself (and others) think about what works and what doesn’t with web design. I just completed a draft… Read more Let’s stop lying to our students.

I and many have noted the uneven knowledge base of students taking college courses, often as a product of equity issues in K-12 education. College accelerates rather than ameliorates these uneven penetrations of knowledge, especially when students take what I call distance digital courses. Distance education has been around for a long time. Adding web-based… Read more An introduction to distance digital higher education.

I looked around, including at my college, and didn’t find any lists that could help a community college student who needed to get a computer for college. So, I made this chart of computer specifications for community college students. There are lots of “best laptops for college” listicles out there (not journalism) and plenty of… Read more So you need a computer for college?

I write this post as I see lots of tips emerging from digital humanities teachers and faculty developers about how to transition or switch to online formats in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Though I find much to laud I also find much lacking, especially when considering my college, which is on spring break.… Read more ⇧ ⌃ Because absolutely no-one asked for my COVID-19 hot take on how to shift control from face-to-face to a student-focused digital learning bridge.

People ask me: so what do you do? And I tell them: I teach history. And they nod, like they know what that means. Today I published an assignment for my World History 1 students about ancient Rome: it uses two historical GIS websites, one of which is still using Flash, and requires special instructions… Read more No, you probably don’t know what I do.

Below are materials for my American Historical Association Annual Meeting Presentation. All materials are published under a This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. World History 1 Assignment using Omeka Neatline

It’s the last week of class, and many of my students are anxious about their grades. I wish I could tell them that I am anxious too, not because I think a grade is a perfect measure of learning, but because I know it causes them worry. I wish I could adequately convey the respect… Read more What I wish I could tell my students.