Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Monday, July 09, 2007

Comparative politics sharing

Patrick O'Neil (left) of the University of Puget Sound, was teaching at an AP workshop in Bellevue, Washington at the same time I was teaching one at Carleton College's Summer Teaching Institute. After that experience, he created the Teaching Comparative Politics group on facebook.

He is interested in creating more dialogue between and among comparative politics teachers at secondary and post-secondary levels.

That is something I believe is valuable and important.

Nearly ten years ago, Chip Hauss and I wrote a paper for the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association titled "Across the Great Divide: Cooperation between high school and college faculty." (The cooperation suffered when my doctor told me I shouldn't be flying around the country so soon after surgery. Chip had to present the paper without me.)

Two years ago I created an online discussion site for teachers of AP comparative politics. It fell victim to its audience's hectic schedules (see the paper mentioned above) and insecure software.

Patrick O'Neil thinks that facebook is a flexible tool that has the potential to facilitate discussion and sharing of ideas and documents. I know little to nothing yet about networking software like facebook, but I do hope it works.

Here's what you need to do to join the group:
  1. Go to facebook
  2. Create an account or sign in if you already have an account. Please note that facebook asks for lots of information, including asking for permission to harvest the contents of your e-mail directory. (Personally, that's something I would never allow, no matter what I was assured about privacy and security.) You don't have to give facebook anything more than an e-mail address and a password to use on that site. You have to be the judge of what you want to share with the facebook world.
  3. Go to the Teaching Comparative Politics group at facebook, see who else has joined the group, start a conversation, make an announcement, or ask a question.
  4. Expect good things.


"See" you there.


Labels:

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home