Last semester, in a seminar on Charles Dickens, I assigned students to update a Wikipedia page for a Dickens character. I briefly discussed the assignment on this blog in December, putting my own assignment in the context of other professors who have used Wikipedia in their classes in various ways. The exercise worked well for
Nicholas Roe, John Keats: A New Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. John Batchelor, Tennyson: To Strive, To Seek, To Find. London: Chatto and Windus, 2012. 2012 was a good year for biographies. In November I wrote about a new biography of Dickens, discussing it alongside a couple other Dickens biographies that challenge the
In the twenty-first century it is fairly common to discuss teaching as the application of psychological principles (as in Susan Ambrose et al.’s How Learning Works [2010]) or even the alteration of neural pathways (as James Zull does in The Art of Changing the Brain [2002]). This research is seen as something rather new: as