Update on my Obsidian "Course"
The past few weeks have been filled with personal drama that has taken me away from work and from creating content for Substack. I posted some videos on Lifelong Learners, that I'm taking off YouTube. There are a lot more where those came from, so I can continue that. I came to the end of my primary sources for the first volume of my American History Told By Contemporaries anthology, which covers the period usually included in "US History I" courses. I had begun converting that into an online "course" in Obsidian Publish, which I invited supporters to take a look at. After posting the first chapter, I became distracted by a bunch of personal issues.
During this period, I had been making a video of my "Chapter 2" lecture, based on the OER content from the anthology. In the first chapter, I split this up into over a dozen little chunks and linked them all together. As I'm looking at it now (after completing the video) I'm feeling less inclined to do that with this chapter. I think the question is, what are these bits for? Are they just to provide background for the primary source passages? If so, do they do that effectively?
I don't think I want to necessarily reinvent the wheel and just provide the obligatory narrative that people could get elsewhere. Today, anyone could ask ChatGPT to write a narrative of American History and it would produce a well-written account that covered the standard elements. Any student could do that and any instructor could as well. I don't think there's anything to be gained by adding such a narrative to a sourcebook or a course. I think I should really lean into the primary sources and what they tell us about the ways people were thinking and talking at the time the events of US History unfolded.
I suppose this does suggest there may be a place for explaining specific events or people who appear in the sources, who might not be familiar to readers. If the point of the primary sources is to expose readers and students to additional perspectives and voices, it stands to reason that many of these may be a bit unfamiliar or may require a bit of context. I think this is what I should focus on, rather than a painstaking narrative of the bits anyone can find out easily, just to pad the text. One of the elements of the Obsidian app I wanted to explore was the ability to link notes to each other and provide a less linear structure to the text. I think I can still do this with these explanatory notes, and I can even link from a basic narrative that I provide as a review.
So maybe I'll add a review narrative at the beginning of each chapter, for students who may really be unfamiliar. But I won't expect students to read it unless they want to. This approach suggests I can dispense with the PowerPoint deck and cutting the thing up into digestible little chunks. I can still have little narratives attached to the primary source passages, but they can be framing and context-providing notes rather than bits of standard history textbook exposition.
I won't be using this in a class in the fall, since all of my US History sections are "1877 to the present". But I'll keep working on it, so I can make it available to people in the outside world, via Obsidian Publish. I'll post the review narrative and the video I made (without slides) in the second chapter content. Then I'll focus on the sources and notes that make them easier to understand.
As I add more content (probably some this weekend and then more every couple of weeks) I’ll announce it here and provide links for supporters. Feedback is very helpful, so please let me know what you think. A link to the currently-available content is below the “fold” at the bottom of this post. Thanks!