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There is a risk that the mistakes of the past – both teaching to the test by schools and micro-management of the school system through the means of exams and league tables – may be repeated in the EBC.

nternational evidence from high-performing education systems suggests more formative assessment during schooling would be beneficial

Dickens had encountered that narrative trope in the stories written by the Lowell mill girls, who typically published either anonymously or under pseudonyms like “Dorothea” or “M.” In one anonymous story called “A Visit from Hope,” the narrator is “seated by the expiring embers of a wood fire” at midnight, when a ghost, an old man with “thin white locks,” appears before him. The ghost takes the narrator back to scenes from his youth, and afterward the narrator promises to “endeavor to profit by the advice he gave me.” Similarly, in “A Christmas Carol,” Scrooge is sitting beside “a very low fire indeed” when Marley’s ghost appears before him. And, later, after Scrooge has been visited by the ghosts of Christmases Past, Present, and Future, he promises, “The spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.”

That’s not how the scholars see it. Literary borrowing, even quite detailed borrowing, was accepted practice at the time—“It was just a different way of looking at things back then,” says Archibald. (“American Notes,” for instance, includes many pages of writing by the famed 19th-century physician Samuel Gridley Howe, all without attribution, and apparently without any thought by Dickens that he was doing something improper.)

In theory, dual enrollment enables high school students to accrue college credits for very little cost and imbues them with a sense of confidence that they can complete college work. If students can succeed in college classes while still in high school, conventional wisdom holds, they will be more likely to matriculate at the postsecondary level.

The problem is that high school is not college and completion of a dual enrollment high school class is not always a guarantee that students have learned the material.

The poll for this list — The Best Web 2.0 Applications For Education — 2009 — is located below this post, and closes on February 1, 2010. Please vote for no more than ten of the thirty-two sites listed. Please note that I’ll be listing these sites in my post from my pick from number thirty-two and ending at first place, but the poll is listed in the opposite order.

Number twenty: PodOmatic is an extraordinarily easy way to create a podcast. Sign-up and your class has your own channel — all you need is a computer microphone. I’m adding it to The Best Sites To Practice Speaking English.  I’m also adding it to The Best Places Where Students Can Create Online Learning/Teaching Objects For An “Authentic Audience”.

PinDax is a new web tool that lets you “pin” virtual “Post It” notes on a virtual bulletin board.  It’s very, very similar to a tool I like a lot called Wallwisher.  It has a lot more “bells and whistles” than Wallwisher.  That additional complexity (and I have to admit, it doesn’t seem that much more complex — it just seems to have a lot more options) doesn’t necessarily make it more attractive for classroom use.

Students did not agree on the merits of the wiki. Some were deeply offended when other students eliminated or modified their contributions. Others found the chance to pick apart other’s words and conclusions exhilarating. Regardless, most students seemed to grasp the important lesson I hoped to share: that history is the conversation we have about the past. History is about the authorial choices scholars make. History is about the evidence included and the evidence excluded. By asking students to participate in a joint-writing exercise, they were compelled to pay attention to the language others used, the phrasings and structure employed, the anecdotes emphasized, the facts obscured. I told them the story of an undergraduate English professor I had who spent an entire class session discussing why Shakespeare began Macbeth with the word “when”. Words matter. Words shape arguments. They determine meaning, and they form our view of the world around us, including our view of the history of the world around us. Students also came to appreciate that history was not a bag of facts we historians force them to memorize. Instead, as Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob suggest, history is the product of that collective effort of truth seeking.

I still caution students about using Wikipedia. But I think the wiki can help our students see themselves as part of that democratic conversation so important to our profession. Throwing their ideas into the ring for others to challenge forces students to defend their ideas, modify their conclusions, and reconsider their assumptions. The wiki, while not perfect, may help us change the way our students think about history. It may help them be more attentive to language and argument. Importantly, it may help them value civil discourse as a civic virtue. These are good lessons for history students and for their professors. —Kevin B. Sheets is associate professor of history at the State University of New York, College at Cortland and project director of the “American Dream Project,” a Teaching American History grant-based project in upstate New York. He regularly teaches courses in historical methods and American intellectual and cultural history.