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"University of Wisconsin Professor Diana Hess has published Controversy in the Classroom: The Democratic Power of Discussion (Routledge, 2009). The longitudinal study of high school students that is a major source of data for this book was partly funded by CIRCLE. Hess argues that planned, moderated discussions of controversial issues teach essential democratic skills. She provides research-based advice about how to define "controversial issues" and handle them in classrooms."

"University of Wisconsin Professor Diana Hess has published Controversy in the Classroom: The Democratic Power of Discussion (Routledge, 2009). The longitudinal study of high school students that is a major source of data for this book was partly funded by CIRCLE. Hess argues that planned, moderated discussions of controversial issues teach essential democratic skills. She provides research-based advice about how to define "controversial issues" and handle them in classrooms."

The Massachusetts Council for the Social Studies (MCSS) is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit educational organization. It is a network of social studies educators who work at every level of schooling. They communicate with each other through publications and meetings. They broaden their communication by working with related professional associations, government, and private agencies. MCSS is affiliated with the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) and participates fully in that organization's efforts to advance the profession. NCSS encourages the highest standards of teaching, teacher preparation, and curriculum development. NCSS has developed and published both a code of ethics and academic freedom standards. It has established a defense fund to provide first-line legal assistance to teachers threatened with actions that violate this freedom. Social Education , the official journal of NCSS since 1937, is an outstanding organ of information and commentary. The Social Studies Professional is a newsletter of resources and opportunities. Social Studies and the Young Learner is a quarterly journal devoted exclusively to elementary social studies education. In addition, the NCSS publications program features a wide variety of bulletins, special publications, and standards. The program of the NCSS annual meeting provides major speakers, clinics, sessions, tours, a major exhibit of instructional materials, and several awards honoring those who have contributed to the advancement of social studies education.

New game-based high-school history course Posted by: Don Tapscott on 05Jun 2009 For a couple of decades I've been advocating a new model of pedagogy that involves technology. For example, I just published a piece in the Edge on the Demise of the University. The purpose of introducing technology into schools isn't to simply digitize existing processes and leave the basic broadcast teaching model unchanged. Instead, technology opens the door to new techniques that focus on the student and allow students to proceed at their own pace. In this spirit, imagine students studying American history with the same concentration and enthusiasm they display when playing their favourite video games. After all, 97 percent of high school students are avid gamers. That's the goal of Conspiracy Code, an online game based course released this week by Florida Virtual School (FLVS), and 360Ed, Inc. an education game development company.

The History Engine is an educational tool that gives students the opportunity to learn history by doing the work-researching, writing, and publishing-of a historian. The result is an ever-growing collection of historical articles or "episodes" that paints a wide-ranging portrait of life in the United States throughout its history and that is available to scholars, teachers, and the general public in our online database.

"In the First Person is a free, high quality, professionally published, in-depth index of close to 4,000 collections of personal narratives in English from around the world. It lets you keyword search more than 700,000 pages of full-text by more than 18,000 individuals from all walks of life. It also contains pointers to some 4,300 audio and video files and 30,000 bibliographic records. The index contains approximately 20,500 months of diary entries, 63,000 letter entries, and 17,000 oral history entries."

peer-reviewed, online journal exploring the real and imagined places of the American South and their connections with the wider world. We welcome submissions from scholars, photographers, and visual artists in such areas as geography, southern studies, regional studies, African American, Native, and American Studies, women's studies, LGBTQ studies, and public health.

The case of the Orlando Project offers a useful interrogation of concepts like completion and finality, as they emerge in the arena of electronic publication. The idea of "doneness" circulates discursively within a complex and evolving scholarly ecology where new modes of digital publication are changing our conceptions of textuality, at the same time that models of publication, funding, and archiving are rapidly changing. Within this ecology, it is instrumental and indeed valuable to consider particular tasks and stages done, even as the capacities of digital media push against a sense of finality. However, careful interrogation of aims and ends is required to think through the relation of a digital project to completion, whether modular, provisional, or of the project as a whole.