Today was good, but a bit odd.
I started class with a brief presentation about Iberian pre-history from Homo heidelbergensis through the Iberians and Celts. I think that I was able to help the students understand how Iberian pre-history feeds the collective historical imagination of people like the Basques even today.
After that the students broke into their groups. Last Thursday I had the students in charge of describing the weapons from their time period break off into their own subgroup, and today they continued working together. They are building a D&D style spreadsheet with different weapons from different time periods and then ranking them based on weight, price, and relative lethality.
For much of class they were at the board hammering out some of these details.
I love having the students working in these groups because I think that they are really coming together to create something much bigger than the sum of their parts. All of the groups have done an impressive job of putting together a lot of information from a variety of different sources in just a week. Take a look at what one group has done here:
About halfway through class a couple of students, who have been tasked with a description of medicinal practices in the late 15th century, were asking me where they might go to broaden their research. I recommended that they read The Last Jew. They then asked me if they could go to the bookstore and pick it up. I said sure. Soon after, another pair of students asked if they could go to the computer lab to work on their contribution. Again, I said sure. Then more and more students started to leave. By the end of class, just a handful of students were left. Perhaps it is naive of me, but I believe that most of those who left did so because they were going to do research or write. I am OK with that, but it did feel odd. Maybe we will start class next time with a little discussion about this. It is something I had not anticipated, but I think I can work with it.
Finally, by now I believe that our Google Docs issues have been resolved. The next time I do this, I am going to make sure that we make a list of people's Google addresses and only deal with those. I am also going to lock down my templates so that students can't modify them. Hopefully that will help some.