This semester I return to full time teaching at Cornell and am reviving my course on The Rise and Fall of “Civilization'”. The idea of the course is still as it has been in the past: to interrogate the idea of civilization, how it gets constructed and refracted through the ancient past and then rebuilt as a foundation for modernity…as well as modernity’s undoing. But this time around I plan to use a number of active learning approaches to enhance student learning and also train their archaeological eyes.

Using TimelineJS, a tool from the Knight Lab, I’ve made a timeline for the intersecting and overlapping frameworks of the course. Students will be using the same tool for timelines of their own.

Students will also be using StoryMapJS for exercises centered on the material landscape of the Cornell Campus.

The StoryMap above is a demonstration version that I use for showing students how to navigate the various tools available.