From: Bill Murin
Date: 4/22/99
Time: 1:31:24 PM
Remote Name: 131.210.2.154
I'm in my 29th year (ouch!) of univ. teaching. I've used just about every combination of texts, supplementary texts, writing assignments, web assignments, etc known to humankind. My institution is much more like Mel Dubnick's than Ed Harnham's. Every Fall I face the same dilemma, the need to get my American Govt students up to speed on the internet as fast as possible because all of the writing assignments for the course are web-based. For the first week or two of class I simply schedule internet familiarization classes outside of regular class time for students who have little or no internet familiarity.(I have to do this myself befause we are mostly an undergrad institution--no TAs).
Some take advantage of it, some don't. Unlike Mel, I have not noticed any significant change in internet familiarity over the past few years.
Some of my colleagues have taken a rather draconian approach to this and have put the couse syllabus up on the net. They dont hand it out in class. A student's first assignment is to go and get the syllabus.
As for texts, this time around I'm using Janda, Berry & Goldman, Challenge of Democracy in the brief edition. I'm also using MicroCase's American Government: An Introduction Using Explorit. For those of you not familiar with MicroCase, they publish a series of "workbooks" in American politics, comparative, methods, etc. Forces my students to get used to interpreting real social science data.
Not only don't they know the "facts" of American politics, or history; their analytical skills are pretty poor as well. They do not seem to have the ability to look at a contingency table and tell me what it means in a couple of sentences.