“Zoom” is a course in “Big History.” It moves through a range of disciplinary perspectives (astronomy, geology, biology, anthropology, etc.) to tell the universe’s story from the Big Bang to the end of time. This approach covers 13.7 billion years and puts human history into terrestrial and cosmic contexts.

 

The primary, semester-long assignment engages students in thinking directly about how materials presented by guest lecturers from different disciplines relate to one another. Students form groups centered around a particular discipline and then create a set of wiki pages profiling their discipline: what types of evidence it considers, how it goes about evaluating that evidence, and examples of content knowledge that the discipline has produced.

 

Students collaborate across groups in order to create linkages, both literal hyperlinks and intellectual connections, among wiki pages and disciplines. A structured peer-review process guides students as they critique other groups’ work and determine how it might connect with their own.

 

The pedagogical innovation is twofold: it puts wikis to use to encourage new ways of thinking and collabora-ting, and it gives students the chance to take ownership of their learning as they teach others, creating an open educational resource that reflects what they have learned and the connections they have made in Zoom.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Above photo:

Douglas Northrop (Near Eastern Studies)