I’m really excited about the Google Knol concept, and I’ve been thinking about how I’d like to use it as a teaching resource. Wikipedia has a problem in that at any moment incorrect or false information can be edited into an entry. Whilst the owners say that the democratic and widespread nature of Wikipedia means those errors will be corrected and picked up by others, at any snapshot point in time if one of your students goes to read a Wikipedia article, they may unintentionally include errors that haven’t been picked up in their reading.

Now, of course students should be developing critical thinking skills when they read any source of information, but encyclopedias are presented as authoritative, precisely because they are supposed to give an accurate overview of a topic. Hence the ‘critical thinking’ guard can easily be let down by students when using Wikipedia. Consequently, I rarely recommend students include Wikipedia in their reading.

Now, I confess I do use Wikipedia. If I want to get a quick glimpse at a topic before I begin any serious research on it, I’ll scan through Wikipedia. But I certainly do not rely on it as my only source of information. If it’s a subject I know little about, I am extremely guarded about what I read there.

With Knols, however, a teacher is able to write their own entries on particular topics that they may want to make accessible to their students. I have dozens and dozens of lecture notes and articles that I have written on topics over the years, everything from the use of daraba in the ‘beating’ verse of the Qur’an, to conversion patterns of Australians who become Muslims, to the relationship between rationality and religious faith. At the moment they are sitting on my computer (and backup disks) but I am planning to craft them into Knols so that I can use them as teaching resources down the track. Very exciting stuff!

I gave my first two postgraduate lectures this week (I’ve only done undergrad for the Uni before). I have to confess, unusually I was a little bit nervous. Mostly because I thought to myself ‘undergrads know bugger-all so I just need to introduce them to the main themes and concepts, but by postgraduate stage, they’re supposed to have background knowedge, be able to critically assess the information they are receiving and put it in the context of their previous subjects etc. etc.’

So, I over prepared (spot the newbie lecturer). The difficulty with teaching subjects that have to do with Islam & the Muslim world for traditional western academic disciplines (like politics, sociology etc.) is that few non-Muslims have much more than a scant knowledge of the basics of the religion, its peoples, cultures, history etc. And because you cannot afford to do an ‘introduction to Islam and Muslims’ for each class you teach, it means that you are somewhat handicapped depending on the knowledge of the pupils who attend the class.

Still, some of the themes I was teaching in these two classes (one was on the topic of Wahhabism the other on religion and politics) are relevant to subjects they probably would have come across before: reactions to modernity; the rise of fundamentalism; the relationship btwn religion and the state.

I also discovered that the first lecture room was low-tech, so I had to quickly muck up some overheads. Luckily, the second class I wanted to show snippits of a doco, and that had the full technological shebang, except I couldn’t make the DVD skip to the bit I wanted easy, and I had to ‘fast-forward’ through to the relevant spot. (Nothing like five minutes with your finger on the ff-button and a classroom full of expectant students).

I’m very pleased to have the opportunity, though. I’m doing another lecture again next week and then I’m doing Cranlana again on Tuesday. Luckily I always wanted to be on the stage hardy-har!

For those interested in the research I’ve been doing on Muslims (the project is still underway, but partial results from some geographic areas are ready), the following is a poster in .ppt format that I’ve made for submission to my university’s HDR exhibition.

I wouldn’t normally work in Powerpoint (especially for creating a graphic) but that was the requirement of the exhibition, so fonts look a bit funny on Mac (I had to create it on a Windoze - ugh).

Anyway for those interested, you can dl it here.

Use Gmail to store your papers/journal articles etc. including the notes you may want to make on a particular item you have read/reviewed. Coolomondo.

I have to confess, I do like LaTeX. It produces such beautiful looking documents. Would you like to see a sneak peak of a couple of pages of my thesis? I have to fix up a couple of things (the footnote citations should be in headline not sentence style, and the commas aren’t being sucked in American-style in subsequent shortened citations) but behold the beauty of LaTeX.

Example 1
Example 2
Example 3