Active Learning in Political Science ©
Made possible in part by Soomo Learning
This week I returned to my roots to replay another version of Victor Asal’s Hobbes game. One of my favorite things about the Hobbes game is that it can always be slightly altered to introduce new kinds of interaction in the game. In order to do this you really do need to play Victor’s original …
Continue reading “When Hobbes Turned Liberal Institutionalist….”
This guest post comes from Alex Leveringhaus, from the Department of Politics, University of Surrey. He played Simon’s blindfold ice-breaker last week and it prompted some thoughts about philosophy. Obviously Imagine you are a member of a team that has been assigned a particular task. Nothing unusual about that. Imagine further that your team is …
Continue reading “Blindfolds, philosophers, and negotiations”
It’s good to be back in the classroom. So good, in fact, that within the hour I’d got back out of it. Of course, this was all in the service of setting up the class for the semester’s work on negotiation, which I finally began at 9AM on Monday morning. (personally, I like that slot …
So that was the summer pause, apparently, and now it’s back to the grindstone. Luckily, one of my very first tasks is to get ready for the annual UACES Teaching & Learning workshop, which we run ahead of the main conference, this year in the fine city of Bath, England. The event has developed over …
It’s that period in the year where we’re all doing all those things we said we’d do now, because we didn’t have time then. Supposedly. Personally, thanks to the continued pyschodrama of British politics, I’m still knee-deep in commitments to lots of people, with only scant sight of any end. Indeed, I’m increasingly of the …
I finally started teaching again last week, and as usual, I got students on my negotiation course to play the Hobbes game, to get them to reconsider their view of the world. I do this because it’s a really neat way of highlighting fundamentally different logics of interpersonal relations – competitive versus collaborative – and …
Continue reading “Collateral damage in the rise of active learning”
Since Chad was kind enough to pick up on the theme of my post last week – emotion’s role in what we do – it’s only polite to return the favour. Chad’s issue is one that all of us who use simulations encounter. We’re trying to build a more manageable version of the real world, …
It’s the middle of the summer and I don’t teach again until late August. But, I am thinking about first days. It’s an important day of class, but it’s easy to treat it as a throwaway class (that’s certainly how most students seem to see it). What do you do? Most of us probably do the usual: …
Continue reading “Start the way you mean to finish (and continue)”
This is Part 2 of an ongoing series aimed at newcomers to using simulations and games in their classroom. Part 1 introduced the series and focused on how to reduce the workload required in the design and use of these pedagogies. Skepticism is a pretty standard attitude that we face when trying to convince instructors …
Continue reading “Beginner’s Guide to Simulations: Part 2, Benefits of Simulations”
Many of our regular readers on ALPS already use simulations and games in their classes. But plenty of folks find us because they are interested in learning about new-to-them pedagogies, and want some guidance in how to use them in their classes. For these folks, we are starting a new series here on ALPS: The …
Continue reading “Beginner’s Guide to Simulations: Part 1, Reducing the Workload”