After looking again over the primary sources from Strayer Ch.11 (Doc.11.1, Doc.11.2, and Doc.11.3), please respond to the following question prompts in a comment below:

1) What attitudes toward Jews, Christians, and other non-Muslim peoples do these primary source selections suggest on the part of Islam?

2) What do you think is the relationship between the selections from the Koran (Doc.11.1), from the Hadith (Doc.11.2) and from Sharia Law (Doc.11.3)? How do these sources of authority work together to govern Islamic society?

3) After looking at these sources, what sort of problems do you think early Islamic society and empire had?

You do not have to rote-answer each question in turn if you so choose. Feel free to respond in general with a short paragraph or a response to a fellow classmate’s offering. Also, be sure you include your full name and your class section (e.g., MW 3:00), so that it makes it easier for me to give you credit for participating.

2/21 Update: If you do not put an email address in the comment form, you will get the Internal Service Error when trying to post a comment. The emails are not displayed or linked to your comments where anyone but me can see them. It is part of the spam comment management system, nothing more.

After having watched your flash reports for module #1, here is my generalized feedback for those that want to improve their presentations for future reports. These are not specific to any individual report and are in no particular order.

1) Please be aware that you are presenting material to your classmates. This means you need to be mindful of *how* you are presenting. This means speak clearly, loud enough for everyone to hear, and speak to the class, not the display on the board. You should also do more than simply read directly from a script or read PowerPoint slides. It is stilted and deadens the impact of what you are saying if you spend the entire time reading.

2) Regarding organization, you should be structuring your reports around a question that you are attempting to answer, in this case the issue of historical significance. For this, you can rely on the prompts I have given you. Do not simply info dump all over your classmates; have a point to what you are presenting. Along with this, be mindful of merely tossing out random, pointless facts that are not relevant to your overall purpose (this was a problem for those who had not bothered to answer a question).

3) Be careful about stepping on other people’s topics. If you see that another group has been tasked with reporting on a battle that is connected to your prompt topic in some way, briefly mention it, but do not spend half your time describing the battle and taking away from the other group’s presentation. Stick to your prompt.

4) For those that have prompts related to battles, keep in mind that your topics would benefit the most from visual aids and maps. Simply describing combat maneuvers without a visual aid does not help anyone understand what you are talking about.

All in all, your flash reports for module #1 were not bad for first-timers, but there is definitely room for improvement.

I have posted the link to the Google Doc that contains the group assignments for the Module #1 flash reports (for those of you who volunteered to go first). You can find it on your course syllabus page or by clicking the link here.

These blog posts are the initial primers for understanding how this is all going to work, so you should take a little time to look them over:

• Opening the Mystery Box (aka The Raison d’être of this Website)
• Ways to Follow the Website
• A Guide to Website Abbreviations

If you have any initial questions, please post a comment below, use the Anonymous Student Comment Form, hit me up on Twitter, or email me at your leisure.

We will be going over all this in greater detail when we meet for our first day of class, so don’t worry if some of this seems unclear.

The movie response paper for the sixth film, Dr. Strangelove, is due by Monday, December 12, 2011 at 6pm. You are free to drop a paper version of this paper off either at my office (MAK D-1-136…slide it under the door if I’m not there) or in my mailbox in the History Department main office (MAK D-1-160, just down the hall from my office).

The study guide for the final exam has been posted. You can find it on your course syllabus page or follow the direct link here: HST 102 Final Exam Study Guide FA11. The exam will take place through Blackboard, which means we will not have a final exam session on Monday, December 12, 2011. The final exam will open to you sometime on Tuesday, 6 December 2011, and remain available for you to take until 12 noon on Thursday, December 15, 2011.

If you would like to pick up any graded papers from me, I will be in my office Tuesday and Wednesday this week outside my office hours (which means I’ll be around from 10am-4pm on Tuesday and 10am-3pm on Wednesday). I will also be available on finals week on Wednesday and Thursday as well, leaving campus by 5pm on Thursday and not coming back until January, whereupon you can pick anything up then if you like.

Let me know if you have any questions.

This is a reminder that you have a series of short lecturecasts to peruse for our continuing journey into Module #5: The Age of Catastrophe, 1914-1945. The three lecturecasts are located, as usual, on your course syllabus page. Instead of having you rush around at the end of your Thanksgiving break trying to get all this material in for a quiz at the start of class on Monday, I have decided to use Blackboard just this once to deploy the quiz for you. The quiz has an announcement tied to it (meaning you should see it as a notice when you log into Blackboard), so you should have trouble finding it. It is a timed quiz (only fifteen minutes), and you must complete this quiz before Saturday, December 3, 2011 at 11:30pm.

Tomorrow in class we will be watching the movie Downfall about the end of the Nazi regime in 1945. I will also be giving you back a few more graded assignments, which have been appearing in the Blackboard gradebook all holiday break (in case you haven’t noticed).

I have posted the PowerPoint slides for class tomorrow, dealing with the militarization of European society and the First World War. The links are located on your course syllabus page, as always. If you have any questions, just let me know.

It has come to my attention that there has been a problem with some students signing up for wiki groups and then not contacting their groups, contributing any work, or doing much of anything. Presumably these students assume they are going to earn grades for these wiki groups despite not doing anything — what we might term free-loading.

Consider this, then, a reminder (because I apparently need to remind some of you of this) that if you sign up for a wiki group and then do nothing to help the group write the wiki, prepare the presentation, or whatever, and this comes to my attention, you will receive NO POINTS for that particular wiki module.

It is incumbent on you to make an effort to participate in the wiki groups. It is not the responsibility of the rest of the group to chase you down.

Just a head’s up…