Teaching research/writing skills to Curatescape contributors?

[Eli Pousson]

Hello fellow Curatescape users,

I sent an email about this project back in the late fall but we are finally launching our course on teaching people how to research and write about historic places — as both an educational program and to encourage people to contribute to our Explore Baltimore Heritage site.

I pulled together a list of contributor guidelines and research guides for this unfinished collection of Curatescape Project Management Resources I put together last year, including:

• Explore Baltimore Heritage Contributor Guidelines
  
• ExploreCU contributor’s guide
  
• East Texas History Contributor Guidelines
  

I'd love to hear how others train and support volunteer (or student) writers and contributors to their Curatescape projects. Do you have any activities or exercises that you use to build skills before students write a full story? Any rubrics that you use to assess/edit student work?

Please let me know! I'm also happy to chat with anyone by phone if you have time to share your experience and advice.

Best,

Eli

301.204.3337

pou...@baltimoreheritage.org

Director of Preservation & Outreach, Baltimore Heritage

On Mon, Nov 2, 2015 at 1:51 PM, Eli Pousson <pou...@baltimoreheritage.org> wrote:

Hello all,

We're developing an online course to teach local historians (or anyone who is interested) how to contribute stories to our Curatescape-based Explore Baltimore Heritage website and app. We started outlining the topics for the course in a public Trello board a couple weeks back and I've put together an early prototype based on existing training materials.

Over the past few years, we have worked with a variety of contributors - local university students writing as part of a course, student interns, and interested volunteers. A couple years ago, we developed a set of contributor guidelines that have helped some but, unfortunately, I think they often go unread by the people who might benefit the most!

In an effort to make it easier for those groups to learn how to contribute stories to Explore Baltimore Heritage, we're exploring the idea of teaching a course this winter that would guide people through the process of researching and writing a story. We're thinking this would take the form of weekly sessions for 5 weeks with a significant online component for anyone who can't attend one or all of the in-person meetings.

I'd love to hear from others about what kind of training you are doing for volunteer or student contributing and to see any instructional or teaching materials you have put together to help guide the research and writing process.

Our course is published through GitHub pages so you can also check out the repo here. This course is supported as part of a larger project (the Local Preservation School) that might interest any of you who work or teach historic preservation.

Thanks for any feedback you can provide!

Eli

mobile 301.204.3337

email pou...@baltimoreheritage.org

Director of Preservation & Outreach, Baltimore Heritage

11 ½ West Chase Street, Baltimore, MD 21201

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Explore Baltimore Heritage - Download free for iPhone or Android

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