What Happens When You Teach Students to Lie Online?

Mills Kelly
Associate Dean for Enrollment DevelopmentGeorge Mason UniversityAssociate DirectorCenter for History and New MediaGeorge Mason UniversityAssociate ProfessorDepartment of History and Art HistoryGeorge Mason UniversityRead Bio

What happens when undergraduate students are encouraged to create false history and then post it online for all the world to see? In this talk, Professor Mills Kelly, Associate Director of the Center for History and New Media, will discuss the results of a recent course he taught called "Lying About the Past" in which his students created an online historical hoax that fooled a fair number of people (including several professors). Along the way the students worked harder than any group of students he's taught in more than a dozen years in the college classroom. What lessons can we learn about teaching and digital culture from his experiences? Come to the talk and find out.

T. Mills Kelly is Associate Dean for Enrollment Development at George Mason University, where he is also an Associate Director of the Center for History and New Media and an Associate Professor in the Department of History and Art History. His conventional training is in East European history and he is the author of one book and many articles in that specialty. His unconventional training is in history and pedagogy as they happen in the digital world. In that capacity he has been the co-director or PI of several major NEH-funded web projects in history and is the author of numerous articles and several book chapters on the intersection of digital media and historical pedagogy. He blogs at edwired.org.

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All talks free and open to the public. Attendees are welcome to bring their own lunches.

Contact: MITH (mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 301.405.8927).