Abstract
How do undergraduate students learn a historical narrative of Judaism in late antiquity? How do we, as teachers,
assess our success at conveying to them not simply a specific history, but a broader set of critical skills that they
should be able to apply to new data? In his survey class on early Jewish history, the author conducted an experiment
in which the class’s primary assignment was to work as a group (and in sub-groups) to build a “wiki” (a collaborative website) on early Jewish history. This experiment had three goals: (1) to seek to discover how students moved
from passively learning a narrative of this period of Jewish history to actively applying what they learned; (2) to
assesses the effectiveness of incorporating more active learning in such a class; and (3) to evaluate the strengths
and weaknesses of the wiki as an educational tool. This paper reports on what he learned from this experiment and
proposes some pedagogic implications for the use of wikis in educational settings as well as how students make sense
of historical narrative.