About

I am an associate professor of History and faculty fellow for Networked Learning at Virginia Tech. I teach courses in Soviet history and culture, historiography and historical methods,and animal studies. My current research focuses on the cultural implications of domestication and the dogs used by the Soviets to develop the manned space flight program in the 1950s and sixties. I use networked pedagogies to foster learning communities that empower students to produce knowledge and learn with and from each other. These practices augment student-centered learning strategies by helping students leverage the affordances of the web to produce their own histories — histories grounded in the fundamentals of historical inquiry, presented in multi-media format, and curated through the filter of peer mentoring, dialogue, and ethical consideration of the historian’s task into unique digital portfolios. My professional website is http://amynelson.net/, and I blog at Sirius Reflections (http://siriusreflections.org/).