Through the generosity of Donald and Nancy DeLaski, Martha Washington: a Life (marthawashington.us) examines Martha’s life and relationships by making available documents, historical items, teaching materials, and other resources. A biographical narrative exhibit, written by George Mason University History professor Rosemarie Zagarri, highlights the major milestones of the First Lady’s life as a young woman, bride, mother, First Lady, and widow.

Three teaching modules use Martha’s experiences as a lens through which to examine themes of sociability, slavery, and the Revolutionary War. Each includes a short introductory film, a collection of primary sources, and classroom activities for middle and high school students.

The site also includes a searchable archive which allows visitors to examine more than 450 items and documents related to Martha and her life. The letters, documents, images, and material culture objects in the archive provide users with a glimpse into the world of Virginia’s 18th century planter class.

This fall,  George Mason University and CHNM will join in the German Embassy’s campaign, Freedom Without Walls, a crosscultural celebration of the unification of East Germany and West Germany, and the possibility for peaceful change  throughout the world. CHNM is hosting the George Mason website for Freedom Without Walls, which will feature updates on project news, Campus Week events, and new content.

The Campus Weeks are a component of Germany ’s Freedom Without Walls campaign, an effort to reach out to the generation that was born around the time the wall came down.

Ambassador Scharioth explained that reaching today’s university students is critical if the memory and the inspiration of the fall of the wall is to be preserved. “Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the vestiges of the wall remind us that freedom is precious,” he said. “We are proud to support a new generation of future leaders in their effort to discover and to share what the fall of the wall means to them,” he continued.

The Freedom Without Walls Campus Weeks will include public speaking competitions and an art competition involving replicas of the Berlin Wall to be located across the country.

The German Embassy has created a website with information about the historic anniversary at www.Germany.info/withoutwalls, as well as a Freedom Without Walls page on Facebook. The Germany.info website contains comprehensive information about the history of Germany’s division and reunification, and it will document the Campus Weeks using online video and photos.

The Freedom Without Walls campaign is generously supported by Air Berlin and by the Max Kade Foundation, Inc.

The Goethe-Institut USA and the Wende Museum in Los Angeles provide support in kind for the German Embassy’s Freedom Without Walls campaign.

Colleges and Universities Participating in Freedom Without Walls Campus Weeks 2009

Amherst College

Boston College

Bowdoin College

Brown University

California State University Long Beach

Canisius College , Buffalo

Chapman University , LA

University of Cincinnati

Columbia University

Cornell University

Duke University

University of Florida

University of South Florida

George Mason University

Georgetown University

Johns Hopkins University

University of Massachusetts – Amherst

University of Michigan

Middlebury College

University of Missouri-St. Louis

University of Oregon

Rice University

University of St. Thomas

UCLA – to be confirmed

Vanderbilt University

University of Virginia

Wartburg College

Washington University

Westminster College

Open Access Week draws worldwide attention to the unrestricted sharing of scholarly research and materials for the advancement and enjoyment of all. Open Access (OA) literature is freely accessible online–maximizing the visibility, use, and impact of research. Building on the success of last year’s Open Access Day, University Libraries’ participation in OA Week offers students, faculty, staff, and the public an opportunity to learn more about Mason’s OA initiatives.

Open Access is a growing international movement that encourages the unrestricted sharing of scholarly research and materials with everyone, everywhere, for the advancement and enjoyment of knowledge and society. Open Access is the principle that all research should be freely accessible online, immediately after publication. OA maximizes access to research, thereby enhancing its visibility, use, and impact.

Open Access Week is an opportunity to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access to research, including access policies from all types of research funders, within the international higher education community and the general public. The now-annual event has been expanded from a single day to accommodate widespread global interest in the movement toward open, public access to scholarly research. October 19-23, 2009 marks the first international Open Access Week.

Open Access Week builds on the momentum started by the student-led national day of action in 2007 and carried by the 120 campuses in 27 countries that celebrated Open Access Day in 2008. Organizers and contributors include SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition); the PLoS (The Public Library of Science); Students for Free Culture; OASIS (the Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook); Open Access Directory (OAD); and eIFL.net (Electronic Information for Libraries).

For more information about Open Access Week, please visit http://www.openaccessweek.org/.

Recently, museums and other educational institutions have embraced social media—media that encourages multi-way communication and the building of networks—to connect with their audiences. But, participating in social media raises a lot of questions that include concerns about balancing accessibility of collections with control; grappling with authoritative and personal voice; and measuring impact and outcomes. While these issues are of concern to many institutions, they need to be addressed with special tact by those who deal with sensitive subject matter and vulnerable populations, and who hold in trust the memories of victims of tyranny, human rights abuses, and genocide. This un-conference aims to hash out these concerns with people interested in these issues.

The un-conference will be held on Saturday, December 5, 2009 from 8:30am to 5:30pm at USHMM in Washington, DC. To learn more and submit an application, visit http://www.ushmm.org/social/blog/about.

A survey of the field shows that for many years art museums have been at the forefront of offering their visitors learning experiences that extend beyond traditional exhibit labels. That trend continues as art museums add cell phone tours, podcasts, and platform-specific applications in an effort to capitalize on the commonly-owned portable devices—iPods, MP3 players, Blackberries, cell phones—that visitors already carry in their pockets.

CHNM found that while all genres of museums are very interested in offering content and unique experiences using mobiles, their biggest challenge is working with small budgets and a small staff, limiting their ability to develop content for mobiles.

To address these needs, Mobile for Museums offers recommendations and free, replicable prototypes based on this research on how to economically provide mobile users with positive experiences in and outside a museum.

These prototypes include:

• New plugins for the Omeka http://omeka.org software package allowing institutions to use already-created collections content and re-purpose it with plugins for use inside the gallery, including: Send to Mobile, Bar Codes, and Social Bookmarking.

• Website design optimized for cross-platform mobile browsers that is accessible by a variety of mobile and smart phones, for possible use outside of the gallery.

• A cross-platform application built in PhoneGap that harnesses the functionality native to a mobile device.

These examples are simply proofs of concept, but we hope that by making them and the code available http://code.google.com/p/art-in-the-city/ we will provide the museum community with some fresh possibilities for mobile development.

Finally, the report site includes a dynamic Resources section http://chnm.gmu.edu/labs/mobile-for-museums/resources/, with a Yahoo Pipe of feeds from museum-related websites discussing mobile topics. A public Zotero group offers a growing, annotated bibliography of current resources, and is open for all to join and to contribute other research in the field: http://www.zotero.org/groups/mobile_museums/items.

CHNM encourages collaboration and discussion of our findings and prototypes, through commenting directly on the site. We hope that this research and development will encourage more institutions to share their development and experiments with the greater museum community.

This fall,  George Mason University and CHNM will join in the German Embassy’s campaign, Freedom Without Walls, a crosscultural celebration of the unification of East Germany and West Germany, and the possibility for peaceful change  throughout the world. CHNM is hosting the George Mason website for Freedom Without Walls, which will feature updates on project news, Campus Week events, and new content.

The Campus Weeks are a component of Germany ’s Freedom Without Walls campaign, an effort to reach out to the generation that was born around the time the wall came down.

Ambassador Scharioth explained that reaching today’s university students is critical if the memory and the inspiration of the fall of the wall is to be preserved. “Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the vestiges of the wall remind us that freedom is precious,” he said. “We are proud to support a new generation of future leaders in their effort to discover and to share what the fall of the wall means to them,” he continued.

The Freedom Without Walls Campus Weeks will include public speaking competitions and an art competition involving replicas of the Berlin Wall to be located across the country.

The German Embassy has created a website with information about the historic anniversary at www.Germany.info/withoutwalls, as well as a Freedom Without Walls page on Facebook. The Germany.info website contains comprehensive information about the history of Germany’s division and reunification, and it will document the Campus Weeks using online video and photos.

The Freedom Without Walls campaign is generously supported by Air Berlin and by the Max Kade Foundation, Inc.

The Goethe-Institut USA and the Wende Museum in Los Angeles provide support in kind for the German Embassy’s Freedom Without Walls campaign.

Colleges and Universities Participating in Freedom Without Walls Campus Weeks 2009

Amherst College

Boston College

Bowdoin College

Brown University

California State University Long Beach

Canisius College , Buffalo

Chapman University , LA

University of Cincinnati

Columbia University

Cornell University

Duke University

University of Florida

University of South Florida

George Mason University

Georgetown University

Johns Hopkins University

University of Massachusetts – Amherst

University of Michigan

Middlebury College

University of Missouri-St. Louis

University of Oregon

Rice University

University of St. Thomas

UCLA – to be confirmed

Vanderbilt University

University of Virginia

Wartburg College

Washington University

Westminster College

The MERLOT Awards program recognizes and promotes outstanding online resources designed to enhance teaching and learning and to honor the authors and developers of these resources for their contributions to the academic community.

MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching) is a leading edge, user-centered, searchable collection of peer reviewed and selected higher education, online learning materials, catalogued by registered members and a set of faculty development support services. MERLOT’s vision is to be a premiere online community where faculty, staff, and students from around the world share their learning materials and pedagogy. MERLOT’s strategic goal is to improve the effectiveness of teaching and learning by increasing the quantity and quality of peer reviewed online learning materials that can be easily incorporated into faculty-designed courses.

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution is an accessible introduction to the French Revolution, presenting an broad archive of some of the most important documentary evidence from the Revolution, including 338 texts, 245 images, and a number of maps and songs. Lynn Hunt of UCLA and Jack Censer of George Mason University—both internationally renowned scholars of the Revolution—served as principal authors and editors. The site is a collaboration of CHNM and American Social History Project (City University of New York), and supported by grants from the Florence Gould Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The annual NECC conference—presented by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) and keyed to the National Educational Technology Standards (NETS)—features innovative workshops, including Model Lessons, BYOL (Bring Your Own Laptop) sessions, and Open Source Labs. The nonprofit ISTE focuses on improving teaching, learning, and school leadership by advancing the effective use of technology in PK–12 and teacher education.

With a decade of successful digital tool-building experience under its belt, we at CHNM have come to the conclusion that effective digital tools are forged mostly in practice rather than theory. Although inspirational ideas and disciplinary training are necessary, the creative process succeeds or fails due to pragmatic, often hidden or ignored fundamentals such as good user interface design, thorough code commenting and documentation, community engagement, dissemination and “marketing,” and effective project management. We may have a vision for an ideal end product, but frequently a tool is made or broken in seemingly more mundane aspects of software development.

Too often these practical aspects get lost in our conferences and workshops, only to be encountered by inexperienced tool builders at later stages of development and release. We thus believe a useful digital humanities institute should involve a great deal of doing in addition to basic instruction. There is no reason that a week long institute can’t both teach and produce something useful to the community—an actual digital humanities tool—while also laying the foundation and skills for future endeavors by the participants. Indeed, the act of doing, of building the tool, should be the best way for participants to learn what digital humanities really is and how it really happens.

We therefore propose a unique kind of institute: One Week, One Tool will teach participants how to build a digital tool for humanities scholarship by actually building a tool, from inception to launch, in a week—a digital humanities barn raising.

One Week, One Tool won’t be for the faint of heart. For one week in June 2010, from early mornings to late nights, we will bring together a group of twelve digital humanists of diverse disciplinary backgrounds and practical experience to build something useful and useable. A short course of training in principles of open source software development will be followed by an intense five days of doing and a year of continued community engagement, development, testing, dissemination, and evaluation. Comprising designers and programmers as well as project managers and outreach specialists, the group will conceive a tool, outline a roadmap, develop and disseminate a modest prototype, lay the ground work for building an open source community, and make first steps toward securing the project’s long-term sustainability.

One Week, One Tool is inspired by both longstanding and cutting edge models of rapid community development. For centuries rural communities throughout the United States have come together for “barn raisings” when one of their number required the diverse set of skills and enormous effort required to build a barn—skills and effort no one member of the community alone could possess. In recent years, Internet entrepreneurs have likewise joined forces for crash “startup” or “blitz weekends” that bring diverse groups of developers, designers, marketers, and financiers together to launch a new technology company in the span of just two days. One Week, One Tool will build on these old and new traditions of community development and the natural collaborative strengths of the digital humanities community to produce something useful for digital humanities work and to help reset the balance between learning and doing in digital humanities training.

Are you ready to rumble?

The historians and technologists at CHNM feel lucky to serve this vast audience, but although all of our tools and resources are free, they are not without cost. With your help we hope to continue our service and innovation for another fifteen years and beyond. The National Endowment for the Humanities has given CHNM a rare challenge grant, which will match donations to CHNM’s endowment for a limited time.

Whether you use CHNM’s popular Zotero software for your research, get your daily fix from the History News Network, learn from award-winning sites such as Historical Thinking Matters and Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives, or scan through unique digital archives such as the Papers of the War Department, we hope you will make a contribution today. Your tax-deductible gift will help us to reach even more students, teachers, and scholars worldwide.

To make your donation right now, please visit:

http://chnm.gmu.edu/donate/

From all of us at the Center for History and New Media, we thank you in advance for helping us, as our motto says, “Build a Better Yesterday, Bit by Bit.”

UPDATE: An anonymous donor has stepped forward who will match the NEH’s match for the month of June, up to $15,000. So now is a terrific time to contribute and stretch your donation even further!