Teaching History in the Digital Age

I found this week’s reading particularly interesting mostly because of a personal connection I have to one of the articles. The author of the review of the “Who Killed William Robinson?” website is the head of the history department at the University of Guelph, and I took his course in Historical Methods which he mentions in the review and wrote a number of assignments using this particular website. I do apologize for the personal anecdote, but I do think that my experiences with this website might give some additional insight into the use of technology in teaching history from a student’s perspective.
I recall initially being confused with the instructions that were given for the assignment. In the syllabus that was given to us at the beginning of the class, we were told that we were to write a paper exploring the primary sources on the website, but that we were not supposed to determine who killed William Robinson. This was the case, but we were later given a paper that suggested theses for the paper were that William Robinson was killed by white settlers, black settlers, or natives. This was the cause of endless confusion among us students (at least my circle of friends in that class), and I cannot stress enough the importance of clear and concise instructions when assigning work on an online database. We had no idea exactly what we were doing, and only now after reading this review do I finally understand the purpose of the exercise – that primary sources are often incomplete, and difficult to work with. We certainly found them difficult to work with, and a group of us spent countless hours at the library, pouring over the documents, throwing out suggestions, shooting them down, starting again, tearing out hair, until we finally churned something out that we weren’t sure was what was expected. The assignment had very little feedback afterward, and we chocked up our confusion to the fact that professor Crowley might not have been terribly organized. I do not mean to be disparaging, but that was what we felt. If we had been given feedback afterward that summed up the point of the exercise, it might have taught us more than it did.
The lesson learned from this, I think, is that online exercises and websites like this, while they can be useful, should be used as an augmentation to classwork, rather than what seems like a diversionary exercise. While online sources, and databases are student-initiated learning, this does not mean that the professor necessarily remain in the background.
I do not mean any disrespect to Professor Crowley by this criticism. I very much enjoyed the rest of his Historical Methods class, and the other classes I took with him. If my remarks come off sounding rather disparaging, that is not the intent. My intention was to highlight a caveat regarding the use of online historical sites.
I really enjoyed the reading about the French Revolution website, and was particularly interested in the use of pictoral and musical sources. With regards to the latter, I think that this is where internet technology really shows its advantages. The use of music, I feel from personal experience, really makes the historical figures and period one is studying come alive. I feel that it could engage the students in ways not possible through textbook reading, and lectures. And the fact that it is online, and accessible at any time has distinct advantages over the professor playing a brief sound clip in the lecture.
With regarding to the use of pictorial sources, I thought this brought up a very interesting, and far-reaching question. In the case of the woodcut drawings from the Revolution, it was noted that because of the process of individual hand-colouring, no two woodcut prints were exactly the same. This led to the question, which one should be digitized, and therefore be considered representative? Now while the unique example of these Revolutionary woodcut drawings highlights this dillema particularly well, the question of which sources should be digitized is a valid one for all historical sources. In an ideal situation, every historical source would be digitized, but the scope of this project would be so vast that the completion of such a project would not be likely to be seen in our lifetimes. Moreover, with the current pace of technological development, it remains to be seen whether any effort to digitize sources could keep pace.
Digital sources are certainly much more convenient than digging through archives, or travelling to reading rooms of far-flung libraries. While I do not think that professional historians would ever question the need to research paper sources, I think there is cause for concern over the ramifications of digital sources for students. When confronted with the choice of researching in a library, versus online archives, I belief that the average student would probably opt for the latter approach. What sources are digitized, therefore, could have an impact on history students, for their interpretations of historical events would be formed on the analysis of a limited series of documents. The decision of which documents to digitize is one which should not be taken lightly, and all of the ramifications considered.