Albany Congress of 1754 Project
The objective of the project is to provide a learning module that exposes high school or undergraduate college students to primary source documents, gives the students experience in interpreting these documents and historically thinking about the issues and decisions that faced the Indians, American colonists, and the Board of Trade in England. The module would occur sometime during the middle of a course on colonial America and is estimated to take approximately two weeks to complete. In the weeks leading up to the module we would have sessions giving the students a sense of the historical landscape from the perspective of the Indians, colonists and English in Britain.
The web site will provide access to the primary documents, maps of the areas, and background for all of the historical figures. Each student will be assigned a historical person to role play. A student may be assigned one of the Indian, or colonial representatives, or they may be assigned on the Board of Trade that will consider the colonials plan. The students will be required to research primary documents and the background of the person they are assigned. The students will be provided a set of boundaries for the person they are representing. The idea is the students will need to look at the issues from the perspective and time frame of the person they represent as well as the body politic that they represent and whose interests they are forwarding at the Albany Congress. A game construct will be used to allow the students to play out their decisions. For a conceptual comparison, see www.muzzylane.com.
Two additional elements I am considering are an ongoing blog where the students can comment among their particular group on the deliberations that day and incorporating a computer based training (CBT) module in the website that allows the students. The blogs would represent the kind of hall talk and side conversations that are held during the day long proceedings at the Congress. The CBT could be used before and/or after the role playing game. The first CBT would be a way for the students to test their understanding of the historical setting going into the role playing exercise to ensure they were on the same page. The second CBT could be used in after we reviewed the game results compared to what actually happened. I am thinking that perhaps I could have two class sections during a semester where one class used the website module and one received the lecture-read textbook- discussion-test approach and the other used the multi-media approach and then comparing results.