Here’s the skinny on my project…
I originally had the thought to use the Simile Timeline to show data from some random historical event. The interactive part would be to have the student enter their age. This would plot a static bar along the timeline so that the students could visually see what they would have lived through from that historical time frame. They would also be able to add the ages of their parents for the same effect.
After looking around for data from some historical event, I found that there is no good timeline for World War II. I did find lots of data, just no good format. So my purpose is to present a World War II timeline, but instead of going the route of showing a static bar for the students age, they will have to read a little bit about the War, some of the contentions on why some details might be more important to some people than others, and then give them the opportunity to pick the top ten most important events of World War II and generate a timeline of that. They will also have to explain why they chose the dates they did. I’ll probably limit this to a high school level, so I’ll give them 20-30 dates to choose from.
So basically the site would be 1) a description of how the interpretation of history is often relative to the researcher, 2) give the students an opportunity to order history and defend their reasons, and 3) provide a time line with as many dates as possible. I could also show how it can be important to limit the historical data in order to understand what’s going on (too many dates just make for a lot of points on a line).
I’ll probably start off with a lot of the data on the wikipedia, if I can figure an easy way to scrape all of that data.
Someone has already hacked together a plugin for WordPress that incorporates the simile timeline.
See a working copy of it at MissionJournal.org.
This was a tough weekend. I usually find time on Friday and Saturday to do the study and reading for this class. But this past Friday and Saturday I was fixing the server that this website lives on.
It just brings home one more point. Books will be used forever. Long after the last plug on a server is pulled, long after the data on a hard drive becomes unreadable due to incompatible hardware, the book will be there. Just like it always has. It can’t be turned off, it can’t be hacked. Anyhow, despite that bit of anti-technical rant, I’ll endeavor to expound on the qualities of a few websites.
Historical Thinking Matters, Do History, and Morning Sun.
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Sarah Horton’s book begins auspiciously enough with the content, but by the end, it left me overwhelmed by the technical details. While it did help me to understand some of the inner workings of html and web layout, which I have been near but not into over the past several years, I was left wondering if the book isn’t already somewhat out of date. I actually dearly hope so, because I imagined that FrontPage and various programs for creating web sites have interfaces nowadays more like desktop publishing programs, and less like computer programming manuals of the recent yore. Knowing as I do how fabulously well paid web designers are, who have come to consult with educational content groups I have worked with, and then disappear to work their magic, I am left wondering how the average prof could manage to mount content on the web. Sarah Horton’s premise at the beginning of the book was about assessing the possibilities, getting the necessary help, and so on. Certainly, those people who found an entree to the world of html early in the Daniel Boone stage did learn how to “speak html” and learned the hard way how to create web sites, or YLWYNTK (you learn what you need to know). Thus I learned a lot about computers, but never wandered into that design pasture. Horton’s initial cautions about the amount of time it would take are thrown to the wind when the technical stuff starts coming on. Those who learned on their own, or with a bit of help at the outset certainly did so when web sites were much simpler. How one would enter now without a program for the proverbial dummies, seems prohibitive. Web designers get paid a lot more than professors, methinks, and asking a professor to do that on top of an already full schedule seems too much. Bass and Rosenzweig’s warning about the type of technology training teachers really need also comes to mind here–it seems that the use of it is more important to foster than the techniques. Innovation must have made the process of building web sites less clunky by now. As a historical artifact, it is interesting to note how the story of web design seems to be one of bending a medium to a purpose it was never designed to fulfill, namely aesthetics over plain vanilla text and image. It shows how technologies evolve in unexpected ways.
Bass and Rosenzweig highlighted three important uses of digital technology (more…)
I seem to keep making comments before I’ve even read most of the articles for the week. I haven’t even finished the first one that I’m reading as I make this comment. But if I don’t make them as I think of them, then I’ll forget them and won’t make them…
So, in reading Brass and Rosenzweig’s article, they mention how search engines can help students learn more and different aspects of history. That’s all fine and good, but the examples they give are a bit of a stretch for the K-12 and even college student. They say:
“In other words, the search engines cannot only help students to find what they are looking for; they also allow them to examine patterns of word usage and language formation within and across documents.”
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The links from the syllabus are incorrect. They should be as follows:
Bass, Randy and Roy Rosenzweig, Rewiring the History and Social Studies Classroom: Needs, Frameworks, Dangers, and Proposals , White Paper for Department of Education, Forum on Technology in K-12 Education: Envisioning a New Future , December 1999
Kelly, T. Mills ” Using New Media to Teach East European History ,” Nationalities Papers (September 2001)
Kobrin, David, ” Using History Matters with a Ninth Grade Class ,” The History Teacher (May 2001)
Schrum, Kelly, ” Making History on the Web Matter in the Classroom ,” The History Teacher (May 2001)
Weis, Tracey, ” Evaluating Websites for History Teachers: Using History Matters in a Graduate Seminar ,” The History Teacher (May 2001)
Here we go, our adventure into the digitalness of history….
I start my blog entry (late as it is) with a question and comment about Prof Kelly’s experiment written about in the JAHC. The questions: I wonder if there could be more reasons why students didn’t venture outside of the class website? Comment: I think sometimes students are conditioned to only use the sources that teachers give them. They are taught that using material supplemental to what has been given would be called “cheating.” Another, and probably more accurate reason students didn’t venture out into the wild web, is because they are lazy. In general, I would say most students want to do the bare minimum.
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I started reading these articles as I usually do, just ready to soak in all the info and take it as it is. But in trying to do better at analyzing, I took a proverbial step back and tried to decifer what it is these people are writing about. The following are thoughts and questions I’ll be looking for answers to as I finish reading this weeks articles.
So at first glance (and the limited scope of looking at just the first few pages of David Pace’s piece) it seems that the question here is: How do historians improve the teaching of history?
Now it’s what the answer to this question seems to be that has me a little confused, concerned, and a bit baffled. Pace, and some of the other authors from past readings, seem to be approaching this from a ground up method. They realize the teaching of history is bad, it doesn’t share the same level of importance as researching history does (and therefore lacks necessary tools), and that improvement is necessary. But at first glance, what with all of their lamenting the lack of research or scholarship on how to teach history, it would seem that Pace and others feel the need to find out how to teach from the very beginning, as it were. What I’m getting at, is that there has been tons of research, scholarship, and what have you in the field of teaching. There’s usually a school of Education at every university. People know how to teach. So why don’t historians just take some classes on how to teach, then apply history to that?
Well, one rebuttal to my own question is that there must be something different about teaching history than other subjects. And of course there is. (Warning blatant over-generalizations ahead.) For example, history is all subjective (how did people think 1000 years ago) and math is all factual (1+2=3, was true 1000 years ago, now and forever).
So those will be my questions that overshadow my reading: 1) How can historians improve the teaching of history? and 2) Why is teaching history different than teaching any other subject?
Check out my notes for the results of my reading.
So here’s a professor recording and selling his lectures online for $2.50 a pop. Also interesting is all of the comments by the slashdotters. The biggest discussion centers around whether they should be free or not, if the professor has the right to charge for the lectures. The best part of the discussion (in a humorous way) is the link found in one of the comments. Give it a listen to all the way through.
So, how does this apply to our class discussions? Simple, this is one case point where technology is affecting teaching. Is it ‘fair’ to have to pay for a lecture you missed or would like to hear again? One commentor gave an analogy that going to a class is like going to a play. You pay for a class which entitles you to a class session at a particular time in a particular place. The same with buying a ticket to the theater. You wouldn’t expect to get to see the video taped version of the play just because you paid for a ticket to see it live.
Anyhow, interesting stuff about technology and teaching going on all around us.
Some of us in class seemed interested in being offered a class where we are taught ‘how’ to read like a historian, ie. the power-reading.
So… let’s do something about it!
Dr. Kelly, how can we do something about it? Do we need a petition with names, and send it to Dr. Holt, or who?