Part I – Intro and Background
Intro to Project
Albany Congress Background data
NYPL Digital Gallery
Part II – Visual Interpretation
Architecture of the Capitol – central scene mural
Part III – Primary source documents
Roger Trask’s article Pennsylvania and the Albany Congress – inclides primary source quotes
Proceedings of the Colonial Congress held at Albany
Part IV - Role playing exercise - determining Albany Plan
Part V – Post-role playing exercise
Actual Albany Plan
Franklin’s reflection in 1789
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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Posting Update – Third time must be a charm — Ammon,on my second attempt to post the site was completely down from (7:00 PM – 8:43 PM)
I chose to evaluate two websites from a design perspective. By doing so, I hoped to learn the material of the sites, as well as discover ease of use and if the sites provided creative elements that want me to explore what information and tools are contained within each site.
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World History Sources
Just a minor formatting issue, but the homepage does not fit entirely onto my screen, and there seems to be a great deal of empty space which could be used more effeciently.
This is a remarkable site. There is very little about which I can be critical. The scholarly reviews about the online primary sources alone is an incredible resource. Well organized and sorted by both geographic region, and chronology, I only wish I knew about this site during my undergrad degree! But there is so much more on this website. A guide to unpacking evidence from various types of sources, examples of historians analysing sources, and case studies on how 16 teachers have taught with primary sources. This an amazing resource for both teacher of history, and students, although perhaps below the university level, but then again, it is available to anyone, and that is one of the benefits of the internet. (more…)
Much of the excitement surrounding digital history is its great flexibility. Not only does new media offer multimedia capabilities, changing what content might easily be presented to students, but it also is adaptable to any age group. The ability to quickly and effectively incorporate images and sound, with or without the use of textual narration allows younger students the opportunity to engage visual material they might find more approachable, while older students can appreciate the connectivity between objects and the open-ended possibilities of the Web. (more…)
I first examined the World History Matters and History Matters projects sponsored by the Center for History and New Media looking for shortcomings. Although failing in this initial endeavor, as I found no glaring deficiencies, I learned to appreciate these projects as models for incorporating technology not just into learning history, but teaching as well. From these two model databases I have decided that three essential requirements must be met in order to have a useful digital history project. Firstly, as in all good academic history primary sources must form the backbone of your project. They must be available for students and other site visitors to interact with, by listening, reading or watching. Secondly, there must be a mechanism through which site visitors are guided to historical thought. This mechanism could be as complex as an interactive game or as primitive as simply posting a few samples of how historians think about sources. Lastly, a good project will emphasize teaching as well as learning. Well developed sites will supply teachers with exercises, assignments or questions to pose to their students. Recognizing that educators provide the historical context for student learning makes this requirement all the more important in creating a successful digital history project. (more…)
These two projects are quite different. It is hard to find any weaknesses in DoHistory or WH Sources, except that they and the other projects on the CHNM site ought to have more revealing and clear titles–that seems to me the signal weakness in the suite of projects as a group. They are all excellent, but their titles can be confusing and too generic. It might be a function of titles chosen before the sites were fully developed in content and scope. DoHistory, for example, might have been envisioned to house a future project along the lines of the Martha Ballard Diary resources, but it is alone in the category now, so it should have its own title, or attach a subtitle. The site is so remarkable an example of a unique digital history resource that its title should not be generic, because people can’t easily find it. It does come up on a search, but not on a browse of chnm. (More on DoHistory below). On the other hand, World History Sources, which I visited on an earlier occasion, used to be a list like a WH version of the Webography resource collection (annotated rather than reviewed, I recall). Now it could be “Historical Thinking Matters,” or “History Matters,” or “DoHistory.” Nothing is distinctively different enough about these titles. (more…)
Up to this point in the course, we have learned how digital technology has re-shaped the traditional pedagogy of historians. Digital media as a tool for learning has made information more accessible and readily available for the historian. This post will look at a few of the projects that the Center of History and New Media at GMU has worked on in the past, as well as analyze their strengths and weaknesses…(well mostly strengths.)
The first project that we will look at is called World History Sources and is located at this link: World History Sources. Upon first glance, the site looks very easy to navigate. There is not a lot of clutter, which makes a world of difference when trying to access the various sources one would need to conduct research. For instance, the links on the main page of the website provide access to more specific information. This is very helpful when doing research for an essay because the user does not have to sift through a lot of pointless information just to find something on say, Trade in World History. What is also quite effective about the website is that it offers interactive multimedia features to help one analyze specific aspects of World History, such as music. By actually hearing and seeing the music played, the historian may arrive at a better analytical interpretation of the music, as opposed to just reading about what’s being played. The ease at which one can navigate this site also matched with the interactive features makes World History Sources a full-fledged winner. (more…)
CHNM links to the City University of New York site “The Lost Museum” about P.T. Barnum’s house of entertainment. The site offers a broad survey of social history in the 19th century city, involving such areas as race relations, gender relations, working conditions, style/fashion and particularly interesting, documentation through the museum’s exhibits of American middle class attitudes toward the wider world that was beginning to become known at the popular level through the European colonial experience. (more…)
When considering which sites from the list to evaluate, I wanted to try and use examples that centered on American History – my preferred focus. History Matters and Historical Thinking Matters fit the bill nicely.
By name, these sites seem like they would be very similar; and they are in some ways. Both are designed to provide a starting point or hints to educators about teaching history. They are also both utilitarian, not terribly flashy. Each has a “how to use this site” function as well. This link is quite useful. It shows a reader that this site is not going to be an encyclopedic source of information, but rather clues about doing research. I think, however, that their differences are more significant.
History Matters’ (HM) main page, which appears when you first log in is chock full of links. The print and few pictures are small and a little hard to read on a 15” monitor. In contrast, Historical Thinking Matters (HTM) has slightly larger images and larger type. HTM also has a less crowded front page and is a little more intuitive in how one might use it. From the point of the consumer of information, the HM page is almost too much to digest. It does however have some features which HTM does not. HM has some neat links to resources which describe certain types of primary sources, where HTM concentrates on specific historic incidents and the types of sources which are available for them. I think HM might be very attractive to people who hate to go to the library.
In a perfect world, I could use both sites for inspiration if I were a teacher. I would have to know about them though. I wonder how educators find out about sites like this. I might use HTM to get ideas on how to approach a subject in a broad sense, and search HM to get ideas about specific sources like using maps. Since the information on the sites is intended for use in planning classroom instruction, not to be the primary way someone learns about a subject; the lack of slick images and graphics is not really a big drawback. These sites aren’t designed to catch the attention of distracted students and reel them in to a subject about which they may feel ambivalent.