I reviewed three web projects on the CHNM website: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity; History Matters; and DoHistory. All three we well-designed projects that evidenced significant forethought and consideration of the potential users, yet their primary audience and intent differed.
History Matters contains a lot of good practices that any institution of learning should consider before designing a web project. The History Matters project has a variety of uses for students and teachers at the secondary and university level. History Matters provides access to primary and secondary sources that have been reviewed by professional historians, an important aspect for K-12 teachers that want to be able to direct students to trusted, reliable web sources with breadth and depth of data covering over 1,000 web sites. (more…)
For this week’s blog entry I selected World History Sources and DoHistory both of which are currently managed by the Center for History and New Media. They represent opposite ends of the historical spectrum. DoHistory focuses on the use of primary sources to study the lives of ordinary individuals while World History Sources literally covers the world and contacts between cultures. (more…)
The Center for History and New Media has just posted up the Beta version of Zotero, a browser-based citation management system (a la EndNote). It is (of course) free and very powerful–and promises to get more powerful as new features are added–like citation sharing. You need to run Firefox 2.0 (which is also in Beta), but I’ve been using Zotero for a couple of weeks now and already can’t live without it. Download it and give it a try.
It seems odd that the late 1990’s and the first few years of the 21st century should seem so long ago in computer years yet this week’s readings illustrate just how far things have come. The articles covered using new media in the class room, student web pages, online syllabi, websites, and course portfolios. As the authors discussed the relative merits of each of these they highlighted issues that in some cases don’t seem as relevant today. Hood and Spafford for example bemoaned the lack of computing facilities for undergraduates and the lack of web authoring software, while Pomerantz mentioned how members of the faculty still lacked Internet access at home. Other’s cited a lack of email access for some students. For instance Mulderink states: “at the outset of each quarter, I survey my students to find out how many are familiar with electronic mail and listservs, and, typically, about 10% of the students have had prior experience with these forms of communication and learning.” (more…)