Teaching History in the Digital Age

Earlier this semester we discussed the tension or conflict between good scholarship and the need for excellence in teaching.  While both are important, scholarship has traditionally outweighed the other when it came to awarding tenure.  How were we to foster excellence in teaching if it didn’t receive the same support and rewards? Some of this week’s readings raised a similarly thorny issue.  Daniel M. Ringrose’s article Beyond Amusement: Reflections on Multimedia, Pedagogy, and Digital Literacy in the History Seminar presented two multi media projects he introduced to his students over the course of two semesters.  The article details the trials and tribulations of teaching his students web authoring techniques while at the same time trying to teach them how to construct historical arguments.  He set lofty goals for himself such as changing faculty expectations, promoting digital literacy, and assessing what aspects of his project might transfer well to other institutions.

What he found, however, among other issues, was that there was an enormous investment of time spent teaching the mechanics of website construction,  time that could not be spent on more traditional historical matters.  This expense in time was true for the students as well since time spent developing new media material meant less time spent on traditional writing and editing.  Evens and Brown’s article Teaching the History Survey Course using Multimedia Techniques makes a similar point when they suggest there was a need to introduce technology skills to ensure students would be computer literate but that this required a considerable effort.  Sarah Horton’s book Web Teaching Guide: A Practical Approach to Creating Course Web Sites illustrates this conundrum in that the book spends the vast majority of it’s time discussing mechanical issues such as how to handle images, organized site files, or write for scanning.  Her book was not aimed at historians in particular as far as I know and that may be why she spends so little time on actual content but it does point out how much information a new web author must absorb prior to constructing a new media project.

Most of the articles I read this week discussed programs that tried to incorporate teaching web building skills into the history class.  The Clio 2 class offered here at George Mason devotes an entire semester just to developing web skills alone.  Even then that course was perhaps one of the most time intensive classes I’ve ever taken in terms of completing the homework assignments.  There simply wasn’t time to cover much of anything else.  This begs the questions can this be done effectively within a traditional history course as the previously mentioned authors attempted and is it appropriate to spend time in a history class on this? Despite the enormous effort most of this week’s authors answer yes.

As Michael Coventry suggests in Moving Beyond “the Essay”: Evaluating Historical Analysis and Argument in Multimedia Presentations students need to learn how to read new media forms.  We are living in a digital age.  We’re confronted with new media in ever increasing amounts.  If as many of our earlier articles suggest, it is appropriate for us to teach students how to think like historians, to critically read primary sources, couldn’t we also argue it is important to teach this new media as well?  Are we supposed to freeze the methods historians employ simply to avoid having to learn new skills?  Tracey Weis supports the idea that students need to learn how to read visual sources in her article What’s the Problem? Connecting Scholarship, Interpretation, and Evidence in Telling Stories about Race and Slavery. Yet she does not shy away from this challenge. Instead she is “excited by the new forms of historical argumentation emerging in multimedia narratives.”  Ringrose perhaps offers the best hope when he suggests offering a lab section to students for additional credit.  I think that it is impractical to attempt to teach web authoring skills within the confines of a history class wherein that class is intended to teach more traditional historical material.  Despite this history departments can not shy away from the need to teach the next generation of historians how to work with the media at hand.  It is probably true that our students will come to the classroom with progressively more advanced skill sets as their exposure starts at an earlier age and software becomes more user friendly.  In the meantime we must be willing to teach these skills just as we would teach students how to read a primary source. This assumes of course we are willing to learn ourselves.