Teaching History in the Digital Age

Many of the readings this week took into account the whats and hows of communication and narration. This seems to really get at the heart of why new media seems to be a necassary step in the future of education.I first started thinking about this with regards to Sarah Horton’s points about how people read on the web and the influence this should have on how one inserts content into a site is particularly provocative. In some ways her assertions about the approach people take to digital documents does not seem to be much different than how people approach paper texts. For example, as graduate students faced with large amounts of weekly reading, we are trained to quickly identify, consume, and analyze important points from a text without reading each and every page in a book. This is usually referred to as skimming. The only difference between this and what Horton calls scanning seems to be semantic. However, this does not seem to be a process limited to the higher levels of education. Thinking back to high school as well as grammar school textbooks, I remember how one could quickly identify the important topics of a chapter, as they were usually in bold text. Reading several sentences of hundreds could infuse a comparable level of knowledge. So how can new media improve upon this process? It seems that hypertext holds the ability to turn a series of normally isolated chunks into a connected, yet nonlinear, narrative. This potentially offers a greater possibility of learning concepts as opposed to facts, and encourages thinking rather than memorization.

This seems to be an even more important avenue to pursue in light of the changes we see in web construction and use six years after publication of the Web Teaching Guide. One of the main concerns with the use of digital technologies in the classroom, which I hinted at last week in a comment, is how to move past the web browser and/or desktop as the only access point available. Students are ever more likely to be using cell phones, iPods, Blackberries, and telepathy (almost had you) than computers to communicate leaving possibilities for educators to use mediums like podcasts or text messaging in the classroom. Podcasts, with their enormous multimedia capabilities seem to offer wonderful possibilities, though so far they mostly seem to be used to reproduce lectures.

Without even addressing the questions about moving off away from the desktop, thinking about the forums, blogs, and mixed type sites students currently use presents another problem to consider. For example few sites are as popular among the student-age population as MySpace or Facebook. These sites incorporate a range of multimedia options, while also employing blog and forum type formats. The sites encourage a familiarity with multi-media possibilities, which students can not only consume, but create as well. Michael Coventry explores the utility of this in “Moving Beyond the Essay,” noting multimedia “allows authors to show multiple examples quickly with narration over them or to guide viewers over specific parts of an image and show analysis directly beside or over a specific point.” Students seem to be aware of these possibilities in the way they choose to present themselves to the online community. As such, Coventry seems right in his suggestion that assignments requiring a multimedia product from students can be used positively and can help them to develop concise, yet complex, materials.

The quickly changing nature of communication seems to point at new avenues for education, including history. Whether adopting new tools such as portable video players, or finding new uses for old materials, educators can be better prepared to make connections with their students by understanding the mechanics of the ever and quickly changing ways they relate to each other and the world around them.