Teaching History in the Digital Age

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.

The Center for History and New Media has explored the ways digital media allows for greater creativity in presenting historical material. Two of their projects, Women in World History and Imaging the French Revolution, exemplify these efforts and the ways digital history can be adapted to different education levels. They also demonstrate how audio, image, and video files might be manipulated in ways that encourage learning, both in and out of the classroom. Both of these sites are powerful examples of the great potential digital media has in changing the way we think about history education.

Finished this past summer, Women in World History (WWH) hopes to create “an online curriculum resource center to help high-school and college world history teachers and their students locate, analyze, and learn from primary sources dealing with women and gender in world history.” WWH achieves this goal by employing a number of tactics beyond simply gathering materials into one place. Instead, WWH leverages the power of new media, providing guides on how to approach primary documents and use them in the classroom, reviews of other websites containing material that can by employed in a curriculum, and providing a number of modules which are ready-made to be implemented into a variety of courses.

What is critical to WWH is the guidance it offers to teachers on using digital materials in their curriculum. Rather than approaching the Web and digital history as a magical tool which will work its wonders in the classroom, WWH realizes its effectiveness lies in the hands of the teacher. The site contains a number of valuable resources for educators, including an interactive guide on how to analyze documents; modules containing primary documents, teaching strategies, recommended assignments, and a bibliography; case studies of their sue in the classroom; and an extensive collection of primary sources, as well as reviews of other sites containing source material. The instructions on assessing primary sources seems especially important in shifting history from a passive to active learning experience, as many teachers themselves likely have not been trained in this area. In this way, WWH functions not simply as a clearinghouse for source material, but a tool which can help teachers understand the changing approaches to history education while providing them the materials needed to successfully implement such methodology into their classroom.

Imaging the French Revolution (IFR) demonstrates that the digital medium can promote scholarship at higher levels of education as well. This site was created in 2003 to foster a scholarly discussion about using prints illustrating the French Revolution to discern attitudes about violence, public crowds, historical memory, and other topics. The site presents not only a series of images that were assessed by a group of historians, but essays they wrote about the images, and an online forum in which they discussed the implications of using visual media in historical analysis.

The way IFR presents images highlights two of the inherent advantages digital media allows for. First, it gathers images from both sides of the Atlantic into one readily acceptable space. Given the high costs that can be incurred in traveling to perform research, this is no small feat, and opens these documents to many who might never otherwise see them. Second, it allows the user to manipulate the images in ways not possible with the originals. Using the image tool, one can drag and drop the illustrations into different patterns, and closely examine the objects in juxtaposition with others-a true advantage when analyzing visual material. Images promote creative reads of history and open insights into groups often ignored in text. As Vivian Cameron notes, the have “symbolic value,” as “souvenirs or ‘memory triggers’ of a momentous event, which operated to perpetuate those symbolic events.” By grouping such items together, a broader and more complex reading of these symbols is possible.

In this way, IFR promotes advanced, collaborative, and creative scholarship. It also has great value in the classroom, as it can also be shown to students as a model of how historians approach evidence and carry out analysis. Not only are the essays an interesting approach to the French Revolution, but in conjunction with the images they also explicate the historical process at work. Furthermore, through the discussions, students can see how history is formed upon the building blocks of shared ideas. IFR is instructive on several levels and seems a useful tool for encouraging critical thinking among older students while broadening their knowledge base of the French Revolution.

The Center for History and New Media is not the only source for history on the Web. The University of Houston has also created an extensive project, Digital History, “designed and developed to support the teaching of American History in K-12 schools and colleges,” and provides a comprehensive resource for such courses. The site centers around an online textbook that is complemented by a series of modules highlighting primary sources, secondary material, and digital lectures on topical or chronological sections. Digital History has managed to gather together a great deal of online sources, including links taking users to primary documents from the National Archives, interactive maps from PBS, and extensive image collections, to name just a few. The variety and breadth of the material presented is astounding, and in this way becomes useful to not only to high school educators, but those of younger students as well. By incorporating both multimedia presentations, as well as primary sources, Digital History offers much to the teacher seeking to move beyond the textbook in the classroom.

In offering their own textbook, Digital History seems primed to disturb the traditional history education model quite a bit. However, the glaring weakness of Digital History is the absence of links between the textbook and the visual, audio, and primary materials on the site. There does seem to be an advantage in presenting uncluttered textual material in developing a historical narrative, as it focuses the reader on the text, without distraction or interruption. It also gives educators more freedom (and responsibility) to choose which documents to point highlight during a lesson. However, this is also the model of education sites like Digital History is trying to challenge. For example, the textbook chapter on Vietnam includes no links to material from the Vietnam module, such as images from the war, or the maps which are linked to. It seems that the textbook might benefit from the incorporation of material that opens up the use of primary sources and sends students toward other Web resources.

What becomes apparent in looking at these three projects, is the emphasis placed on making primary sources available and offering guidance in their use in the classroom. This certainly is one of the great benefits of digital media, as expensive document collections or textbooks become less necessary to the history curriculum. Furthermore, it provides students with the opportunity to understand how history is approached by historians, and how interpretations of historical events are made. An approach emphasizing this kind of work for students seems to offer an immense improvement over the repetitive memorization students all too often associate with history. Instead the past can be opened through the markers it has left, and with encouragement and guidance, a deeper, fuller sense of history can be accomplished.