Teaching History in the Digital Age

Susan  on Week 5 Readings: Living under a migraine headache since yesterday (Sat. 9/23 through today), I don’t know how cogent these remarks will be, but I came to this week’s readings glad to be moving beyond the discussion of what might be to the concrete examples of using digital resources to enhance teaching and learning history.
First, I will note my own experience that I have set up a class blog (I’ll share it when it begins to take some shape; it took a while to get everyone in the class onto it, etc.) and the preliminary impression is that it adds something to the class, which meets twice or thrice a week in blocks.
                The samples presented by the readings, on ways to involve students in accessing and creating web content demonstrate very different purposes and a spectrum of the amount of “value added” by making them web-based in the context of using them for teaching a courseo. The degree to which these projects are effective, Bass’s criteria can be applied, which are defined below from Engines f Inquiry.”
·       On the top of the scale of web-necessity are the  course portfolios, whose very purpose is to make them public, and what more prominent place to put them than on the AHA site as a statement to the profession on the one hand, and as an opening of the formerly closed classroom. To quote the article, “it must be open to public scrutiny, it must be structured in such a way that others can offer critical review and evaluation, and it must be available to other members of one’s scholarly community for their use and elaboration.”
·       The Visible Knowledge Project cited in T. Mills Kelly’s course portfolio is a resource that could only have its impact through the web. It is an open portal for educators unlike any journal or hard copy publication could ever be. It actually gave me a valuable piece of scholarly ammunition in a steering committee meeting for the high school project I am working on, on the weight given to final exams.
·       At the same level on the value-added scale are web sites like the French Revolution materials.  Such material could not be made available for the ordinary classroom in any other way.  Posting of such archives and other material prepared for classroom use is a tremendous bonus for the whole enterprise of teaching, and the article notes that the lay public has made use of them as well. I have used such resources many times.
·       The practice of putting syllabus and course materials on the web is of course a parallel to the paper course packs. Paperless is green policy—not to be discounted as a factor adding value, apart from the results of the survey that students with easier access did more recursive reading.
·       Lower down on the spectrum are student projects like the ones on material objects in Adrienne Hood’s article. Such things could just as easily have been presented in other forms. It is not a great addition of value to post them on the web, and some of the links are dead.  In the same vein, the presentations on O’Leary’s family histories from “Beyond Best Practices” last week are nice to have on the web, but could have been done just as well without it, for the class purposes.  But students often receive a boost in motivation by public posting. That is surely a value added.
 Mulderink gives us more ways to evaluate the purposes and results of  incorporating technology into teaching by quoting Randy Bass’s  six types of learning that can be enhanced through information technologies: distributive, authentic, dialogic, constructive, public, and reflexive in “Engines of Inquiry” posted on the Crossroads Project at  http://www.georgetown.edu/crossroads/guide/engines.html . Summarizing Bass’s points,  they are defined as follows:

Distributive Learning: New technologies allow students access to the knowledge across diverse resources; and allow better distribution of responsibility for constructing knowledge by providing a public forum for sharing ideas. 
Authentic Tasks and Complex Inquiry: Archives of electronic primary materials enable learners to engage in authentic research tasks and complex inquiry that would be impractical or impossible without this technology. The non-linear ways of arranging these archives reflect and enhance complex thinking. 
Dialogic Learning: These technologies enhance the element of discussion in learning, and provide forums for collective learning, potentially with a global audience.
 such as email, electronic discussion lists, and teleconferencing, provide powerful new Constructive Learning: The process of building hypermedia projects and web sites encourage more complex projects than the typical paper that students know rarely leaves the professor’s file cabinet or even circular file. It puts learning into student hands beyond grades.
Public Accountability: “students who think of their work and ideas as public tend to take their work more seriously and engage in issues more thoroughly.”
Reflective and Critical Thinking: the entire experience of learning from non-traditional materials is to encourage multiple literacies, formulating of complex questions, and multiple ways of reaching conclusions. By having the information available so readily, it encourages returning to look at it again; further reflexivity is encouraged by the group process and revision possibilities. We have long since forgotten what it was like to commit oneself to text in the age of the typewriter.
 

I found these criteria useful in evaluating the projects we have looked at, and they should be useful for our own designs, and for decisions about the overall mix of traditional and technological our teaching. They help answer O’Malley’s plea to have design enhance these purposes, and to rethink the way we do our jobs, and make the best use of technology because of its functionality rather than just as a novelty or an analog to paper. (though being green isn’t bad by itself. I can personally attest to having saved gallons of gasoline and attendant pollution, parking fees and time for the family because I could access this week’s readings entirely on the  web. With the migraine, it wouldn’t have gotten done otherwise, so we have a health benefit, too.)