Teaching History in the Digital Age

Sarah Horton’s book begins auspiciously enough with the content, but by the end, it left me overwhelmed by the technical details. While it did help me to understand some of the inner workings of html and web layout, which I have been near but not into over the past several years, I was left wondering if the book isn’t already somewhat out of date. I actually dearly hope so, because I imagined that FrontPage and various programs for creating web sites have interfaces nowadays more like desktop publishing programs, and less like computer programming manuals of the recent yore. Knowing as I do how fabulously well paid web designers are, who have come to consult with educational content groups I have worked with, and then disappear to work their magic, I am left wondering how the average prof could manage to mount content on the web. Sarah Horton’s premise at the beginning of the book was about assessing the possibilities, getting the necessary help, and so on. Certainly, those people who found an entree to the world of html early in the Daniel Boone stage did learn how to “speak html” and learned the hard way how to create web sites, or YLWYNTK (you learn what you need to know). Thus I learned a lot about computers, but never wandered into that design pasture. Horton’s initial cautions about the amount of time it would take are thrown to the wind when the technical stuff starts coming on. Those who learned on their own, or with a bit of help at the outset certainly did so when web sites were much simpler. How one would enter now without  a program for the proverbial dummies, seems prohibitive. Web designers get paid a lot more than professors, methinks, and asking a professor to do that on top of an already full schedule seems too much.  Bass and Rosenzweig’s warning about the type of technology training teachers really need also comes to mind here–it seems that the use of it is more important to foster than the techniques. Innovation must have made the process of building web sites less clunky by now. As a historical artifact, it is interesting to note how the story of web design seems to be one of bending a medium to a purpose it was never designed to fulfill, namely aesthetics over plain vanilla text and image. It shows how technologies evolve in unexpected ways.

Bass and  Rosenzweig highlighted three important uses of digital technology, including Inquiry based learning using primary sources (and secondary sources) on the web that would be otherwise impossible to access. It was quite accurate to include the fact that photocopying, though taken for granted, has in fact given teachers a much wider range of materials beyond the textbook (or instead of it) to draw upon. To the use of primary sources, this week I had students visit the Bradshaw Foundation cave art collection, and other links to Lascaux Cave, sites in Arkansas, Africa, India, and Italy, and identify themes in the various expressions, including the obvious (hunting) but also magic, celebration, warfare, and loss. There is no way such a collection could have been shown any other way. The sites also corroborated the material from last week on the Human Genographic Project’s findings on early migration. It is important to emphasize that the experience has to be set up carefully, with inquiry activities. Just telling students to go to a web site will elicit little usable response. David Kobrin brings out a good point with his example of using History Matters as a starting point, to avoid the randomness of search engines and to save lag time getting started.   Online interaction is a way to increase interaction, but if it were multiplied across the number of classes the average high school student takes, it would soon get old. Students already journal for many classes and engage in all sorts of writing assignments. The best idea here is to get them involved in something that is not a chore, like the pen-pal exchanges with faraway classes.

Making student work public through digital projects holds tremendous promise, but teachers have to be prepared to abandon the typical cycle of lesson plans for getting through a ton of material in a year. And while it will become obvious that  good learning is taking place, it will run headlong into the “coverage model” unless it is carefully planned and balanced, and the technology is not too daunting. Flexible school scheduling instead of the dreadful 50 minute period can help make it more realistic at the K-12 level. Michael Coventry explored the essay published with multimedia formats online, and highlighted the skill and necessity in that format of making a point through compression on two examples. Students would vary widely in their ability to grasp this technique in a short time, or understand it without extensive coaching, and as the author notes, moving from the typical written paper to a mulitmedia version must be constructed in steps (drafts, bibliographies, storyboards, etc.) to make sure it has substance. In contrast, Mary Larson carefully dissected her own analysis of how the students were learning, finding that visual presentations made their development of interpretive skills more obvious than in written work alone. The article was not so much a how-to as a very interesting reflection on student learning in tandem with teaching efforts. T. Mills Kelly engages in a similar reflection on these tandem processes by discussing how a change in the assignment made an advantage (analysing the construction of nationalist identities in part through media like the web) out of a disadvantage (students’ inability to evaluate the reliability of web sites as historical source material), and found a way to use scholarly material in print as a baseline criterion for that analysis.

Under the Bass & Rosenzweig “hazzards” section, they note that electronic media might be best for deeper types of inquiry than for standards-based coverage. However, online quizzes and practice tests may help use standards as a “floor” rather than a “ceiling” and provide teaching time over and above what is needed to tick off standards required now by the states, especially in history.

Kelly Schrum’s article on History Matters was an eye-opener for me because, even though I have visited the site, I had no idea it had such depth and breadth as a teaching tool. I thought it was another clearinghouse. Schrum alerted me to the importance of such a gateway site. I will certainly use it as we get into the more complex topics of world history.  In all, the articles provided a lot of ideas and challenges in ways I had never thought of.