Teaching History in the Digital Age

This post was originally intended as a comment on Michelle’s post, which was very amusing and honest about her method. It can be illuminating to toss in a search term just to see what comes up. The Tax Museum piece was very funny, though I was not excited enough to visit. How about looking for a Death Museum? Then it got too long. I intended to share my experience looking for a very definite item to use in teaching (objective: give students quick and representative access to the actual sites to supplement the texts’ generalizations about the Neolithic period), namely Neolithic sites. This would satisfy the objectives of illustrating specific examples from history, illuminating “how do we know” about the period, and investigating “how do historians/archeologists find out about the past?”) I started with two important, far-flung neolithic sites, namely Catal Huyuk (Turkey) and Skara Brae (Orkney Islands, Scotland). For the latter, a Google link opened up to the Megalithic Portal, a grab-bag site for people in the British Isles who are really into buried stones. This site, though ugly, had a nice B/W image catalog and minimal text, for browsing http://www.ancient-scotland.co.uk/skarabra.html. This one, however, was a keeper: http://www.orkneyjar.com/history/skarabrae/ It is attractive, has color images and provides illustrated overviews in an informative sequence that is not too long. The simple links are typed headings in a sidebar/box with a light green font. Just below on the sidebar are links to several video clips. The site includes content on the site as archaeologists understand it, but also accounts of archaeological investigations. The language is very accessible to a general audience. The story of the discovery, the find, the results (info on life in the 5,300 year old village is all there, along with a nice taste of Scottish local color, some poetry, and also links to megalithic sites around Scotland. Then, beyond the Wikipedia site on Google’s list, is the following looney entry http://www.geocities.com/futhark_runes/SkaraBrae_AncientEgyptianSettlement.html, an extended argument for the notion that Skara Brae was not indigenous, but a site peopled by Egyptian Priest/Astronomers (who were also coincidentally stonemasons/pyramid engineers)who found themselves shipwrecked in the Orkney Islands on a voyage of exploration(one hopes they were not leopard hunting when they got off course). It goes into mathematics, hieroglyphics vs. runes on the buildings, et. Well, it’s fun, and perhaps offers a pedagogical Trial by Fire: send the kids there as an assignment and pretend to be serious, then see if they believe it. I shudder to think–might try it.
For Catal Huyuk, the first sites that came up were horribly academic, dry articles with nearly no illustrations–arguments among hyper-specialists. Then I found a nice site at http://smm.org/catal/introduction/ (the Science Museum of Minnesota!), which includes an overview of information (including a sound clip on pronunciation of Catal Huyuk, images, and a short, very choppy video. The best part is the “activities” page, which is very attractive and interactive, with an “imagine you lived here” interface, allowing kids to cook a neolithic dinner, investigate seeds found and their modern counterparts, and study satellite images that show changes in topography over thousands of years. The excellent thing about this site is that although it is clearly for children, it is rich in authentic content. There are two games, the best being a digging strategy game that allows students to see how strategies for digging the smallest number of holes will reveal the identity of a picture underneath. Brilliant. Other areas of the site are “Mysteries” (featuring “The Goddess Figurine-” and the
Baby Burial-” Comic Books. This is very attractively packaged knowledge, and includes brief accounts of differing archeological interpretations of the finds. The “Artifacts” section features about a dozen objects found at the site. To bounce off of the “is it the same as being there?” question, I could answer that as an encapsulated experience from the comfort of a chair, a visitor could learn in a short time what archaeologists have spent years figuring out, and still come away with some sense of respect for the process and the tentative nature of the study, as well as the technology involved in an archaeological investigation.