Teaching History in the Digital Age

Posting Update – Third time must be a charm — Ammon,on my second attempt to post the site was completely down from (7:00 PM – 8:43 PM)

I chose to evaluate two websites from a design perspective. By doing so, I hoped to learn the material of the sites, as well as discover ease of use and if the sites provided creative elements that want me to explore what information and tools are contained within each site.

The Liberty, Equality, Fraternity website offers a simple, yet creative homepage and its primary goal of providing “an accessible and lively introduction to the French Revolution” is obvious by its tagline “Exploring the French Revolution.” The homepage is uncluttered by a lot of text, which makes the person visiting the site click on a navigation button to continue to another layer of the site. Rather than put the line “With 12 topical essays, 250 images…,” I would use what are the clear navigation buttons: “Explore,” “Search,” and “Browse” as the invitations to view the contents of the site. The information buttons are clear as information buttons because they are set off to the right-hand lower corner.
I started with the “About This Site” button, as I wanted to discover what the site’s mission is. The introductory paragraph summarized clearly what the mission of the site is and I found that the information mentioned above, “with 12 topical essays, 250 images…,” is more suited for this page. This button also provides site navigation instructions that could be an excellent option on the homepage rather than under this page as to some the words “search” and “browse” mean the same thing as what this site calls “Quick Search.” Although the location of the three navigation buttons make it clear that they are buttons that lead one to the material of the site, the titles of the buttons do not offer a definition of what is behind each button. By including a separate navigation tutorial button instead of putting it on the “About This Site” button, which many users would choose ignore completely it would make the user more apt to click on it to learn how to efficiently use this site. This simple change would make content within the site even easier to access than it is currently is.
The “Book and CD-Rom” button is nicely labeled and the page does no more than what it says; nice and concise. I like the “Credits” page, but would have liked to see an email address, or a few where I could email questions regarding site content, etc. The button that links to “Imaging of the French Revolution” is excellent, yet its location at the bottom of the page does not highlight the valuable new material. An easy move to the top, where the current line “With 12 topical essays, 250 images…,” would draw attention to this link.

Overall, this site is simple to navigate and if I were not viewing it from a critical standpoint I would find Liberty, Equality, Fraternity full of easy-to-find information on the French Revolution.

The second site I visited was Women in World History. I was first struck with how spread out the homepage is. Having to scroll down to view all of the elements of the site immediately makes the site appear possibly be difficult to use. By simply moving up the graphic and moving down the seven navigation buttons below the image, the site would fit onto a page that would not need to scroll and make it more inviting for exploration.

Other than the extra-long homepage, this website provides a clean way to explore Women in World History. Each secondary page nicely includes information on what one will find within that navigation area. The simplicity of the site makes it virtually impossible to get lost within it. The inclusion of the navigation buttons on the top and bottom of each page allows one to go back to previous sections of the site and explore additional sections of the site without having to return to the homepage, but the homepage is always easily accessible from every page.

The site uses alternatives of presentation such as video under the “Analyzing Evidence” section. If ones chooses, they can listen to a scholar discuss a particular topic. However, if the user cannot listen to a video, transcripts are provided. Such detail allows for a very user-friendly site. In addition, this site provides external links for additional information on this topic. Women in World History presents a clean, straightforward website that is simple in design and easy to navigate. It is a site that makes the user willing to explore what the site has to offer

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I chose to explore an art history site for Week 8 and was pleasantly surprised Columbia University’s Media Center for Art History, Archeology, and Historic Preservation with Stephen Murray currently serving as its director. http://www.mcah.columbia.edu/

The center “explores material culture, vision, media, and pedagogy in the broadest sense to connect faculty research and student learning through the creative application of technology.” It appears that they are just beginning to house digital projects on the site, but with exploring this site and Stephen Murray’s faculty homepage there were wonderful examples of how to present art and its history to a wider audience of students, teachers, and connoisseurs. The web projects range from periods in art such as Romanesque, Gothic, Medieval, Byzantine, and Modern.

I decided to analyze the web project on Unpacking Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. http://www.learn.columbia.edu/demoiselles/ The site requires Macromedia Flash and the homepage provides a link to download the software should the user not have it.
The colors of the website are simple and appear to not take away from Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Upon entering the site there is virtually no text and the user must rollover the text provided in order to continue to the depths of the website. And this is where I had to stop. It was not until a got to the secondary page and clicked on “Pablo Picasso” that I discovered I needed a Columbia University ID and password; how disappointing as it appears to be a visually stimulating website. So I will continue on to another web project.
Number two – Istanbul Documentation Project. http://www.learn.columbia.edu/istanbul/
Again, the homepage contains virtually no text except for explaining that Flash and QuickTime are needed to view the site – the words “Flash Plug-In” and “QuickTime Media Player” are hyperlinks to the necessary downloads. In addition, a user ID and password are provided so that those entering can view the images. After hitting ‘Enter” a second webpage is opened.
The dark blue background is a good choice as this site is image-heavy and using a dark color frames the images rather than detracts from the image. There is an introductory page with rotating images of Istanbul and one must scroll there mouse over the images to ‘Skip the Intro” or right-click their mouse to move to the main page.
After entering, the page would be better served if one did not have to scroll down to discover what is available within this website, rather a page that fits on the screen would be preferred to make it easy to discover what the site has to offer. The navigation buttons are on the right-hand side and are not easy to view as the text faces the right. The interactive map on this main page offers various elements. It is easy to discover that the “dots” are links to additional information, which appear on the right-hand side of the map. Below the map is very small text that makes the user have to come close to the screen to see what links they have to the map. They end up being layers of the city of Istanbul and are a pleasant addition to the map. Unfortunately, when I went to click on the buttons with the layers of the city up I could not click on all of them and this is where I had to be intuitive as no instructions were provided to remove the layers. It turned out that I had to go to the bottom of the map and re-click on the layers to remove them.
The “Introduction” button did not open a new page. Instead it filled the right-hand side of the map. I was a little concerned at the amount of text in such a small place until I noticed an icon that would bring the text to a PDF document. if this was not there, I would immediately choose to leave the site because, although, the dark background is great for the images white text can be difficult to read, especially when there is a lot of it. The last paragraph of the introduction lets the user know the purpose of the interactive map. This information would be much more useful on the homepage prior to getting to the map than within the introduction to Istanbul. When I went to close the PDF page my computer froze up (the first time), closed the web page completely (the second time) and froze up (the third time). Obviously, this element needs to be repaired.
After I reopened the site, I went to the “Monuments” button, which brings up a nice hyper-linked list of Byzantine and Ottoman monuments of Istanbul. Each hyperlink provides a brief description and image of the monument. This information is contained in the only area where there is text – the right side of the interactive map. Therefore, to get back to the list of monuments one needs to click on the navigation bar’s “Monuments” button; a slight annoyance, but not something that detracts from the website.
The “Images” button opens up an external link where the User ID and password are needed. What is nice, if you forgot to write down this information the initial page is separate and can be restored to view the User ID and password. The page takes a little to load and when it finally comes up you are prompted to go to a new link as the page has moved. This new page did not prompt me to enter an ID and password, but does seem to allow a creation of individual profiles. The images are just that, images with little descriptive information about the monuments, but do allow the user to click on various sizes of each image. The link change does make viewing each image time consuming, as you must go back to the “Image” list to click on the next image you choose to view.
The next navigation button is “QTVR,” which for the technically challenged refers to a Quick Time Virtual Reality. Each link to the monument brings the user to a 360 degree view of the monuments of the website. The last navigation button is “Key.” This link provides a key for the interactive map and would be much better-suited on the map where the layers are located rather than has a separate navigation tool.
Over all, this site provides very interesting information on ancient Istanbul, but is not for the novice, both from a scholastic standpoint as well as from a technological standpoint. I wanted to explore every element of this website because it presented the material in a way that wanted me to view all the monuments of Byzantine and Ottoman Istanbul. One aspect that would have been beneficial is to include external links that could offer more in depth historical background of Istanbul.