Teaching History in the Digital Age

In the introductory lecture to the course, Professor Kelly noted that Sarah Horton’s Web Teaching Guide was published in 2000 and remains the authority on the subject to this day. This I find astonishing given the speed of the development of internet technologies. Now, in fairness, I have read the book and do not know if the website www.webteachingguide.com has been kept up to date with current developments.

One of the developments which I feel if a glaring ommission is something rather near and dear to us, for we are required to post in it every week, blogs! On page 23 of the Guide there is a chart listing desired sample content of a course website, and under Comments column for the item Discussion it is written “Is there a way to post links and comments? Need to check with computing. Also, can students post things besides text, such as images or video?” While I understand that this is to represent a complete novice’s approach, it is important to consider all of the changes that have taken place over the past 6 years. The internet, through blogs, has become much more user friendly. Even people like myself, with approximately 20 minutes of education in writing HTML, are able to create pretty decent looking websites with the help of tools like Blogger. Additionally, blogs are able to post videos and images with the help of countless online hosting services. Videos can be hosted on websites such as www.youtube.com and images on websites such as www.photobucket.com, websites that will automatically create the HTML code for you so that all one needs to do is simply copy and paste the code into the text of one’s blog post.

There are a number of concerns raised in this book that I found are significantly out of date. Digital cameras are mentioned as being low resolution, and problematic when this is now no longer the case. Digital cameras compete with film so effectively now that Nikon has essentially abandoned the film camera market, producing now only two models of film SLR cameras. Additionally, concerns are raised in the book about excessive use of audio and video because “the majority of your students connect to the Web using slow modems” (84.) This is also no longer the case. When was the last time you surfed the web on a 56k modem? Granted high speed internet is not available in every single household, but in a university setting, high speed internet would seem to me to be the exception to the rule.

Now the fact that this book is out of date doesn’t detract from the important and valuable information with regards to structuring a website. But it does paint an inaccurate picture of the state of the technological development, giving a reader the mistaken impression that what they might want to do with their website is a lot more difficult than it actually is. An updated book I feel is needed. I liked this quote in the last few paragraphs of the book: “New technologies are constantly introduced that promise to revolutionize the way we do things on the Web. Those that can keep pace change the design and methods they use on their sites about every year. Those sites that are not regularly updated quickly become long in the tooth.” Condemned by her own words. If that statement is true, and design and site methods are revolutionized on a yearly basis, why hasn’t there been an updated version?