Clio Wired (History 696)

After reading Pace's article, Dr. Kelly's article about his experiment at Texas Tech, and reviewing the on-line heuristic tools such as Who Killed William Robinson? and the CHNM's Webography Project, I read through everyone's responses to the topic. It seems that most people are "on board" with this digital revolution, willing (if not always eager) to see the utility and promise in digital media for instructional use. To no one's great surprise, I'm sure, I agree for the most part.

But after class last week, it seems to me that the toughest nut to crack is how to measure whether a student is learning in a better way through digital media. Indeed, in considering my future career as a professor, I wonder how I will judge whether or not my students are learning at all. Will I encourage what Dr. Kelly called the "compromise answer?" Lecture for a semester, hold a couple review sessions, field student questions about the exam, and then present questions that they have a reasonable expectation of providing the answers I have hinted to them throughout the semester. To be perfectly frank, and to echo Scott's nostalgia, such was my experience in undergrad classes not even ten years ago. We had one professor in my History department interested in utilizing the digital medium for instruction. The result? For a couple of semesters, every history class has a "discussion board," not unlike this blog, but with limited student interaction. Also, I recall my wife having to develop a web project for a class with this particular professor way back in 2000. But that's it - readings were still books or packets purchased at the bookstore, primary sources were located through legwork in the university library or in local archives, etc.

Are we much further today? Judging from the sites we viewed last week, I would suggest that we are. The digital medium allows access to sources and didactic tools in levels unheralded a decade earlier. But I don't think it's the ease of access that promotes "better" learning now opposed to then. Rather, I submit that it is the immersion and interactivity engendered by such powerful access that can potentially motivate a student to greater achievement.

Now, I may indeed be blowing smoke here. My teaching experience is limited to instruction in basic military tasks given to young recruits in an environment that can only be described as draconian and the embodiment of rote memorization. Alas, the joys of living expenses in NoVA have precluded me from looking for an assistantship to practice my instructional method. However, I can recall that in the truly exceptional classes I had as a student myself, the common element among them was offering me a level of agency with regards to my own education. Whether it was being presented with forms of primary sources I had never used before (personal journals, troop manifests, etc.) or being asked to do more in a classroom environment than taking notes or participating in discussion (actually teaching one module, perhaps), these were the times that learning became internalized and contextualized.

Such, I feel, is the great promise of the digital classroom. By giving the students not just the freedom to access the material, but the license to manipulate, deconstruct, and reconstruct the information, the knowledge gained is quantifiably better and qualitatively more useful.