Clio Wired (History 696)

My first point is that that we keep talking about the power of the internet to provide a "choose-your-own-adventure" learning experience. For young learners, surfing through 1000s of google hits and other portals usually leads to a very broad and often only loosely connected body of information. These sources can be woven together in creative ways that could produce meaningful and worthwhile results, but unfortunately (to me at least), schools seem to obsess about depth, focus, and standard interpretations to predetermined questions (i.e. "right" and "wrong" answers) rather than independence, resourcefulness, creativity, and artfulness. While I would not suggest accepting any random thing a student might write, I do think if we could adjust the value we place on certain academic skills, without sacrificing rigor, the Internet could be a greater asset in the classroom.

Also, this arrangement seems to transfer more of the responsibility in the teaching/learning relationship to the student, who is now expected to individually explore and discover the materials that will be the sources of information. The teacher, then, would ideally spend less time collecting or distributing source material and more time guiding the students in its use. However, in reality, the teacher might spend more time policing the legitimacy of hundreds of random sources their students find. We talked about this, and the Webography Project was offered as a partial solution to this problem. But I wonder if constraining the boundaries of the internet actually limits some of the benefits of the medium (more on this below).

Finally, the more and more ubiquitous the Internet and digital mediums become, the more they are likely to shape not only the methods of teaching and learning, but also foundational thinking processes with which students will approach the task of building historical understanding. The David Pace article gave numerous examples of the disconnect between professional academics and the students they hoped to teach in order to argue that historians should pay more attention to being "scholarly teachers" (paragraph 11). Pace's call for more informed teaching rests on the fact that students approach learning with a variety of thinking patterns that shape how they are able to process, evaluate, and produce information and ideas. With this in mind, I would argue that the greatest impact of digital mediums lies not in how they can be used to teach or learn in different ways, but rather in how they affect the habits people form in their thinking processes.

One classic clio example of this is Prof. Kelly's story about the poor kids who couldn't figure out impossibility of the answerless puzzle because they had been playing peasant quest too much. But kids' exposure to digital forms has expanded vastly since the days of the apple IIe, and it would be interesting to see the same test offered again for kids who spent significant time on the Internet, IM, and massive online gaming communities. Would the new phenomena of perpetual distraction (Ken's term from earlier in the semester? or constant partial attention maybe?), habitual skimming, ambiguous online identities, continual surfing of links, and the formation of non-geographically-dependent relationships improve children's ability to form mental connections, ask new questions, and become more critical of motives and meaning? Or will students simply become masters of compartmentalizing their world and expect to have ready answers handed to them at only a few key strokes? The reality will probably fall somewhere in between these extremes, so finding and responding to this will be the job of the successful digital teacher of the future.

I know this is quickly becoming a dissertation that is too long for any normal human to read, but I just thought of this--if digital mediums do change the way people think and economics still make a huge difference to kids' access to these resources, will there be more of a difference between how affluent kids learn compared to their disadvantaged counterparts?