Clio Wired (History 696)

For example, the "purpose" of the Valley of the Shadow Project is to act as "as a research library in a box, enabling students at places without a large archive to do the same kind of research as a professional historian."

My own experience with new media up until this point was at UVa in the American Studies Master's program where we constructed and maintained Xroads, a repository for student work and "tools" for studying American Culture. Frankly, I just thought working with new media was neat; I never really had any underlying motivation in mind to start. I wasn't even aware that we had an m.o., but checking out the website now, we apparently did:

We agreed early on that the site's primary objective was to be useful to students of American culture; each of the sub-pages in AS@UVA is designed as a service, a utility, something to do work. In effect, the whole thing seemed more real in the sense that they weren't just accumulating course credits that would eventually be exchanged for a diploma -- they were building something tangible, something useful. And they would leave with the usual transcripts and diplomas but also with a portfolio of their work, examples of what they knew and could do.

Interestingly, Alan Howard, my advisor at UVa, also presented a paper entitled "New Paradigms for Teaching and Learning: Four Case Studies" International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities at the University of the Aegean in Rhodes, Greece in 2003. In it, he looks at Four sites at UVa (Uncle Tom's Cabin, Xroads [of course], Salem Witch Trials, and The Valley of the Shadow) as "transformative" educational tools:

In my judgment, we are now at something like the cast-iron storefront stage in our educational use of the new technologies. We understand them primarily as the means to teach with greater efficiency and flexibility at lower per-unit costs... But the highest and best use of the technologies can't be simply to provide a more cost-efficient way to massify the retailing information, some sort of high-tech successor to the correspondence school. I think they should be understood, instead, as a new kind of lens that allows us to create different kinds of knowledge, more complex and credible models for describing the way the world works and that will be arrived at by different means.

I agree with Alan that the technology can be used to do so much more, but I really don't think that any of the sites he mentions are really there yet. They present us with the information, maybe give us a different way to look at it, maaaaybe a different way to think about it, but not yet a different way to learn.

I think CHNM is really blazing the trails in terms of changing the way we teach and learn with new media. Not only do they "incorporate multiple voices, reach diverse audiences, and encourage popular participation in presenting and preserving the past," but with projects like the "Matters" Projects (History, World History, Historical Thinking) and Women in World History, etc., they are actually showing the reader a new way to think and learn--mapping out a path, explaining how to use the sources that they are making accessible, why they are important and what it all means.

This is where I think digital scholarship should be taking us...

...and I'm spent. Bed. now.