Resources

Since 1994 under the founding direction of Roy Rosenzweig, the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University has used digital media and computer technology to democratize history—to incorporate multiple voices, reach diverse audiences, and encourage popular participation in presenting and preserving the past.

CHNM uses digital media and technology to preserve and present history online, transform scholarship across the humanities, and advance historical education and understanding. Each year CHNM’s many project websites receive over 16 million visitors, and over a million people rely on its digital tools to teach, learn, and conduct research.

CHNM’s work has been recognized with major awards and grants from the American Historical Association, the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Department of Education, the Library of Congress, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Mellon, Sloan, Hewlett, Rockefeller, Gould, Delmas, and Kellogg foundations.

The Selected Civil War Photographs Collection contains 1,118 photographs. Most of the images were made under the supervision of Mathew B. Brady, and include scenes of military personnel, preparations for battle, and battle after-effects. The collection also includes portraits of both Confederate and Union officers, and a selection of enlisted men.

An additional two hundred autographed portraits of army and navy officers, politicians, and cultural figures can be seen in the Civil War photograph album, ca. 1861-65. (James Wadsworth Family Papers). The full album pages are displayed as well as the front and verso of each carte de visite, revealing studio logos, addresses, and other imprint information on the approximately twenty photographers represented in the album.

In this issue of Academic Commons we look at the possibilities for building knowledge around teaching and learning in a rapidly changing technological landscape. We take these questions up in the context of a dual challenge: to understand better the changing nature of learning with new media, and the potential of new media environments to make learning--and faculty insights into teaching--visible and usable.

Funded by the U.S. Department of Education (contract number ED-07-CO-0088), the National History Education Clearinghouse (NHEC) is designed to help K-12 history teachers access resources and materials to improve U.S. history education in the classroom.

The Clearinghouse, funded through the Office of Innovation and Improvement's Teaching American History (TAH) program, builds on and disseminates the valuable lessons learned by more than 800 TAH projects designed to raise student achievement by improving teachers' knowledge and understanding of traditional U.S. history.

The Center for History and New Media (CHNM) and the Stanford University History Education Group have created the Clearinghouse with the goal of placing history content, teaching strategies, current research and issues, community building, and easy access to resources at center stage.

We aim to bring together the many communities involved in improving history education and professional development for history teachers, allowing practitioners, historians, administrators, and history educators to present multiple perspectives, debate current issues, and work together to improve history teaching in classrooms throughout the United States.

The Commons was launched on January 16 2008, when we released our pilot project in partnership with The Library of Congress. Both Flickr and the Library were overwhelmed by the positive response to the project! 

The program has two main objectives:

• To increase access to publicly-held photography collections, and
• To provide a way for the general public to contribute information and knowledge. (Then watch what happens when they do!)

Historical Thinking Matters provides high school students with a framework that teaches them to read documents like historians. Using these "habits of mind," they will be able to interrogate historical sources and use them to form reasoned conclusions about the past. Equally important, they will become critical users of the vast historical archives on the web. Historical Thinking Matters equips students to navigate the uncharted waters of the World Wide Web. The site is the winner of the American Historical Association's 2008 James Harvey Robinson Prize for an Outstanding Teaching Aid.

The Object of History is a cooperative project between the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media. The project was conceived of in an effort to find a low cost way for students and teacher of U.S. History to have access to the museum’s collections and the expertise of the curators. As a result the materials on the site are designed to improve students’ content knowledge of standard topics in U.S. History and to improve their ability to understand material culture objects as types of historical evidence.

A second goal of the project is to provide smaller museums and historical societies with a model for creating similar materials using their own collections and expertise. Hence, in January 2008, we will offer a downloadable package that will include templates, a database structure, and a guide to creating object lessons using the software. This free package will be available to all interested users and will be composed using open source software.

With the support of the Institute of Museum and Library Services and in collaboration with Minnesota's Land Management Information Center, the Minnesota Historical Society has created True North: Mapping Minnesota's History to provide Minnesota's teachers with the knowledge, curriculum, and tools to teach the state's new graduation standards for geography and history, using online digital resources and applications.

The Horizon Project, as the centerpiece of NMC's Emerging Technologies Initiative, charts the landscape of emerging technologies for teaching, learning and creative expression and produces the NMC’s annual Horizon Report. Since the launch of the Horizon Project in March 2002, the NMC has held an ongoing series of conversations and dialogs with hundreds of technology professionals, campus technologists, faculty leaders from colleges and universities, and representatives of leading corporations.

Each year, an Advisory Board considers the results of these dialogs and also looks at a wide range of articles, published and unpublished research, papers, and websites to generate a list of technologies, trends, challenges, and issues that knowledgeable people in technology industries, higher education, and museums are thinking about.

Each edition of the Horizon Report is released with a Creative Commons License and may be freely replicated and distributed for noncommercial purposes provided that each is distributed only in its entirety.