Digital History in the Classroom in Practice

I find myself using digital tools in the classroom as much as I formerly used other resources to bolster my teaching and presentations. Just in this semester, I have used two different varieties of collaboration through digital methods within my undergraduate classrooms. When I have run these options, I instantly recognized that using digital tools in the class are tricky since there are limits to what I can do in a single period without enhancing the project to be unwieldy.

The first iteration came within the the first several weeks of History 101, Western Civilizations. I found myself droning on about explorers and the class (which is at 6 pm) was clearly not engaged in the material as I presented it. I reached into my teaching experience to have the class develop a list of explorers on a Google Spreadsheet. The spreadsheet was shared access with the class and editable by them. They had several minutes to collaborate and develop some cursory answers for who the explorers/conquistadors were and what they meant. The limitations to this exercise were severe, but it allowed groups of students to experience collaboration, sharing efforts, and for the class to collectively assess the value of the explorations.

The second iteration came with discussing the Enlightenment. Enlightenment thinkers writ large, including those associated with the scientific revolution, reads as a long list, but when groups of three are told to assess the value of several thinkers and list their contributions, it becomes a learning experience through developing and sharing information. The second component of this exercise was to map the primary locations of each of these thinkers. With a quick overview, we could see that many thinkers lived in similar areas and it is clear the opportunities for collaboration and shared ideas. Inspiration drives inspiration – at least at a cursory overview. You can view the document here.

Digital history can be more than the long-lasting, architecture-intense, behemoths that can tax individual and university resources. Digital history can be short and intense and still yield positive results.

Digital Humanities and their tools: Omeka and Neatline

Over the last several years the great folks at several universities deeply committed to digital work have produced two of the most useful production tools, Omeka and Neatline. These two pieces of an essential digital toolbox allow for users to build and display digital creations of humanities, but especially history.

Omeka is an open source tool that gives users the ability to build digital collections. Using a simple yet robust interface, Omeka allows users to build websites that draw from digital archives of material large or small. It is usable and manageable. Most importantly for many scholars, it does not require deep programming knowledge to use nor does it expect a large collection to be mediated through its servers. Omeka is both usable as a downloadable version onto servers or can be used as Omeka.net will host user uploaded content. Created by the Center for History and New Media through George Mason University, Omeka may be the most important foundation for digital humanists and historians on the internet. But that is not all.

At it’s core, Omeka is a foundation on which other projects can be created. In the last few days, the Scholar’s Lab at the University of Virginia released Neatline – a way to extend a collection hosted through Omeka to display in both space and time. Using what appears to be a modification of Exhibit, a product of the Simile projects at M.I.T. labs, Neatline integrates the display of information through time and space – using an interlaced Timeline and Google Maps display along with pop-up bubbles. I have used Exhibit to create numerous projects, especially for the Railroads and the Making of Modern America project, all of which required me to relearn the coding process for building displays. I knew that Exhibit was the easiest tool to use for what we needed it to do – integrate timelines with maps. What Exhibit wanted to do, Neatline perfects. It is now exceedingly easy to build a mediated collection of digital history items that can be displayed however the user desires online. Neatline is simple to get started and robust enough to display content as the user sees fit. It is easy to use, something Exhibit attempted but struggled with.

Using Omeka to build a collection of material, no matter the size, and combining it with Neatline’s display possibilities would allow scholars of all levels to demonstrate their work in new ways, extending understanding and user interaction in ways text simply cannot. I cannot wait to build with Omeka and Neatline together and see what I can do.

Digital Scaffolding

In June, I am presenting at two different classes for Nebraska Wesleyan University on history. I am not just teaching history this time around. Rather, in the first class I am presenting historical topics coupled with primary source material to current secondary teachers who will be building lesson plans that incorporate the material presented each day.

I will be presenting from Ohio State’s Prohibition site, and from two of the major sites I have worked on: Nebraska’s Railroads and the Making of Modern America and Civil War Washington. Each of the sites offer both commentary and analysis coupled with plenty of primary sources in original formats. For both Civil War Washington and Railroads and the Making of Modern America, the original intentions of the projects included making the information relevant and usable for teachers in the classroom, but there has been little direct use by classroom teachers in using these sources.

This is the challenge of building digital sources and pillars of information. In order to ensure use, there must be some press for the scholarship to be used – a method of publishing and pushing out the availability of the projects. It is rare for sites without much publicity to become popular. There needs to be some press beyond being located within Google’s parameters. Civil War Washington has amazing information, most of which is just recently coming to fruition mostly because there had been little press in the right directions to make the site relevant to teachers. The Railroad and the Making of Modern America site also faced similar constrictions for a while. With the publication of The Iron Way, the website spiked in interest from a wide array of directions.

When we create websites with an intended audience, we need to find ways to connect with that audience. Sometimes we are fortunate to get outside press for a re-launch or we generate some considerable buzz. For those of us working in alt-academic circles, we have a purpose for our projects and have to build interest in what we are doing.

The second class I am working on this summer is Teaching with Technology, a course designed for current teachers to hone their use of digital tools for their classrooms. I am teaching this course with Leslie Working under the Historical Studies program. This course focuses on the tools that we use, both online and off and how to better use them in the classroom. One of the offshoots of the course will be to introduce the class of fifty or so participants to the work Leslie and I have done over the past several years on the Railroads and the Making of Modern America project, the Civil War Washington project, the Crossing Indian Territory site and the Suffrage Activism website. Each of these different projects will benefit from the course (as of course will the participants), but the publicity is ancillary to the original projects. The projects did not ask for the publicity, but since we use these sites as examples of possibilities they will gain ample exposure.

Connecting with our intended audiences is always complicated. If your history project is intended to be used at a variety of levels, the information needs to be available to be scaffolded to the intended audience. Similarly, if the project is for multiple levels, it should be apparent how each could use the material. Creation of the project needs to keep the end-user in mind. Scaffolding the digital project so each successive level can build on what was learned before keeps the audience interested, the users engaged and maintains the usability of the project.

Foucault and Digital History

Philosophy of history does not often reach into the digital realm – often history is treated one way and digital worlds are treated another. Today the We Think History blog has an interesting piece on Foucault and Digital History, tracing some of the philosophical trends that digital history must face and bringing questions to the emerging field. This is a very interesting if not provocative piece, if not for the questions it raises, then for the reviving of Foucault’s philosophical acumen.

Code Academy and its detractors

In the past year, an internet startup CodeAcademy has sparked lots of interest and some professional detractors. It has me engaged and I am torn over its usage.

CodeAcademy promises you can learn to code as an interactive and fun way to learn with your friends. “Coding” for CodeAcademy is learning JavaScript – an essential piece of programming language. The website provides an interactive write space to follow the instructions posted. The instructions are clear and well written. As one uses the page it feels like you are doing “something” even if you don’t know what it is exactly.

CodeAcademy presents an interesting dilemma for those of us who call ourselves Digital Historians and are also teachers. First on the teaching part: the website gives instruction on how to write code. One is rewarded with virtual patches and can observe one’s progress on a sliding scale. This is good. But as others have pointed out, CodeAcademy fails on the pedagogical front. It is call and response, but not built on a scaffolding model founded on theory. The basic theoretical understanding of why you are doing what you are doing is lost. The programming side may be strong, but as the call for employees does not include any positions for teachers or those with pedagogical understanding, the “Academy” part is lost. But is there value for online startups that promise you to learn how to code? Yes! This is where the books on how to code have lost out on the “born digital” teaching methods. Teaching code online has definite advantages, but the best way to learn is with a teacher and preferably in a classroom. Somehow using computers to make them do what you want them to do (coding) has been relegated to something that amateurs can do and in a weird way does not need to be taught in the classroom. This is flawed.

CodeAcademy does have its uses, especially for those who are trying to make the jump from analog to digital history. It is very difficult to make time for class that may be the best way to learn but not fit schedules. If you have a direct need of learning basic coding, CodeAcademy might be the best place to get started. I think this, or something very similar, should be required before any humanist starts to call themselves “digital.” Having a digital presence, while a good start, does not make a digital humanist.

Code Academy can be a great place to begin one’s quest of having a digital identity.