Taking on Thomas Friedman and the M.O.O.C.’s

Please read Mark Byrnes’ take on Thomas Friedman’s embrace of the MOOC as the future of learning. As much as I want to write about this, Byrnes does it way better.

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 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.