Teaching and Research in the New Media: Theory

The American Historical Association held a Pre-Meeting Workshop today at its annual meeting in Washington, DC on the “Intersection between Teaching and Research in the New Media”. I was able to attend for most of the day and wanted to share with you some of the highlights from several thought-provoking sessions. This is a very long post, but I wanted to provide sufficient details on recommendations, lessons learned, references, and successful strategies to be of greatest use to those who were unable to attend.

Keynote Address

Ed Ayers, president of the University of Richmond, opened the session discussing his goal to use new media to build community among students, classes, and colleges through a giant collaborative research project (a really big moderated wiki). He also stressed the need to create “intentional archives,” and not just digitized materials. As a demonstration, he discussed his initial efforts at the University of Virginia with the Valley of the Shadow and History Engine projects. The value of these Web sites is that they show how the past is connected in space and time by allowing users to search by date, place, topic, and episode—you can see disparate information simultaneously, something that is difficult to achieve in traditional narrative histories. UVa students initially developed the content but then the development of standards and training workshops allows professors at other universities to contribute content. During the process, Ayers discovered that students liked seeing their efforts “published” and worked hard to ensure it was “Web worthy”, no longer feeling their assignments had little value after completing the class. Furthermore, reliance on the submission of others provided some peer pressure to develop good materials and content expanded as the work of a class would build upon the work of previous classes. He did admit that the project was complex, required constant maintenance, and he was supported by many teaching assistants who would review and monitor work. Although many people are hesitant to tackle such complex projects, he urged everyone to “just plunge in and see what breaks.”

Ayers closed his presentation with a discussion of projects at the University of Richmond, some of which are under development. His current effort is to help “visualize social patterns”, a technique commonly used by scientists. He has taken freely available information (such as census data), plotted it on a map using GIS, and arranged each map into a chronological series, and constructed a movie by using morphing techniques in Adobe After Effects. These Quicktime movies reveal patterns, or in his demonstration, a US map showing the changes in African American population from 1810-1970. It’s like watching time lapse photographs or moving weather maps on tv. Although not available yet, he hopes to use this technique for an “Atlas of American Voting”.

Theory

David Jaffee of the City College of New York discussed that historians are easily impressed with digital archives because it allows rare material to be easily accessible both off-site and through search engines and it holds the promise of allowing students to “do history.” Unfortunately, simply sending students off into the archives doesn’t work—they need guidance through a structured experience (e.g., analyzing sources, creating hypotheses, navigating archives). As a result, he’s worked with several scholars to create structured activities for Investigating U. S. History and used “Evangelicalism in Antebellum America” by Jonathan Sassi as a demonstration. Jaffee believed that scholars have made a “pictorial turn” and that images (such as HABS photos) are now much more commonly used as evidence, not merely as illustrations, but warned that “abundance and availability does not lead to historical understanding.” He suggested we need to help student analyze images and presented the National Gallery of Art’s “interactive portrait” of George Washington as a model. Jaffee also pointed to some potential directions for new media at the Sophie Project and the Visible Knowledge Project. In his closing remarks, Jaffee argued that the new new media questions how history should be taught and shows that most history teachers do not know how students learn.

Kathryn Sklar and Tom Dublin took a different approach with their project by creating “authoritative work” on the Web for both students and scholars. Their survey of the Web showed that women’s history was seriously absent, thus they created content that was focused and deep in their Women and Social Movements in the U. S. [unfortunately, only available through subscription]. Although scholars and students both share the goal of creating new knowledge, they have different communities of discourse, that is, scholars discuss among scholars using different set of rules (weighing evidence, referencing sources, mutual critique to create authoritative work) than students (who talk to other students and results in non-authoritative work), thus Web sites must serve each audience separately. To do this, they’ve identified a major historical question, selected rare documents to address the topic, and then supplemented the documents with a scholarly introduction, biographies, a bibliography, links and for teachers, suggested lesson plans. “How Did African-American Women Define Their Citizenship at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893?” provides an example of the design of a typical module. Sklar noted that funding for this project ended when it was no longer experimental (foundations tend to only fund new or model projects, not on-going ones), thus partnered with a publisher to maintain the content (hence it is now only available by subscription).

John McClymer of Assumption College argued that we need to eliminate the difference between pedagogy and epistemology, stating that, “to learn history, you need to do history,” an approach that’s typically used in science labs. Instead, the typical history course doesn’t do very much history at all—students read textbooks (secondary sources), take quizzes, learn superficial information, etc. Instead, he advocated a new strategy that opens with dissonance and an overload of information, then a quick assignment to gauge student reactions, followed by a puzzle or question and a series of primary sources to explore the topic. McClymer felt that it was acceptable for students to have more questions than answers (”it’s not chemistry”) and because they won’t be able to master a topic in one course, it’s more important to focus on the process of inquiry and maintain their interest in history. He strongly recommended Stephen Mintz’s Digital History as a resource for students and teachers. [For more details on his thinking, see "An Inquiry Approach to Teaching U.S. History".]

Mills Kelly of George Mason University closed the session by discussing the differences in using media between teachers and students. He believed that there is a disconnect between the resources we create online and what students do, noting that although we frequently use email, students instead use text messaging. We don’t know what students do with the materials we create—we see their products (i.e., papers, exhibits, test results) but don’t understand the process (i.e., decision-making, analysis, organization). We need to allow manipulation, sharing, and connecting with others—a shortcoming of UVa’s History Engine. Kelly recommended the Pew Internet and American Life Project’s report on teens and social media, which shows that most teenagers have created online content, are more conscious of on-line privacy than adults, and use social networks that make no sense to us (e.g. Facebook).

The discussion that followed raised many issues, including the limited availability of multimedia sources (e.g., audio, video), whether students should be allowed to create content for the Web, few scholars or teachers have sufficient skills or experience to use new media, the need to teach teachers how to do good history, the balance between good design/production values and scholarship/content, the disconnect between the history and education departments at universities, the demands of standards of learning and testing, whether self-organizing and tagging should be allowed for users, whether the classroom should be separate from the outside world (a retreat from the treadmill) or integrate new media, if the new media can be better than a book, and the 1898 AHA report on the Study of History in Schools.

The session on “practice” will posted in a future blog entry.