cac.ophony.org

Chuck Dziuban did a fine job, but as theory values the abstract over the concrete, his talk provoked thought more than it suggested actual, real uses of technology in the classroom. The second panel session I attended was a group of CUNY historians who designed online teaching modules as part of the “Investigating US History” project. The modules consist of scalable research projects that employ primary sources available via the Web. Students are directed to examine a series of historical documents—say, lithographs and advertisements related to the slave trade, or audio tapes of Lyndon Johnson’s conversations in the White House– and then to write responses, on a course Blackboard site, to the prompts of faculty members.

The historians involved in the project are top-notch, and both the scholarship directing the modules and the design of the site are strong. I was struck, however, by how methodologically similar the pedagogic process of these modules was to the ways in which primary sources have been mobilized in the teaching of history for years. The Web has drastically improved access to primary sources, and the success of these modules lies in how faculty have framed the sources for students and directed their exploration. The site harnesses the Web’s speed and ease of information exchange for high-level history teaching. In this case, new technologies have expanded what can be done in the classroom without significantly altering the processes of teaching and learning.

It seems to me that the next generation of technological teaching tools—the products of Web 2.0, which enable increased interactivity– may pose a challenge to traditional pedagogies. While I haven’t seen inside the Blackboard sites to the fruits of the “Investigating History” modules, they seem to work on the same tracks that the teaching of history has for some time. That is, a scholar/teacher provides materials and background for students to work through with guidance; as students do, they learn about the past and about participating in the historical project. These are sound pedagogical goals for any history course.

In other disciplines, blogs and wikis have upended traditional teaching methods and goals by empowering students with more accessible means to produce and disseminate knowledge. In the teaching of history, such empowering elements of the Web have been employed in this project to reinforce and strengthen one traditional model (while also enabling more robust discussions of visual culture due to the increased accessibility of images). Historians like those who presented at the conference sense that the future of teaching history lie in using technology to more vividly open up the worlds of the past to their students. It will be interesting to see if new technologies continue to reinforce traditional methods of teaching history, or if they challenge those methods. One example of how they might is here.