April 1, 2015 by Adina Langer
Last night we talked about an important audience for digital history projects: K-12 students and teachers. We also talked about historical thinking and about setting appropriate educational goals for digital history sites and other public history projects. After our discussion, students spent time browsing for possible grant-funding agencies to whom they could apply for digital history project funding.
Digital History Class Notes Week Eleven
March 31, 2015
4:30 p.m. – 4:45 p.m.
- Project check-in
- Exhibit outlines
- Workshop in two weeks
- You decide what part of exhibit you want to workshop
- Themes
- You don’t have to use Customeka or Mall_Theme, but those should provide you with more customization options.
- Upcoming deadlines
- April 14
- Exhibit part ready to workshop in class
- Sign-up for meeting date/time with me for the following week.
- Week of April 21
- Request the first draft of exhibit ready by Thursday, April 17, before your meeting with me. That will enable me to give you the best quality feedback.
- Annotated bibliography and grant narrative (if you choose to do one) also due by your meeting with me.
- All item rights must be secured.
- Securing rights
- Georgia Archives
- Emory MARBL
- Southern Spaces
- Adding additional items
- Anyone using Social Explorer?
4:45 p.m. – 6:05 p.m.
- Public History and Education
- Brainstorm public history institutions and practitioners:
- Museums
- Docents
- Archives
- Reenactors
- Archeologists
- Scholars/Historians
- Historic Sites (National Parks Service)
- Universities
- Governments offices
- Libraries
- Historical Societies
- Businesses
- Theme Parks
- High Schools— at least they should be.
- Education is central to the mission of public history
- How do public historians define their audiences?
- People who are interested in history — history consumers
- Visitors to the sites of history, (accidental visitors)
- Free-choice learners
- Audience classified by age
- Adults
- high school students
- Elementary school students
- Parents with toddlers
- Retirees
- Policy makers
- Everyone likely to first encounter history through
- Schools
- Family
- Trips to sites
- Effective educational policy requires the setting of educational goals, and the effective achievement of these goals requires an understanding of where public history audiences overlap, and where (and how) the most effective history learning can occur
- Digital history as a site of educational collaboration:
- Naturally lends itself to collaboration among archives, scholars, exhibition developers, and audiences.
- Why should digital history producers focus on the K-12 student and teacher audience?
- Start them young
- Introducing them to importance of history, foment enthusiasm, passion for history. What is history?
- Medium they understand better already– digital sites are accessible to young people.
- Museum sites have lesson plans
- How can digital history sites serve as gateways to life-long historical thinking and learning?
- Lesson plans
- Play to your strengths
- Meeting the standards
- Relating history being discussed to contemporary issues
- Making content personal
- How to set educational goals
- Understanding standards
- State social studies standards and frameworks
- https://www.georgiastandards.org/Standards/Pages/BrowseStandards/SocialStudiesStandards.aspx
- To accomplish our goal of informed citizens, it is essential that Social Studies teachers:
- Bridge essential understanding about the past to contemporary events.
- Assist students in understanding the nature of historical inquiry and the role of primary and secondary sources.
- Encourage the consideration of multiple perspectives on events
- Engage students in speculation about the known and unknown motives and actions of historic figures.
- Integrate the strands of Social Studies.
- Common Core standards for literature and math
- Assessment
- Document Based Questions
- Persuasive writing
- Content-oriented or fact-based tests
- Understanding historical thinking
- How is “historical thinking” different from other ways of thinking?
- Put yourself in the shoes of past actors. Figure out their motivations within the context of their time periods. Step away from your present experience.
- Approach the past as a foreign country. Forget about your own culture
- Acknowledging your bias
- Not about getting to the right answer– about learning, not about getting to a specific goal.
- Engaging in dialogue with source material and with past scholarship
- Think outside– the archive— archeology, literature, material culture, art history. Not just the textbook
- Can’t just go to academic sources— want to look at oral histories, and look for the gaps in the record.
- Then you have to analyze all of this source material for veracity and bias
- Showing how the record can disagree on reasons for events.
- Sam Wineberg of Stanford University defined it as an “unnatural act” due to the
- Necessity of distancing ourselves from present concerns and notions of direct causality.
- How do National History Standards (1994) define historical thinking skills?
- “In addition, true historical understanding requires students to engage in historical thinking: to raise questions and to marshal solid evidence in support of their answers; to go beyond the facts presented in their textbooks and examine the historical record for themselves; to consult documents, journals, diaries, artifacts, historic sites, works of art, quantitative data, and other evidence from the past, and to do so imaginatively — taking into account the historical context in which these records were created and comparing multiple points of view of those on the scene at the time.”
- What skills may be too challenging for K-12 students to master?
- Assessing significance requires a great deal of background knowledge.
- Assessing veracity of source material
- Being able to overcome present-mindedness
- People don’t know their own biases.
- Cross-cultural comparisons
- Language
- Limited in access to educational materials through socio-economic barriers
- Limits to going to archives
- Teachers’ skills can be limitations too– lack of professional development opportunities or interest
- What roles do Rosenzweig and Bass believe digital technology can play in improving social studies education/
- Inquiry
- Start with questions
- Start with curiosity
- Research process more than looking for specific answers
- Access to primary sources
- Search techniques and digital tools
- Bridging reading and writing
- Gathering evidence and then synthesizing it into a conclusion
- Access to evidence sets
- Mind-mapping software and other productivity tools
- Looking at things related to space— ways to looking at reading differently
- Cost-effective access
- Providing public forums for student work
- Easier to set up a blog
- Create presentations online
- Engaging with parents and other communities, sense of accomplish
- What are the requisites for these frameworks to be successful?
- Equity of access
- Proper teacher training
- Integration with assessment
- How should we assess digital history sites for their engagement with K-12 student and teacher audiences
- National History Education Clearinghouse http://teachinghistory.org/
- Pre-consultation with teachers is ideal for developing educational content on a digital history site
- American Memory Teaching Fellows, for example.
- Google analytics
- Not just about seeing how the site can fit the curriculum but also about seeing how your site can fill teachers’ needs.
- Whither the CD-ROM?
- What were some advantages of the CD-ROM as described in Rosenzweig and Brier? (Packed with over 8 gigs of space!!!)
- Portability
- Vetted, contained
- What were the pitfalls of CD-ROMS?
- How do modern learning tools compare?
- How can a digital history site replicate and go beyond those advantages while avoiding the pitfalls?
- Being good curators of content
- Can provide more content because you’re not limited by size
- Portability with apps and mobile sites
- Editing content
- But you still need to pay for people’s time.
6:05 – 6:15
6:15 – 7:00
- Grant-funding and you
- Exercise
- Break up into groups and browse available grants.
- Select a grant to which you could apply to develop a digital history project.
- Review organization mission statement and think about how that relates to possible digital history ideas.
- Brainstorm possible projects that could work with your grant.
- Come back together and present on your findings.
- John-Joseph, Kate, and Alexandra
- Very specific
- Try to think of a large organization that focuses on your content-area
- Each presidential library has own system of grants
- Jennie and Nathan
- Mostly looked at NEH Digital Humanities grants
- Implementation vs. Start-up grants
- Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere
- ArtStor digital humanities scholarship, but must use their software
- Susan and Austin
- Foundation Center for Atlanta
- Crest Foundation– art history
- Getty — also art history
- National Archives
- Digital dissemination of archival records
- National Railway Historical Society
- Becky and Caroline
- Alumni association and Greek Organizations on Campus for Georgia Tech
- ACC sports conference
- City planning commision
- Brookwood Hills neighborhood Association, Buckhead History Center
- Julie and Leslie
- Started with federal organizations
- Annenberg Trust?
- One of the High Schools has digitization needs and wants grant written for them
- Apply as individual vs. organization
- NPS and Department of the Interior
- IMLS
- but nothing specific for this purpose
- How much control should grant-givers exert over their projects
- Names on grants
- People censor themselves for their grant-givers
- Depends on legal language of the deal
Category Instructor Commentary | Tags: Adina Langer, audience, Common Core, curriculum standards, grants, historical thinking, students, teachers, Week 11
Week 11 Notes
0April 1, 2015 by Adina Langer
Last night we talked about an important audience for digital history projects: K-12 students and teachers. We also talked about historical thinking and about setting appropriate educational goals for digital history sites and other public history projects. After our discussion, students spent time browsing for possible grant-funding agencies to whom they could apply for digital history project funding.
Digital History Class Notes Week Eleven
March 31, 2015
4:30 p.m. – 4:45 p.m.
4:45 p.m. – 6:05 p.m.
6:05 – 6:15
6:15 – 7:00
Category Instructor Commentary | Tags: Adina Langer, audience, Common Core, curriculum standards, grants, historical thinking, students, teachers, Week 11