Kornblith is a member of the Electronic Advisory Board of the Journal of American History and the Organization of American Historians. He is co-editor (with Carol Lasser) of the Textbooks and Teaching section of the Journal of American History. He has served on the editorial board of the Journal of the Early Republic.

T. Mills Kelly is the Associate Director of the Center for History and New Media and an Assistant Professor of History and Art History at George Mason University. He is a specialist in late-Habsburg history with a particular focus on radical Czech nationalism, and is the author of numerous articles on this subject. The most recent of these include: “Last Best Chance or Last Gasp? The Compromise of 1905 and Czech Politics in Moravia,” Austrian History Yearbook, (2003). At present, Professor Kelly is making revisions to the draft of his manuscript, tentatively titled “Without Remorse: Czech National Socialism in Late-Habsburg Austria.”

Professor Kelly also conducts research on the influence of digital media on student learning in history. During the 1999-2000 academic year he was a Pew National Fellow with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and is currently a fellow with the Visible Knowledge Project based at Georgetown University.

Michael O’Malley received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1988. He taught at New York University and at Vassar College before coming to GMU in 1994. His specialty is 19th and 20th century cultural history, His dissertation was published as Keeping Watch: A History of American Time. He has additional publications on the history of timekeeping technology, the evolution of movie narrative, the practice of digital history and on the history of ideas about money and value. He is at work on a book about the history of American money. Other research interests include the history of the corporation and the history of recorded sound. He has also worked extensively in new media and history.

Ayers addresses the technology push across US campuses and yet the lack of support for educators to integrate this technology skillfully into their classrooms.

Bass, Randy. “Can American Studies find a Whole in the Net?” American Studies in Scandinavia, 1996.

An early article addressing the benefits of web technologyg and how it can be used to help students engage with American studies from a different perspective.

Bass, Randy. “Engines of Inquiry: Teaching, Technology, and Learner-Centered Approaches to Culture and History.” Technology and Learning, February 1998, http://www.georgetown.edu/crossroads/guide/engines.html.

Dividing his argument into six sections–Distributive Learning, Authentic Tasks and Complex Inquiry, Dialogic Learning, Constructive Learning, Public Accountability, and Reflective and Critical Thinking–Bass further unpacks earlier arguments as to why the web is essential to modern educational pedagogy.

Davison, Graeme. “History and Hypertext.” The Electronic Journal of Australian and New Zealand History, 1997, http://www.jcu.edu.au/aff/history/articles/davison.htm

A somewhat uncertain, and early, exploration of the possible benefits, as well as drawbacks of the web.

Denley, Peter, and Deian Hopkins, eds. History and Computing. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987.

Discuss and question the impact that computers and new technology will have upon traditional historical methods.

“The Horizon Report,” EDUCAUSE, The New Media Consortium (NMC), 2006.

A report on how technology is impacting and promises to impact the education world in 2006.

Evans, Charles T. and Robert Brown. “Teaching the History Survey Course using Multimedia Techniques.” Perspectives (February 1998)

A review of how two Virginia high school history teachers use the multimedia powers of the web to help their students engage history interactively.

Jacobs, Gabriel. “Hypermedia and discovery based learning: What value?” Australasian Journal of Educational Technology 21, no. 3 (2005): 355-366.

The author revists an earlier article she had written celebrating the advent of the web. She concludes that the web has not returned the results early advocates had claimed it would.

Jaffee, David. “’Scholars will soon be instructed through the eye’: E-Supplements and the Teaching of U.S. History.” The Journal of American History 89, no. 4 (March 2003)

Jaffee reviews a sampling of modern textbooks (in 2003) and highlights what they offer in new media resources and how these can help educators draw students into authentic historical inquiry.

Kelly, T. Mills. “For Better or Worse? The Marriage of the Web and Classroom.” Journal of the Association for History and Computing III, no. 2 (August 2000).

Kelly discusses the reality of the web in the modern classroom and ways educators can take advantage of this new medium.

Kornblith, Gary. “’Dynamic Syllabi for Dummies’: Posting Class Assignments on the World Wide Web.” Journal of American History 84, no. 4 (March 1998): 1447-53.

An early account of how Kornblith found online syllabi to help further engage his students with history.

Lindenmeyer, Kriste. “Using Online Resources to Re-center the U.S. History Survey: Women’s History as a Case Study.” Journal of American History (March 2003).

Lindenmeyer reviews a class she taught with online primary sources and highlights how the online nature of the class furthered students historical inquiry and thinking skills.

Milman, Natalie B. and Walter F. Heinecke. “Technology and Constructivist Teaching in Post-secondary Instruction: Using the World Wide Web in an Undergraduate History Course.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association. Montreal, Canada, April 1999.

A detailed review of a research project conducted at the University of Virginia by professors from their education school. They followed a digital history course and sought to determine how the nature of the class changed as a result of focusing both the sources and the finished product around digital history.

Rosenzweig, Roy. “Digital Archives Are a Gift of Wisdom to Be Used Wisely.” Chronicle of Higher Education 51, no. 42 (24 June 2005): B20.

Discusses the benefits and pitfalls of the web.

Rosenzweig, Roy. “The Road to Xanadu: Public and Private Pathways on the History Web.” The Journal of American History 88, no. 2 (September 2001): 548-579.

An article exploring the rapid growth of history on the web. specifically looking at the growth of online sources and archives.

Rosenzweig, Roy, and Randy Bass. “Rewiring the History and Social Studies Classroom: Needs, Frameworks, Dangers, and Proposals.” Forum presented at the Technology in K-12 Education: Envisioning a New Future. White Paper for Department of Education, 1 December 1999.

Bass and Rosenzweig discuss the web as an important tool in furthering constructivist educational goals.

Rosenzweig, Roy, and Daniel Cohen. “No Computer Left Behind.” The Chronicle of Higher Education (24 February 2006).

Cohen and Rosenzweig argue that technology is challenging the way that educators have taught and tested history in the classroom.

Rosenzweig, Roy, and Michael O‚ÄôMalley. “Brave New World or Blind Alley? American History on the World Wide Web.” The Journal of American History 84, no. 1 (June 1997).

An early exploration covering what history can be found on the web and what this offers to historians.

Seed, Patricia. “Teaching with the Web: Two Approaches.” Perspectives (February 1998)

Seed highlights the advantages of the web as encouraging multiple perspectives in history and also allowing students to manipulate data to find exactly what they need.

Sklar, Kathryn Kish. “Teaching Students to Become Producers of New Historical Knowledge on the Web.” Journal of American History 88, no. 4 (March 2002)

Argues that through posting homework assignments and research projects on the web, students become producers of historical knowledge rather than consumers.

Tebeau, Mark. “Pursuing E-Opportunities in the History Classroom.” The Journal of American History (March 2003)

Tebeau raises the question of how revolutionary has technology be in the history classroom. He then looks at some of the ways that technology is changing how students approach history.

Wynne, Ann. “History Instruction and the Internet: A Literature Review.” Journal of the Association for History and Computing II, no. 1 (April 1999)

Early review of literature about technology and the history instruction.

Professors Kelly, O’Malley, and Kornblith represent three experienced voices grappling with how new media can facilitate history pedagogy. What insights do their voices provide into how teaching has changed over the last ten years as a result of the infiltration of new media? What warnings do they provide and what expectations for the future?

• Student attitudes remain predominantly unchanged: All three acknowledge that new media is not “the” answer to all teaching woes. Students still exhibit signs of laziness, sloppiness, and unimaginative work. Their familiarity with the medium does not automatically make them more adept at analyzing online materials. Further, the instant gratification of the web can, at times, work against the careful, slow reading required of a historian. This means that history educators need to decide what new media tools to use and then must teach their students how to effectively use these tools.
• Constructivism melds well with online tools: Professors Kelly and Kornblith clearly highlight the effects that the growing consciousness of constructivism has had upon their teaching methods. Their growing desires to make the classroom more interactive and student-engaged, have led them to look to online tools as unique methods of facilitating this environment. In this way, the web is only as useful as the pedagogical methods behind its use.
• New media is changing history pedagogy… slowly: In discussing challenges that new media provides to traditional historical methodology and to the way that history students potentially interact with their world, all three acknowledge the reality of some changes. Noting the importance of reaching students where they are, the challenge remains to pull them out of presentistic thinking that quickly looks for instant gratification through Google searching. Historians must think about how new technologies, such as search engines and online sources, may begin to change the dynamics of the field, and then think about how to best use these potentially transformative tools to engage students with historical methods–and even more importantly, to bring them into the field as it grapples with what it means to “do” history in the media of the twenty-first century.
• New technologies offer historians and their students hopes for increased access to information: In historical terms, ten years is not a very long survey period–and being in the midst of this period, makes it difficult to determine the exact impact that the web and its related technologies are having on the discipline and it‚Äôs teaching. Yet, Kelly, O’Malley, and Kornblith acknowledge the potentially transformative effects of new media. Engagement through 3-D immersive environments, through GIS mapping (that allows for vast amounts of information to be sorted and displayed visually), and for detailed searching (that enables word analysis heretofore unheard of) encourages students to a deeper interaction with history. Further, as more sources become much more easily accessible, hopes for a broadened and deepened democratic knowledge of a global past, becomes a greater reality. And within these high hopes, resides the potential for increasingly sophisticated productions as world-wide collaboration becomes a daily occurrence. At the same time, the potentials listed in the early 1990s for history education in new media have not greatly expanded or developed. While some of these hopes have been met, very few historians are discussing how we can continue to expand upon this media. The same highlights listed in 1994, are reported in the JAH today in 2006.
• New media does facilitate increased student engagement: Professors Kelly, O’Malley, and Kornblith also confirm the expectations of many history educators that increased source access through online archives and collaborative technologies moved students slowly away from being consumers of historical information to creators of content knowledge. While all three noted varying degrees of success in their classrooms, they noted the fact that the technology makes their teaching goals more easily reached.

What the work of these professors show is that some changes are occurring and producing good results. However, for these professors new media does not primarily cause these results, rather it facilitates the desires of motivated history instructors to use the lingo of a rising generation and to harness the powers of new technology to help students learn about a subject foreign and yet incredibly pertinent to their development. What this study suggests is that history pedagogy is changing, but that much more potential for continued transformation exists.

Where to go from here?

While helpful, this study also raises as many questions as it begins to answer. Aside from the very basic challenges of how to provide history educators with the necessary funding and training to take advantage of new media, it also raises the challenge of training students to use a medium they know well when it comes to entertainment, but which remains foreign when it comes to educational research.

• What cognitive changes are taking place within the younger generations as a result of their reliance on technology and how can historians bridge the gap between their ways of accessing worlds gone by and a student’s mindset?
• What new media developments have become “invisible” to us so that we are no longer able to acknowledge how they affect our thinking towards history and history education?
• What are the hopes and the pitfalls awaiting us in the future and how can we maneuver around them well so as to truly harness the powers of new media to our advantage? How can we move from classrooms characterized by students as consumers to engaged students who learn what it means to “do history”?

In a way, these questions are no different than the ones raised by each generation as it grapples with its particular “new” medias. The challenge for twenty-first century historians is to recognize what changes are offered and occuring as a result of our “new” media and how to meld the goals of the discipline with the advantages provided by the technology.

Professor T. Mills Kelly:

1. When did you start using new media in the classroom? And how did you use it? (1:08 min)
2. How do you use technology in your classes today and why? (4:08 min)
3. How much do students and their familiarity with new technologies drive the types of technologies you use in your teaching? (2:34 min)
4. Do you see cognitive changes occurring as students grow up in an increasingly new media saturated world? Are they understanding information differently as a result? (0:47 min)
5. How do the changes you see in students affect the way you teach history in the college classroom? (3:34 min)
6. How do you think historians should alter their pedagogical methods in order to reach modern students? (1:33 min)
7. What do we need to teach them about the technology that they use every day? (0:29 min)
8. How has history pedagogy changed as a result of new media? (2:47 min)
9. Where are we headed with new technology and history education? What future changes do you see occurring? (5:15 min)

Professor Michael O’Malley:

1. When did you start using new media? (2:22 min)
2. How did you use technology in the classroom originally? And how do you use the web now? (4:27 min)
3. How have new technologies challenged historians in their traditional historical methods? (3:08 min)
4. How have new technologies challenged history pedagogy? (1:12 min)
5. How has new media affected students cognitive developments and thus changed the way they approach history? (2:00 min)
6. You see searching as a unique advantage of the web for education. Can you expand upon this? (0:47 min)
7. In your class, does using the web to “do history” encourage students to see history differently? Has it changed your teaching? (2:09 min)

Professor Gary Kornblith:

1. How long have you been using new media in your history classroom? (3:14 min)
2. What drew you to using new media in the classroom? (2:33 min)
3. How has new media changed your teaching methods/ pedagogy? (1:03 min; 2:44; 2:54 min)
4. Do you believe that new media has affected students cognitive developments and thus changed the way they approach history? (3:16; 2:23 min)
5. What would you list as three benefits of using new technology in history education? (2:43; 1:58 min)
6. What would you list as three downsides of using new technoloy in history education? (2:49 miin)
7. Has new media revolutionized history pedagogy? How has history pedagogy changed as a result of new media? (2:46 min)

The hopes of history educators were often articulated as a:

1. belief that increased access to sources would encourage authentic engagement in historical inquiry, and a
2. belief that access to new media tools would encourage more student collaboration and ownership of work.

As historians discussed potentials that new media held for the field, many also embraced different pedagogical methods—methods identified as constructivism that sought to move students from being consumers to producers of knowledge.

How have historians’s approached new media and what have they cited as its benefits?

Authentic Historical Inquiry

Assertion #1: New technologies and specifically the increased access to a plerthora of primary sources on the web, will encourage student to authentically engage in historical inquiry.

Educators have marveled and celebrated the amazing growth of sources on the web, which allow students to be the “novice in the archive,” as Randy Bass has noted. The exponential growth of the internet has provided access to an amazing array of sources. As students interact with these sources in an online environment, what benefits have history educators noted over the past ten years of use?

• Students engaged in video gaming are daily interacting in a virtual world where they must constantly balance multiple decisions and potential. Likewise, as professors ask them to look at online sources and to jump from link to link, comparing numbers of interlinked sources, students’ abilities to grasp the multi-causal nature of history increases.¹
• Diverse sources highlights multiple perspectives that allows for different explanations of historical events. Further, looking at a plethora of sources allow students to engage in increasingly sophisticated and original arguments about history.²
• Students’ learning processes involves not just looking at sources, but about seeing them in a larger universe of connected links and sources. The non-linear way that most links are established on the web allows students to explore them in a somewhat unmediated way that encourages students to make connections and historical arguments on their own, instead of regurgitating what they read in a textbook.³
• In studies done with students, it was found that they were more likely to return to sources on the web. This increased interaction encouraged them to create their knowledge over time, thus helping them to emulate the disciplinary process of developing interpretations and conclusions.⁴

Collaborative-Based Knowledge Formation

Assertion #2: Online tools creates a more collaborative environment where students are not only able to share in a potentially more comfortable medium, but where they share ideas and push each other to think about issues from different perspectives.

Modern communication tools such as email, instant messaging, forums, and blogs enhance communication outside of the classroom—an environment where not all students feel comfortable communicating. What advantages do these online communication tools bring to history educators and their students?

• Requiring students to “publish” their finished products online makes them take the assignments more seriously and feel that their work has larger significance.⁵
• As students communicate online, they work to create their own arguments, within an environment that allows for a diversity of opinions. Often, collaborative environments online encourage students to be more interested in hearing what their students had to say and in working with them to create better products.⁶
• Educators also believe that web-based projects approach students as producers rather than consumers.⁷
• The web allows for a more democratic understanding of the past as authors lose their privileged position. This set-up moves the educator from being “sage on the stage” to holding more of the role of coach encouraging students to do their own inquiry based explorations.⁸

Is this dependent on New Media?

While the skills that historians note students gain through online interaction can be gained outside of modern technology, the unique benefits of the web that come through free access to an increasing number of sources, the unique capabilities of hypertext, and the many collaborative tools available to students and teachers, not only more clearly highlight historical thinking methods, but give students the opportunity to grasp these methods in an evironment already familiar to the cell-phone chatting, internet surfing, video gaming generation. One key part of this equation, that many historians quickly note, is that technology is not neutral. In order for the benefits of the web to truly change history pedagogy in beneficial ways, educators must frame and present it well to students.

While these benefits have been celebrated for the past decade, the next section explores how three historians have used new media and if they see these promised benefits truly surfacing in their history classroom.

Notes

Research Question

The motivating question in my research: Has new media begun to transform history pedagogy in the college classroom?

My preliminary hypothesis: The web provides key tools that used in conjunction with constructivist pedagogical methods transforms traditional history pedagogy and equips history educators to challenge students to move from mere consumers of historical information to creators of content knowledge.

Research Method/ Organization

The question I pose here is considerable, and one only adequately answered after much surveying and researching. As such, this presentation marks my efforts to lay the groundwork for this broader study and to gather feedback from others who may also be interested in this question. This website is divided into three main sections.

Framework reviews many of the promises offered in the 1990s as to the web’s possibilities‚Äîand its downfalls.

Interviews consists of selections from three audio interviews I conducted with history educators who have engaged with the medium over the last decade and in a way that has caused them to rethink how they present history to their students. They weigh in on how digital media has changed (or not) over the last decade and how it has challenged their thoughts about history, their methods of teaching history, and their students’ engagement with history.

Conclusions offers my preliminary thoughts on what these interviews suggest about how much the web is affecting the way history is presented in the classroom. It discusses some of the reasons why so few historians have yet to grapple with this in their own classrooms and suggests possible trends for the future. In the spirit of collaboration, these thoughts are presented as laying the necessary groundwork engaging with this issue on a deeper level and I eagerly encourage comments and questions.