Framework

Scholarship on history and new media from the late 1990s often expressed hope that developments in technology would enable students to more authentically emulate historical research methods and ways of thinking.

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

1Graeme Davison, “History and Hypertext,” The Electronic Journal of Australian and New Zealand History, 1997.

2Davison, “History and Hypertext;” Patricia Seed, “Teaching with the Web: Two Approaches,” Perspectives (February 1998); Randy Bass, “Can American Studies find a Whole in the Net?” American Studies in Scandinavia? (1996); Charles T. Evans and Robert Brown, “Teaching the History Survey Course using Multimedia Techniques,” Perspectives (February 1998); Natalie B. Milman 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).

3Bass, “Can American Studies find a Whole In the Net?;” T. Mills Kelly, “For Better or Worse? The Marriage of the Web and Classroom,” Journal of the Association for History and Computing III, no. 2 (August 2000); David Jaffee, ” ‘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).

4Bass, “Engines of Inquiry.”

5Bass, “Engines of Inquiry.”

6Milman, “Technology and Constructivist Teaching in Post-secondary Instruction: Using the World Wide Web in an Undergraduate History Course.”

7Kathryn Kish Sklar, “Teaching Students to Become Producers of New Historical Knowledge on the Web,” Journal of American History 88, no. 4 (March 2002).

8Bass, “Can American Studies find a Whole in the Net?;” Milman, “Technology and Constructivist Teaching in Post-secondary Instruction: Using the World Wide Web in an Undergraduate History Course;” Davison, “History and Hypertext.”

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