Conclusions
Where are we now?
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.