Teaching the Introductory Course (Harbison & Waltzer) Fall 2011
Towards Teaching the Introductory History Course, Digitally (Fall 2011 version)
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 For some college students, introductory history courses provide a pathway into the study of the past as a major or a minor, or fulfill their genuine curiosity. Much more often, though, intro courses are populated with students who are enrolled in order to meet a general education obligation. Many faculty members approach these courses with less enthusiasm than they bring to upper-level courses in their areas of specialization, resigned to the fact that a significant portion of the students do not particularly want to take the class. In this context such courses are regularly pitched to meet a specific set of learning goals: to introduce students to broad historical themes in an area, to expose students to the processes and importance of the historical project, and to sharpen students’ critical thinking skills around evidence gathering and argumentation.
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 In the past two decades, the Internet has made possible the emphasis of other learning goals in the intro history course. More easily accessible data sets and archival materials have enabled the construction and execution of sophisticated lesson plans beyond a faculty member’s area of focus, and made a rich abundance of sources available for those courses that allow student research. Through these processes such courses can develop a more wide-ranging information literacy in students than was possible a generation ago. They can heighten students’ media literacy as well. The combination of a scholarly “pictorial turn” and the explosion of available primary sources on the Web have injected into intro history courses a more rigorous examination of visual resources.1 Faculty members now lace their lectures with graphics, photographs, and audio and video that are much more readily available than in an earlier era.
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 Yet, despite the increased dynamism enabled by these innovations, a fundamental tension that has infused the learning goals of the introductory course for years remains: the tension around coverage. Most of these courses are surveys, and they begin in a moment and promise to end in a moment. The schedule of the course requires quick and steady forward progress whether or not students have mastered a period’s complexity. Faculty members, especially new ones acclimating to the vocation (who at our college teach a significant portion of the introductory courses offered),2 are regularly plagued with guilt about oversimplification, leaving those inevitable loose threads, and moving too fast. Many students get lost in a blizzard of facts and become convinced that if they did not understand the 1920s there is no way they can understand the 1930s and if that is the case, what is the point of reading about the 1940s? The students who are going to be history majors or hobbyists excel, the others do less well, and then the faculty member resets for another run through the chronology.
¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 Models other than the survey for introductory history courses exist. For instance, at our college, students may elect to meet their general education distribution requirements via a “themes” course, which tends to be more focused on a set of ideas or circumstances. These courses still tend also to proceed chronologically, but students may linger on a particular subject for weeks at a time and explore it more deeply, and the pressure towards coverage so embedded in the survey is less present.
¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 We have been exploring an approach to the introductory history course that seeks to build into it an array of pedagogical approaches that we feel make it a more immersive and ultimately more influential experience. It borrows from the “themes” approach in that it seeks to more deeply ingrain into students a particular kind of historical understanding, but it also follows the trend in upper-level and graduate courses to make the process of doing history the implicit subject of exploration.
¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 2 Four specific and related pedagogical processes have influenced the shaping of the course. The methods of Writing Across the Curriculum/Writing in the Disciplines programs (WAC/WID) have helped us shape a wide-variety of writing assignments that create a sustained, multi-modal engagement with course materials. The Visual Knowledge Project (VKP) has taught us that by having students make public their engagement with the topics of the course, instructors have more chances to intervene in student learning, and students also have the opportunity to see how their classmates make knowledge.3 The Open Educational Resources (OER) movement has expanded exponentially the source material we draw upon in our teaching, moving us far beyond a textbook, and helped us play with the traditional definitions of a “course.” And the principles of networked learning tie the other approaches together, emphasizing for students that doing history is a collaborative and dialogic process.
¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 2 Before delving into additional detail about the courses in question, we would like to share a bit about our collaboration. Since 2006 we have worked together at the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute at Baruch College, City University of New York (CUNY), Tom first as a Fellow for Instructional Technology and now as the Project Manager for Digital Learning, and Luke first as a CUNY Writing Fellow and now as the Assistant Director for Educational Technology. The Schwartz Institute was founded as an academic support unit intended to improve the communication skills of Baruch students, and since Mikhail Gershovich became director in 2006, work there has focused increasingly on educational technology. We both earned our doctorates in history from the CUNY Graduate Center, and as graduate students we both worked with the American Social History Project. Luke has taught history as an adjunct instructor at Baruch and Montclair State; Tom has taught history as an adjunct at Baruch. Luke’s primarily current responsibility at the Institute is to run Blogs@Baruch, an open source publishing platform built on WordPress that is used by nearly 9000 members of the Baruch community for a variety of purposes, including course blogs, departmental and program websites, and online magazines and journals.4 The system has more than 1600 individual spaces, and Luke maintains and develops on the installation, supports all users, and advises faculty members on how they can use the space to meet their pedagogical goals. Tom’s work at the Institute ranges from video editing to hardware and software support for staff engaged in digital communication projects. The courses that prompted this essay were Tom’s, and each was taught using Blogs@Baruch, with Luke as a sounding board, adviser, and occasional participant both in class and on the course sites. We use the term “we” advisedly; Luke has learned much Tom’s course design and management, and Tom has learned much from Luke’s knowledge of the open publishing platforms and pedagogy. Most significantly, our numerous conversations about teaching history have always been imbued with a distinct sense of how the study doing so should fit into the larger curriculum of a college, and we share a commitment to experimentation with fresh methods and ideas.
¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 0 In the fall of 2008, Tom taught his first class at Baruch, an introductory U.S. history course. For nearly all of the students, this was their first class in history and was likely to be their last, given their interest in pursuing business-related majors.5 Difficult decisions quickly arose about when to allocate class time and materials to discussion of broad themes of U.S. history versus when to drill down on specific facts about seminal moments. An effective division needed to be drawn between historical and historiographical study.
¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 0 Tom decided to devote roughly one-third of class time to exploration of methodology. Most of this time was used by students working in groups to analyze photocopied primary source documents. Most students participated enthusiastically in these exercises, but their work was highly compartmentalized and constrained within small groups. Upon completion of an in-class activity, students routinely reported back to the rest of the class, but these were often limited by class time and students’ difficulty sharing visual content in real time. For example, in one assignment, students met in small groups to draw conclusions about a series of three primary documents dealing with one aspect of Reconstruction. Each group had a unique set of documents (e.g., documents detailing changes in voting rights), but similar questions that required them to make decisions about the combined meaning of the sources. In addition to answering what information could be gleaned from the documents, students were also required to hypothesize which additional sources would enable deeper, more accurate conclusions about the subtopic. A “recorder” in each group wrote answers to questions that the instructor collected. During a report-back session, a “reporter” from each group spoke for a minute or two to summarize their conclusions and communicate a takeaway message that would be useful to other students for understanding the subtheme. Some groups used electronic devices to seek contextual information about authors of the documents and the period or location where a given document was produced. And a subset of these students located additional documents that complemented those in front of them. However, these groups did not have a way to easily share that information with the whole class.
¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 0 In this setting, students gained some experience practicing history, but not in the immersive, interconnected manner that Tom was seeking. We both believe that undergraduates, even if taking their first and last college-level history course, can benefit immensely from exposure to and trial with methods employed by professional historians. By doing research in primary sources to deepen their comprehension of a particular topic, and entering into dialogue with existing analyses to synthesize their own understanding, students can better learn to grasp the complex, contested nature of historical knowledge, and integrate that skill into their vision of the world. These goals were not being met via the mostly bidirectional conversations happening between Tom and his students. Student thinking processes were also not being recorded in a way that could easily be shared with and reflected upon by the rest of the class. Communication between instructor and students was limited to feedback transferred in a shuffle of paper; students were not seeing and learning from one another’s successes and failures in reading, interpreting, and writing about history. When connections between in-class student work and the larger themes of the course were made, they were too often limited to a particular interaction with a single student, and not sustained subsequent classes.
¶ 11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 0 In an effort to expand and extend the sharing process, Tom turned to digital technology. At first, this meant the college’s course management system: Blackboard. It provided students with a space to carry on discussions outside of class, where they could share conclusions from one day and pose related questions going into the next. Yet, the system replicated many of the divisions previously encountered in the classroom, and failed to break the call-and-response pattern in which students answered narrowly-defined questions posed by the instructor. Because of its graphic design, site architecture, and barrier between it and the open web, the system was largely devoid of student-published multimedia and student voices. Student work could not be shared beyond the class, and even within the class it was difficult to create a web of knowledge that could be referenced, reorganized, and built upon.
¶ 12 Leave a comment on paragraph 12 0 In the summer of 2010, Tom taught the history survey again. But this time he made use of the college’s open publishing platform, Blogs@Baruch, and engaged Luke as a partner. We drafted the architecture of the web space simultaneously with construction of the syllabus. By choosing a highly-customizable WordPress theme—Atahualpa—that elegantly displayed images, and adding a plugin— NextGen Image Gallery—that allowed for easy embedding of slideshows, we created a site that welcomed student creativity. Yet we also structured the space with a categorization system that brought order to the content as it accrued over time. We created two types of categories: major themes of the course, and out-of-class assignments. We intentionally left the taxonomy loose, leaving much of the classification work to the students.
¶ 13 Leave a comment on paragraph 13 0 During the first couple weeks of class, when student contributions to the blog were still limited, students referred to the course site as a “resource.” They expected that it would spit out information that they needed or desired: the syllabus, readings, lecture slides, and ultimately—at the end of the course—a grade. Over the course of the semester, there were indeed many times that the site did operate as a tool for the transmission of information, and it did so quite effectively. But after about three weeks, students began to see the site was more than that. They recognized that it was, above all, an active workspace that both encapsulated and propelled the majority of the work for the course. That semester, it became clear to Tom that using an open publishing platform exponentially expanded the opportunities for a range of work to be done and created conditions for pedagogical experimentation that weren’t present in a more traditionally structured lecture/discussion intro course.
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¶ 15 Leave a comment on paragraph 15 1 In the following paragraphs, we will describe some of the key characteristics that have emerged through the use of Blogs@Baruch in introductory history courses, initiated first during the summer of 2010 and then developed further through six additional sections taught in 2010-2011. These specific qualities show how the course sites have enabled students to consistently practice various historical methods and skills, and exemplify the pedagogical approaches that we value and believe should be central components of a school’s general education curriculum. We’ve chosen to focus on how running these courses has impacted our thinking about pedagogy. Due to FERPA concerns, we’ve intentionally omitted any direct links to or citation of student work.
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Active.
Whether students participate in flurries of informal discussion or composition of essays based on deep research and reflection, they are constantly expressing new ideas on their course sites throughout the semester. To challenge students’ preconception that successful history equals memorizing content, we require them to repeatedly engage with a range of sources. Students are required to visit the site between every class meeting, and at each stage contribute something new in response to a writing prompt.
¶ 17 Leave a comment on paragraph 17 0 This encourages students to specialize their knowledge in narrow topics of their choosing. This prepares them to challenge historical treatment of that topic in our course textbook, lectures, and discussions. And most importantly, it prepares them to teach their classmates about their topic and field questions about the turf they have just familiarized themselves with. There is not enough time for students to exhaustively research topics, but regardless of their level of mastery over the material, students can get some taste of what it means to develop expertise, and the process by which a community of learners strives for this goal. The degree to which they develop deeper understanding of a particular subject is documented as they construct “micro-monographs,” three- to four-paragraph essays that elaborate on very narrow topics.6
¶ 18 Leave a comment on paragraph 18 0 We find that many students, once they begin such investigations, thrive in the role of detective, particularly at assessing the accuracy of information. For instance, when students were asked to fact check Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York using a series of digital archives and asked to publish their findings on the course site, most were able to expound on their findings with embedded images, videos and texts (from both primary and secondary sources), offering narratives that replaced and corrected those conveyed by the movie. In addition to giving students some brief experience with this process, it sets up reflective conversations in class about the processes in academia and commercial publishing by which monographic works are produced, interpreted, and synthesized. In this context, students can begin to evaluate their own work as a secondary source. This type of exploratory learning is closely in line with our belief that students learn best when they are producing knowledge.7
¶ 19 Leave a comment on paragraph 19 0 Students also practice modifying their historical narratives and conclusions as they answer their peers’ questions and gather new information. Such assignments immerse them in the process that is so common to the work of humanists: constructing an argument and adjusting it many times in the face of questions and new evidence. By doing so, students experience first-hand the evolving and contested nature of historical understanding.
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Social.
In the open environment of the course site, students can easily view other student-created historical arguments and respond to them. In class we review examples of model critiques, which helps students hone their ability to offer constructive criticism. Our online conversations are often enriched by students’ quick access to new information from digital archives across the Internet, and the ease with which they can draw in historical evidence. In addition to helping fellow classmates by asking questions and offering critiques of blog posts, students often willingly share sources with one another, even when not specifically prompted to do so by assignments. The course site extends and ties together our face-to-face meetings: sometimes work on the site helps set up in-class conversations by establishing questions and lines of argument, while at other times it serves as an extension of debates and investigations that germinated while we met.
¶ 21 Leave a comment on paragraph 21 3 During the fall of 2010 and spring of 2011, Tom had students from two simultaneous sections of his introductory course share a single web space. Most students took naturally to initiating conversations with students from outside of their own section. Many of the most probing questions and constructive criticisms were launched across sections. The extra social (and physical) distance between the students worked as an advantage more often than not, with shy students more likely to speak freely from a somewhat more anonymous position. The additional voices in the space intensified the rate at which ideas were exchanged, and gave each class much more material to consider.
¶ 22 Leave a comment on paragraph 22 3 The social dimension of Blogs@Baruch became more pronounced when we incorporated BuddyPress in the fall of 2010. This plugin allows students to customize profile pages, track their work across the installation over their career at the college, and interact with other students system-wide. The simple act of linking their account to a profile picture gives students a stronger attachment to the course site, as their profile picture shows up every time they leave a comment in the system. Students at Baruch are introduced to Blogs@Baruch in their Freshman Seminar courses, and they intuitively approach the platform as an academic network rather than a social one. They have little interest in discussing non-academic topics in this venue; for that they have Facebook. More and more students are using Blogs@Baruch in a variety of classes, and we are exploring ways to develop curricula that take fuller advantage of the networked nature of this publishing. We’ve seen what can be happen when we link a couple of sections of a class that share a professor and a syllabus; we’d like to explore how the curriculum of the college can be impacted by experiments around interdisciplinary exchanges and co-teaching across departments.
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Open.
Much of the vibrancy of the community within our course sites flows from the fact that we keep the spaces open. Everything the students contribute, unless they choose otherwise, instantly becomes visible across the Web. On a few occasions, students have received comments on their posts from professional historians. In one case, a photo archivist from a presidential library asked a student about the provenance of an image he had posted. Apparently, the image the student had used was pervasive on the Internet, but the original source information had been lost. The student did not have the answer to the archivist’s puzzle, but this prompted a series of valuable teaching moments about the implications of open publishing, the work of the archivist and the historian, and the complex issues that surround questions of intellectual property.
¶ 24 Leave a comment on paragraph 24 4 A learning environment as open as this also has a profound effect on helping students imagine audiences for their writing. Before using an open publishing platform in the survey course, students wrote primarily for us as the instructors, perhaps with some moments of peer review sprinkled in. When students publish to an open platform, indexed by Google, the stakes are immediately raised. We spend significant time in class discussing the implications of openness on writing and review processes. The diversity of audiences and intensive peer review made possible by the shape of our web spaces sharpens student writing as well as their historical thinking. In pursuing this goal, we are influenced by WAC/WID programs, which hold that having students write frequently and in a variety of modes and for a range of audiences deepens their engagement with course material.
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Media rich.
WordPress provides easy options for elegantly combining multiple media forms. Many assignments call on students to present and interpret images, audio, and video. This introduces students to the power of multimedia to represent (or in some cases misrepresent) historical ideas. It also brings them face to face with particular methodological challenges that accompany the use of visual and aural sources, and offers them a sandbox in which they can practice distinctive techniques for reading multimedia sources. Students regularly embed images, consult online tutorials for analyzing visual evidence (such as those provided on History Matters), and write up their findings.8 Classmates comment to question or build upon the initial interpretation of the source.
¶ 26 Leave a comment on paragraph 26 1 The aesthetic richness of the site is achieved primarily through the work of the students. WordPress software allows for simple embedding of images and video, so students constantly illuminate points in their own writing using the surrounding space. At times, they are given an opportunity to fill other spaces on the site. Students begin each semester with writing activities and multimedia presentations about which people, places, and events they believe best represent the themes of the course as they understand them. They locate and upload header images for the site that they deem representative of important turning points in U.S. history, and the header automatically rotates through their selections during the semester. This assignment provides us the opportunity to uncover and interrogate students’ preconceptions about the themes of the course and the study of history as we begin the semester. It also allows students to see themselves as producers with a significant degree of control over their learning environment. Students have remarked that seeing their work profiled prominently on the site, in both the header and the content of their posts, gives them a sense of ownership over the space.
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Metacognitive.
Many of the interactions between students and the course site require them to reflect on their content before or after they publish it. Before adding any text or media to the site, students must think about the most appropriate placement of their new information, deciding whether to write a new post, respond to an existing post with a comment, or reply to a comment in a threaded conversation.
¶ 28 Leave a comment on paragraph 28 0 Students also gain experience classifying knowledge after they have finished composing a post. They are responsible for much of the organizing, categorizing, and prioritizing of their work, using categories and tags. This forces them to revisit their creations relative to larger projects, and oftentimes relative to the larger goals of the course. When they “tag” a post, students must extract the three or four key ideas present in their discussion, and their choices contribute to the building of a folksonomy of the content of the course. The tagging organizes the roughly 500 posts authored by each class during the semester into archives. This eases assessment, and students can review their portfolio of contributions, and with a single click, a series of posts on a topic.
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Immersive.
Our course sites provide a hands-on learning environment in much the same way that a laboratory enriches a class in the hard sciences. In the process of analyzing primary documents during class group-work, they actively practice historical inquiry. And thanks to powerful digital archives and web spaces such as The Lost Museum, Picturing U.S. History, and the September 11 Digital Archive, we witness students grappling with historical questions while engulfed in a sea of sources.9 Prior to the availability of a site that allowed for open student publishing, students learned from immersion on a more atomized scale, and it was a challenge to maintain continuity between discrete rounds of experimentation. Students entered microcosmic historical study spaces, but rarely had the freedom to range widely and pioneer new projects.
¶ 30 Leave a comment on paragraph 30 0 An online publishing platform like Blogs@Baruch helps bridge this gap and stretch the canvas on which students can work across the entire course. Instead of punctuating single units alone, as many existing history teaching modules that employ technology do, the space builds over time and reveals to students major themes and connections in a way they can easily grasp, engage with, and revisit. The course site also helps students visualize the tension between breadth and depth in the study of history. Students demonstrate a greater awareness of historical perspective than was present before we developed such a space, and the site helps them understand the differences between various methodologies in historical study.
¶ 31 Leave a comment on paragraph 31 0 The space also helps immerse the teacher more deeply in the pedagogical experience. As the Visible Knowledge Project has demonstrated, digital tools can foster transparency of processes that allow teachers to not only better assess their students learning, but also their own teaching strategies. Documentation of student learning in an open web publishing space forces important questions about teaching to the surface. Some of those questions include:
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- How can student work outside of class be seamlessly integrated with face-to-face experiences in the classroom?
- What types of writing should students spend their time on?
- How tightly should instructors at this level scaffold research and writing assignments?
- How frequently and bluntly should instructors redirect communication from and between students?
- To what degree should larger research and writing projects be assigned across the semester relative to smaller, daily tasks?
- How frequently should students practice and reflect on methodology and historiography, as opposed to historical content?
- What factors determine whether students should work independently or in groups?
¶ 33 Leave a comment on paragraph 33 0 These pedagogical puzzles do not disappear with the implementation of an open web publishing space, but they are more routinely foregrounded in the preparatory process, and in order to make the space an effective one the instructor must grapple with them. While projects like the Visual Knowledge Project exposed the “intermediate thinking process” in particular projects and course units, publishing platforms like WordPress now make it possible across not only an entire course, but multiple iterations of the course. Both students and faculty can navigate the sites conducting the type of “socially situated learning” promoted and prized by the VKP as “intrinsic to the development of expert-like abilities and dispositions in novice learners.”10
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Assessment and Moving Forward
One of Tom’s students, when Luke asked her and her classmates how they felt about their course blog, responded “I don’t like it because it keeps the class always on my mind.” To a faculty member, this is praise with faint damnation. We all want our students to be absorbed in the processes of the course, even if we would prefer they be less resistant than this student to such absorption. We have not yet designed an assessment to measure student learning within this type of course, though it is something we would like to find the time and resources to implement with adherence to FERPA. Students in these classes are certainly writing more frequently and voluminously than they have in previous courses that we have each taught. In earlier iterations, students wrote on average three five-to-seven page papers, or roughly four thousand words, over the course of the semester. In these recent courses, students are writing about twice that much, in shorter and much more varied bursts.
¶ 35 Leave a comment on paragraph 35 1 The course sites have served as highly effective assessment tools. They paint a more complete, richer picture of student performance and understanding than do the traditional midterm/essay/final exam models. A significant portion of final grades (at least 30 percent) is determined by their performance on the course website, and students are judged on their creativity, effort, attention to instructions, and the timeliness of their contributions.
¶ 36 Leave a comment on paragraph 36 0 Like most public universities, ours is under significant pressure to cut costs. Two methods that are being explored are jumboization to save money on labor, and hybridization to save money on space. Technology is necessarily implicated in both of these processes, and we’ve been insistent that Blogs@Baruch and the services of the Schwartz Institute not become regarded as “efficiency” tools at the college. But faculty members are increasingly caught in a situation where they are forced to teach courses much larger or different in structure than what they would prefer, and the experimentation around questions of pedagogy and curriculum development that we are doing can provide guidance and models through this transition. Small introductory history courses at large public universities are simply not on the horizon anytime soon. This context increases pressure on faculty to focus on coverage, because assigning reading and delivering lectures appears to be more manageable and measurable than having students produce a significant amount of work in their own words.
¶ 37 Leave a comment on paragraph 37 0 Our experiments, though, suggest that history courses that embrace and build upon the idea of “the student as producer” can invigorate introductory history instruction, as well as introductory courses in other disciplines, while pushing back against the passivity and anonymity that prevail in larger courses. It is important that we not eschew factual knowledge—“coverage”—but we can certainly devote more of our energy to building the conditions for that understanding to best develop and to continue to develop after the semester ends. At their best, these courses can not only provide a baseline for our students to know about the past; they can also teach our students what it means to do history.
¶ 38 Leave a comment on paragraph 38 0 About the authors: Luke Waltzer is the Assistant Director for Educational Technology at the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute, Baruch College. He holds a PhD in History from the CUNY Graduate Center. He can be found online at http://lukewaltzer.com and on Twitter @lwaltzer. Thomas Harbison is the Project Manager for Digital Learning at the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute, and holds a PhD in History from the CUNY Graduate Center.
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- Michael Coventry et al., “Ways of Seeing: Evidence and Learning in the History Classroom,” Journal of American History 92 (March 2006), http://www.journalofamericanhistory.org/textbooks/2006/introduction.html. ↩
- In the spring 2010 semester, adjuncts taught 8 of the 16 introductory classes offered by the department. In fall 2010, adjuncts taught 8 of 24 introductory courses. In spring 2011, the number was 7 out of 19; and in fall 2011 it was 6 out of 18. About half of the courses that the department offers are introductory. Information supplied by the History Department in email correspondence on September 7, 2011. ↩
- See https://commons.georgetown.edu/blogs/vkp/. ↩
- See Blogs@Baruch at http://blsciblogs.baruch.cuny.edu. ↩
- According to the Baruch College Office of Institutional Research and Program Assessment, 78.2% of Baruch undergraduate students intend to study a field within the Zicklin School of Business. See http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/ir/FACTSHEET.htm. ↩
- Educational researcher and historian Sam Wineburg has shown that students of history process new information in a more sophisticated and productive way as their expertise in a field deepens. Samuel S. Wineburg, “The Cognitive Representation of Historical Texts,” in Teaching and Learning in History, eds. Gaea Leinhardt, Isabel L. Beck, and Catherine Stainton (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1994), 85-135. ↩
- For more on the notion of “The Student as Producer,” see Mike Neary and Joss Winn’s work at the University of Lincoln: http://studentasproducer.lincoln.ac.uk/. ↩
- “Making Sense of Evidence.” http://historymatters.gmu.edu/browse/makesense/. ↩
- “The Lost Museum,” http://www.lostmuseum.cuny.edu/home.html; “Picturing U.S. History,” http://picturinghistory.gc.cuny.edu/;“The September 11th Digital Archive,” http://911digitalarchive.org/. ↩
- See https://commons.georgetown.edu/blogs/vkp/themes-findings/. ↩
I like that this essay frames its case study in terms that are broadly applicable to folks who may be using different kinds of digital platforms in their classrooms, in different ways. The particular challenges of survey courses are familiar to me even though I teach in a different field, and this essay leaves me filled with ideas of things I might like to try. Especially effective, I think, is the organization of the essay: instead of offering a linear narrative of how the pedagogical experiment unfolded, the authors present several discrete attributes of the digital tools they used (e.g., ‘social,’ ‘open,’ ‘media rich.’). Where I might otherwise be left thinking, ‘interesting, but I’m not sure how I’d adapt that to my own courses,’ here I can ask myself: ‘how can I make the digital platforms available on my campus (or even, how can I make non-digital elements of my survey courses) more “immersive” or more “metacognitive.”‘ Terrific.
I also really like this essay as a case study in what creative teachers, with support from their institutions, can do in the classroom. What is most striking to me is the necessity of the collaboration–one instructor focused on the content, the other on the technology side. Implicitly, this essay makes a case that institutional investment in technological supportive services are required to bring best digital practices (and experiments) to traditional teaching.
Overall, I found the article very inspiring in its frank discussion of pedagogical approaches, evaluating their usefulness, and actually providing examples of ways to teach courses. This topic is of particular importance and interest as I am a current graduate student and an academic teacher-in-training during the digital revolution. Reading this brought many questions and ideas to mind; however, they may be beyond the desired scope of this article and do not have to be answered.
My first concern stems from experience as a student. Often the use of technology ‘hits a wall’, to so speak, with the rather large number of teachers who do not know how, and/or are not willing to learn how to best adapt a curriculum to changing teaching environments, student audiences, and new delivery methods. How many teachers at Baruch College actually use the technology available, and to its full potential? I have found teachers often very comfortable and satisfied with their methods, and consider it a waste of time or following a fad if they test new software or technology. Blackboard (or a similar product, like Moodle) does seem to be a ubiquitous presence in many schools as the standard technological supplement to a course, but many professors do not use it beyond the “resource” model described in your article (syllabus, email, etc), and certainly the software often does not easily allow use for much else. Would the availability of a campus WordPress blog actually change professors’ teaching habits? How many currently use a blog or website option, but post only the same things that are seen on Blackboard?
Another concern with digital documents is the longevity and accessibility, given my experience with Blackboard and other software platforms. Would a blog disappear after the semester is done? What if the school upgraded or changed their software, would the old version no longer be accessible? Should a Creative Commons copyright be put on the blog if it is around for the long-term? What if someone wants to use a blog, but their school only provides Blackboard. Would a regular WordPress, Tumbler, or Blogger page work? Is there much paperwork, waivers, or other legalities involved in having student work posted publicly (FERPA, etc)?
Echoing some other comments, I believe, would be the question on how ‘intuitive’ is the blogging approach. I am thinking of situations where adult students and others not experienced with using these new things are faced suddenly with a class that bases most of the grades upon using an special device or software program (like Photoshop, a blog, an iPad, a Mac when the student is accustomed to a PC, etc.). Specialized tools and new software are exciting for the options they provide in teaching large or small classes, and in researching, but is there a point at which the students are no longer engaged and instead are overwhelmed, intimidated, and frustrated? How much time should be allotted for training?
Technology is only a tool, and this article shows how there needs to be a careful, well thought out selection and implementation of different methods. Being aware of the options, acquiring experience and training for new things, and having an open mind and discussion of what works best for students (which often means overcoming personality hurdles and technology phobias) is something many history departments certainly need to address.
Historians have a responsibility to keep abreast of recent research in human learning and effective teaching techniques, and the digital age has played a large role in inspiring studies of cognition and neurobiology that can help historians become better teachers. This article makes a lot of excellent points about the need for innovation and collaboration in developing more interactive, immersive survey history courses. The introductory history course is key to generating student interest in and understanding of the study of history, which is why I find the experimentation described in this article so relevant to discussions of history in the digital age. Harbison and Waltzer list four pedagogical processes that they utilized to shape the course they developed: Writing Across the Curriculum/Writing in the Disciplines, the Visual Knowledge Project, the Open Educational Resources Movement, and networked learning theory.
Each of these processes emphasizes exploration, collaboration, and primary source research as a means not only to help students work through the information in the course, but to examine how they think about, work through, and learn from that material as well. It’s about process, not product, and this is central to any successful learning experience. While it’s true that these processes and the emphasis on process rather than product could be utilized in a “traditional” (i.e. non-digital) introductory history course, I agree with the authors’ assertions that the digital medium and digital technologies and resources present unique opportunities to both teachers and students.
For one, historian-teachers have access to resources that make it possible for them to observe and actively participate in their students’ attempts to navigate through the course material and develop critical analysis skills. This makes it far easier to intervene and redirect students when they are having difficulty grasping key ideas or concepts and has the added advantage of clarifying student thought processes. As a teaching assistant I have learned that it is nearly impossible to predict the ways students from a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences will interact with a given text, lecture theme, or primary source. Thus far, speaking with students is the only way I have found that I can gain sufficient insight into how a student is interacting with the material to understand what a particular problem is and offer appropriate advice and direction for rethinking the problem. It seems that the digitally-taught history course offers another, potentially more effective approach: observing the learning process itself. This could make it possible to reach students before they journey too far down the wrong path or become discouraged and give up.
A second obvious advantage of teaching history digitally is that it gives historians a viable platform for showing students the need for and potential of history in the digital medium. The introductory history course taught digitally will, as the authors discuss, require the use of both digital tools and digitized sources. By showing their students what is currently available online, historians can also discuss what is currently not online—as well as what this means for the discipline of history. Examples of digital scholarship can inspire students to imagine new ways of doing history, ways that are probably quite different from how they are used to thinking about history (generally in terms of names, dates, and “dusty old books”). Digitally-taught history courses also provide a means to increase media literacy, not just in the sense of increasing student knowledge and abilities with regard to digital technologies and tools—as Harbison and Waltzer point out—but also in the sense of showing students how to critically evaluate historical sources and arguments in the digital medium. If historians don’t assume an active role in educating students about how to determine good history from bad—both in print and online—who will? Wouldn’t we rather it be us (trained professionals) educating students in our history courses than some amateur or demagogue on the Web? Of course critical evaluation of sources and argument ought to be discussed in any introductory level history course, by does not the digitally-taught history course offer a unique opportunity to impact the primary way the digital generation encounters history: on the Web?
I am also particularly encouraged and intrigued by the authors’ experimentation with open platform publishing. First, this medium seems bound to generate “more rigorous examination of visual resources,” as the authors argue, and it enables both students and historian-teachers to take full advantage of a wide variety of source material. When students write and publish in the digital medium, they are able to utilize not just visual sources, but audio, video, and born-digital sources as well. This is sure to please students of the digital generation, who already tend to be well-versed in interaction with multiple forms of media, but it also promises a process and a product that will be more interdisciplinary in nature than the traditional class essay tends to be. “Media richness,” as Harbison and Waltzer term it, offers a new path to increased interdisciplinarity within the teaching, study, and profession of history. (Although of course interdisciplinary methods require their own introduction and discussion of best practices if students are to use multiple media effectively and critically.)
Open platform publishing also offers a means for historian-teachers to get their students to practice and develop their writing skills more. I have been a teaching assistant for a few professors who have attempted to utilize in-class “mini-essays” as a practical opportunity to enhance students’ basic skills in forming critical arguments supported by evidence. And by practical I mean that they are brief enough to evaluate quickly—something that is key in large classes—and consume very little class time. Mini-essays are a good enough technique to start with, but they aren’t particularly useful as the semester goes on and one works to see improvement over time. Mini-essays, by their very nature, don’t allow for much in-depth analysis and thought. The “micro-monographs” Harbison and Waltzer refer to seem a much more useful tool in the effort to achieve the same end, and the fact that these micro-monographs are developed and presented in an open, digital platform makes them all the more useful to historian-teachers’ efforts to find more effective ways to educate students. Writing as an iterative process holds great promise in getting students to improve both their writing skills and competency in making a historical argument. Harbison and Waltzer discuss having students write and publish a brief piece on a focused theme, then garner feedback via peer review and instructor intervention, gather more evidence, and rewrite. They state that their students wrote “more frequently and voluminously” over the course of the semester than in most other courses they previously taught. These short bursts of writing seem ideal for many of the goals of an introductory course, and they enable the historian-teacher to engage with their students in a more thorough, meaningful way than a typical large survey course allows.
Overall, the experiences shared by Harbison and Waltzer in this article are a good illustration of the positive results that can be achieved when one is willing to experiment with the digital and find ways to utilize its advantages for the specific purposes of historians. And if more historians begin to think of what they would like to do with and within the digital medium, we can also begin to ask for (and create) the digital tools and resources we need to create the kinds of history courses we can currently only imagine.
This essay is an important contribution to our knowledge of how to enhance student motivation through digital media. In a survey class an instructor mostly communicates with students through lecture, and thus rarely gets to communicate a professional’s passion for history on a more profound personal level. Likewise, the students communicate their ideas of history through essays and tests, and virtually never engage into the informed history-related discussions with their peers. The idea that an instructor can and should transcend this deadlock is both empowering and challenging. The enthusiasm and benefits of open access blogging about history for the students are clear. Yet how can one replicate this experience?
First of all, a more thorough discussion of teaching methodology will make the argument of using the authors’ experience much stronger. The discussion of goals the authors set for their classes, how assignments and activities communicate these goals to the students, finally how grading reflects the initial goals and recognizes student’s on-line contributions will open the authors’ experience for peer-instructors around the United States and, possibly, abroad. A greater focus on the goals, assignments and grading, spelled out in a few paragraphs at the beginning will also help instructors in other humanities classes to adapt authors’ experiments to the needs of their subject areas. A few statements on of class-size, grading load, and ways to cope with it in classes of hundreds of people will also create a larger audience, more experimentation, and improvement on the teaching techniques the authors’ pioneer.
Another theme of the essay is developing students’ writing skills and integrating the Writing Across the Curriculum and Visual Knowledge project methodologies. Blogging about history seems to incite students’ interest by involving them directly in what they are learning. As a former teacher, and an instructor-to-be I would like to learn what kind of writing fits best in the classroom blogosphere. Is it analysis of sources? Is it reflection on a reading? Is it creative writing on a historical theme? I.e. what type of (historical) writing should instructors using blogs introduce their students to and want them to develop? Addressing these questions will bring into clearer focus the relationship between writing and the “pictorial turn” in the history survey classroom. A picture may be worth a thousand words, yet it is evocative, argumentative writing and speech that makes us form a connection with it and understand where it fits in a historical theme.
Finally, what is the use of “creating a web of knowledge that could be referenced, reorganized, and built upon”? (paragraph 11) Is it of use only to students, or do these texts have a potential to be utilized as teaching tools in the same course, in oher colleges, even to amount to a textbook in a corresponding area of American history? In other words, what should the “student as producer” generate to satisfy their instructor’s hunger for digital teaching experimentation? How does the instructor ensure that contributing to a blog remains a creative activity and not a run-of-the-mill, conveyor-belt task? While the bloogging experience is fresh and innovative all of us in the digital humanities should find out methods to keep it that way for generations of students to come, especially if open-sourse blogging in history survey courses is here to stay.
I would be interested to see some time-and-motion consideration here, not for the students (which seems to be covered) but for the instructors. Does setting-up, maintaining, contributing and moderating (if this last is done) such a site consume more time than the older methods of pedagogy would have done? If so, is any use of this sort of teaching as an `efficiency measure’, something which the authors wish to avoid of course, misplaced?
I also wonder, with Ms Nichols above, what happens to old content, especially given that various web-search systems will cache it. Are old blogs archived; are they available to new students? Whose is the copyright? These are issues it would be nice to have resolved even if in the most summary form.
As a student I very much like this notion. I prefer online interaction to large lecture theatres and particularly like the idea of having more freedom of choice as to when to participate.
However I am left wondering whether increased engagement with this intro course impacts on their other work.
Also it might be worth further exploring the pastoral and social implications of moving interactions away from the face-to-face towards the virtual.
I can relate very much to Tom’s dilemma about teaching the U.S. survey and how to bring students into the doing of history. As teachers of the U.S. survey we often face a trade off between content coverage and habits of mind or historical thinking. My U.S. survey course has gradually moved since 2005 quite far to the side of using digital technology and online data repositories to encourage and develop disciplinary habits of mind, analysis, and writing and communication. I especially appreciate the “authentic learning” experience that Waltzer and Harbison take through the blog assignments. I have done similar work with wikis.
The main questions I have for this essay are about scale, openness, and assessment. Some of these are covered here. But I have found it difficult to scale writing intensive activities. What do the authors do to handle a course of 200 or more students? Openness is clearly an advantage because students see themselves in a different light–producing work for an audience. But how are these materials adding a new dimension to historical analysis? Or are we replicating what’s already largely available? The History Engine serves as one model of class-based activity to enrich history and make connections otherwise impossible. The decision to move to open blogging then, it seems to me, is a critical one and needs to be further contextualized and defended. Assessment is related to scale. But how is assessment managed? When I experimented with large-scale group wiki projects (150 students) producing research-based entries like those described here, we tried to come up with innovative assessment strategies. For example, higher rewards for consistent effort–we tallied number of edits in a 24-hour period over the course of the assignment so that we could see if a student made 50 edits in the last day of the assignment or if they made 3 or 4 a day for 15 days running. Then there is the question of assessing the writing. The essay states that student performance is assessed on the based of creativity, effort, attention to instructions, and timeliness–how? And of cut and paste plagiarism, which could be addressed more thoroughly in this essay.
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