Theresa Huston's Teaching What You Don't Know invites us to begin designing our courses by asking ourselves what it is we want the students to be able to do at the end of the class. She distinguishes figuring out what we want students to be able to do from what we want them to know. Once we know what we want them to be able to do, we can design the course backwards from that goal.
As I start my journey into teaching a graduate seminar in digital history, I have been able to identify four key things that I want my students to be able to do as result of the class.
1. To consume digital history intelligently, with the same kind of sophistication and critical analysis that they do other forms of historical knowledge. This feels to me like a natural extension of the teaching I already do, in which I guide students through careful reading of scholarly texts, primary sources, and primary source repositories. As I write this, I know that I should also be able to help students read museum exhibits critically, but thus far I have not structured my courses to include museums (because there are excellent public history and museum studies programs at my institution, I have left this task to my supremely talented colleagues, in whom I have enormous confidence).
2. To use digital tools to enhance their own research. This task in some sense feels the hardest to me. I was impressed, stunned, and a little overwhelmed at the American Historical Association's sessions on digital history at the 2012 conference in Chicago. Historians are already using all kinds of digital tools to re-see their evidence (possibly being reconceptualized as "data") in new ways. Visualizations, data mining, and mapping were the predominant general approaches that I can recall; all of them are basically new to me. Only mapping feels familiar enough for me to stretch towards, thanks largely to the four years I spent on staff at the Newberry Library and the 13 years I have spent at UWM, which happens to host the magnificent resources of the American Geographical Society Library.
I personally lack that basic drive of technical curiosity that impels other scholars to spend hours noodling around with new tools. I proved to myself for the purposes of a presentation last spring that I can figure out how to make a Wordle to include in my Powerpoint. But I recently loaded the FreeMind tool onto my laptop in hopes of making a simple three-dimensional axis for use in a conference response and gave up, feeling like I had wasted my time and not learned very much. When I attended a THATCamp session intended to teach me to make simple Google Fusion maps, I gave up in minutes and learned to Tweet instead. Figuring out how to help students figure out what the available digital tools are and how to use them will present enormous challenges for me.
3. To be able to participate in (or even lead) digital history projects. It seems to me that most of my graduate students, who are excited about history and want to share it with the public, will need to know how to take part productively in digital history projects if they take their careers forward in the historical field. I have been leading the project for the Encyclopedia of Milwaukee since 2008 and have a small network of people working on digital projects. I think that I will be able to harness these opportunities into a useful conversation about what the role of the historian in the digital history project should be. At this stage, one of my key questions is about how much a single person has to know about technological matters in order to be useful on a digital history project. As I am a project leader and don't know much myself, I suspect I will be arguing (at least implicitly) that the basic bar is low--as long as you have the resources to engage people with complementary skills in the project.
4. To continue to learn about digital history on their own. This is always a goal in my classes, although what I do about it varies from almost nothing to a lot. It seems to me that in this case, being a content novice will really help me achieve this goal. I simply cannot lecture to students about digital history tools and sites because I don't know most of them. Instead, to teach the students about digital history, I have to engage them in the process of figuring out what the resources are and reporting back to the rest of the class on them. Collectively, the students will have to teach me more than I can teach them. The research and presentation skills they will build up in the process of educating each other about digital history are naturally transferable in the future.
Today, those are my basic goals. It is entirely possible as I learn more about digital history, I will need to reshape those goals. I welcome your feedback about whether there is some big category of digital history learning that I am missing.
No comments:
Post a Comment