The Future of Teaching the Past: Digital Technologies and History Education in the 21st Century

The Future of Teaching the PastDigital Technologies and History Education

in the 21st Century

National Council for History Education

March 13, 2009

Sharon M. Leonsleon@gmu.edu

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/cwphtml/cwphome.html

"Democratized access is the real payoff in electronic records and

materials. It may be harder to preserve and organize digital

materials than it is paper records, but, once that is accomplished,

they can be made accessible to vastly greater numbers of people.

To open up the archives and libraries in this way democratizes

historical work. Already, people who had never had direct access

to archives and libraries can now enter. High school students are

suddenly doing primary source research; genealogy has exploded

in popularity because you no longer have to travel to distant

archives."

Roy Rosenzweig, “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era,” The American Historical Review 108, no. 3 (June 2003). Paragraphs 56. http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/108.3/rosenzweig.html

http://www.hewlett.org/Programs/Education/OER/

"OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the

public domain or have been released under an intellectual property

license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others.3 Open

educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules,

textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools,

materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge."

Dan Atkins, John Seely Brown, and Allen Hammond, A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement (Hewlett Foundation: February 2007) p. 4.

http://teachinghistory.org

http://teachinghistory.org/history-content

The most successful educational uses of digital technology fall into three broad

categories:

- Inquiry-based learning utilizing primary sources available on CD-ROMS

and the World Wide Web, and including the exploration of multimedia environments

with potentially fluid combinations of text, image, sound, moving images in

presentational and inquiry activities, involving different senses and forms of

expression and addressing different learning styles;

- Bridging reading and writing through on-line interaction, extending the

time and space for dialogue and learning, and joining literacy with disciplinary and

interdisciplinary inquiry;

- Making student work public in new media formats, encouraging

constructivist pedagogies through the creation and exchange of knowledge-

representations, and creating opportunities for review by broader professional and

public audiences.

Randy Bass and Roy Rosenzweig, "Rewiring the History and Social Studies Classroom: Needs, Frameworks, Dangers, and Proposals," White Paper for Department of Education, Forum on Technology in K-12 Education: Envisioning a New Future, December 1, 1999. [http://chnm.gmu.edu/resources/essays/d/26]

http://www.academiccommons.org/issue/january-2009

http://teachinghistory.org/issues-and-research/research-briefs

http://historicalthinkingmatters.org

http://zotero.org

http://www.flickr.com/commons

http://docs.google.com/

http://www.wordle.net/

http://matrix.msu.edu/~mmatrix/

http://objectofhistory.org/

http://digitalstoryteller.org

http://www.lmic.state.mn.us/ghol/

http://omeka.org

The Future of Teaching the PastDigital Technologies and History Education

in the 21st Century

National Council for History Education

March 13, 2009

Sharon M. Leonsleon@gmu.edu