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January 31, 2006
The Geography of Aryanization
This past week I found an interesting application of GIS technology to the history of the Holocaust in Austria. The website NS-Crimes in Vienna offers visitors a large database of information on Jewish families evicted from their apartments in Vienna in 1938-1939. The database includes information on each evictee, including such things as date of birth, reason for eviction, any deportation information, and so on. As useful as these data are, what is more useful about this site is that all the data is geolocated so that you can click the "map" icon in the database and see exactly where the person you are looking at resided in the city. Or, you can approach the problem the other way and look at an interactive map of the city that includes icons showing how many Jews were evicted from a particular area. By zooming on on these locations down to the street level, one can gain a much more precise understanding of the geography of this one piece of the Holocaust.
This particular project provides no technical information on how the map and database were created. However, the project itself provides a useful model for a simple interface that allows users to explore georeferenced historical information from two different directions (the database or the map).
I expect that I'll find more and more of these kinds of projects as I begin poking around the web. In intend to assign this one to my Western Civ students this semester to see what they can make of it. I'll report the results of their investigation later on in the semester.
Posted by mills at 04:17 PM
January 30, 2006
Off the Desktop
Environmental historian William J. Turkel of the University of Western Ontario offers those interested in GIS and history a place to start their thinking on the subject. His website on Place-Based Computing includes a number of useful resources, but perhaps the best is a series of slides he presents from a talk given last year at a conference in Canada. In this presentation he walks you through the ways that students in a Public History course will be creating a place-based archive during the semester. I can't wait to see the results of this course, because it is an example of an innovative historian using digital media to help his students think about the past in very different ways. I'm hoping the results of their work will be posted online so we can examine their conclusions. I'm willing to bet their final projects will look nothing like a conventional end of semester "paper" and that the conclusions they draw as a result of thinking about the past geospatially may well be quite different.
I am also taken with the idea Turkel presents of treating places as archives. I've just begun thinking about a project to do something like this in the Czech Republic and his essays on this subject provide just the focus my thinking needed.
If you are considering any work with GIS and history, start here.
Posted by mills at 06:17 AM
January 29, 2006
Best Practices?
I’ve just returned for a two-day meeting where groups of scholars tried to determine what might constitute “best practices” in introductory undergraduate courses in several disciplines. Three of the six groups in attendance were historians (US, European, World) and it was very interesting to watch the way the three groups approached their charge. Each group received a list of criteria that were to serve as a starting point for discussing the characteristics of some idealized best practices course. These characteristics fell into three general categories—content, teaching methods, and what are best called “historical thinking skills.” We were then to decide which items on this starter list ought to be included, which out to be excluded, and how those that remained out to be considered more (or less) important.
The World Historians immediately threw out the starting point document they’d been given and rewrote the entire thing from top to bottom. The Americanists decided that they really needed to start with historical thinking skills, then go on to teaching methods, and then and only then get to the content. The Europeanists (my group) proved either the most compliant or the most agreeable (depending on one’s perspective I suppose). We started on page one of our document and worked our way through to the end in a more linear fashion.
I might be tempted to conclude that these three approaches to the same task were somehow indicative of the characteristics of our sub-disciplines, except that there were only a half dozen or so historians in each group and so we were anything but representative of our peers and how they might approach such a task.
What was more interesting than our style, however, was the substance we all arrived at. In each case, regardless of method, the groups seemed to have arrived at about the same place. The starter documents we received seemed to present a best practices course as one that efficiently “covers” some generally agreed upon body of content while exposing students to various historical thinking skills. All three groups of historians saw things the other way ‘round. That is, that a best practices course was one that uncovered various ways of knowing about the past as part of an investigation of central concerns in the discipline. Content thus became secondary to what might make a course an exemplar of “best practices” or not. This is not to say that we didn’t care about content—we did and passionately I might add. But we all (or at least most) seemed to see content as the way to teach larger concerns.
This might seem revolutionary to some in the historical community. Alas, I’m sorry to report that in 1905 the American Historical Association issued a report arguing for much the same approach in the first year of the college course in history.
Will it work this time? Stay tuned…
Posted by mills at 10:02 PM
January 25, 2006
The Passing of the Killer App
In a meeting the other day, one of our graduate students observed that for undergraduate students today, email is a way to get in touch with old people.
Ouch.
Deeply wounded by this notion, I decided to test this proposition out with some of the undergraduates I know. Alas, they mostly confirmed this statement. When I asked them how they mainly stayed in touch with one another, they said:
Myspace
Facebook
Livejournal
Text messaging
Instant messaging
Phone calls
But email? For the very unscientific sample of students I spoke to yesterday (five altogether) email was for getting in touch with professors, staying in touch with parents, or contacting companies to purchase products, ask for technical support, and so on.
Supporting this notion that younger people are turning toward newer and different ways of staying in touch are the statistics published by Livejournal.com on its website. Livejournal, which bosts only 9.3 million accounts (as compared to the 27 million or so Myspace users) has a demographic that is largely aged 18-21 and almost two-thirds female. So, for example, there are ten Livejournal users aged 18 for every one aged 30 and more than three 18 year-olds for every 25 year-old. Facebook and Myspace do not publish similar information on their sites, but given the fact that Facebook users must have college/university or high school issued email addresses to sign up, the average Facebook user must be even more heavily weighted to the 18-21 year-old demographic.
What does this mean for history educators--beyond the depression that acceptance of our dinosaur status will induce?
First and foremost it means that we are going to have to start using these new communication platforms, and fast. Otherwise our students will be engaging in a dynamic and freewheeling conversation that we have no access to. But it also means that we are going to have to think carefully about how educational purposes can be best served in these new platforms. After all, education is what we're good at, isn't it?
Posted by mills at 04:41 PM
January 24, 2006
General Education and Today's Student
Wither general education in America? Tom Ehrlich, senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, is blue about the Harvard plan for general education. In an essay for Carnegie Perspectives, Ehrlich (formerly president of Indiana University) laments the proposal of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences to substantially water down Harvard's general education requirements.
Ehrlich's main criticism is that "the sad reality is that the new plan looks like it was crafted to serve the faculty and not the students. It will ensure that faculty need teach only what they want to teach, leaving it up to students to make whatever connections they can among their courses." In particular, Ehrlich worries that students will lose the sort of common academic experiences that the core curriculum provides and will end up taking an idiosyncratic cluster of freshman and sophomore courses that are too focused on narrow, career-focused goals, rather than acquiring the sort of broad-based knowledge that the core curriculum was designed to provide.
On the one hand, Ehrlich is right to be concerned. For more than a century, Harvard and other institutions at the pinnacle of the American educational system have set the standard for undergraduate education that many instutitions further down the food chain then seek to emulate. For instance, it was at Harvard in the 19th century that the current large lecture/TA recitation section system began. In its first decades this approach to the large course was even known as the "Harvard system." So, it is reasonable to expect that if Harvard waters down its approach to general education, others will follow suit.
But is this a bad thing?
It is if one assumes that the course will continue to be the unit of content delivery over time. It is also a bad thing if one assumes that students should not be allowed to decide what knowledge they ought to acquire during their undergraduate years. While I agree with Ehrlich that students ought to expose themselves to a wide fund of knowledge, especially when they are freshmen and sophomores--before declaring a major--I'm less convinced that they must do so.
For more than a century we have delivered an undergraduate curriculum that is largely unchanged. Students enroll at our universities, they take 40 or so courses, 10-15 of which are narrowly focused in a major, and they graduate and head off to the world beyond the campus boundaries. And then they find out what they don't know. Employers demand specialized or general knowledge and skills of them that they didn't get in college and so they attend corporate training courses, take continuing education from us, go back to graduate school, or simply change careers to avoid the first items in this list.
Why not let the students and the market decide what is best? Give them the chance to accumulate what they think they ought to learn?
The downside to this, of course, is that many students will over concentrate. But won't those students find themselves at a disadvantage in the job market? Won't employers want employees who can think as well as do?
And, if I'm right that the course is being undermined by technological change, then I suspect we'll see the proliferation of content modules that students can take either as part of a course or on its own. And if this happens, students will be able to over concentrate even more. But if employers care about this, then I suspect we'll see less and less over concentration as students align their educational experiences with employer expecatations.
So, is Ehrlich right to be worried? At one level he is, but at another level he's worrying about a problem from the previous century instead of the new century.
Posted by mills at 11:44 AM
January 22, 2006
Off the desktop
So, do you think this move of content from the desktop to the handheld device is gathering steam? According to today's Washington Post the iTunes website has already sold 8 million video downloads. I don't know about you, but that number seems like the beginning of a trend if ever I saw one. Academic content developers take not. Desktop applications--old news. Handheld applications--news.
Posted by mills at 07:28 PM
January 21, 2006
Scapbooking Learning (cont'd)
A reasonable question that could be asked about my plan to require a "historical scrapbook" from my students this semester is how I might assess the quality of their work. Because I expect my students to ask just this question, I've given them a set of assessment guidelines, drawn heavily from a grading rubric that Lendol Calder of Augustana College uses for his student essays. I'm hoping that giving them explicit evaluation criteria on day one will help them to create scrapbooks that make it possible for me to see just how much they've learned during the semester.
My handout says:
Your scrapbook will be evaluated each time according to the following criteria, with a different emphasis depending upon the nature of the content.
Comprehension: Did you understand what the author of the source or the book was saying or meant? Does your annotation, blog posting, or essay accurately reconstruct the literal meaning of what you read and is it free of misconceptions of authors' meanings.
Questions and Thesis: Are you asking good historical questions, which are then answered (in your essays or blog postings). If the answer is in an essay, does it take the form of a thesis that makes a significant claim that can be supported by evidence.
Analysis-Connecting: Did you understand how what you read fits into a bigger picture? Does your work connect information from various sources and how well does it compare, contrast, corroborate, or observe interesting links.
Analysis-Causality: Does your work demonstrate an understanding of notable change over time? Is attentive to multiple causation and does it avoid simplistic explanations?
Analysis-Sourcing: Does your work demonstrate that you know what the sources you've collected are good for and does it identify sources, contextualize and assess documents for bias, reliability, point of view?
Multiple Perspectives: Does your work demonstrate an understanding of how others might plausibly interpret this evidence differently? Does it consider more than one point of view and rebut or concede possible objections to your thesis (in essays)?
Humility: Does your work demonstrate an understanding of what you do not know that you need to know? Is it appropriately self-critical; does it admit contrary evidence; qualify arguments; recognize limits to your historical knowledge?
Research: Does your work use relevant sources found on your own and demonstrate creativity in the finding of those sources?
Prose Style: Does your work use correct grammar and punctuation and is it written in clear, compelling prose?
Self-Reflective: Does your reflection on your work accurately summarize the strengths and weaknesses of your own learning? Does it display an awareness of what you know, don't know, and should know?
Posted by mills at 05:40 PM
January 20, 2006
Scrapbooking Learning
For the first time in six years I'm going to try something substantially new in my Western Civ course. The last time I re-wrote the course was in 1999 when I reconfigured it as part of my Carnegie Foundation research project (please excuse the ugly frames...it was 1999 and frames were way cool). In those days my interest was in the ways that digital media might influence student learning in a survey course. These days my interests are in the ways that digital media influence student collaborations and in the ways that various media (not just digital) can be used to allow students to exercise more control over the work product they turn in for assessment.
To that end, I've changed the assignments for this semester's course, centering them on what I'm calling scrapbooks. Why scrapbooks and not portfolios? I have two reasons. The first is that the term "portfolio" has all sorts of connotations in higher education these days. The U.S. Department of Education even has a webpage on student portfolios which means portfolios have been with us for a while now. So, I wanted to avoid being locked into something that people thought they already knew what it was and so whatever my students produced wouldn't be a real portfolio. The second reason is that I'm assuming that most students have seen something called a scrapbook and so have some idea of what one might look like and feel like. I'm hoping this will mean the assignment will be a bit easier for them.
Where I'm going to make it difficult is by not telling them what form their scrapbook should take. I honestly don't care if it looks like the kind of family scrapbook from last year's vacation that is found all over America, or if it is a digital product, or a binder, or anything in between. The form is entirely up to them. I'll be interested to see how many of them decide to use the Web Scrabook to build their own course scrapbooks.
What's not up to them is what the minimum requirements for content are. I've provided them with a list of just what the scrapbook must contain. What they include beyond that is up to them. As one would expect, I'm requiring their blog postings, various essays, reflections on films, performances and museum visits, primary sources they collect organized around a theme, and a self-evaluation.
Will it work? I think so. Will it be more work? I'm sure it will be. But this semester is a good opportunity for me to try out something a bit more labor-intensive because my teaching load is lighter and my book is in press.
As the semester unrolls I'll be chronicling this experiment here, so stay tuned...
Posted by mills at 06:12 AM
January 18, 2006
History Blog Awards
At last week's American Historical Association annual meeting the Cliopatria Awards for the best history blogs were announced. Winners are listed below. Check them out.
Best Individual Blog: Mark Grimsley's Blog Them Out of the Stone Age
Best Group Blog: K. M. Lawson, Jonathan Dresner, and others, at Frog in a Well
Best New Blog: "PK"'s BibliOdyssey
Best Post: Rob MacDougall's "Turk 182" at Old is the New New (9 January 2005)
Best Series of Posts: Nathanael Robinson's "The Geographical Turn," Parts One, Three, at Rhine River.
Best Writer: Timothy Burke at Easily Distracted
Posted by mills at 11:29 AM
January 17, 2006
The Future of the Course (continued)
What do you want to do when you graduate from college?
That question, more than any other, drives our students' choices about academic majors. They want jobs and even if they don't know, exactly, which job (or career) they want, they know they want a job when they graduate. Sure, they also want to be educated, but mostly they want jobs. And who can blame them? Jobs are good things to have.
The problem is that their education has so little to do with either their goal of finding a job or of becoming educated. This is because students are forced into curricula that have little connection to what employers expect of them and everything to do with what we in the professoriate have decided is good for them. Second, the courses that populate those curricula--many of which have changed little in their basic outline since they were invented decades or centuries ago--force students to grapple with an entire 10-14 or so weeks worth of content just so they can get at the pieces of that knowledge that they really want or need.
As I pointed out yesterday, digital technology is poised to subvert this knowledge delivery model.
Just as iTunes and TiVo have subverted the delivery of music and television, imagine what it will be like when students can select those bits of the educational content we offer that are relevant to their personal educational and career goals. In such a world, they could continue to enroll in courses, but they could also acquire only bits and pieces of courses--those bits and pieces that they need or want as opposed to the ones we force them to have.
What would this look like?
As Princeton University's Stan Katz wrote in his article "The Cheated Undergraduate" (Newsday, May 4, 2003):
We would do better to challenge undergraduates to ask their most urgent questions about themselves, the world and the human condition - and to organize their curriculum around these questions. Students should be encouraged to think deeply and systematically about beauty, poverty, goodness, gender, war, disaster, progress - or whatever in their life experience commands the greatest intellectual and emotional urgency. They need to be able to build their own knowledge base, whether through existing courses, independent study or guided experiential learning. Students need not be limited to pre-packaged courses in various disciplines and loosely configured "majors." They need to be able to negotiate with faculty ways to gain the knowledge they need to solve the problems that absorb them. They need something more akin to "focus areas" than "major" fields.
In other words, we stop making the decisions for the students and let them start making the decisions for themselves.
Can't work, you say?
Alas for those who say "can't", it already is working. For more than five years now, Elizabeth Barkley, a musicologist at Foothill College in California, has been teaching her introductory music survey just this way, allowing students to mix and match elements from a menu of content to create their own version of her course. To be sure, her course is still bounded by the three credit system, but that is because it is only one course, not an entire curriculum. But the proof is in the pudding--enrollment in her course has soared from 45 the last year it was taught as a traditional survey of music history to over 780 students. It seems to me the students like this delivery system.
In a comment on yesterday's posting on this subject, Jeremy Boggs asked what sort of technological resources would be required to pull of such a radical redesign of the college curriculum. The answer, as is so often the case with questions like this one is "It depends." If you examine Elizabeth Barkley's course, you'll see that it is a mixture of traditional classroom activities, student attendance at performances, and some technological delivery of material...all at a cost that a community college could afford.
Further, as the technology costs drop and faculty members' facility with the technology increases, I'm certain that we'll see more and better learning modules developed by individual professors, obviating the need for the outsourcing of such materials to corporations.
How long will this take? My guess is that it will be ten years or so before this sort of approach to the delivery of course content becomes common. But it's happening already and as we know, technological change in any industry has a way of speeding up once it gets a foothold...
Posted by mills at 09:00 PM | Comments (1)
January 16, 2006
The Future of the Course
This past Thursday on the Diane Rehm Show on WAMU (88.5 FM) Walter Mossberg, personal technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal made several very interesting points about the future of television that are germaine to the college course.
Mossberg pointed out that TiVo, and now Apple's delivery of individual television shows via iTunes, has upset the long-standing relationship between television viewers and the content providers. Since the beginning of television, viewers have been forced to watch television shows in the sequence the networks dictated. But now the technology makes it possible to watch television shows whenever and wherever we want. And now it is even possible to purchase portions of shows--indidivual skits from Saturday Night Live, for instance.
Similarly, iTunes has done the same thing to the record/CD album. From the time the LP pushed the 45 into oblivion, music buyers were forced to purchase entire albums just to get the songs they wanted. Now they purchase only the songs they want--and do so by the millions and millions.
Given these developments, can it be long before the college course breaks down into its component parts as well?
Take the history course, for instance. I teach a "survey" of 20th century East European history in a fairly classic mode. That is, I begin around the beginning of the century and end in the late 1990s, covering (and uncovering) the history along the way through lectures, readings, and collaborative activities. But what if my students only wanted bits and pieces of that course--the equivalent of one song from an album or one skit from SNL?
I know, you are recoiling in horror at the idea that students would be able to take and use only those bits and pieces of various courses that interested them. If you want to know what this feels like in the real world, you should probably get in touch with someone from NBC, CBS, ABC, or one of the big recording studios. They've lived this reality already. It couldn't happen in higher education, you say...which presupposes that educational institutions somehow have the ability to withstand the subversive forces of technology that multi-billion dollar coporations did not have.
My guess is that the iTunesization of education will come sooner rather than later. Why? For one thing, the model is already in place in the two of the other areas of life our students care deeply about (television and music) and so the demand for similar delivery of educational content will grow rather than diminish. Second, the model will become more and more compelling for colleges and universities as well. Imagine the momentum in this direction that will develop as universities (and professors) realize that they can sell individual days or weeks of a course at a profit to as many students as want them. Tell me it won't happen. Then perhaps we can discuss some real estate in Florida that I've been looking to unload cheap.
But if this scenario comes to pass, what will it mean for our students' education? Read on tomorrow...
Posted by mills at 07:27 AM | Comments (3)
January 13, 2006
MemoryWiki
One of the more interesting recent entries into the business of collecting history online is the MemoryWiki project which has the slogan "Everyone has a story. Make yours history." Started by the Russian historian, now writer for The Atlantic Monthly, Marshall Poe, this new project takes advantage of the popularity of the Wikipedia and aspires to create a massive database of personal narratives and memoirs. Already, with almost no publicity, the MemoryWiki contains 434 memoirs, ranging from a college student's confrontation with the Secret Service to a "Where were you when JFK was shot?" memory.
Much like NPR's StoryCorps project, the MemoryWiki has the advantage of being an open archive of memories. Even better than StoryCorps, which is only available if you happen to be in the location of the recording equipment, MemoryWiki is available anywhere, anytime. All you need is the Internet. These open archives make it possible for the average person to record their own stories which historians can sift through later (or ignore) if they choose. Unlike the traditional archive, there are no barriers to this collection, which opens up many vistas for research in the future. No longer will historians be beholden to the acquisition regimes of particular archives...if digital archives take hold (as they seem to be doing) then the future archive is truly vast--and keyword searchable.
I expect that we'll see more and more projects like MemoryWiki in the months and years ahead. What remains to be seen is whether they can pull off interoperability.
Posted by mills at 07:31 PM
CHNM on WAMU
Roy Rosenzweig and Dan Cohen from the Center for History and New Media appeared on the Kojo Nnamdi Show on WAMU this past Tuesday where they discussed collecting history online. A big part of the discussion was the new Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, the second in our line of digital memory projects (the September 11 Digital Archive being the other).
Posted by mills at 08:49 AM
January 12, 2006
New Media at the AHA
After a hiatus for the holiday break, EdWired is back.
I spent last weekend in Philadelphia at the American Historical Association's annual conference. Most of the time I was locked in a hotel room interviewing candidates for a European history position at GMU, but I did manage to get out long enough to chair a panel on GIS in history. This panel, organized by Carol Keller at San Antonio College, on GIS in the Humanities.
This was one of the most interesting panels I've attended at the AHA in years and to my mind points to one of the two most important emerging trends in the use of technology in historical research and teaching. If you take a minute to peruse the San Antonio College website, you'll quickly see some of the many possible applications of GIS in history. The interface for their project is a little clunky, but they only had a small NEH grant to pay for it. Overlook the clunkiness and you'll be able to imagine a number of ways GIS can be ported into your own research or teaching.
We have now begun using GIS in our collecting history projects--the September 11 Digital Archive and the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank. Using the Google API we now make it possible for visitors to these archives to geo-locate the stories, images, etc., that they find in these archives. Imagine what this would be like if, for instance, every image in the Library of Congress's American Memory Project was similarly tagged?
On a sadder note (for me), only one of the nine candidates we interviewed at the AHA even asked about the work we are doing in digital history at GMU. This stands in contrast to the candidates for our search in US history--all of whom asked about it (or some I'm told). European historians have a long, long way to go when it comes to digital history as compared to our Americanist colleagues. Sigh...
Posted by mills at 05:46 PM | Comments (4)