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March 31, 2006
Collecting the History of A Big Surprise (cont'd)
The persistent flogging of the GMU Basketball Digital Memory Bank is starting to pay off. As of 6:00 pm today (a little more than 24 hours since the site went live), the site has logged over 1,400 unique visitors and more than 40,000 hits. One hundred digital objects have already been deposited in this collect-history-as-it's-happening archive.
The GoogleBot crawled the site around 3:00 today, so it should start showing up in Google searches before much longer, at which point we can expect a good deal more traffic. And for reasons unknown, someone in Andorra is checking out the site. See what you learn when you have good log tracking?
At this point, much of the promotion is good old fashioned marketing--handing out flyers, calling friends and relatives, pestering students. As the traffic begins to build, it will be interesting to see how many people find their way to the site. One would expect that if GMU defeats Florida on Saturday night that the traffic will jump significantly. I also suspect that within a month, this same traffic will die off until the basketball season starts up again next fall.
Posted by mills at 05:59 PM
March 30, 2006
Collecting the History of A Big Surprise (cont'd)
The George Mason Basketball Digital Memory Bank has now achieved lift off. Since the site officially went live several hours ago, visitors have begun to pour in and contributions to the memory bank have begun.
One thing we've learning in all of our projects is how essential it is that we flog the hell out of them to everyone we can think of. "If you build it, they will come" was the voice of a ghost in a cornfield, not a mantra for website development. So, instead, we have been emailing, posting on MySpace, Facebook and other social networking sites, writing to sports writers, posting to sports blogs...in short, doing everything we can online to create traffic for the site. And, in addition, we've been doing it the old-fashioned way...handing out flyers in crowds in the student union building and elsewhere.
Whether this project really takes off will be a function of the success of the men's basketball team in Indy this weekend. But it will be fun to watch it grow.
Posted by mills at 07:27 PM
March 29, 2006
Collecting the History of A Big Surprise
One of the main activities of the Center for History and New Media these days is collecting and preserving history online. Our biggest project is the September 11 Digital Archive, but we have several other similar projects, the newest of which is the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank.
Until now...
One of the great things about these memory banks is that they can be used to collect the history of just about anything. So, when our university's men's basketball team reached the NCAA Final Four this week, one of our graduate students, Meagan Hess, decided to create the George Mason Basketball Digital Memory Bank. The database is up and running yet, so start uploading your stories, images, memories of GMU's dream-like run through the NCAA Tournament this year.
What's the lesson here? Watching this project take shape as the collaboration of several talented graduate students over the past three days, I've reached a couple of tentative conclusions:
1. We need to develop several templates that potential users can simply sign up for and use as the idea strikes them--much the same way that the Blogger.com interface allows anyone to start a blog in less than 10 minutes. Creating a simple digital memory bank is more complex than creating a blog, but that's really just a technical problem to be overcome, not an inherent obstacle.
2. When we do develop a series of templates (design + underlying database for that design), we'll have to wrestle with the server capacity issues that arise. And we'll have to think through the ways we can control what people may be putting on our servers--a particularly pressing issue given that we're a state agency (no porn, thank you very much). This is a combination technical and management problem.
3. Given the amount of work it required several talented graduate students to get this project up and running, without such a template approach, digital memory banks will, for the present, remain the province of a small community of people with the requisite technical skills.
So, check back in a few days to see what ends up in this new digital memory bank. By then, I'll have more to say about the necessity of promoting websites to obtain the participation one desires.
Posted by mills at 09:16 PM
March 27, 2006
The History Blogosphere
Today at the Center for History and New Media, Jeremy Boggs gave a presentation on the History Blogosphere (as of today). This blog entry is being written as he speaks, just to give you an idea of the potential immediacy of blogging. His presentation links are available on his blog.
According to Jeremy, Cliopatria is now tracking several hundred history blogs...quite the emerging community. To get a quick look at some of the best, take a look at Jeremy's list of the Cliopatria awards. Among the best designed is Frog in a Well, one of the few history blogs with real design, as opposed to just using one of the templates (as is the case with the blog you are reading). For those with designs on better design of their history blog, Jeremy recommended Blog Design Solutions.
Several of the better blogs (including Cliopatria and Frog in a Well) Jeremy showed were group blogs. These have the advantage of multiple people posting content and multiple perspectives on associated topics. They also fly in the face of the common practice of blogs as being narcicisstic.
For more on what Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) has to say about the "Golden Age of Blogging", check out the interview with him on the Kojo Nnamdi Show on WAMU (88.5 FM in Washington). The podcast itself is available via iTunes.
Some of the questions from the group in attendance were about who is blogging in the history community, why they would do it, and how they can control the look and feel of their blogs. Several in the audience agreed that they found many blogs a little hard to read and no one spoke up in favor of lots of scrolling down the screen (surprise, surprise). We also discussed the implications of what one writes, including the possible hazards.
If you want to know which of the many history blogs is Jeremy's favorite, check out Old is the New New.
Another good place to start to find history blog posts? Try the History Carnival or the Carnival of Bad History.
Conclusions? An emerging conversation about the past is taking place in blogs, largely outside the view of mainstream academia. What will this mean for our profession? For the study of history? As of today, it's too soon to tell.
Posted by mills at 12:02 PM
March 24, 2006
1989 Online
This past week I got the news from the National Endowment for the Humanities that our grant application to create a major website on the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe was accepted. The project, Making the History of 1989. Sources and Narratives on the Fall of Communism, will be the latest installment in our websites that marry scholarship, teaching, and learning. Here is a mock-up of the proposed website that we prepared for the proposal.
This particular project will take three years (or so) to complete, which meansit will be done just in time for the 20th anniversary of the collapse of communism in the region. For those of us who were there when it was happening, it's very hard to believe it will be 20 years.
Several of our websites (History Matters, Women in World History) contain databases of primary sources and the 1989 project will include at least 300 sources, many drawn from the collections of the National Security Archive and the Cold War International History Project. One thing we are going to do differently with this database, however, is test out the idea I floated the other day. We are going to allow visitors (who sign in) to tag what they find in the database. We'll have begun the process of tagging ourselves, but I can't wait to see how visitors tag the sources themselves. We'll also be creating some teaching suggestions for high school and college teachers around this tagging.
As the project moves along, I'll be blogging about it a good bit. Having a diary of how such a large project unfolds will, I hope, be instructive to others who want to do something similar (or at least of similar scope).
For now, if you know anyone who has some extra cash and would be willing to contribute the $10,000 the NEH required we raise in matching funds, please put them in touch with me right away!
Posted by mills at 10:19 AM | Comments (1)
March 22, 2006
History Course Podcasts
Check out this comment from Jeff Curto, one of the people whose podcasts I featured in an earlier post. Note, in particular, the reaction of his students to being part of a larger audience. His perception of their response squares with what I've learned over the years about students and online writing. The larger the perceived audience is, the better their writing seems to be (by and large).
Posted by mills at 09:55 AM
Scapbooking Learning (cont'd)
I've now completed the grading of the first round of scrapbooks that my students turned in for my Western Civ class. As one would expect, their performance was all of the map. By far their best work was for the personal history assignment I give them. Once again these essays (mostly) displayed excellent research, careful writing, and even some historical analysis. Their essays included a wide variety of primary sources--everything from a marriage license from Cuba to an audio tape of a young man facing a mortar barrage in Viet Nam.
Now I need to figure out how to get them to bring the same level of effort to their other historical writing. The essays they wrote on The Return of Martin Guerre, for instance, were (mostly) devoid of evidence and were just not written as well.
One thing that is clearly at play here is that they care about what they are writing about when they write about their family and its history and they just don't care much about Bertrande de Rols, Arnaud du Tilh and Martin Guerre. Another issue is relevance--the history of their family seems to have relevance over and above their desire to do good work on an assignment about a loved one, while the social realities of Artigat, France seem much less relevant. I'm going to have to think on this and try to figure out new assignments about the past that matter as much in the hope that if the assignment matters, they'll put more into it (and thus get more out of it).
Finally, only one student in the class turned in anything that would qualify as "new media", even though Ieft the format of their scrapbooks entirely up to them. This one example was a PowerPoint presentation. By contrast, three students turned in scrapbooks that looked like the scrapbook your family might have from its last vacation.
Posted by mills at 09:41 AM
March 21, 2006
Subverting the Archive
After a Spring Break hiatus, edwired is back.
A recent story in the Washington Post by Linda Hales (March 11 edition. I'd post the link but their archive search page isn't working) detailed the plans by the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum to turn every web visitor into their own curator. Once the site goes up for public use (October is the expected launch), visitors will be able to tag anything they find online and create their own personal online museum. Because these tags will be public, as is the case with Flickr or del.icio.us, visitors will be able to wander through the virtual museums of others with similar interests (or at least with similar tagging).
As Hales points out in the story, thish is a risky strategy for the "traditional museum autocracy" because it will require them to let democracy into their world. When visitors are creating their own exhibitions, adding content, and forming communities around that content, what role does the institution play as the keeper of the cultural keys?
Now, what institution can we think of that is even more staid than museums? Archives anyone?
Imagine a day when the National Archives or the Library of Congress starts to allow visitors to tag their online repositories. Then we'll see what the archive really looks like to the user--as opposed to the archivist. Given the growing ubiquity of tagging, I think that day is not too far off.
The teaching implications of tagging are enormous. If we allow our students to begin assigning their own significance to the evidence we introduce them to, I think we'll find that they make meaning from this evidence in ways that we couldn't imagine. Of course, this means allowing them to make their own meaning from the past, something that many members of our conservative and fussy tribe will recoil from. But just as many, will see it as a marvelous chance to find out what our students can do with the evidence we give them.
Posted by mills at 10:15 AM | Comments (1)
March 10, 2006
Tests we don't need, but probably ought to prepare for
The once and former president of Harvard, Derek Bok, published an interesting op ed piece in the Washington Post last week. Bok takes notice of the growing demands for assessment tests in higher education and neatly summarizes the reasons why they are a bad idea--at least in some disciplines.
I'm all for assessment in disciplines where there is an agreed upon body of knowledge needed for basic professional mastery. For example, I want my nurse to know that I have two kidneys and one liver or the engineer who designed the airplane I'm flying in how much weight that newly designed wing can stand.
But what should every English major know about poetry? What should every history major know about the past? What should every art major know about art?
It's easy to dismiss the idea of such testing. But that would be much like the fabled ostrich with its head in the sand. Testing is so politically expedient that if we try to pretend it's not going to happen, it will likely sneak from behind and bite us.
So, what should happen in the humanities? I'm with Bok on this one. Scholars need to--must, in fact--develop assessment tools that can demonstrate that our students have really learned something worth knowing. We have to come to clearer agreements on what that learning would look like and then show how, without multiple choice tests, we have assessed that learning over a trajectory of years. And, when we fail to meet our own benchmarks, we have to show what interventions we've implimented to address some lack of success among our students.
I think digital media offers great promise for helping with this assessment process. In future posts I'll outline some of the ways I think that can happen. For now, I'll go try to pull a few colleagues' head out of the sand.
Posted by mills at 06:11 AM
March 09, 2006
Why textbook publishers should fear asteroids
One of the least fun aspects of my job as coordinator of our Western Civ course is dealing with the constant stream of textbook reps that flows through my office door. They come to see me because our course enrolls approximately 1,500 students a semester, which means that if their book wholesales for $50 and all of our instructors assigned it, they'd be getting about $150,000 in sales just from this one course at GMU. It's a guaranteed market, because every undergraduate at GMU must take the class to graduate.
Back in the day (2001) when I started running this course (which, by the way, is taught in sections of 25 and spans all of Western Civ in one semester!), we assigned only one textbook. The idea behind this one textbook decision (which predated my arrival) was that in this way all students at our university would share some sort of common intellectual experience. I was very uncomfortable from the beginning about this decision because (a) I don't think textbooks provide anything like an 'intellectual experience' and (b) instructors like to pick their own textbooks. Well, we've dumped the common textbook idea and instead are now assigning a common historical monograph--something that is actually thought provoking rather than mind-numbing.
But it hasn't stopped the publishers' reps from knocking at my door. Don't get me wrong, they're all perfectly nice people and several of them are genuinely good at what they do. But there are two big problems with the product they're selling. The first is price. Western Civ textbooks range in price at our bookstore from just over $50 to just over $80, with most clustered toward the top end of this range. Given all the other pressures on their finances, many of our students just don't buy the textbook. Or, worse, they buy the textbook and then don't buy the other books--the ones with real historical substance--because they can't afford them.
The second, and larger problem with the textbooks, is that they are so out of sync with the historical profession. Here I'm speaking only about Western Civ textbooks, because I don't read World History or US History textbooks. But Western Civ textbooks I know pretty well, both because I've assigned plenty of them over the years and because last year I thought long and hard about writing one myself. I even got to the tentative proposal stage and my proposal got very positive reviews from the dozen or so people who looked at it for the publisher. But in the end I decided that, as much as I wanted the riches that might flow from a successul book, it seemed like a black hole that would suck me in and never let me out.
So, what do I mean by "out of sync"?
Pick a textbook, any textbook, and try to find the historians in it. In fact, try to find the practice of history in it. Oh, sure, there are primary sources and suggestions for how to work with them, but try to find the disagreements among historians over what that evidence means. Try to find competing the narratives that are the stuff of what we do. Try to find anything other than the voice of God telling the student reader that this happened, then this happened, then this happened, and here are some reasons why it all happened this way. Historical scholarship thrives on uncertainty, but textbook writing thrives on certainty.
Have you ever met a historian who said, "Oh, I just love my survey textbook?"
I'd be willing to bet that one reason why you probably haven't is the fact that textbooks are so certain about everything they present.
Okay, so this is not a new critique of textbooks. So why should the publishers fear asteroids? Have you visited any of their websites? The vast majority of the material provided there is five to ten years behind both developments in history in new media forms and at least as far behind (if not farther) behind advances in what we know about how students learn about the past.
Just last week one the eager sales reps in my office told me, in response to my question about what they were doing that was new and innovative, that the big new thing for them was e-books. E-books? New? Oh my.
So, like the dinosaurs before them, they publishers of these books better start thinking about new income streams before too much longer. Students are going to stop buying the books because they are too expensive, professors are going to stop assigning them (a) because they are too expensive and (b) because they just aren't very good, and even if professors assign them and students buy them, they are likely to remain largely unread. Why? Because, in case the publishers haven't noticed, our students avoid reading books as much as possible. And so if the book is expensive and the professor is unenthusiastic about it anyway, what possible motivation will the student have to read it.
I promise not to rant in my next post...
Posted by mills at 03:00 PM | Comments (2)
March 05, 2006
Gathering Steam
Edwired is gathering steam. According to our logs, this blog has had more than 1,000 visits since January 1. Who knew a blog on teaching history with technology could be interesting to so many people? Now, to put it in perspective, during that same period of time, the various sites that make up the CHNM website had just over 2,000,000 visitors. Can you say tiny fraction of the larger project? And for a little more perspective, edwired ranks 217,330 in the Technorati rankings. But hey, that's out of the 29.8 million they currently search. And who knows, with luck, I might crack the top 200,000 before long...
Posted by mills at 03:27 PM
March 02, 2006
Lewis and Clark in GIS
Here's another History-GIS website that offers some intriguing possibilities. The Lewis and Clark Across Missouri site offers visitors a virtual tour of the portion of the Lewis and Clark expedition that took place in the Show Me State. A particularly good application of the possibilities of GIS is the interactive map of the outbound and inbound campsites. Each site is plotted on a large state map and when you click on the site you get a detailed USGS map of the location. Where the creators of the project have added real historical value to these maps is with their recreation of the Missouri River's course in 1804 or 1806. The old flow is drawn over the current USGS map so that visitors can see how the river has changed over time.
As much fun as this site is to peruse, it still lacks a lot of historical content. It's one thing to learn where the campsites were and how the river has changed, but that only scratches the surface of the information that could be provided to visitors. What about diary entries from the day/night when the expedition was camped there? What about images of that moment in their journey? What about information on the Native Americans they encountered at various points?
My own take on these shortcomings of the site is that it was created by geographers who had a different set of concerns than a historian would. This is where I think historians and geographers can really enrich one another's work. The geographers know how to do this kind of sophisticated map production. We know how to turn that map into a compelling interactive narrative. Now we just have to start talking to one another more than we currently do.
Posted by mills at 09:50 AM
March 01, 2006
History Course Podcasts
After some back and forth with myself over what to do about podcasting, I've made the decision to podcast my summer school course on 19th century Europe. The back and forth was not about the virtues of podcasting, but about the technical aspects. Of course, it means I'm going to have to go and upgrade my iPod so I can have video (like I needed an excuse) and, more importantly, the ability to attach a microphone to the iPod. The camera and the mic we've already got here at CHNM, so now I just need some practice with iLife.
A good overview of what the educational blogosphere is saying about podcasts can be found at Endless Hybrids. Reading through the posts compiled here, you get a sense for the range of opinions--from enthusiasm to outright anxiety.
Posted by mills at 06:17 PM | Comments (4)