It’s all but impossible for me to believe it, but 10 years ago this week I wrote my first post in this blog. And, oddly enough, this post is #500. If I were a numerologist I’m sure I could make something of that symmetry.
Way back in 2005, that first post was about my attempts to teach students to be more critical consumers of historical content they found online–and in 2015, I’m still at it. While I’ve tried many different approaches to teaching this skill and habit of mind to my students (some controversial, some not), the biggest change between 2005 and 2015 is that in 2005 I asked them to review historical websites using a rubric of my own devising, in 2015 I ask them to build websites using a rubric of their own devising.
Between then and now, I think the biggest lesson I’ve learned as a history teacher is that students learn best by doing digital history rather than by learning about digital history. I should have known this, of course, because my first true digital history courses were “doing” courses — the first was a seminar at Grinnell College in which my students built a database of historical sources and the second, at Texas Tech, was a seminar in which my students took one of my colleagues online (creating his website for him). And along the way, I’ve taught lots of other digital history courses that involve really doing digital history.
What’s different now–really since 2007–is that I’ve found ways to combine the creation of digital history (which involves a lot of teaching of technical skills) with careful consideration of the underlying principles of digital information and the underlying principles of historical thinking. Once I found that sweet spot, my students’ results improved substantially.
The tools available to do this work are so much more accessible and user friendly than they were in 2005, and I suspect that by 2025 they will be even more conducive to the kinds of deeper learning about the past that I’m after.
When I started writing this blog, Google and YouTube were still very new, and Twitter, data phones, and 3D printing didn’t exist, at least in the commercial space. No one, or almost no one, was talking about “big data” or data visualizations in the humanities. Zotero and Omeka, which I use all the time in my teaching, weren’t available, and the big thing everyone seemed to want to talk about was how to use Facebook to teach about the past (not so much a topic these days).
I’ll also be very interested to see what new challenges the tech innovators of the world can throw at us. No matter what they throw, however, I strongly suspect that in 2025 we’ll still be talking about how to teach students to be critical consumers of online historical content.