I will be teaching a graduate seminar, Readings in Oral History, this quarter. We will be using the Oral History Association’s Wiki as the home for both the course and writen assignments. Please join us and share your thoughts, resources, and work as well.
I teach HST 217 Ohio History for the first time this quarter. I volunteered to teach this course both because my colleague who taught Ohio History, Harvey Wachtell, retired and because I look forward to engaging students with museums and historic sites in Southwest Ohio as well as with online resources for Ohio history. The course is designed around digital applications including WordPress, RSS, Zotero, and Del.ic.ious. I will use marjoriemclellan.wordpress.com as the online home for the course this quarter. Click on the Ohio History tab to learn more about the course.
HST 211 American Civilization to 1877
This is a mixed mode course, meeting twice a week and online. Students will have the option of either developing and writing a Document Based Question and Essay or contributing an essay on the historical context of a work of children’s historical fiction for the ChildLit Wiki. In both options, students will create a blog about their research.
HST 486/686 and WMS 399/599 Family and Gender in Modern American History
This is a mixed mode course, meeting twice a week and online. Students will work on individual research linked to group projects. Students will share their research on collaborative blogs and then produce a final digital media production to share with the class. Students will also submit individual research papers.
I introduced a collaborative, project-based learning assignment based on original archival research and employing Omeka, a web-based collections and digital exhibits application, in my fall quarter course, Family and Gender in Early American History. I was not satisfied with how I staged and integrated the project nor, as a result, with how I assessed student work. However, some students contributed a great deal to the project and gave me valuable feedback. Planning for next quarter when I will teach Family and Gender in Modern American History, I have begun to articulate learning goals and expectations. Here’s my current take on this problem. This rubric reflects all student work for the course:
Learning Goals and Assessment
20%
Subject matter content knowledge→ Final exam based on readings and class presentations.
20%
Using/applying historical content→ Short writing assignments requiring synthesis of the secondary scholarship read or presented in class. (Course web log.)
15%
Historical research skills → Uses appropriate collections and resources, conducts and documents systematic research, locates, collects, identifies, describes, evaluates, and summarizes evidence in both primary and secondary sources, keeps research results organized and accessible. (Research process web log)
15%
Synthesis, analysis and explanation → Makes a clear argument, supports position effectively, recognizes and addresses alternative explanations, identifies the significance of findings, relates findings to previous scholarship, integrates and synthesizes research into an effective, organized, and coherent explanation. (Research paper)
10%
Conventions for historical writing →Grammar, punctuation, spelling, citation of sources. (Research paper)
10%
Effective team collaboration → Sets clear project goals, meets deadlines, communicates and shares information, participates in and contributes to collaboration, fulfills role, cooperates with and listens to others, solves problems, group accomplishes tasks together. (Exhibit project/students learn from each other.)
10%
Effective multimedia presentation → Uses the technology available and applies many of the features to produce high quality production, resolves technology related problems, used technology in a way that meets ethical/professional standards (copyright adherence, privacy, etc.), organization and presentation reflect and effectively convey the research and analysis. (Exhibit project, students share with the class.)
Please let me know what you think of this and suggest resources that I can look at to improve this plan.
This is based in part on ideas from Grant Wiggins on authentic assessment and David Moursund, “ICT-Assited Project Based Learning“
I am a public historian; in my years at the Wisconsin Historical Society I worked on exhibits, researched outdoor museum interpretive plans, and documented historic house interiors and collections. When I went on to graduate school in American Studies and began to teach, I found that designing a course was a bit like designing museum experiences. While history exhibits are often constrained by both collections and location, the curators identify important themes and stories to tell; analyze artifacts, images and other primary sources; and bring the ideas and the documents together into a script and a design. The exhibit team identifies the important ideas that they would like visitors to consider and reflect upon and they imagine how different types of visitors will move through and experience the production. While graphic design, text, artifacts, and images are arranged to guide the visitor experience, curators cannot insist that Visitor A spend a half hour rooted in one spot, contemplating a particular exhibit component. Visitors may skip over or track back and make connections across sections of the exhibit that were not part of the design. Visitors make their own exhibit experiences.
This past year, I looked at how new media tools and productions blur the distinctions between public history and learning in a college classroom even further. We can now design an immersive, rich, interactive digital exhibit experience—supplemented perhaps by outside readings or assignments—to meet the requirements of a course. Experiments in Second Life course design are one of many possible ways to accomplish this. The same “production” may also engage other visitors, learners who don’t come for the credit hours. And the potential is not limited by the frame of a computer screen. Spring quarter, my Ohio History class will hit the road to visit museum exhibits and historic sites and city streets using and producing podcasts and other resources—others are using handheld GPS devices to design history learning experiences.
Digital tools and assignments should enhance the course rather than becoming the subject of the course. At the same time, digital media infuse our lives. The newspapers, long a crucial document of record that historians analyzed, are now struggling to compete with online news options. The primary sources that future historians will use are often “born digital” today. Learning to critically evaluate these sources, to conduct research with digital tools, and communicate in new media must be part of learning in both history and across the curriculum.