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Focus on Final Projects
After watching the videos of previous HIST 689 students discuss their projects and give some advice, I had a couple of takeaways that I can apply in my final project. They discussed collecting resources, making the course structure, having the activities coherent and applicable to the lesson, just to name a few. I liked how in some of the videos, they not only gave the content/resources but they also gave the learning objectives either at a course level or for each module. One action item that I would like to do based on one of the videos, is to have my students record themselves talking about their thought process for…
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Sixth Piece of the Puzzle
My final project will be and online course where my “students” will be able to learn more about African-American newsreels in relation to other forms of media during World War II. Their final project will be to create a script for an audio podcast or video news segment where they analyze their historical findings. My intended students will be those in undergraduate history and film studies majors. They should be able to look at African-American news segments, from the All-American News, during the War and compare it with other media during the same time period. It can be about any type of political, social, economic, culture, etc. issue but in…
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Wikipedia and the Malleable Past
I will focus on one of the two questions (highlighted in bold) below: What are the challenges we face as history educators with presenting the past in the digital world? How have digital tools made it easier to teach about and help our audience(s) engage with the past? As a caveat, I’m not claiming to be a history educator in the traditional sense of the word but in my taking this class and as a history major, I have realized some challenges in the historical digital world. Challenge number one is making the historical documents available to the public so that then said public can use them to their benefit.…
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Respond to Wineburg
After reading, Sam Wineburg’s “Why Historical Thinking is Not About History,” I was left with more questions than enough answers. Historians, students, and the public in general, needs to be aware of how to ask probing questions to understand the world around them. How can teachers/historians/digital public historians promote historical/critical thinking in the minds of their audience effectively is the important question. When Wineburg gave the example of a California school teachers giving an assignment where the students did their own research and not in-depth normal, scholarly research led to disastrous results. Without the right tools and knowing how and when to use them effectively for your audience becomes an…
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Fifth Piece of the Puzzle
One text that I will use in my final project is using some kind of online newspaper database. One example would be using Google Newspaper Archives as a resource. I will give my audience this option along with a list of other newspaper and other kinds of media databases, to search for content based on their thesis. Some of this content based on their search results might give them information about what was being said about that particular topic throughout the nation/world. They can use this resource to help them compare against the All-American news reel sources and analyze the relationship between the two. One activity that I might have…
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Fourth Piece of the Puzzle
I chose this video from the Library of Congress because it is one out of at least 20-30 All-American newsreels that my audience can choose from. It will be difficult to analyze this source because it is a short segment with a lot of information in it, so my audience will need to fact-check the items mentioned. They will need to choose at least one or two of the newsreels to analyze in their final projects so watching each one, seeing what is being said, how that compares to other news media coverage during this time, will be at least time-consuming.
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Film – Consuming and Creating
The film/images that I will use will be from the All-American newsreels available at the Library of Congress. I will lead my audience to think deeper about it by having them study not only the cultural aspects of the film but also the cinematography of it as well. I will ask various questions as well. For example, “what are your initial thoughts about this segment? What is the main argument from this newsreel? Can you provide any background information? How does this relate to some of the other similar primary sources that you have found on this topic? How does it differ?” and so on. I would use digital storytelling…
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Third Piece of the Puzzle
My intended audience would be upper-level History, English, or Film Studies undergraduates at a university. I chose this audience because they should be knowledgeable about History/English/Film to be able to analyze the sources carefully. Also I want for everyone in that audience to give feedback because maybe they can offer insight into the activities that I cannot.They should be able to form well-formed arguments and conclusions and be able to use technology of some sort to do their final project.
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Second Piece of the Puzzle
Two questions that I need to answer are: How will digital media and/or digital tools be important to teaching my target audience one of the essential lessons I’ll be focusing on in my project? The digital tools and media will be important to my final project because I need to have the ability to show videos and play audio recordings on it. I also need a view where my audience can create their artifact in piecemeal fashion and still save their work as they go along. I want my audience to be able to respond or react to the videos or other content that I add in a way that…
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The History of History Teaching
We had to choose to answer one of the three questions listed here: What elements of historical thinking have remained at the heart of history teaching over the decades? How have history teachers responded to technological change in the 20th and 21st centuries? How have external expectations constrained teaching and learning in history, and how might the digital turn disrupt those constraints? The one that I wish to answer is the third one (in bold above.) The external expectations that been placed on historical learning and teaching have hindered students in many ways. The SATs or SOLs or AP tests or any of the standardized tests have structured the historical…