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Final Project Draft
My final project for HIST 689: Teaching and Learning Digital History is entitled Impacting Everyday News During World War II. This project is a course where college students will learn more about World War II but through the lens of reporting/news media coverage. They will be given a couple of links to the All-American News newsreels, an African-American news source during the 1940s and 1950s, available at the Library of Congress. They will analyze the newsreels and then compare and contrast it to other news media coverage during World War II. They will come up with an historical thesis based on their findings. I split the course into topic sections…
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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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Circling the drain Project:1971 Watergate Transcripts
To look at the whole view of the 1971 Watergate transcripts visit here. This first image below is of an unfiltered/unaltered world cloud of transcripts from April to October of 1971. On initial glance of the graph below, notice that the words “president,” “ehrlichman,” “haldeman,” “unintelligible,” and “uh” are larger than the other words. This could mean that in the transcripts, these people are talking or they are being talked about. Two words mean that the words that were spoken were unintelligible to the transcriber and thus written down as such and the “uh” is a word that was spoken during these conversations many times. From this moment on, I took…