Daniel M. Ringrose | Beyond Amusement: Reflections on Multimedia, Pedagogy, and Digital Literacy in the History Seminar | The History Teacher, 34.2

Beyond Amusement: Reflections on Multimedia, Pedagogy, and Digital Literacy in the History Seminar

Daniel M. Ringrose
Minot State University

TO JUDGE BY recent technology-related presentations at the AHA and the slow trickle of related articles, the integration of technology into history teaching is a cautious, contemplative process.¹ As scholars experienced with the sweeping claims and costs of past revolutions and technologies, it is understandable that historians are cautious about using computer technology in the classroom. Still, recent articles in these pages provide ample evidence of the fruitful application of technologies such as media slide shows, electronic discussion forums, and web resources to enhance the experience of introductory survey courses. In addition, a number of new media projects have become nationally known for their focus on materials and technology created for students.² These resources include web-based readers, elaborate course web pages, and lectures enhanced with multimedia presentation software.³ In the arena of history teaching it appears that the predominant use of new technology is to enhance traditional instruction and to facilitate the presentation of images and outlines. Student-produced web pages are among the few student-centered activities favored by historians, but these are not without their critics, some who question the value of teaching technical skills rather than content and others who find the exercise valuable, but very time consuming. Fewer faculty, it seems, have embarked on the difficult path of teaching students to manipulate multimedia evidence so as to advance historical arguments in projects equivalent to seminar papers.⁴

This article seeks to give faculty considering multimedia assignments a comparative assessment of two intensive technology projects conducted in upper division history courses at Minot State University. One incorporated a multimedia paper in place of a traditional paper in an upper division seminar on urban history. A second, conducted a semester later, incorporated an oral history class project in a course on memory, warfare and society. I will begin with a discussion of the rationale for attempting these technology-based projects, not the collaborative planning that made them possible, and present two detailed case studies. Subsequent sections will consider the pedagogical implications of teaching history with multimedia projects, the changes in faculty expectations which the such projects entail, and the value of promoting "digital literacy" in the history seminar. I conclude by asking the extent to which our experience might be transferable to other institutions and a proposal for creating an environment which I believe to be needed to make projects such as those we attempted a sustainable feature of small history departments like ours at Minot State University.

It would be tidy for me to argue that it was a judicious consideration of the costs, benefits, procedures and pedagogy which influenced my decision to attempt multimedia projects in a history seminar. A more honest admission is that the rationale for the projects evolved from a vague sense that "we should be doing this." Our campus differs little from other small state universities in that assumptions about the intrinsic value of instructional technology drive a variety of initiatives. These include the recent outfitting of a select number of larger classrooms with "electronic podiums," a nascent distance education program, and receipt of an ambitious Title III grant for technology in education. All conspire to render our institution a technology ambitious, but resource limited campus. All of these factors tend to favor the use of technology to enhance faculty-centered instruction. For me, however, the challenge was to use such resources to facilitate student-produced projects.

In the initial planning stages of each multimedia project I moved beyond the "we should be doing it" model to attempt to define more explicit criteria for the experience I hoped the project would provide. The topical nature of the selected courses invited a mode of electronic presentation that would facilitate interpreting a variety of source material. The major papers for the first course, a topical seminar on issues in urban history, would clearly benefit from the inclusion of the many maps, photos and drawings students could discover in the research phase of the course. The second course focused on popular memory and conflict in the twentieth century. A media-based project here could facilitate comparative presentations of oral histories collected by the students as well as their analyses and contextualization of this material. In both cases the intent was to encourage students to incorporate a wide range of primary source material and to engage them in the practice of reading non-traditional texts for clues about spatial boundaries, cultural practices, and evidence of change over time.

A Fortunate Opportunity for Collaboration and Setting Goals

Crucial to the success of these projects was the advice, technical expertise and collaboration of a colleague in Minot State's education college.⁵ A series of informal planning meetings led us to explore a range of issues related to project design, pedagogy, implementation, and the potential for collaboration between history and technology education students. In retrospect, these conversations predicted many, but by no means all, of the issues that emerged during each of the multimedia units. Most crucial was that each of us delineated our expectations for students and for the collaborative experience. One area we each wanted to specify was the process by which students would produce their projects. For the education students we wanted to address the chronic lack of content-based projects in the educational technology course. These students were to aid the history students with technical issues while learning how to preserve the content and arguments that were central to each seminar project. History students, in turn, were to learn the technical skills, but with the intent of enriching their projects with evidence in a variety of media forms. We agreed that each of us would evaluate our own students separately, according to criteria appropriate for each class.

My experience with conventional upper division seminars, as well as recent departmental assessment efforts, produced additional objectives for the student learning experience.⁶ One was for students to demonstrate increased proficiency and comfort with oral presentation of evidence and arguments. Each media assignment was to culminate in a public open house to showcase the projects and allow authors to interact with viewers and to explain their work. An important expectation was that the public nature of the project might move students away from the all-too-common tendency to produce work quickly, often at the last minute, with the sole goal of satisfying one reader, the professor. Our departmental assessment reviews indicated that students rarely write for a broad audience; these projects would require them to do so.

Our past pedagogical experiments with group writing and group critique had also suggested that student isolation in the writing process commonly hindered, and in some instances prevented, any significant collaborative experience. Moreover, most of our students had to juggle families, weighty work schedules and social commitments. The high number of hours they committed to work and family obligations reduced time spent outside of class on research and revision of their work. A 1999 study of history majors graduated since 1995 at MSU showed 80.4% of respondents working while completing the degree. 30% reported at least thirty-one hours of non-academic employment each week; an additional 17.4% reported between twenty-one and thirty hours per week.⁷ This stunning finding and past experience suggested time would be a particular concern for any media project that required the work to be completed after hours in a university computer laboratory. Because one goal was to design an assignment that would be engaging yet manageable we faced a difficult compromise, to dedicate a good deal of class time to each multimedia project. Any media assignment would have to engage students sufficiently to encourage them to dedicate their most valuable commodity, time, to making the project a success. These limitations are hardly unique to our campus, nor are they uniquely related to the use (or non-use) of technology in the classroom. Questions of student preparation, available study time, and attitudes toward collaboration, writing and revision all point to issues of pedagogy and student learning, two topics that have drawn renewed attention in recent years.⁸ In the following case studies our goal was to acknowledge that the project would have to work within these many constraints, while still constructing a media-based assignment that would meaningfully challenge students.

Case 1: "Urban History"

Goals for students in the urban history seminar included the use of a variety of primary source media - photos, text, maps, and illustrations - to advance an argument about a major theme in urban development. Typical seminar papers addressed topics such as company housing in Pullman, Illinois and Bourneville, England, social class in Marseilles and Algiers, urbanization and monarchy in Budapest, and women and careers in East Berlin. Our particular concern was that our history students view multimedia as an extension of conventional research and writing practices. Accordingly, the first third of the semester addressed thematic and topical literature on urban history. The reading load then tapered off to allow for concentrated work on a formal research prospectus, gathering resources, and critique of rough drafts. The closing weeks of the course were dedicated to the transformation of conventional drafts to an interactive multimedia formats, to presentation at a public open house, and to a summary discussion during the final class meetings.

In planning the course my colleague from education and I had expected the highest hurdles to be technical, yet in point of fact the most significant issues were organizational. After a short course on the presentation software students quickly acknowledged that the real challenge was to reorganize their rough drafts to take advantage of the multimedia format. Pages of text that read easily when printed out proved difficult to digest when presented in a screen-by-screen format. The linear form of presentation so familiar to students disintegrated quickly when they introduced links to pictures, maps, footnotes, and other visual materials. For many the fundamental learning experience was the realization of how difficult it would be to recast their material into a non-linear format while preserving the integrity of their arguments. Unexpectedly, collaboration with educational technology students complicated this goal because they were anxious to demonstrate their proficiency with the software, including animation and other high-tech bells and whistles. These at times conspired to obscure what in drafts had been clear arguments.

A common feature of most projects was multiple paths to and through the content and to the argument advanced by the author. For example, one paper argued that the emperor Franz Joseph of Austria retained his authority in part because of his close attention to ritual and ceremonies in the urban public sphere.⁹ In the written draft the author began with a brief introduction and a substantial amount of biographical material, followed by several case studies of royal rituals, such as a yearly foot washing ceremony. The paper then moved on to a discussion of locations where particular events took place, the different social classes who participated in them, and concluded with arguments asserting the author's original thesis. While one could quibble with the validity of the argument, the writing style and other minor points, the draft essay had considerable potential as an example of a paper that used evidence to advance a credible thesis.

Because of our concern that the novelty of the multimedia format might eclipse the text-based arguments of their drafts we required each student to include the full text of their drafts somewhere in their projects. Consequently, this paper (one of the more polished drafts in the class) when translated to multimedia, offered a text option on the initial screen which allowed viewers to read the paper essentially as it originated, but broken up into a series of screens for legibility. A second link on this project's introductory page takes readers to a series of scanned maps of a city (Figure 1), each with its own audio narration. Link areas on different parts of the maps either zoom in to show additional detail or link to passages in the main text of the paper. Similarly, at key points in the text highlighted words transport the reader to the map section, much like the hyperlinks found on many web sites. A third option opens a series of annotated building photos and illustrations. As with the maps, these materials are cross-linked to sections of the text as well as to the map materials. The multimedia version of this essay thus makes a successful attempt to retain the central argument yet also allows distinctly non-linear exploration of the material. My initial impression of the finished project was (and remains) favorable, yet I wondered how many people would begin with the textual material and follow the links to maps and images as one might in a printed article, when one returns always to the text.

Figure 1

At the public open house it quickly became evident that few visitors, if any, started by reading this or any of the project texts beyond the initial introductory page. Instead, the vast majority preferred to explore the maps, listen to the annotations, and only occasionally (and often accidentally) follow links from the visual materials back to the body of the paper. Clearly multimedia projects are open to the criticism that their organization confuses the reader who views them in an order other than the author's intended linear argument. However, another way to see the strands of the project is as a series of entry points, any of which might engage a viewer to learn more about the topic. Like a discussion that ranges unpredictably through topics, viewers of these papers experienced them in unexpected ways. One goal of a conventional historical project is to convince the reader through a logical presentation of arguments, but there is little certainty that the reader will experience a multimedia project in the order or detail the author intended.

Some students, though, used this feature of multimedia to their advantage. Careful design can allow authors to impose structure and sequence and as well as the to offer textual, visual, and aural experience of the reader. The author of an exceptional paper on women and careers in East Berlin after 1945 carefully structured her screens to force the reader, like the subjects under discussion, along a dreary, pre-ordained path. An opening title page gives way to a series of photos that walk the reader along the Berlin wall until he or she reaches the project's table of contents (Figure 2). This and successive sections of the paper structure the viewer's experience with striking effect, reinforcing her argument that in post-1945 East Berlin women found their lives rigidly planned, yet enjoyed wider social freedom than their Western counterparts. Each section of the paper presents text from the original draft interspersed with topically appropriate images that the reader must step through in order to move on to the next section. Here the advantage of multimedia is its ability, thoughtfully employed by the author, to force the viewer along a predefined path. The effect is a subtle reinforcement of the theme of the original paper; the use of non-textual cues conveys the experience of a planned society and careers at the same time as the reader consumes the argument in its textual form.

Figure 2

These two examples are typical of the projects produced in this urban history seminar and they illustrate the simultaneous benefits and difficulties of media projects. The most immediate qualitative benefit was that students exhibited a higher degree of effort and engagement in preparing their media presentations than is typical of most writing-based seminar projects. And while many clearly enjoyed the bells and whistles of the multimedia software, their engagement ranged well "beyond amusement" to include thoughtful selection of maps, interpretation of photos, and extraordinarily successful research via interlibrary loan of period-specific materials. Most projects focused on early twentieth century urban areas. Materials that proved especially useful included tour guide books from the period, pamphlets on topics such as company housing, and reprinted map collections. Our success with interlibrary loan, despite our remote location in North Dakota, suggests similar projects are probably viable on most campuses.¹⁰

The pressure of a public presentation of the final project certainly encouraged student participation. The open house scheduled at the end of the semester was well attended by faculty, students and administrators. Since the authors were on hand to guide viewers through their projects and answer questions they gained first-hand experience in writing for a broader audience and justifying their choice of evidence and their arguments. The novelty of the projects made the audiences forgiving, and weaknesses, technical or interpretive, that may have caused anxiety were forgotten when the local television station arrived unannounced. A final benefit of this format was that the authors received CD-ROMs of their presentation to include in the assessment portfolios maintained in the history department.

While my initial satisfaction with the projects and their value to their student creators has not diminished, discussions with my collaborator have revealed a number of shortcomings and revisions to the urban history assignment. I should not have attempted to fit this project into an already full syllabus. The time required to attend to technical training and computer problems far exceeded original predictions. Despite three weeks of dedicated laboratory time and the earnest participation of educational technology students, the task of translating lengthy papers to multimedia format exceeded the time allocated. This forced a reduction of the synthesis readings and discussion planned for the final weeks of the course. Careful revision of project content was another victim of time constraints. In retrospect, we recognized that the rough drafts the students had presented prior to beginning the media project had been only minimally revised in the final version. This was in part due to the complexity of learning a new media format and to student preoccupation with searching out, selecting and incorporating visual materials. Had more of this time been spent further revising content and argument the projects would have been more persuasive. Also to blame is the poor quality of the editing tools included in multimedia software. Programs such as Hyperstudio are geared toward visual presentation and thus allow myriad options for manipulation of colors, images, links and animation, yet lack even the most rudimentary tools for spell checking, footnotes or global search and replace. It was particularly difficult to print copies of the projects to aid in proofreading the text. Despite these reservations, the projects encouraged a high level of student collaboration and use of unusual visual materials. These positive aspects of multimedia projects, particularly the collaboration and presentation elements, had sufficient merit to attempt a second implementation the following semester.

Case 2: "Men, Women and War"

The second case study in an upper division discussion course entitled "Men, Women and War: Popular Memory and Public Understanding," used the same set of software tools and the clearly beneficial collaborative elements, but was structured differently to address organizational issues raised by the first project. This course focused on nineteenth and twentieth century warfare and explored how societies remember and explain conflict. As in the urban history class, the majority of the term was dedicated to topical discussions and thematic readings, plus an interpretive mid-term exam. Students then prepared a short, focused research paper on a topic of their choice. Rounding out these conventional assignments was a group assignment to collect oral histories from local residents. This assignment used a multimedia format to compare oral testimony, to add analysis, and to contextualize readings and themes introduced earlier in the semester. While the project was not as large is the urban history assignment, it served to integrate main themes, so as the term progressed it became the centerpiece of the course.

Experience with the urban history media assignment underscored the importance of advanced preparation, so as the students progressed through the readings they generated an ongoing list of themes, issues and questions to ask about memory, war and society. These included nationalism, gender, myth and media, popular memories, and cultural context. Students used these themes to interrogate the assigned readings and then to design a common list of related questions to use as the basis of their oral interviews. Each student then interviewed one person - a parent, family friend, veteran, or relative - to learn about their memory of a particular war. The conflicts and people were different in each case, but each student interviewed with a common set of questions and themes. To address issues of time and scale raised in the first projects we designed a project that would have the students conduct individual interviews but then assemble them, with assistance from educational technology students, into a composite thematic presentation. Common themes ensured continuity between interviews and allowed the multimedia component of the project to build on the rest of the course without overwhelming it. The project stressed the importance of the individual experience in creating public memory and introduced students to the complexities of oral history. The multimedia format allowed them to include excerpts of recorded interviews, photos, illustrations, and analysis.

A second major change was to reduce the scale of the technical work conducted by each student to avoid assigning projects of the magnitude of the urban history papers. Our solution provided a basic template file that contained sections for each common theme and predefined locations for text and analysis. Students received the same technical instruction as in the Urban History project, but spent far less time on the rudimentary technical decisions and arrangements of material. Some elected to personalize their sections of the project, but to save time others elected to stick with the basic format in order to focus on the content. Inclusion of audio segments of the interview, much as Art Spiegelman does in his interview sections of the critically acclaimed CD-ROM version of Maus, a Survivor's Tale, proved particularly effective.¹¹ In one project the student paired transcription with the heavily accented English her great aunt, a civilian who immigrated from Germany after WWII (Figure 3).¹² Each interview was transcribed or paraphrased and accompanied by the student's analysis. Although students were encouraged to interpret the responses in the context of class discussions and historical patterns, the analyses was less thorough than I had expected. Future versions of this assignment will need to model such interpretations, perhaps through reading and discussing projects such as Maus.¹³

Each individual project was grouped under a common starting point which allowed the viewer to directly access a project or to see comparative pages on each of the main themes (Figure 4).¹⁴ This part of the design was supposed to allow the viewer to ask questions such as "show me all the responses on questions of gender" and then display these responses grouped accordingly. Figure 5 illustrates one attempt to allow readers to compare responses by theme, but this strategy proved less effective than expected. The page compares key phrases related to the topic "Myth and Media" and each phrase links the viewer to its project. Conceptually this approach was appealing, for it would allow viewers to construct their own comparisons and conclusions, but a thorough implementation of it would have required a substantial investment of faculty time and considerable technical intervention. Such intervention seemed inappropriate; faculty should not co-opt a project to turn it into something other than what students produce. We elected instead to make suggestions, much as one might on a rough draft of a project, but did not wish to write the project for our students.¹⁵

Figure 3

Figure 4

Careful adjustments for this second project produced a much smoother learning experience than in the urban history course. Templates shortened the technical learning curve and careful division of labor allowed each short interview segment to be combined into a larger project. The oral histories stretched students to interpret varied viewpoints on the themes they had worked on in common and the resulting project linked disparate elements of the course in positive ways. Collaboration with each other as well as with educational technology students heightened the experience. In retrospect, it is important to stress that the two cases presented were quite different and that, despite the hurdles we faced in implementing these assignments, on the whole my colleague and I were quite satisfied that the experiments had provided meaningful learning experiences for our students.

Figure 5

Rethinking Expectations

While I think my experience of these projects provides evidence that multimedia projects are well worth including in upper-division courses on a selective basis, instructors must be prepared to devote considerable time to the project and will be expected to have a relatively high level of comfort with the hardware and software tools. Inclusion of multimedia projects will also cause both instructors and students to rethink preconceptions about appropriate history topics for a seminar and to carefully consider ways to accommodate the uneven technical abilities of seminar members. Such rethinking stems most significantly from the intensely visual nature of multimedia. For technical and cultural reasons the medium tends to privilege visual presentation rather than textual materials. One well-known consequence is that most people avoid reading lengthy texts on screen. While economy of verbiage may seem an anathema to many historians, it does make the choice of words, and by extension the clarity of argument, especially important in media projects. I have noted that visitors to our public open houses for both projects confirmed the general preference for visual rather than textual content. They consistently explored the maps and iconography of the urban history projects before delving into the textual arguments of the essay. Viewers of the popular memory project rarely read the analyses that contextualized and interpreted the oral histories. They focused on the histories themselves, preferring instead to skip between passages and to listen to recorded interview excerpts. The most successful urban history projects guided the viewer through the project to create an emotional or dramatic effect (the case of women in East Berlin) or combined short textual passages with images or maps on a single screen. To the traditional eye the latter mode appears visually pleasing, but lacking depth of argument, much like the superficial entries in many CD-ROM encyclopedias. A crucial pedagogical lesson to draw from these two projects, therefore, is that it is extremely difficult to make and sustain a complex argument in the multimedia format.

In the creation phases the software tools make revision of textual and supporting materials difficult. Undoubtedly this will improve with time, but arguments and texts clearly need careful polishing before going to the multimedia format, especially since even well prepared textual components appear at a disadvantage vis-à-vis visual material. Few of our students resisted the temptation to emphasize style over substance, particularly when given tools designed to encourage the former. It is crucial to remember that one may in fact get what one wishes for, as I did when I encouraged students to be creative in their presentations. Multimedia creativity sometimes overwhelmed the final product. Early versions of some projects were visually stunning, yet reminiscent of early laser printed papers: elegant, yet often empty of meaning. While none of these projects should be described as intellectually bankrupt, this is clearly one area where the projects would have benefited from additional time for critique and revision.

Veteran historians and teachers will no doubt agree multimedia projects share the potential pitfalls that accompany most modes of student work, including conventional writing assignments, in-class discussion, or oral presentations. In addition, the transition to multimedia accentuates the potential for the loss of a significant interpretive message. Herein lies the paradox caused by incorporating new media into a writing intensive course. If we do not attempt such projects at some point in the curriculum we essentially leave our students and graduates to their own devices as they increasingly cope with and very likely are expected to produce materials in this medium. Yet if the alternative is to incorporate thorough and meaningful instruction in such projects in the name of teaching "digital literacy," perhaps better termed "digital argument," we must also decide what we will leave out of our courses. The crucial question should be whether inclusion of a multimedia assignment might be simply too large a task to be meaningfully accomplished without overwhelming the broader purpose of the seminar. Most historians expect that a conventional seminar paper exhibit a thesis sustained by successive explanation of relevant evidence to create a persuasive argument. How, then should we react when the essential elements of the multimedia model are weighted in ways that obscure or eliminate the linear nature of the argument, downplay textual explanation of evidence in favor of visual materials, and emphasize style over substance? Casual application of multimedia risks undermining one of the central elements of our discipline. Students' inclination to include evidence they found "neat" or "unusual" produced the frustration of linking this evidence to a credible argument. Media presentations encourage a fractured, one-screen-at-a-time organizational mode, one that indicates contemporary students are conditioned to gather information in discrete visual bits even when the connections between them are tenuous at best.

Transferability

The resources at Minot State University, an ambitious but modestly endowed state university, proved adequate for seminar classes of fifteen students in both the cases under consideration. The combination of two reasonably adept faculty members and a handful of dedicated technology education students proved sufficient to overcome most technical issues. Larger numbers of students would have required resources, support staff, and faculty time beyond the capacity of our campus. On well equipped campuses, however, faculty are likely to find that technology installations are not organized for collaborative work, favoring instead laboratories for word processing or media rich classrooms designed for faculty-centered presentations. The preceding narrative and discussion hint that incorporation of multimedia projects entails considerable amounts of work. Make no mistake, it does. One must consider how to instruct students in using a new medium to produce credible historical arguments, how they will acquire the requisite technical skills, and upon what standards they will be judged. For the immediate future it seems likely that on most campuses multimedia assignments will depend on intense faculty involvement at all stages: from initial planning to the scramble for equipment, space, and technical resources to the arrangements for a public demonstration. As our campus has limited independent support personnel, a fortuitous friendship with an educational technology professor produced a unexpectedly successful collaboration between students and faculty in two quite different disciplines. In our case faculty collaboration made the projects possible, but introduced additional questions about assessment and coordination of faculty and student time.

Despite our success, the costs were high, both in terms of content material not taught and invested faculty time. One respondent to a recent survey of usage of new media by historians noted "teaching technical skills at the expense of historical content and methodology is a calculus of dubious value."¹⁶ Doubtless, we could continue to include such projects on an occasional basis, but the question of balance with the course as well as issues related to resources and, student time, make it unlikely that we would be able to sustain their inclusion on a more regular basis.

Conclusion

It is my contention that successful multimedia projects should exhibit a sophisticated version of digital literacy that includes textual and visual arguments, careful design and layout, as well as the level of academic rigor expected of conventional papers. But, given the resources and configuration of most history departments it is not reasonable to accomplish all of this in the framework of an existing seminar class. One promising possibility is to adopt the model used in laboratory sciences to offer a multimedia laboratory section for additional credit in conjunction with our existing seminar offerings. Such laboratory sections for credit could address issues such as fair use and copyright, appropriate use of the internet for research, aesthetic design, presentation of arguments, and writing for particular audiences. Such a section could do justice to the conceptual, organizational and technical complexities of digital media while preserving the integrity of our existing upper-division course offerings. Still, without additional time we should not pretend the task of making our students "digitally literate," in the robust and academic sense of the term, can be smoothly accomplished within the traditional seminar. The challenges raised by multimedia projects call for pedagogical adjustments that go beyond simply including such projects in existing seminar courses. Multimedia raises new pedagogical issues of considerable magnitude: copyright, aesthetics, technical skills, and balance of visual and textual materials all add levels of complexity to conventional modes of historical presentation. Perhaps historians need a new bottle to accommodate this new wine. The experiences presented here are by most accounts successful, yet raise the difficult question of replacing significant portions of existing course material with the treatment of issues related to digital literacy.

In the immediate future scheduling and insufficient student time pose significant obstacles to multimedia assignments. In our experience it was possible to reserve blocks of time in a dedicated computer laboratory, but the history seminar and the technology education course met at separate times, and consequently during scheduled class hours only a handful of educational technology students could assist the history students. Many students' work schedules prevented use of the computer laboratories outside of class. A laboratory section model would provide coordinated class time dedicated to development and instruction on media projects.

All in all, I am optimistic about the incorporation of technology in the history curriculum. In designing these projects my colleague and I made initial assumptions that proved false, yet still produced vibrant learning experiences for our students curriculum. Issues of technical competency will almost certainly diminish as future generations of students arrive in college as fluent in video and multimedia software as they are now with word processing, email and video games--and as faculty acquire skills in using multimedia. However, tough questions remain about how we can use technology to encourage good historical practices by our students.

Appendix: Technical Considerations

The projects discussed in this article relied on widely available and relatively inexpensive hardware and software. While our environment favors the Macintosh platform, all the tools we used or their functional equivalents also are available for Microsoft Windows.

Hypermedia Authoring Software:

Hyperstudio--http://www.hyperstudio.com

Macintosh & Windows

Image Processing Software:

Photodeluxe--http://www.adobe.com

Macintosh & Windows

Sound Editing Software:

SndSampler 3.7.1--http://hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/HyperArchive/

Macintosh shareware program--Windows equivalents exist

Computer Hardware:

Power Macintosh Clone--Motorola Starmax 3000

64 mb RAM

4 gigabyte hard disk

15" color monitor

10baseT ethernet

Scanner:

8.5 x 11" flatbed scanner--UMAX 1220s

Network Storage:

Due to the shared nature of most computer laboratories it wasn't possible to leave project materials on lab computers between sessions. Each student was issued 5 megabytes of network disk space on a server lent to us for the semester.

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Notes

¹ A preliminary draft of this essay was presented at the American Historical Association meeting in Chicago, 2000. In addition, portions related to collaboration and oral history were the subject of a short session at the Association for History and Computing meeting in Philadelphia, 1999. I particularly wish to thank my colleagues Warren Gamas for his enthusiastic collaboration throughout these projects and Bethany Andreasen, Joseph Jastrzembski and Ernst Pijning for their thoughtful comments and suggestions.

² Among the most successful of these is the Valley of the Shadow project. Edward Ayers, Valley of the Shadow [web site]. The University of Virginia, 1999 [cited March 13 2000]. Available from http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/vshadow2/. Similarly impressive efforts on the French Revolution and the History Matters project are underway at the Center for History and New Media: Center for History and New Media [web site]. George Mason University and The American Social History Project, 2000 [cited March 13 2000]. Available from http://chnm.gmu.edu.

³ Powerpoint, it seems, has become something of a standard in corporate settings, at conferences, and to some extent in large lecture classes. For a serious critique of this development see Ralph Mason and Denis Hlynka, "'Powerpoint' in the Classroom: Where is the Power?" Educational Technology, September-October 1998, 42-45. Perhaps the premier example of primary source sites on the web is the Internet Modern History Sourcebook. Paul Halsall, Internet Modern History Sourcebook [web site]. 2000 [cited 1 January 2000]. Available from http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/modsbook.html. A comprehensive, if somewhat dated guide to history sources is Denis A. Trinkle, Dorothy Auchter, Scott Merriman, and Todd Larson, The History Highway: A guide to Internet Resources. New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1997. Recent articles published in these pages address several aspects of course web pages. Thomas J. Brown, "The Purposes of Courses Web Sites: A Case Study." The History Teacher 31, no. 1 (1997): 61-68. Kathleen Noonan, "Untangling the Web: The Use of the World Wide Web as a Pedagogical Tool in History Courses." The History Teacher 31, no. 2 (1998): 205-219. Nancy Fitch, "History After the Web: Teaching with Hypermedia." The History Teacher 30, no. 4 (1997): 427-441. While others have reported some success with computer assisted instruction and pre-packaged CD-ROMs, both are beyond the scope of this article. Julian J. DelGaudio, "Should Historians Become Programmers? Limitations and Possibilities of Computer-Assisted Instruction in the United States History Survey." The History Teacher 33, no. 1 (1999): 66-78. Bill Friedhein, "Who Built America in the Classroom." The History Teacher 31, no. 1 (1997): 69-75.

⁴ See for example, Adrienne Hood and Jacqueline Spafford, "Student-Constructed Web Sites for Research Projects: Is It Worth It?" Journal for MultiMedia History 1, no. 1 (1998): http://www.a1bany.edu/jmmh/vol1no1/websites.html.

⁵ Particular thanks go to Dr. Warren Gamas for his invaluable collaboration, advice, and expertise. Both he and I welcome comments and questions: gamas@misu.nodak.edu and ringrose@misu.nodak.edu.

⁶ For several years now our department has been running a digital portfolio project to gather, evaluate, and record on CD-ROM writing produced by our majors. While the mandate to assess our program was externally imposed, the form of assessment we have developed has proven a useful way to identify areas needing improvement in a discipline that does not lend itself to many meaningful quantitative assessment measures. Details on this project are available at the following web site: http://history.misu.nodak.edu.

⁷ The report concluded "as a consequence, it is nearly impossible to expect students to coordinate group work outside of class, or to attend special lectures or field trips held outside of scheduled class hours. Indeed, one wonders when these students, many who are also parents, an area not asked about, find time to study consistently. We can only conclude that many do not and that the rest value their education so highly that they go to super-human effort to meet the many demands on their time." Bethany Andreasen, Daniel Ringrose, Joseph Jastrzembski, and Jonathan Wagner, "History Department Program Review," 36 pages, plus appendices and external review comments and response. Minot, ND: Minot State University Department of History, 1999, 22-23.

⁸ These observations stem from my own teaching experiences as well as recent research on the teaching of history. On the need for additional writing and analysis see Anthony Brundage, "Teaching Research and Writing to Upper Division History Majors: Contexts, Sources, Rhetorical Strategies." The History Teacher 30, no. 4 (1997): 451-459. Andrew Feenberg, No Frills in the Virtual Classroom [web page]. AAUP, 2000 [cited 1 February 20001. Available from http://www.aaup.org/publications/Academe/99so/SO99FEEN.HTM. Shelley Goldman, Karen Cole, and Christina Syer, The Technology/Content Dilemma [web site]. U.S. Department of Education, The Secretary's Conference on Educational Technology, 1999 [cited 2 February 2000]. Available from http://www.ed.gov/Technology/TechConf/1999/whitepapers/paper4.html.

⁹ In this and all subsequent reproductions of project pages the only changes made have been to remove information identifying the student authors and interviewees.

¹⁰ The caveat is that the research phase must begin early in the semester to allow sufficient time to acquire the needed resources. Students who are prone to changing topics found themselves at a comparative disadvantage to those who stuck with one topic throughout the semester. Perhaps a European-style approach in which topics are rigidly assigned would be more appropriate to such time-critical projects.

¹¹ Art Spiegelman, The Complete Maus. A Survivor's Tale. New York: The Voyager Company, 1972, 1973, 1980-1994. CD-ROM.

¹² The interview was recorded with an inexpensive microcasette recorder and imported to a sound editing program for conversion to Quicktime audio format. While time-consuming, these recorded segments proved to be one the largest attractions at the public open house.

¹³ The pedagogy of instruction in electronic media is largely uncharted water. When teaching footnoting or other forms of analysis one can select from abundant sources of articles, but examples of high-quality multimedia projects are for the present far more scarce.

¹⁴ Astute readers will note one project dealt with memories of World War One. The student in question elected to "interview" Vera Brittan by using the common interview themes and questions to examine a number of her major writings.

¹⁵ Research on similar proiects at the secondary school level points to one disturbing trend: the tendency of faculty and sometimes parents to intervene to polish or complete a major group project. See for example, Shelley Goldman, Karen Cole, and Christina Syer. The Technology/Content Dilemma [web site]. U.S. Department of Education, The Secretary's Conference on Educational Technology, 1999 [cited 2 February 2000]. Available from http://www.ed.gov/technology/TechConf/1999/whitepapers/paper4.html.

¹⁶ Denis Trinkle, "History and the Computer Revolutions. A Survey of Current Practices." Journal of the Association for History and Computing 11, no. 1 (1999).

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