So. Many. Digital. Tools.
My serving of humble pie continues to grows with each set of weekly readings as I realize just how much I have to learn about teaching history responsibly. I, admittedly, struggle with how to reconcile the old with the new, meaning the old ways of teaching, learning, and understanding history with the new technologies that crop up constantly and can be, let’s face it, a bit overwhelming.
As I was poking around teachinghistory.org, I read an Ask a Digital Historian piece called Digital Tools: Outfitting a Teacher’s Arsenal written by Ben Walsh, a history teacher in the UK, in which he’s responding to a fellow teacher’s question about which new tools to implement in the history classroom. Ben’s response is simple: spend money on teachers, not tools. Rather than getting caught up in the frills of the latest and greatest technologies that may likely never be used fully in the classroom (for any multitude of reasons – not enough hours in a day, stringent milestones, class makeup, and so forth), instead throw money at teachers for them to advance their digital skill set in the classroom. Ben argues that while a lot of these digital tools (that cost money) are impressive, they’re essentially just another form of textbook, and I think that we can all agree that teaching history isn’t just teaching the cold, hard facts. His recommendation is that teachers participate in professional development so that they may learn about new, accessible, and often free tools that can enhance their classroom, not drive their classroom.
Everyone online is an “expert”
The Internet has obliterated authority. You need no one’s permission to create a website. You need no papers signed to put up a YouTube video. You need no one’s stamp of approval to post a picture on Instagram. You can Tweet to your heart’s content—some of you are doing so this very moment. We live in an age when you can practice historiography without a license. Go ahead—Be an author! What determines whether you go viral is not the blessing from some university egghead, but from the digital mob.
– Sam Wineburg in Why Historical Thinking is Not About History
The internet provides an open forum for anyone to share their thoughts – personal, academic, political, controversial. You name it, and it’s out there, somewhere, on the internet, which is equal parts awesome and not-so-awesome. In fact, I think that this flood of information can be quite dangerous if online users don’t know how to navigate it responsibly and logically. One of the challenges then facing history educators is this loaded question of how to teach students to use digital tools responsibly. A lot of sites look credible on the surface, but they may be nothing more than unsubstantiated claims or opinions dressed up in fancy web design with a .org appended to the URL. I’m a firm believer in healthy doses of skepticism, so piggybacking off of last week’s discussion, history educators must teach their audience (either students or the general public) to question and then question some more. I think that we all need a little reminder not to jump at the first thing that pops up on the internet and go, “Bingo! Found it.”
There’s a lot of misinformation floating about on the web, particularly when it comes to history. I kind of see this as an opportunity for history educators to seize because misinformation is better than no information at all, right? Maybe? So if we teach our online audiences to maintain healthy levels of skepticism and understand how to tackle a website from an analytical perspective, then they should be able to identify a false history claim and, more importantly, reconcile it using credible sources. In a very ideal world, I think that this approach makes lemonade and turns the wild, wild west of the internet into a ginormous teachable moment for history educators.
Adapt and adjust
I feel like I’ve said this in nearly every one of my posts this summer, but history educators must teach students how to think, which I think is another challenge of teaching history in the digital age. Not just think about concepts but think from the second they start running with a topic. OK, so the topic is Robert E. Lee. The question is should his monuments be taken down? Where should I start my research? Students must have a sophisticated thought process that goes beyond, Hey, Alexa. Who was Robert E. Lee?
Before digital tools became the norm in teaching history, history educators could rely on textbooks with a bit more credibility; although this, too, is up for debate because textbooks all have one or more authors pushing one or more biases, but there was a more formal review process in place, so textbooks weren’t written in this silo. Wineburg explains,
It was obviously never the case that just because something was printed meant that it was true. At the same time, we often ceded authority to established publishers. We relied on them to make sure that what we read was accurate, that it had gone through rounds of criticism before it reached our eyes.
That being said, there’s a lot of collaboration online, so it’s not all doom and gloom! Wikipedia is a solid example of shared authorship, shared ownership, and shared responsibility via peer reviews. When leveraged in moderation – i.e., maybe start researching on Wikipedia but don’t let Wikipedia rule the roost. Then again, most Wikipedia articles include a list of resources that can provide a solid starting point for further research. It’s all about history educators acknowledging, for instance, that Wikipedia is a great resource but that they also need to teach their students how to question, analyze, and go beyond the superficial. Think like a historian!
We can find the data easily – arguably, too easily – but how do we check its validity? Can we believe everything we read? Of course, the answer is an overwhelming no, but the train has already left the station, so now we need to figure out how to keep up so that we don’t get left behind. As Wineburg says, [We’re] slaves to the machines we have built. History educators already have a heaping plate of responsibilities and are juggling all sorts of challenges of sharing the past in a very digital present, but I’ll close with two rules that I try desperately to follow as a historian:
- Listen to Aretha Franklin. You better think (think-think). Digital tools aren’t the enemy; we just have to teach students and/or the general public to identify the source, check the source’s credibility, and ensure that the research topic is being exhausted from all vantage points. In other words, leave no digital stone unturned.
- Don’t make the claim if you don’t have a source. I try to live by this rule because I think that it’s one of the only ways to handle history responsibly. If everyone posting historical musings online made their claim and then backed it up with a primary or secondary source of some sort, what a wonderful world this would be. (I have apparently set this essay to a 1960s soundtrack.)
References:
Walsh, Ben. “Digital Tools: Outfitting a Teacher’s Arsenal.” Retrieved July 06, 2020, from https://teachinghistory.org/digital-classroom/ask-a-digital-historian/25612.
Wineburg, Sam. “Why Historical Thinking is Not About History.” History News 71, no. 2. 2016.
