Doing History with Technology

Todd Gernes, Ph.D.
Scholar-in-Residence
Director, New Pathways First Year Program
Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies

In his first-year seminar, Representing the Real: Documenting US History (IN127), Dr. Todd Gernes combines traditional archival scholarship and online learning to engage students in the process of "doing history." Using WebCT and the Online Learning Communities weblog to coordinate communication, projects, written assignments, library research, and digital storytelling, Dr. Gernes aims to deepen inquiry, expand multimodal literacy, and sharpen critical thinking.

Through a sequence of writing assignments that builds analytical skills (summary, paraphrase, synthesis, and argument), Dr. Gernes focuses on active reading and interpretation of literary and historical texts. Students are also introduced to basic research methods and theories of history, reflecting on historical truth, concepts of time and narrative, plagiarism and intellectual acknowledgement, and "the fictions of factual representation." Juxtaposing online library resources (digital databases, electronic journals, and virtual reference) with traditional resources (local libraries, historical societies, archives, walking tours, and museums), Dr. Gernes exposes students to a wide range of  "technologies of understanding" while placing these tools in a generative historical context.

Intellectual Journals
Recently, weblogs (blogs), flexible social software that allows individuals to publish multimedia journals and commentary online, have become ubiquitous in the landscape of culture and communication. Early adopters of the technology, such as Dr. Gernes, have integrated weblogs into the curriculum. "The genre of weblogs in our culture is very fluid and connected to ordinary speech," says Gernes. "Rants, jokes, invective, political diatribes - even individual sexual histories are offered prominently for public consumption." By defining blogs in the classroom very specifically as "intellectual journals" about course materials, Gernes offers students a vehicle for exploration, advanced discussion, and one-to-one dialogue. The intellectual journals also provide a space for trying out ideas and sharing work in the spirit of collaboration.

Dr. Gernes models the "intellectual journal" for his students by asking them to read nineteenth-century diaries and memoirs, in which writers, such as African American journalist Ida B. Wells, reflect on reading, the arts, political culture, and activism. Considering the precedent of the "private diary" (many diaries were written, in fact, with an audience in mind), Gernes asks students to consider, from an historical perspective, the radical inversion of public and private that blogs facilitate. The next step for Gernes is to experiment with "video blogs," recording brief responses to student writing in video clips uploaded to the Learning Portal that Gernes helped to design. "Video blogging can be quite challenging, as you can imagine, but it can create a powerful sense of immediacy and engagement. And I like the way the video image forces you to think about communication from multiple perspectives."

Digital Storytelling
In the Spring 2005 semester, Gernes introduced a multimedia final project in his course, digital storytelling. Digital stories use basic multimedia techniques such as still images with a soundtrack and voiceover, and are typically two to four minutes in length. In the context of Representing the Real, a digital story is defined as a multimedia narrative-combining music, sound, usually a narration - which exhibits an analysis of a historical object or topic. Stories may be personal narrations that move outward towards larger theoretical or contextual issues in the form of illustrated blog entries, family stories, personal tributes, newscast style reports, or allegorical pieces. As Gernes explains the assignment to his students, "Your stories may document an event, pay tribute to an individual, illustrate a line of inquiry, or provide a visual analogue to a significant text or archival sound recording."

To complete the project, Gernes asks his students to submit a reflective paper with the digital story, setting the piece in a broader context. "Digital storytelling," Gernes suggests, "is a great way to use technology to engage students in a personal, reflective practice with a focus on content rather than high production values. Some of the projects turn out to be quite sophisticated - yet that is not the ultimate goal of the project." Students share their work in a "mini film festival" at the end of the course, providing a conclusion to the course that emphasizes community.

"New communications technology," Gernes points out, "can bring us closer to our students' native literacy and fluency. Let's face it, our environment of alphabet and image is plugged in. The printed word is valuable, and precious to me personally, but no longer primary in our culture. Our students have come of age in a rhetorical context of cut and paste. In my view, effective teaching in the Liberal Arts requires that we acknowledge this as a cultural reference point and seek to expand our students' awareness of intellectual property issues, academic integrity, and the various and mediated processes of online research and inquiry."

To learn more about using these various uses of text, image, and sound, and to see samples of a course a Web site like that of Dr. Gernes, contact Kimberly Hall, Instructional Technology Group, 617.824.8961 or Todd Gernes at 617.824.8414.