Not the same ol' dates n' facts.....

"History Education Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow," by Michael Serber.

This article discusses how technology has done amazing things for the teaching of History in the classroom. Now students can seek out primary documents, which before had been an excruciating process that could take month just to develop a research project. Now we have Google imaging, scholarly article databases that are user friendly, online libraries with access to images of primary documents. You can even get translations of primary documents that were previously out of the question due to language barriers.

This article specifically discussed the "Gilder Lehrman Institute and Collection" which has, accoridng to Serber, over 60,000 online primary documents that can be used for free. Including a document of the week, and online exhibitions. An amazing resource at the fingertips of any educator.

Seber writes, "From the slate board to the chalkboard, to PowerPoint presentations, smart boards, and computers, technology has paved the way to greater accessibility. No longer is it necessary to write key provisions of the Articles of Confederation on the board or even to duplicate mimeograph stencils."

This may be a revisitation of the obvious, however it is always something to remember. It is no longer unreasonable to ask a student in Secondary School to conduct a scholarly research paper. The resources are so readily available, that educators should not hesitate to ask this much of their students. They can do it, and it will teach them valuable things they shoul know for either a vocational track, or a scholarly one.

Serber, Michael, "History Education Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow," Organization of American History Newsletter, 36 February 2008, Organization of American Historians (http://www.oah.org/pubs/nl/2008feb/serber.html) accessed Jan. 23, 2009.

"History, the History of Computers, and the History of Computers in Education"

As a history major, my first instinct is to look up the history of computers, and how they have grown in American Society. For myself, I can first remember the apartment in Auburn with my mom and my sister. My mom had a computer, and she would go to picnics with the people she met on the internet. Things have definitely changed since 1992, but to look up the major milestones in technological history would provide an insight.

It is very interesting to see the basic time line of technology in the classroom. It becomes plain that the use of technology is just a baby when compared to other age-old education methods. The first computer was created in 1946 (the vacuum-tube based), that is just 63 years ago. Two generations, and after that everything moved so quickly.

This site says that schools didn't even get computers until 1975, which were for merely educational purposes. It wasn't until 1986 when schools began to purchase computers with the intent of using them for instructional assistance and career assistance. And it has only been within the last 10-15 years that computers are seen as a necessity in each classroom.

One thing that comes to mind is can we trust an instructional method that is so new and innovative? Can just simply training youth on how to use them be sufficient?


Source:

Murdock, Everett, "History, the History of Computers, and the History of Computers in Education," California State University Long Beach, 2004, http://www.csulb.edu/~murdock/histofcs.html, (accessed Jan. 14, 2009).

image: Mishra, Santosh, "The First Computer," The Maya Solution, 2007 http://www.mayasolution.org/ (accessed Jan. 14th, 2009).