Kelly A. Woestman
Candidate Statement
I want to thank our current H-Net President, Kris Lindenmeyer for nominating me for the position of President-elect. As the current Vice-President for Teaching and a member of the H-Net Council before that, I have been an active member of the H-Net leadership for several years and plan to build on the work of my predecessors as we continue to move H-Net forward to better serve our diverse constituencies.
H-Net has been a lifeline for someone like me who works at a small state regional university two hours from the nearest metro area. I canıt imagine my professional life without it. I have served as an editor for H-Teach since a few years after its inception in the mid-1990s and remain as a member of the advisory board. A few years ago, I worked with our Executive Director Peter Knupfer and H-Net colleague Tom Thurston to establish the H-TAH network for anyone interested in Teaching American History grants.
The work the H-TAH network has done with both the US Department of Education that runs the TAH grant program and the Organization of American Historians are examples of the partnerships I would like to continue to grow if elected to the President-elect position. Our current president, Kris Lindenmeyer, has been successful in achieving one of her major goals to increase our partnerships with established scholarly and teaching societies and it would be in H-Netıs best interest to continue these approaches not only to increasing our membership but to secure new grants and other sources of funding. Most of you involved in grants realize that they are usually built on extensive partnerships if real dollars are to be secured.
Furthermore, H-TAH has co-sponsored the TAH Symposium in conjunction with the annual OAH meeting for the last two years and we are finalizing plans for the 3rd Annual TAH Symposium in March 2008 in New York City. This symposium represents H-Netıs inclusive strategy of reaching broad audiences that share common interests and heightens our visibility. The primary purpose of this symposium is to look at the impact of TAH grants on the larger historical profession and to examine the cross-currents that affect not only K-12 teachers of American history but also how over $700 million in federal funding is affecting the historical profession in US colleges and universities as historians become involved in career paths they never expected.
Another strong area of interest I have is in choosing the right technology tools to regain H-Netıs status as the premier association for those interested in successfully combining the humanities and technology. With the support of Matrix, we have state-of-the-art tools within our reach and I will continue to work with the H-Net staff headquartered in East Lansing to increase our access to these critical tools and to ensure that they are made available to the widest possible audiences. Choosing the correct technologies to serve our interests is a commitment I take very seriously as we try to keep serving otherwise underserved groups around the world whose access to technology is limited.
Conversely, we cannot allow H-Net to become irrelevant to its subscribers or to its editors because it is relying primarily on technology no longer widely used by the majority of those interacting in different segments of the online world and, in fact, creating new worlds of their own. I share our commitment to open source software as an important way to reach the widest audiences who could not or would not pay for proprietary software. Furthermore, it is critical that we play a role in choosing the technology frontiers we enter instead of having them forced upon us because we chose not to participate in the broader process of large online communities speaking with their choice of tools. Itıs important to note that both blogging and social networking communities (no longer single websites) like Facebook and MySpace have pushed the commercial broadcasters who previously dominated our access to the world around us whether it be news or the latest music to make new choices in how they reach their audiences.
With the expertise we have among our collective whole, H-Net as an organization needs to continue to openly debate where we need to go next while ensuring that we do actually move forward. The only other choice open to H-Net is to be pushed in directions we do not wish to go and ultimately not do our best to serve our diverse audiences. Working closely with the staff of H-Net and our partnership with Matrix is essential in accomplishing H-Netıs founding goal of moving forward to enhance the service of technology to the goals of the humanities to best serve a diverse membership composed of subscribers and editors around the world.
Respectfully submitted,
Kelly A. Woestman
H-Net Vice-President for Teaching
Pittsburg (KS) State University
woestman@mail.h-net.msu.edu
