Canadian Happenings: New Website and Upcoming Conference
Mona Gleason, Editor
Get to your Homeroom!
Since 1997, one of the most useful websites for those interested in the history of children and education in Canada, and in the province of British Columbia in particular, is The Homeroom – British Columbia’s History of Education Website (http://www.mala.bc.ca/homeroom/). The secret to The Homeroom’s success is its appeal as both a research and teaching resource. This year, the website was re-designed, given a new style, new structure, and new search engine. Dr. Patrick Dunae, an historian at Malaspina University College in Nanaimo, British Columbia, and the designer and keeper of the site, understood that the “homepage would serve as a reference and assembly point, in the same way that ‘homerooms’ functioned in traditional high schools.” The site was launched in 1997, which happened to correspond to the 125th anniversary of the BC provincial public school system (1872-1997).
The site offers historians valuable information in broad areas of interest: topics (people, places, programmes, legislation, and the teaching profession), resources (comprehensive bibliography and www resources), schools (public schools, independent schools, and school administration), post-secondary (materials on colleges, universities, and adult education), timeline (a chronology of educational milestones from 1840s to the 1990s), textbooks (searchable database of all books approved for use in British Columbia public schools from the 1870s to the end of the 1920s.) The work of students is featured prominently on the site. This has been a quite deliberate goal for Dunae. According to him, “whenever possible, I encourage students to take on research projects that might connect to "our Homeroom." Students know that only the best essays will be posted to the web site! They tell me they feel all the more happy with their work if they see it online. So, instead of writing a traditional essay, submitting it to your prof, getting a grade and then forgetting about your work -- students who contribute to the Homeroom are encouraged to polish and revise their work for a much larger audience. And students report that they are really gratified to see their work online - from anywhere in the world!” Is Anybody Out there?
When asked about the “success” of the site, Dunae includes a number of criteria by which The Homeroom might be judged: the number of new visitors it attracts, the links it has achieved to other respected sites and scholarly use, and by the comments from those who make frequent use of the site.
According to Dunae, “nearly 44,000 new visitors have come through the front door of the Homeroom in the past few years; and our site server file indicates that the Homeroom is accessed by literally hundreds of thousand of visitors each year -- that is, by visitors who go directly to the Timelines page or some other internal point within the web site, instead of going "through" the index page. In that respect, it is successful.” Dunae also measures the site’s success thus far by its linkages with other sites and the scholarly input it has received from academics. Dunae is also mindful of the positive responses from those with a general interest in the history of schooling in British Columbia from historians, students, and school administrators. He intends to build on the confidence users have in the site, particularly in terms of its accuracy and authority as a vibrant scholarly enterprise. “I want visitors to feel as confident about material they read on the Homeroom site as they would in a traditional hard-copy scholarly journal,” Dunae contends. It is clear that The Homeroom has become one of the most valuable electronic sources for information about BC educational past. With Dunae currently planning options for the growth and diversification of the site, the future promises even bigger and better things.
Upcoming Conference
The 13th Biennial Conference of Canadian History of Education Association/L’Association Canadienne d’Histoire de l’Éducation will be held in Calgary, Alberta between October 21-24, 2004. The theme of this year’s conference is Interdisciplinarity in the Practice and Theory of Educational Histories. The theme is intended to encompass paper and panel sessions that discuss the histories of education from a variety of academic fields, disciplines, methodologies, comparative perspectives, theories, and arguments. Those interested in attending the conference can visit the website at http://chea-ache.ucalgary.ca/.