Note: This report was originally published on H-MMedia, and was written by Melanie R. Shell
Building on the skills and background of university and K-12 faculty, reference librarians, museum curators, and graduate students from around the country, this week-long seminar was devoted to creating a collaborative World Wide Web site that deals with the materials and strategies for teaching the history of the United States. Divided into 10 units, with the seminar participants divided into groups of 3, each group was responsible for a single "unit." In addition to some texts and images provided by the seminar organizers in cooperation with the University of Virginia's Department of Special Collections, participants were required to bring documents of their own to supplement the sources provided by the seminar staff. The goal of the seminar was to present a well rounded picture of the skills needed and the issues involved in creating multi-media teaching tools, with primary emphsis placed on content, so that teachers might take advantage of the strengths and dynamism of multi-media.
On most of these fronts the seminar was a huge success. A couple participants returned home to use parts of the site created at the seminar in their own classes, while others plan to use the skills learned in the course of the seminar to begin creation of or revise their own websites. Salli Vargis, of DeKalb College writes, "I have used one of the units on an experiemtnal basis with my class and their response was positive. They were very fascinated wtih the original documents and sources, which they have never had much access to and of course reading it off the computer screen seemed interesting to them....I have asked them to give me a report about one of the documents that they read giving me an idea as to how it improved their historical knowledge." Randy Shifflett of Virginia Technological University adds that he "hope[s] to use parts of the course we created to introduce our graduate students, some of whom will teach in the public schools, to the use of the WWW in general and this survey in particular. The next time I teach the survey at Virgnia Tech, I want to use this course as a model." Randy also notes that he will also be using ideas he got from the seminar to revise his department's homepage and to build narrative in electronic text format based on his own book project on John Washington, the Fredericksburg slave.
Other participants said that they would probably not be able to use the Making History site itself, but will be able to incorporate parts of the site into their own webpages. "Although I will probably not use the website as it now stands for my survey course, I do plan to incorporate it and a a webpage of my own invention into a fall course on historical methods," Kriste Lindenmeyer, of Tennessee Technological University, writes. Earl Mulderink of Southern Utah University also noted that he expects to begin developing a homepage for his department, "and...will create several course assignments for [his] history survey classes that will requires students to access and use history Web sites." "In addition, I am teaching a course on South African history this next quarter, for which I will integrate a number of Web sites and materials," he writes.
Rebecca Edwards, of Vassar College, writes that she has used her unit's portion of the site, showing the "Election of 1896," to encourage the administration at her institution to fund the construction of a much larger website based around the same theme this autumn. "The seminar gave me concrete information, templates, and resources that will be crucial to the completion of this project," she writes. Kathy Cooke, of Quinnipiac College also noted that while her college "is still a little hesistant to allow anyone on campus beside the technies to make their own Web pages for external consumption," for the present, she plans " to use te web to construct an on-line syllabus taht will include links to sites related to the topic of the day or week. Students can go out and explore to their hear's content, and should find interesting primary sources for assignments." Formal assignments to explore one or two of the sites over the course of the semester, and reports from the students about what they have found, will help hone and focus such explorations. Kathy also plans to use an online newsgroup to facilitate classroom discussion. Robert Phipps, of West Virginia University, plans to "use the web to put up 'exceptional' material....that [he] might not otherwise be able to share with the students." "The idea of using the web as an electronic sourcebook is nece, but only when materials (such as images of original documents, rare photographs, etc.) can be added in," Robert writes. "The demonstrations by UVa faculty and staff were particularly useful in pointing this out."
In addition to the websites, presentations from faculty who were already using the WWW as an integrative part of their courses, on encoding text in SGML, copyright issues, and a variety of demonstrations were also integral parts of the seminar. As Skip Hyser, of James Madison University notes, "First daily lectures or demonstrations were an esentail part of the seminar. It was nicet o learn of the copyright problems, or the ups nd downs of using hypertext in teaching. They helped give the group work soe further thoughts or potential approaches to the materials they were assembling," he writes. "Second, it was a true learning experience watching the units the other groupsl created. The exchange of information by simply watching and listening was amazing." Tom Costa, of Clinch Valley College, noted that the most stimulating presentation for him was that on SGML and Electronic Text Project, by David Seaman, who directs the E-Text Center. "After I startedmaking up some of the materials we had scanned or typed, I could see the attraction," he writes. Many participants noted that the presentation on copyright by Paul Jones, was also extremely valuable to them. Ann Mallek, of St. Anne's-Belfield School, also writes that "as technology coordinator for our lower school, I need to be more able to deveop resources which are fairly foolproof, in order for lower school teaching to rely on material being there and functioning....The nuts and bols methods which I learned will help me do that. I can develop teaching guides to help them learn how to use the site independently, which they like better than having me stand over them."
Though responses to the seminar were overwhelmingly positive, many of the participants also noted that they felt swamped with information and the pressure to construct a site in such a short span of time. For many of the participants, this was their first encounter with HTML, scanning and UNIX systems while for others who had some technical background already, more time to work on the project itself would have been useful. One suggestion for future seminars of this kind was to either offer two sessions -- one centered around a specific subject and devoted almost exclusively to the production of a website and another for beginnners that would include the introduction to HTML, scanning and UNIX commands and procedures. Others suggested expanding the length of the seminar by one or more days to provide more time for instruction and completion of the projects.
"Perhaps the strongest feeling is that the resource is worth it and a way to organize information," Ann Mallek concludes, summing up the feelings of many of the participants. And as Kriste Lindenmeyer adds, "I'm very concerned with the collaborative nature of this seminar, because I realize, now more than eve, how much work it takes to prepare a website for a course. Participating in a group workshop benefits those of us who are working on our own to bring classes 'on-line.' Overall, the seminar was wonderful and worth every minute of my time."