Teaching with Technology

http://mcel.pacificu.edu/jahc/2006/issue2/mcclurken.php

Jeffrey McClurken, a History professor,  and Jerry Slezak, an Instructional TechnologySpecialist teamed up to create an upper level History course at Mary Washington University in Fredericksburg, Virginia. The course they developed has now been taught for a number of years. This article, entitled “Research-Based Web Sites: Students Creating Online Scholarship” in the October 2006 issue of the Journal of the Association for History and Computing,  describes their experience. As an aside, it seems to be harder and harder to find relevant technology articles in my two chosen journals – makes me start to think historians are not on the cutting edge of technology or, at least, don’t publicize it!

The History professor and the IT professional collaborated in creating a course in the History Department called The History of American Technology and Culture.  The reason for creating the course was to come up with a way to “integrate scholarly website design projects” into this upper level History course. As most of you know Mary Washington is an academically strong, relatively small, liberal arts oriented, public four year university. 

The development of the course was to have the two specialists (historian and IT expert) combine to create a course where students would produce a scholarly, well researched, fully cited website on a particular piece of American technology (think of things ranging from the X Ray to the polygraph as examples of pieces of technology). The objectives were to give students the skills to create a website in which to include their scholarly work on a particular item of American technology. Specifically the course was not all about technology. 

 One of the main course management goals was that the technical aspects of the website building should not take over class meetings and take away from the historical scholarship that would be documented in the website.  This website building project was very precisely defined. It would be evaluated based on “presentation and content.” Further, the “bells and whistles” should not overwhelm the technical content. The students were told specifically “presentation is not an acceptable substitute for content.”

The interesting thing about the course development and the major project of the course was the combination of teaching and learning a technological skill (building a website) with the scholarly process of historical research into the item of technology chosen by the student.  The course assumed the students had no particular technology skills and, in fact, the students web skills varied from sophisticated to non-existent. Only one fourth of the students had ever built a web page.  Thus, built into the course was teaching the way to build a web page.  As a result, the History professor was not just assuming that knowledge of his students, nor was he expected to actually provide the technical knowhow. That is where the IT professional came in. The History professor was free to focus on the History side of the project – accuracy of research, writing skill, appropriateness and authenticity of cited material etc.

The course included 4 web skills modules which were taught over a 4 week period by the IT professional, assisted by the historian. These modules basically taught the students on a step by stepbasis how to build a web page and included assignments which were directly tied to the final project of the class of creating the scholarly website. In other words they learned how to create and build a website, by practicing building them, with the assignments in these modules tied to what they would have to create by the end of the class.

The structure of the course was rigid. Students were all instructed on the same platform to use for their website, Netscape Composer. The web skills modules initially were based on a book called Web Page Design, but the instructors determined a more focused program was necessary, so they developed their own modules to be used on Blackboard. The design of the webpages had to include certain basic requirements. While this overall rigidity hampered some students creativity, it made it easier for most students to learn the basics and not feel overwhelmed by the technology piece.

As the course was given several times, McClurken and Slezak refined it in response to student input and their interpretation of whether the course was meeting its goals.  Both were proud of the quality of some of the websites created by the students.  Nevertheless there were some negatives.  Nearly all were related to the technology component, as opposed to the History component.

This article addresses one of my concerns about the use of technology as a teacher. Technically, my subject matter expertise is History, not Technology. I don’t feel comfortable incorporating technology that I don’t understand or can’t explain. In this instance, the IT professional, as part of the team, made that issue go away. Also, the web skills training modules seemed to be set up so that anyone could learn them. Over time, even an historian could pick up the basics and become more proficient.  The key was having an IT professional to collaborate with.

I liked the idea of incorporating the web skills training right into the course. Unfortunately, most teachers of subjects like History, don’t have the luxury of an IT professional as a co-collaborator – most of the time it is hard to find them to troubleshoot why the computer isn’t connecting to the internet for example, let alone spend up to 4 classes teaching how to build a webpage.  This also raises a question in my mind related to courses most teachers deal with – basic subject matter courses, like English, History, Sociology, etc. Adding a technology component is good to teach that skill. But often times adding components like writing and speaking skills are just as important. Unfortunately you as a teacher don’t have time to cover the material of your subject and teach other skills, like technology or writing, or speaking for example.

Nevertheless, as the authors point out, even though most students had little technical background, after taking the course, they had developed key technology skills and learned important historical scholarly material.  Thus, as my title of this note indicates, you don’t need to be an IT geek to create a scholarly website! It’s all in the way it is taught.