I picked up a book, Teaching History in the Digital Age, by T. Mills Kelly (2013) not because I necessarily want to teach digital history.  However, I am interested in how education is dealing with digital history.  I think a view from both sides will be helpful to any historian who wants to put their work out on the web, institutionally or in general.  We should have an idea how our digital work will be looked at.  It isn’t impossible that our digital audience will include students.  So, I will report back on the insights that Kelly provides after I read it.

Read about this book here.

3/1/15

So far the most important thing I have learned from this book is how to teach college students to use digital sources properly.  We can’t just say be careful out there!  Kelly makes the point that just because students are native technology users, it doesn’t mean they automatically know what a trustworthy digital source is (46).  Even professional historians get duped.

Also, more applicable this term, if I understand how students use the internet for research, I may be able to design a digital history project to be more helpful and informative to people looking for that information; not just students, but everyone who is interested.  This point reminds me of my experience in the UNR inaugural class called Digitizing History (History 300a) in which we had to try to figure out how to condense historical information for a website.  It was a difficult thing to do.  Maybe this will help me in the future: (from page 23).

• What happened?
• When did it happen?
• Why did it happen?
• Who was responsible?

This seems very fundamental, but I promise, as a historian trying to translate a comprehensive, scholarly narrative to the web, these basics can get buried. I will keep these basics in mind for future digital projects.