Unit Two: The Local Digital History Scene

Rosenweig: As educators we are constantly bombarded with suggestions, requests and requirements to introduce more technology into our classrooms.  School boards expend significant funds for more equipment and training, parents want to ensure their children are keeping up with technology applications and students want the fun associated with it all.  To meet the needs of our 21st century learners, teachers need to step out of their comfort zones and embrace technology in the classroom, but with an understanding that it has moved far beyond TV/VCR carts and overhead projectors.  We need to not only bring the technology in, but give our students to the tools to safely and effectively use it. As a history and social studies teacher, that includes ensuring my students cannot only locate sources on-line, but that they are thoughtful critics of the information they find.

Rosenweig and Cohen in their on-line text Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving and Presenting the Past on the Web, refer to a number of historians who warned of the dangers of new media and that it "posed a threat to the search for wisdom and depth".  I'm not sure I would take it that far, but they have a point.  There is just so much information out there - where to even begin?  For students hopping on-line and looking to answer a question or work on a paper, the answer is often "whatever came up fasted and first."  As a teacher, it is my responsibility to ensure my students develop the skills and strategies to weigh through the resources the find to discover who is writing, why are they writing it, what is their background, what is their agenda?

Final Project: For the final project in this course I am considering creating a content site aligned with one of the units/topics in a middle school United States History to 1865 course.

Online Reading: As easy as it is to enter a few words into a search engine to learn more about a topic or to instantly download a book onto an e-reader or tablet, it's not that simple.  The formats on which we read and the sources we pull that information from are impacting out understanding, retention, reading speed, vision health…We need to be cognizant of what we're reading, how we're reading it and who wrote it.

Extras: I found an article, The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens, on the Scientific American site.  It was published not long after your blog post from 2013 on Online v Paper Reading Comprehension and mentions many of the same conclusions you reached.  It also references a study by Anne Mangen of the University of Stavanger - Norway.  Professor Mangen is often cited in articles about digital reading. Further searches for her work came up with a number of recent papers, however for most of them only the abstracts were readily available. Full versions of the papers were available through various gated portals and usually for a fee.