2003
Using Digital Technology to Teach American History
Editors' Introduction
Gary J. Kornblith & Carol Lasser Article
Building the Better Textbook: The Promises
and Perils of E-Publication
Michael J. Guasco Article
"Scholars will soon be instructed through
the eye": E-Supplements and the Teaching of U.S. History
David Jaffee Article | Appendix
Using Online Resources to Re-center the U.S.
History Survey: Women's History as a Case Study
Kriste Lindenmeyer Article
Pursuing E-Opportunities in the History Classroom
Mark Tebeau Article
More
than Bells and Whistles?
Using Digital Technology to Teach American History
Gary J. Kornblith and Carol Lasser
Contributing Editors, Textbooks and Teaching
Editors' Introduction
We have all heard the hype: the book is dead, long live the e-book;
the library is dead, long live the Internet; the lecture is dead,
long live "student-centered learning." Even skeptics among us acknowledge
that digital technology is changing how scholars communicate among
themselves and how teachers relate to their students. At a conference
on technology and the liberal arts held a couple of years ago, the
question was posed: What proportion of faculty at your institution
really uses educational technology on a regular basis? The reply:
Virtually all of them if one includes e-mail. And we should include
e-mail. Fifteen years ago few professors outside the natural sciences
used e-mail on a regular basis. Today it is part of the daily lives
of nearly all faculty, regardless of discipline. Likewise, with
the advent of course-management packages such as Blackboard and
WebCT, a rapidly increasing number of colleagues are posting their
syllabi online and holding electronic discussions to supplement
in-class activities. In "smart" classrooms across our campuses,
faculty employ PowerPoint to try to engage young people raised on
MTV and video games. We may bemoan the contraction of our students'
attention spans and their naïve expectation that all questions
have "point and click" solutions, but we cannot ignore that today's
students are living in a culture that values instant access to packets
of data more than it does the leisurely contemplation of classic
texts. For reasons both good and bad, we must renegotiate the social
contract between students and teachers in the "information age."
The essays that we publish in this issue of the Journal of
American History address the question of how best to employ
digital technology in the service of teaching college-level American
history. In the opening essay, Michael
J. Guasco of Davidson College reviews America Unbound,
a fully electronic, interactive textbook published by iLrn,
which is available only online. Next, David
Jaffee of the City College of New York offers a kaleidoscopic
analysis of the electronic supplements produced by the publishers
of mainstream print textbooks. He places the emergence of these
products in historical context, and finding only a few of them "ready
for prime time," he explores the gap between the claims made on
behalf of e-supplements and what they actually deliver in practice.
Kriste Lindenmeyerof the University of Maryland Baltimore County and Mark
Tebeau of Cleveland State University offer guidance
to professors who would rather pick and choose among the wide range
of resources on the World Wide Web than rely on a publisher's pre-defined
electronic package. Lindenmeyer explains how the careful and creative
use of electronic materials on women's experience allows her to
reframe her American history survey, moving gender issues to the
center of the course. Tebeau confronts directly the issue of what
difference technology makes to pedagogy. He argues that digitization
opens up unprecedented opportunities for active learning in the
classroom, which he encourages colleagues to embrace with enthusiasm.
On the basis of these thoughtful essays by experienced teacher-scholars,
the answer to the question of whether digital technology offers
more than bells and whistles appears to be: only if we make it so.
Gary J. Kornblith and Carol Lasser are professors of history at
Oberlin College.