4--Web+2.0

Eric Paul Ziegler EDT 3010, Dr. Chung Tuesday, 28 September, 2010 Web 2.0: Reactions and Selected Tools from the Internet I am something of a [|Luddite]. I compose my work with a fountain pen before typing it into the computer. I carry a small “ [|waste book] ” for notes which I never throw out (despite its name). I am jealous of my Latin skills (such as they are). I believe history students should be able to read primary documents in whatever languages are necessary, scour archives and libraries for obscure informative texts, make cogent arguments about the past, extrapolate new conclusions based on troubling evidence, and teach other students how to do all of the above. These things are done with books of old words, old photographs, and collections of old papers. Sometimes the historian’s work includes other material artifacts like pottery or art, architecture or music, tools or clothing. Anything can be grist for the historian’s mill. Nevertheless, my starting point for “what historians do” is decidedly nineteenth-century in character: Learn your languages, memorize your basic facts, and then start examining the primary sources to see whether you can overturn or augment preexisting views on history. Easy for me, a history nerd. But as much as people say, “You can’t turn back the clock,” the real point is why should we, or perhaps what should we turn it back to? Consider that all of the material objects that represent antiquarianism are artifacts not only of a time long gone but are themselves artifacts of a world yet to come, pointers towards a future that often altered reality to the point of extreme cultural distortion and upheaval. A book printed on a hand-operated press, each page imprinted by moveable type that had to be set with letters cut in reverse into little lead blocks that were stored in wooden trays divided into tiny compartments, one for “a,” one for “b,” and so on. Such a quaint idea in a new century of quantum computing, laptop computers that come out of the box with a minimum of a terabyte of memory and software that permits me to speak into a headset and see my words trans(scribed?) onto the screen. Why use a fountain pen when I need not touch paper at all. Turn back the clock to a simpler time, when the sixteenth-century printing press with moveable type sparked religious revolutions, expanded literacy, spawned industries of books and journalism, and is the only specific piece of technology mentioned in the American Bill of Rights? Every antiquarian oddity from pen to press to pocket watch to paper book is a piece of technology intended to push the world forward, advance the human condition, and solve a problem. So is Web 2.0. As a technological movement, Web 2.0 resembles the transition from using written documents merely as objects of veneration (bibles), record-books (tax rolls), information transmitters (novels, newspapers, operators manuals). Like Web 2.0, written documents needed a burgeoning free society in order to enter the public sphere as a way to facilitate the exchange of intellectual capital. The first newspaper to print a reader’s letter did this. The first book carried out of the printer’s shop and opened to a page when the reader pointed to a page and said to his friend in the town square, “Have you read this?” sparked a personal dialogue on the spot. This is no less than what Web 2.0 is doing now. In the latter example, a revolution ensued, culminating in the founding of the United States of America. I believe we might expect just such an impact from Web 2.0. Within this framework, I found the following five Web 2.0 tools to hold great promise for significantly altering the educational landscape and making the study of history and geography accessible to students who would be bored by the traditional “languages, books, pen, and paper” (no matter how revolutionary those four technologies once were). These five examples are presented in no particular order. 1. [|Twiducate.com] : Twiducate bills itself as “social networking for schools.” At first blush, it is limited in scope and seems more like Twitter and less like Facebook or a full-blown wiki space. However, there are some advantages to using a stripped-down format like Twiducate. To begin with, robust and full-featured does not always mean useful. Simplicity permits students to know what the expectations of an assignment are when all they have to do is look in a single place. Everyone is easily distracted using Internet tools and middle-schoolers do not need any more distraction. Teachers getting used to internet teaching tools can also benefit from a simple platform. I found Twiducate easy to navigate and update with bookmarks, important dates, and timelines. I created a Twiducate page with a sample class, put my birthday in the important dates section, and added an assignment in the form of due date. For that assignment, I created a link to Mark Twain’s // A Tramp Abroad // in Project Gutenberg where students would be expected to download and read the first chapter and then write their essay. Unlike Blackboard, however, there does not appear to be a way to mail completed work via the Twiducate platform. Like a cross between Twitter and Facebook, Twiducate has comment windows which can hold text for visitors (students, parents, other teachers, school administrators) to read. Unlike Twitter, these windows are very robust. Entire text and footnotes can be cut and pasted directly from MS Word directly into them. I was unable to find a way to print from these windows, however. One can print the entire webpage, but that leaves additional text from the window unseen. A final feature I liked was the ability to create an RSS feed from Twiducate so that students would know immediately in their email inboxes whether a change had been made to their syllabus. Fewer and fewer excuses for not knowing what is due and how it should be done! 2. [|Photobucket.com] : I have been a fan of Photobucket for some time, though it is fraught with advertising banners these days. Advertising banners may be a staple of internet life, but as a distraction from the work at hand, they can cause problems with students. In addition, Photobucket is a huge network that contains information not useful or even appropriate for students in the classroom. For this reason, a good use of Photobucket is as a cloud computing network that makes slide shows portable without laptop computers to bring around the classroom, sharable to other sites, and easily edited with various imaging features. In schools were teachers have to move from classroom to classroom rather than the students coming to them, Photobucket would make showing images of Asian architecture very easy. Students who had to write essays based on what they had seen could take notes in class from the slide show and then access the site again at home or in the library while they prepared their work. Students can also create Photobucket accounts and upload their own work. Documents and .pdf files can also be uploaded in order to turn in for grading or for group input from other students. In art or design classes students can search for images which they can then use to manipulate using Photoshop or other design programs. When finished they can then turn in their work using Photobucket as a portfolio. Mature art students can even subscribe to Photobucket for a reasonable fee and produce very professional portfolios in order to showcase their work in lieu of a personal website. Students going on to apply for work in art or design would benefit by this feature. 3. [|Scribblemaps.com] : Using Google as its source of maps both terrestrial and celestial, Scribblemaps gives the teacher and student the ability to layer their own maps for history, geography, earth sciences, and astronomy. There are numerous layers available, including satellite images without any layers or features other than the natural features of the earth. My first use of this site will be to print blank maps of North America and design charts of colonial expansion that highlight the specific events and populaces I want to cover in class. Here in Colorado, understanding how Spanish colonial expansion was kept in check by a very robust Comanche presence is easier done when students can go to Scribblemaps and create their own maps of missions, pueblos, haciendas, Indian settlements, and natural features such as rivers and mountains. Students can document all these features, create map legends, and attach their final product to written essays. 4. [|SecondLife.com] : As you can imagine after reading my preamble to this assignment, Second Life (SL) makes me cringe. I am not a fan of the virtual world, though I have spent my share of time on Facebook and GuildWars. I am jealous of my time and my real life. I would rather be outdoors than on a computer. I firmly believe the best thing for the inside of a person is the outside of a horse. I hunt and fish. I box and wrestle. I don’t terribly mind pain or cold or heat (though I like to complain about them). So when I read that SL has an entire educational component including a hundred virtual geographical “regions” devoted to education and that over three hundred brick-and-mortar universities, including most of the Ivy League, teach real courses in this [|Ralph-Bakshi] -meets-Anime cartoon world, I realized that until I understand how SL works I will be missing out on a teaching opportunity. As for opportunities, there appear to be actual paying jobs in SL schools and SL is currently soliciting teachers to fill these slots. I have not fully grasped the utility of SL, however. The information features are thin and the only way to explore it is to “enter the Matrix.” I can tell there are obstacles to using SL in K-12 environments due to filtering and age restrictions, but these have been largely overcome by the creation of Teen SL where there are a dozen or so schools doing serious work there. Virtual libraries show up frequently in the profiles of the SL educational “islands” as a way of making materials available all in one place. Also within these islands are common lecture halls, seminar rooms, and the opportunity for students to workshop ideas in open or private conversations. I listen to [|Science Friday] on [|National Public Radio] and know that they also have a region in SL where listeners can discuss topics as they are listening to the show. This, too, would be an excellent resource for students studying science in the public sphere. In short, SL is a virtual world where a student or teacher can do almost anything he might need to do in real life, but cannot because of space, time, distance, or money. Except learn to shoot a free throw. 5. [|Nationalarchives.gov.uk] and [|Docsteach.org] : I discovered both of these sites thorough the British site [|Teachers.tv], a collection of videos and resources that showcase teachers using various methods, many of them highly technical, “to widen their skills, develop their practice, and connect with others in the field.” ([]). In both the British and US archives sites are a huge range of historical topics that can be explored by K-12 teachers to bring history alive for students, challenge their interpretive skills, and promote strong writing and research. I was especially impressed by the video seminars available to UK teachers from their National Archives. I would like for my students to have the opportunity to see original artifacts, even if only on screen, and have a real-time seminar from a historian who works with these on a daily basis. As one teacher said in a video on Teachers.tv, it is much better for students to get someone who is the “real expert” and not “just their teacher” to introduce them to certain historical artifacts. While my work in primary source research is extensive, I know that as a teacher I will not have the time to immerse myself in every topic that I want to cover. Having an archivist from the National Archives show us records from Ellis Island, for instance, and explain what some of them mean to us as American, will be a wonderful experience. In comparison, I preferred the activities available on the British site to the US site. It may simply be that their budget for education at the British archives is bigger, but they have put more effort into making it a more effective teaching tool when you consider the distance learning resources available. Compare, for instance, this [|British archives activity] with this [|US archives activity]. They are similar, and I would not hesitate to augment my lesson plans with either one, but the British resources have a slight edge (though clearly not for US history).