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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
For decades the residents of Taos, New Mexico have been afflicted by a low frequency humming—sometimes louder, sometimes almost inaudible—but never completely absent. On almost every college campus in North America, the buzz about using technology in teaching can be almost as annoying—and with each passing year, it gets louder. Although recent events in the American stock market have taken a good deal of the shine off of the idea that the Internet will fundamentally transform the economy, in higher education there seems to be no corresponding waning of enthusiasm for the infusion of new media into the educational experiences of students.
1. The official “Taos Hum” website is http://www.eskimo.com/~billb/hum/hum1.html.Google Scholar
2. See, for instance, Diana C. Oblinger and Sean C. Rush, eds, The Future Compatible Campus. Planning, Designing, and Implementing Information Technology in the Academy (Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing, 1998); and Deborah Lines Andersen, “Historians on the Web: A Study of Academic Historians' Use of the World Wide Web for Teaching,” Journal of the Association for History and Computing, Vol. III, No. 2, August 2000 (http://mcel.pacificu.edu/JAHC/JAHCIII2/ARTICLES/anderson/index.html) for but two of hundreds of possible examples.Google Scholar
3. For the Campus Computing Project survey results, go to: (http://www.campuscomputing.net). Data on student use of new media technology comes from propriety surveys by Greenfield Online, the Greenfield On-line Pulsefinder On-Campus Market Study, Westport, CT, 8 July 1999, www.greenfieldcentral.com.Google Scholar
4. See, for example, the excellent summary by my colleague Paula Petrik, delivered at the American Historical Association's national conference in Chicago, 6–9 January 2000, “‘We Shall Be All’: Designing History for the Web.” Available on the Web at: http://www2.tltc.ttu.edu/kelly/Articles/petrik.htm. On the negative side, one can read such oft-cited works as Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies. The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1994), and on the positive, a recent example is Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).Google Scholar
5. See, for example, Graeme Davison, “History and Hypertext,” The Electronic Journal of Australian and New Zealand History, 1997, (http://www.sociology.org/EJANZH/elehist/davison.htm); and Stanley N. Katz, “A Computer is Not a Typewriter, or Getting Right with Information Technology in the Humanities,” Lecture in the Digital Directions Speakers Series, University of Virginia, 4 February 1999, (http://www.wws.princeton.edu/~snkatz/papers/uvatlk.html).Google Scholar
6. Of course, every discipline has a literature on student learning, even my own—history— although most of the research that exists on student learning is concerned with what happens during the K-12 years. Among the best examples are Samuel S. Wineburg, “Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts,” Phi Delta Kappan, March 1999, pp. 488–99; and by the same author, “Reading Abraham Lincoln: An Expert/Expert Study in the Interpretation of Historical Texts,” Cognitive Science, Vol. 22, No. 3, 1998, pp. 319–46; and Robert B. Bain, “Into the Breach: Using Research and Theory to Shape History Instruction,” in Peter N. Stearns, Peter Seixas and Sam Wineburg, eds, Knowing, Teaching&Learning History. National and International Perspectives (American Historical Association, 2000), pp. 331–52.Google Scholar
7. One good example of how much farther these matters have progressed in the United Kingdom is the upcoming National Seminar “Researching Teaching and Learning in History” http://hca.ltsn.ac.uk/conf/ns-research.htm, May 2001 at the University of Glasgow's Subject Center for Archaeology, Classics and History (http://hca.ltsn.ac.uk/index.htm).Google Scholar
8. “Teaching the American History Survey at the Opening of the Twenty-First Century: A Round Table Discussion,” Journal of American History, March 2001, pp. 1409–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
9. T. Mills Kelly, “For Better or Worse? The Marriage of Web and the History Classroom,” Journal of the American Association for History and Computing, Vol. III, No. 2, August 2000 (http://mcel.pacificu.edu/JAHC/JAHCIII2/ARTICLES/kelly/kelly.html); and John McClymer, “Inquiry and Archive in a U. S. Women's History Course”, Works and Days, Vol. 31, No. 32, 1998, pp. 1–13.Google Scholar
10. See, for example, Anuradha A. Gokhale, “Collaborative Learning Enhances Critical Thinking,” Journal of Technology Education, Vol. 7, No. 1, Fall 1995, (http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/JTE/v7n1/gokhale.jte-v7n1.html); and “Powerful Partnerships: A Shared Responsibility for Learning”, A Joint Report of the American Association for Higher Education, the American College Personnel Association and the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators, June 1998.Google Scholar
11. See, for example, D. P. Diaz and R. B. Cartnal, “Students' Learning Styles in Two Classes: Online Distance Learning and Equivalent On-Campus,” College Teaching, Vol. 47, No. 4, 1999, pp. 130–35; Kelli Cargile Cook, “Online Technical Communication: Pedagogy, Instructional Design, and Student Preference in Internet-Based Distance Education,” unpublished dissertation, Texas Tech University, 2000; and Bill Cutler, “A Course Portfolio,” http://www.theaha.org/teaching/aahe/aahecover.html.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
12. On reverse-engineering courses, see Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, Understanding by Design (Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1998).Google Scholar
13. See, for example, Peter Stearns, “Student Identities and World History Teaching,” The History Teacher, Vol. 33, No. 2, February 2000, pp. 185–93.Google Scholar
14. The idea of students as architects of their own learning is hardly new, but has recently been described in print by Elizabeth Barkeley, in her course portfolio project for the Carnegie Foundation, “From Catastrophe to Celebration: Analysis of a Curricular Transformation,” (http://km12.carnegiefoundation.org/gallery/ebarkley/). This site is password protected, but can be accessed via the Carnegie Foundation main page at www.carnegiefoundation.org.Google Scholar
15. “Choosing Quick Hits Over the Card Catalog,” New York Times, 10 August 2000.Google Scholar
16. One example of the many debates around the issue of peer review and Web publishing is a recent discussion that took place among H-Net editors, following the American Historical Association's 2001 national conference.Google Scholar
17. One good resource for helping students recognize egregious pages is maintained by Marshall Poe at the University of Limerick: “Tendentious Web Pages,” http://www.russianhistory.org/ResourcePages/Tendentious/Tendentious%20Pages.html. In addition, a number of useful Web pages have been created to assist students as they learn to read Web resources with a more critical eye: “Thinking Critically about World Wide Web Resources,” http://www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/college/help/critical/index.htm, and “The ICYouSee Guide to Critical Thinking About What You See on the Web,” http://www.ithaca.edu/library/Training/hott.html.Google Scholar
18. The sites the student in question relied upon most were: www.dalmatia.net/croatia/history/index.htm, www.ustasha.com and www.ustasa.net.Google Scholar
19. Hugh LeCaine Agnew, “New States, Old Identities? The Czech Republic, Slovakia and Historical Understandings of Statehood,” Nationalities Papers, Vol. 28, No. 4, December 2000, pp. 619–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
20. “Kosovo, Serbian Nationalism and Territorial Partition,” http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/-habsweb/syllabi/kosovo.html.Google Scholar
