One of the aims of my course design is to introduce digital history tools at the introductory level. At Normandale Community College, these are our 1000 courses. Let's dispense with the nonsense about digital natives being better with technology than digital immigrants. I fall squarely in the middle of these groups, graduating from my undergraduate in 1997, and I know retired folks with strong tech skills and teenagers for whom the world wide web is very small world. I like to say that all students have uneven penetrations of technological knowledge, which means teaching a class of 30-45 involves significant differentiation of instructions, both in content delivery and skill development.
I've taught my students to research, write, and record podcasts for 6 years or so. The research and writing is pretty standard stuff for history courses, but the recording requires a small degree of technical confidence, if not technical skill. From my podcast lesson plan, I've come to appreciate the need for scaffolding assignments both based on content and on skills.
One person who scaffolds digital history lesson plans beautifully is Michelle Moravec. Her lesson plan on data mining a text (known as distant reading) is a picture of clarity. In two months I will have a distant reading lesson plan that looks remarkably like this one (with attribution of course). I'm thinking the work of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, a 16th c. ambassador of the Holy Roman Empire to the Ottoman Sultan, would be brilliant for this sort of thing.
Speaking of attributions, I finally bothered to figure out how to use Getty Images for free. You need to hover over you chosen image, which brings up a </> tag in the lower right that allows you to embed with appropriate attribution. Posting historical images is now crazy cheap (free). Thanks Getty!
