A better train wreck

Like you, I have strong opinions about a variety of subjects. Most of these subjects are not my expertise, but I still have strong opinions. I just read a tweet about men asking their wives to change their names when the couple marries. I thought, I should comment/like/reflect or problematize that idea. Then I thought, nope. (Full disclosure, neither I nor my wife changed our names when we married. )

Social media amplifies peoples voices, but as a rich, white, heterosexual male, my voice is pretty amplified already. Too often, I find that my contribution to a discussion on social media wouldn't lend new insight, only  reinforce an existing argument thread. So, 95% of the time, I say nothing.

The other 5% of the time I think about saying something, but often still don't. Say with the naming question, I am familiar with four different naming practices around the world (U.S., Spain, Northern Ireland, and Cultural Revolution China). Though not expert, I could offer a minor exposition on what last names mean(t) to families in the world. Still, my comments might focus on a tiny part of a larger sentiment. Say I criticize 5% of a thesis, and I agree with 95% of the rest of the thesis. What part of my words will be amplified?, the 5% criticism. This way lies perdition. Or at the least a circular firing squad.

Again and again I see nominal allies pick each other apart publicly for small disagreements. Those disagreements may contain great meaning (what order do you use: LGBTQIA, GLBTIAQ) but to those who disagree with the premise of the argument, it's an opportunity for attack.

So, I don't comment on 95% of the material for which I hold an opinion. On the 5% I do think about commenting on, I make sure that my comments focus on the 95% of the argument I agree with, not the 5% I don't. That 5% of the 5%, (.25%) I feel compelled to weigh in on, I try to write long form, here, or to the originator directly. Social media for me is for sharing resources or quick networking, not nuanced discussion or prolonged arguments. Just in case you wondered why my retweet to tweet ratio is more than 50:1.

Except for the Nazis. We should always say no to Nazis. It's not hard to say no to evil, right @jack?

As faculty at a college, I use a great bit of technology. And I get pitched in emails by ed tech companies regularly. Others, such as Audrey Watters , have ably documented the fraud and corruption involved in the ed tech higher education world. Between working with tech (including some programming) and reading widely about evidence-based scholarship of teaching and learning, I don't pay much attention to ed tech pitches by email: two seconds and it's in my junk email.

I now have school-age kids, and am seeing the push by ed tech companies in the K-12 sector. For example, I recently saw the new company Class Tag pop up as sponsored posts at a couple teacher blogs. Here are a couple of concerns from a cursory, 5-minute review of their materiel.

1. Their privacy policy "works similar to the way Facebook notifies of of friend requests." I don't think a privacy policy should work "similar to" anything: it should be explicit. Also, if you want to borrow a privacy policy, perhaps not Facebook?

 

 

2. Parent shaming seems to be built into a scoreboard. If a parent doesn't click through emails, they must not be engaged in the kids schooling, yes (NO).(this image comes from a teacher blog , not the company web page.)

3. Translation is tough right? We pay people money to accurately translate others' words, in medicine, in law, in literature. How is this startup going to accurately translate complicated messages about deeply personal learning issues? It's not. And the translations will confuse everyone.

4. The privacy policy indicates they will share personal information (parent information, not children under 13) with any "affiliate of ClassTag who is in the same corporate family as us as long as their privacy practices are substantially similar to ours." What is the same corporate family? And how substantial is substantial? The same corporate family makes little sense if Class Tag is a start up. Unless, like so many ed tech companies, what Class Tag wants to do is get big enough to be purchased by a larger company, that then mines the personal data of the start-up.

 

 

 

 

 

This is not a substantial review of this product or of those endorsing it. That said, knowing what I do of how higher ed tech operates, I'm gradually learning that K-12 ed tech works the same way.

As a final though, consider that this product is free to the teacher and parents. As so many have noted, you either pay for the product, or you are the product. There is no free.

 

 

Several things struck me as I viewed the video responses. First, most of the projects were imagined to be bigger than they turned out to be. In short, the originating scholars eyes were bigger than their stomachs. That's common amongst graduate students and newer faculty, but not always. The project on historical writing seemed realistic in its scope, especially with two creators.

I appreciated the attention to aesthetics and user interfaces most folks created for their projects. I struggle with how much attention to put into web design and how much to focus on other items. It's less a question of UX versus pedagogy and more a question of how much time is available.

Finally, I engaged much more with the short videos than I did with the finished projects in module 8, even the well refined ones. There is an inherently safisfying element to a human explaining why they did what they did that isn't reflected, for me, in texts or links.

For my final project, I will help the students find an article on the Lexis-Nexus database about Normandale Community College, compare that source with a book source from our college library, and blog about the two sources on a common course blog, paying attention to specific tags.

The assignment will run over 4 classes, with the first class session devoted defining a historical question to research and learning the database. The second session will focus on finding an article, reading the article, and finding a book related to the article in our library. The third class session will attend to how to write a blog post and the fourth session will involve editing the posts and ensuring proper tagging.

### • How has the malleability of the past in the digital world complicated our work as history educators?
• How has that malleability made it easier to teach about and help our audience(s) engage with the past? ###

To respond to these questions, let me tell a short story. From the 1970s forward, some scholars on the left politically have argued that knowledge is contextual, not objective. Truth could only be discerned relative to other knowledge that produced that truth. I’m doing a great injustice to the theories of relativism, but there you are. In the 2000s, those on the political right warmed to the idea that if all truth was relative, then any argument could be held up as legitimate. Very quickly, many on the left realized the danger of this argument and retreated to a sort of quasi-empiricism, staking out more intellectual ground for evidence-based decision making.

Historians participated in this larger intellectual tussle, throwing in with the relativists before retreating a bit to land on the side of evidence-based stories. Alas, the horse has escaped the barn, and as a discipline, we have failed to convince our publics that not all stories about the past bear up to the evidence.

Compounding this problem of “my historical truth is as good as yours” is the nature of the digital world. To find truly unsupported information in the pre-digital era, you needed social connections that could facilitate the sharing of balderdash. In the digital era, spinning up a website is literally child’s play. Middle school students create hordes of websites for National History Day (and many are great!). History Day websites aside, we now have explanations about the past with little basis in evidence circulating like collateralized mortgage-backed securities in 2007.

So, historians helped deconstruct the notion that history is based on evidence, and the digital era lets many create their own malleable history. The cruel pièce de résistance of our malleable past is that both debates over truth and the velocity of non-evidence based thinking on the web fit within the frame of historical “facts” not historical thinking. So much ink and pixels are spent arguing over who is right about the past, that the idea of how we create a past has slunk to the back of our public historical conversations.

Despite the above issues, the digital era also offers possibilities to help us teach history in new ways. For example, we can help students dig into digital objects to find embedded metadata that helps frame the objects in different ways. As teachers, we can connect the motivations of migrants in the 19th century to the debates about immigration today. I can pull up my great grandmother’s entry log to Ellis Island and compare those documents with modern entry documents. Many of my students have entrance documents, yet I don’t need to go to Ellis Island to connect 1909 and 2017, I only need the web.

Perhaps most usefully, we can model good historical thinking and bad historical thinking, easily and with high impact. I’ve shown my students the picture of John McCain standing in front of Walter Reed Middle School during his 2008 Republic National Convention acceptance speech every semester and it wows every time. We can show how the inability to think critically can result in lost jobs and lost opportunities while we show the career expanding options in even basic digital history tools.

So, though our field of history suffers from significant structural problems, we also have the tools to combat some of the worse effects of these problems.

Respond to the following questions in a blog post:
• How well, if at all, do Cosset and Chalana incorporate ideas we’ve discussed in our work on teaching historical thinking in their essay?
• Given what you’ve learned thus far, what advice would you give the National Park Service on how best to use their historic sites to teach to a more diverse audience?

Cosset and Chalana acknowledge the contested nature of history, especially when discussing the Whitman Mission National Historic Site. For example, the Cayuse Nation had been included when re-crafting park signage. That said, much of the discussion of the parks does not invite viewers to draw their own conclusions based on the evidence. Rather, the authors (and perhaps the park service) are attempting a “balanced” approach that speaks to the values of today and the past. This approach does not necessarily help visitors engage in historical thinking, as it does demonstrate that the park service and the authors are engaging is historical thinking.

For example the authors write:

Providing an even more balanced interpretation, an orientation film produced in 2012 presents the larger historical context and particulars regarding the Whitmans’ arrival and establishment of the mission through live-action reenactments. In it, Native actors depict Native Americans in re-created scenes, and both white and Native scholars contribute documentary-style commentary. The film goes to great lengths in presenting different opinions without struggling to fully resolve them.

Here, the park board tried to achieve balance in their presentation of historical facts, without actually presenting evidence in a way that might encourage visitors to draw their own conclusions. The phrase “without struggling to fully resolve them” points to Parks employees that dedicated to accurate and complex history. Nonetheless, there is no invitation to make history out of the park. Cosset and Chalana are trying to find the “right” way to tell a story, not necessarily how to help visitors make their own history.

Propmpt: "Given the current discussion about facts, real or “alternative”, how should we use what we know about historical thinking, public perceptions of the past, and what we can do with digital media, to promote a more accurate understanding of the past? Write a blog post that explores these questions."

I applaud Wineburg for privileging historical thinking over historical facts. As I tell my students, arguing over what’s in a picture means you’ve already lost the argument because someone else created the frame. Framing an argument involves a complex set of historical thinking choices that include what sources to include, what theories of historical action will be mentioned and what temporal, geographic, and personnel limits are set. Once you are arguing over who the greatest president of the United States was, you’ve already yielded the field to others as the terms of the debate are set.

Framing, or providing historical context, is especially important given the instant access nature of information retrieval brought on by web technologies. Even the language of the web encourages us not to consider context. When you search a search engine gives you “results,” which as my iOS dictionary defines as “a consequence, effect, or outcome of something.” In put A and get a result B. As historians we often focus on how B is not an evidence-based historical fact, when we should be blowing up the A then B equation entirely to encourage students to ask more human and interesting questions.

For example, I have searched and found not a single year since 40 BCE in wikipedia to lack its own entry. Type in any year and you’ll get a page of what Wikipedia editors conclude happened in that year. Centuries and decades are sometimes linked on the right hand side. References for year entries are typically a single encyclopedia. We, as historians, should start by making these year pages full-to-the brim with references that pull the general public into a wider discussion about historical thinking. As soon as someone google “1492” and lands on Wikipedia, there should be dozens of references that provide context.

This approach largely cedes the ground to Wikipedia while attempting to mitigate the damage it does to our collective historical thinking. A more proactive approach would be to bridges the divides between critical thinking, information literacy, digital literacy, and scientific thinking. While these skills are separate, they all involved sorting credible information. For example, the same technique Wineburg used to debunk the Hitler museum could be used to debunk vaccine or climate change deniers. We cannot, as a discipline, expect our students to value historical thinking in isolation, and there are great partnerships to be made with other disciplines who struggle to teach students how to use digital media.

An opinion piece written in 1997 by communications faculty Willie Johnson titled "COLLEGES ARE STILL NOT ORIENTED TO SERVE STUDENTS OF COLOR" raises issues of access and belonging in college. I will use this article to teach students to use Lexis-Nexus Academic News, a notoriously fickle but enormously useful database of news.

We’ll start with a step by step introduction to the benefit of Lexis-Nexus as a database and how to craft a search. Once the students have explored how to search for an article, and found the article I’ve designated, I’ll ask the students to answer a series of questions about both how to use the article as a digital object (how can they cite it, print it, or find it again) and also about how to unpack the rhetoric of the era (how was Bill Clinton, what is ebonics). We’ll conclude by asking students to identify, in their own terms the thesis of the opinion piece, posting those theses to a message board that students can review after their own posts.

"COLLEGES ARE STILL NOT ORIENTED TO SERVE STUDENTS OF COLOR." Saint Paul Pioneer Press (Minnesota). Date Accessed: 2017/06/29. www.lexisnexis.com/hottopics/lnacademic.

I am thinking about how to use images or films in history. I thought I could use the top image from this [featured article](http://www.normandale.edu/foundation/creating-futures-magazine/creating-futures-summer-2013/the-premanand-legacy) on donors to Normandale. The female in the picture was a long-time mathematics professor at my school and has contributed significant money to Normandale. The professor pictured has three degrees, including a MA and PhD in physics.

First, I’d like to consider students what we actually know about the figures in the picture. Then, we can ask what students think they know (if this pattern looks familiar it’s because I’m stealing it from Mills Kelly, the instructor of the course for which I’m writing this post). Next, I’d like the students to look at the most popular picture of the the founding of the school that shows middle-aged white men in suits using trowels to finish putting in a cornerstone. Both pictures show individuals who made significant contributions to Normandale. I will ask my students to consider how we might use these pictures to interrogate our understanding of the past? For example, the men in suits are using trowels, tools which are typically used by tradespeople. In the picture of the professor and her husband, they are formally arranged and looking away from the camera. Can we find other photos of the era to compare this photo with?

I suspect my students will struggle, as I do, to draw conclusions based just on the pictures, so my challenge is to provide them sufficient background information to guide their inquiries while allowing them to draw their own conclusions.