In our digitally evolving world, educators of history face the challenge of preparing students for an unpredictable future of rich and overwhelming data amidst a society of rapidly evolving technologies. This panel advocates for incorporating advanced tools at early educational levels to meet contemporary undergraduate teaching challenges and promote historical thinking. It is divided into three papers, each dedicated to a specific digital tool: Omeka S, Tropy, and GenAI. We argue that these tools provide invaluable support for teaching critical historical thinking and analytical skills to undergraduate students, while also facilitating and sparking collaboration. By reporting on student engagement, use, and playful exploration of these tools when working with digitized historical sources, we will discuss the lessons learned from our teaching community to inform an updated curriculum that ensures the introduction of digital historical literacy to undergraduate students.
The discussion is framed around three key reflections: (1) how these tools support both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration; (2) the contributions these tools can make to teaching history, and digital history pedagogy in today's education for undergraduates; and (3) why incorporating advanced tools at an early educational level is not only desirable for promoting historical thinking but a demand of contemporary undergraduate teaching challenges. These challenges include integrating technology into curriculum design and rethinking didactic strategies for new learning outcomes. This panel's contribution lies in providing insights from the classroom level, eschewing a top-down approach in favor of the practical, ground-level perspective from the micro-universe of a classroom.
We will discuss our experience coordinating two international digital history courses at George Mason University and the University of Luxembourg for a class project in the spring of 2024, focusing on the project management, communication, and pedagogical skills we gained from this collaboration. Our case study is a firsthand account, drawing on auto-ethnographic reflection and ethnographic observation of the classroom. In this context, Donna Haraway’s concept of ‘situated knowledges’ and bell hooks' ‘teaching community’ are instrumental to our reflections on the exchange with this specific trans-national class. Education here is seen as a holistic, communal activity involving shared knowledge and experiences, not only through substantive content but also through behavioral and procedural teaching contents.
The papers call for the integration of 'hack and yack' in the teaching community as an alternative pedagogical route, drawing on ongoing discussions about the experimental ethos within Digital Humanities. This practice has been profusely discussed as 'doing as thinking', ‘thinkering’, or building as a ‘form of scholarship’, however its pedagogical value has been largely overlooked at the undergraduate level. While most educators incorporate hands-on work to advanced-level students, we argue for the pedagogical potential of introducing digital tools at earlier stages, highlighting how the selected tools can foster historical digital literacy. By doing so, we offer an in-depth look at using these tools in the classroom and provide insights into their educational benefits, particularly in teaching digital data stewardship, a crucial aspect for the future of the historical profession and key for the next generation of digitally literate historians.
This paper explores the implications, advantages, and disadvantages in training both students and educators in the digital tool Omeka S. Omeka S is a web-based content management platform system for collaboratively curated archival items and their metadata. The paper will explore the twofold potential in training Omeka S: methodologies related to primary sources and metadata of digitized primary sources, and the field of digital public history. Omeka S is one of the most widely used digital tools for researchers to publish digitized sources to the public on the web, and thus is a fruitful platform to introduce undergraduate students to both the fields of digital humanities and public history. Omeka S is also an ideal platform to promote students to learn by doing, especially in regard to finding, uploading, editing, and connecting digitized historical sources to one another in the platform. The paper also compares the author’s experience training educators in the platform, including museum curators and digital humanities managers. It also emphasizes the opportunities and challenges to teaching and evaluating student engagement of Omeka S in a remote international classroom. This paper especially focuses on how Omeka S facilitates unique reflections amongst and between students of different nationalities about the topics of primary sources, digitization, and digital public history, expanding their traditional understandings of history. The different experiences and impacts of both educators and students, especially in regard to remote communication and project management, showcases the importance of trans-national collaboration between expert trainers in a widely-used DH tool.
In the dynamic field of digital humanities, more specifically, digital history training, Tropy distinguishes itself as a fortuitous pedagogical tool. Highlighting parallels with existing literature on digital pedagogy and my experiences in an international classroom alongside my panelists, I discuss how collaborative projects using Tropy and Omeka S for curation and publishing digital exhibits enables a rich remote learning environment. This paper explores Tropy's twofold use as a research photo management tool and significant resource for teaching digital source criticism and critical thinking in history. Echoing Douglas Seefeldt and William Thomas' bet on the future of Digital History, despite planning an exhibit, we shift the focus of the classroom away from final product-oriented approach, moving it to a rather process-oriented work, in which students learn by doing the importance of establishing consistent workflows for thriving in data stewardship and handling their sources according to the FAIR data management principles. This collective experimentation helps develop foundational notions of multimodal digital source criticism. By reporting our didactic strategies with these digital tools, this paper advocates for Tropy and Omeka’s valuable contribution to promote Historical Digital Literacy, as proposed by Tona Hangen – as an opportunity as well as imperative of today’s education.
Generative AI (GenAI) has captured public awareness in a remarkable way in 2023. In the humanities, opinions range from strongly positive to negative and a certain degree of cautiousness towards tools like ChatGPT’s impact is recognizable. All the more it is important to include this large language processing model in the classroom as students will sooner or later, if they do not already, use GenAI for their assignments or in private life. Teaching students the practical uses and possibilities for creativity is therefore crucial, and so is a critical approach to the tool. By recognizing that the quality of answers provided by GenAI is contingent upon the quality of the questions posed.Thus, this paper will specifically address how GenAI can aid critical thinking and reflection simply by students becoming aware that the answers we receive can only ever be as good as the questions we pose - and asking good questions is a skill essential to historical research. Therefore, this paper on GenAI in the classroom discusses ways of teaching a responsible but also creative use of this tool, while supporting students in developing their own skills to cope with the vast opportunities that AI now hands us. This may be overwhelming at times which is another reason why we should engage with students about how to cope with this powerful tool. The paper offers suggestions for class activities, such as text analysis and coding help, while scrutinizing the tool itself to aid students’ reflective use of GenAI.