Doing History on the Internet
Resources for Pre-College Teachers

Progress Report

Our project will develop new ways to use technology to support teachers in doing intellectually ambitious teaching in the humanities. Although our approach could be readily applied to any of the humanities, our project targets the teaching of history. New historical resources are becoming available on the Internet that can help teachers bring history to life for students. Students and teachers can do history using the Internet by accessing electronic facsimiles of original documents and databases of historical data, collaborating with peers in other schools and with amateur and professional historians around the world, and can even establish their own historical website containing local materials of historical interest.
Access to historical records, however, is not enough to insure meaningful participation in historical research. Without guidance, many students will be satisfied to read a few original documents, collect some colorful items, and write a paper that is little more than report of what they read. Teachers need to help students move beyond this first step toward fundamentally sound historical research.
Our goal is to enable all interested high school history teachers to do fundamentally sound historical research with their students using computers over the Internet. We will accomplish this goal by developing three kinds of materials specifically designed for high school history teachers - a book on doing history using the Internet, a collection of online resources that help teachers meet the greatest challenges of this kind of teaching, and plans for a teacher workshop that can be used by teacher educators anywhere.
We will develop these materials by the principled study of teaching practice. This approach combines several sources of knowledge: knowledge from historians about sound historiographic methods, knowledge from research on the teaching and learning of history, knowledge from inexperienced teachers who try this form of teaching about the difficulties they face, and knowledge from pioneering teachers who have successfully taught in this way about what worked for them. We will use these sources to identify the crucial challenges posed for teachers by doing history with students and to explain why these challenges arise, persist, and are crucial. Based on this understanding, we will design materials for teachers to help them meet the teaching challenges. As formative evaluation we will try out prototypes of these materials with both expert and novice teachers and revise based on their feedback. As summative evaluation we will arrange for teacher workshops at six sites to use our workshop plans and for twenty-four teachers to use the materials for independent study. Our evaluation instruments will assess appeal, comprehension, and impact on workshop participants.
We will disseminate the materials by publishing the book; by putting the materials up on our own website, making them freely available, announcing their availability widely, and encouraging other educational and historical sites to link to them; by giving conference presentations and writing articles about the project; and by arranging with professional organizations to maintain the website permanently.

Progress Report

Progress Report

Doing History on the Web

We learned in late August that our proposal was not funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The ratings of reviewers were mixed. Some were very high and complimentary. The negative ones downgraded us for proposing "just a website." Presumably they were looking for something different than a website or perhaps we failed to communicate the distinctive qualities we were striving for in our website.

We have suspended work on the project for the time being. I am still collecting interesting websites for teachers of history. I plan to put the links up on the Web before January. In Winter, I hope to interest some STEP teachers in developing a website like this for themselves and colleagues. (report by D. Walker 10/27/96)