Given that one of my primary occupational roles is providing tech support, I offer the following question in part as preemption in my own self-interest but also in the interest of exploring the scope of instruction in the digital humanities (or the “digital” anything for that matter): Should Your Syllabus Include a Note on Web Browsers? If you teach an online class or a class with a significant online component, the answer might be yes.

Whether you are using BlackBoard, a blog platform, or a “proper” CMS, if your course site is doing anything remotely interesting, one of your students is probably using a browser that is not up to the task.

I get questions all the time about browser-related issues and even when I do instructional sessions and warn against using certain old browsers, the questions still roll in. My first troubleshooting question is invariably “what browser are you using?” If the answer is Internet Explorer, that’s usually the last question, followed by many “informative” statements of (arguably) questionable relevance and utility. If nothing else, my mini-rants leave a student with — if not a full understanding of the problem — at least a sense that the “blue e” on their desktop is called a browser, that it’s used to “open the Internet,” and that there apparently are multiple options from which to choose. For many this is a revelation of no small impact.

While not the higher order stuff we (think we) should need to teach at a college level, understanding browsers can still be an opening to understanding lots of “entry level” issues in new media and web publishing. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and more all rely on the surprisingly fragile ecosystem created by both the browser and the coder (even when the coder is a giant billion dollar company like Google, who themselves have given up on supporting old browser tech). If you plan to even broach the topic of web development and design, the browser is the natural place to start. Even if you just want your students to be able to use and evaluate web sources and digital projects, using an old browser is going to work against your sanity and their success.

Browsers are also an obvious choice for opening up discussions about open source technologies. Firefox, Chrome/Webkit, and Opera are great examples of a movement by which users have become creators/participants, and technology can — through small but scaled contributions — be bent to our will, rather than the other way around. If you are using Drupal, WordPress, Omeka or some other open source web publishing platform in your class, or if your students use open source desktop software like Audacity or GIMP, this is a natural connection. Open source is the key to so much recent innovation in education, academe and on the web more broadly, that if you don’t think being an open source advocate is part of your job, perhaps you should ask yourself why not.

Savvy students and instructors may intuitively understand that they can improve their online experiences by seeking out new approaches and alternatives when problems and questions arise, and that recency and novelty are actually important in technology, but this is by no means a norm in any non-tech sector of our culture. If you don’t know what you don’t know, you pretty much stick with what you do know — even if it sucks. I recently questioned a colleague for requiring that assignments be “prepared in MS Word”; if the end product is in the right format (.doc in their case), why require a specific software that comes with specific costs and benefits. Let students choose what software to use and note that there actually is a choice to be made (yes, OpenOffice, iWork, GoogleDocs, and more all export into Microsoft formats if desired), instead of hiding a broader question (what software to use) inside of an unnecessarily absolute decree (buy and use Word) that addresses a specific problem (students turning in papers in unreadable formats) but ignores the bigger context. This is not Microsoft hate (I like Office and, surprisingly, even Windows7), but a serious question about how we prepare students for careers that will invariably involve software and hardware choices (if not by them, than for them). So maybe your students won’t be designers, programmers, IT specialists, or whatever, but they will be consumers of technology and perhaps digital creators of another kind. Scholars and writers (not to mention managers, etc) still need to be versed in the basics of technology so they can understand the options at their disposal, the forces that shape their world, and the language with which to convey their needs and ideas (try asking an 80 year old to describe the usability and effectiveness of a piece of software or a website; these are learned skills). Connoisseurship has its utility.

Security is another issue that needs little description here. Basically, keeping your browser, your OS, and all of your other software updated will go a long way in preventing spyware, viruses and generally poor performance.

A “note on browsers” doesn’t directly address all of the issues above, but it’s potentially a start and it probably can’t hurt.

Even if you are not interested in any larger questions about digital literacy or open source advocacy, or it simply does not fall into the purview of your course, you still might want to include some kind of note on browsers, if only to reduce time spent troubleshooting and haggling with tech-averse students. So with that in mind, I offer the following:

Prefab “Note on Browsers”

This course requires extensive use of the Internet, including websites and other online resources that may require the use of a up-to-date, standards-compliant web browser. Web browsers are free to download and may be installed on any computer in a matter of minutes. Acceptable browsers include the most recent versions of Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer. To ensure that your browser is updated to the most recent version, open your browser and go to Tools >> Options (PC) or Help >> Check for Updates (Mac), or download the latest version of your browser choice at http://www.browserchoice.eu

A randomized list of browser choices:

www.browserchoice.eu
This is actually the same interface that is shown to new computer buyers in the EU, where it was decided that Microsoft’s bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows was anti-competitive and potentially harmful to innovation.

IE6 No More

www.ie6nomore.com
A nice little script you can drop into the header of your site so that users of IE6 and IE7 will get a warning reading “For a better experience using this site, please upgrade to a modern web browser” with links to upgrade to the latest version of IE or download an alternative. Don’t forget to update the code when IE9 comes out in late 2010/early 2011 to be sure your students/users are taking advantage of Microsoft’s promise of greater support for existing and emerging HTML/CSS standards.

Browser-Update.org

www.browser-update.org
I haven’t used this script yet; it looks similar to IE6 No More but apparently checks for outdated versions of Opera, Safari, Chrome, and Firefox as well as Internet Explorer. Billed as an “an initiative by web designers, webmasters and bloggers who want to bring the web further and help their visitors.”

NOTE: The images above are from the very awesome looking Harmonia Pastelis Icon Pack by Teekatas

Today I think I’ll share a few email excerpts to illustrate some of the more annoying aspects of my job, each of which involves public school district IT Departments acting in ways that are (in my very partial and partially-informed estimation) either a) lazy, b) incompetent, c) draconian or d) all of the above. If I come across as a curmudgeon in the process, it’s because I am. Still, it’s important to note at the outset that I understand the challenges faced by the well-meaning folks charged with managing school (and perhaps also business/enterprise) IT. They do so with many skills I do not come close to possessing and under tremendous pressure to meet legislative and policy directives, but are often lacking in the money, staff, and training required to keep up to date with the demands of acting as local gatekeeper and eternal overlord of the internets. Nevertheless, in my brief experience thus far as a member of the ed. tech community, I have yet to meet a school IT coordinator (in public primary and secondary schools, that is, and not in higher ed where the environment is a bit more competitive) who was what I would call “in touch” with the latest goings-on in education/technology/educational technology. In any case, I hope this comes across as constructive. That is my sole intention, to save the fucking children.

Issue number one: filtering. CIPA basically requires that school districts filter their internet access as a means of protecting children from pornography and other sundry objectionables across this big bad internet. I actually do not generally disagree with this, though I do make some obvious qualifications. For one, filtering should not be any broader than what is actually needed. Unfortunately, this is a tall order. Google Safe Search might provide some indication of how this works and doesn’t. Safe Search is essentially the same kind of filtering algorithm that a school might employ through purchasing a third party application. Try googling “firefighter” with safe search turned off and see what kind of image results you get. Firefighter is a pretty innocuous term and one that a kid is pretty likely to be interested in at some point. But without some kind of filter, even Google cannot avoid returning some questionable material on the first page. But turn safe search turned back on (set to moderate or even strict) and the results are generally more wholesome, right? Actually, no, they’re pretty much the same. Take a look yourself. This is not a jab at Google, just a quick way to point out that algorithms – even the best of them – are not infallible. They make mistakes. So instead of endlessly refining their algorithms, third party filtering apps take a hammer to the web, locking down students’ web experience and blocking content on the broadest of terms in an effort to overcome their own inherent limitations.

Which brings me to my second qualification, that filters should be locally configurable. If a teacher or student needs access to a site that is blocked, there needs to be a mechanism for whitelisting it and/or adjusting the parameters of the filter. This seems not to be the case for many districts. For example, as discussed in the email below, on several occasions lately, I’ve been told by teachers and other education professionals that some of the educational and professional development sites I’ve created and/or maintain for work are actually not accessible by educators in their classrooms or in the school building. One teacher was told by their IT department that it’s because “the site is a blog and blogs are blocked.” Sometimes that is true (the site is a blog), and sometimes not. I’ve never looked into the blackbox that is an internet filter but my assumption is that to determine if a site is a blog (whatever that actually means these days), this school’s filter detected that the site in question used WordPress (we use it a lot as a CMS and for course blogs) and thus came to the conclusion that it =blog and is therefore somehow unsafe or inappropriate for minors. Don”t believe it? Check out this “tutorial” about protecting children from blogs from a filtering software company.

So, anyway, on with the email excerpts.

…By the way, it’s pretty unsatisfactory that a district would block any of our sites. Presumably they do this automatically (i.e. they use 3rd party “child protection” software without retaining any control of their own) by deciphering which platform is being used (WordPress, Omeka, etc.). We’ve had similar issues with the [OMITTED] site. Frankly, I think it’s time that teachers forced their districts to adapt to current web publishing models rather than letting some outdated software make decisions for them. Considering that we use the same kinds of software that the NYTimes and other major sites use, this is clearly an injustice for students and teachers alike (if not for small “publishers” like ourselves) and also gives school IT admins an unearned sense that they’ve done their job. But I digress…

And another (regarding the blocking of a Google Docs data collection tool)…

[OMITTED] may have some responses recorded on paper that she will send me if/when she gets them (one of the teachers had Google blocked in their district for some inexplicable reason so they did them on paper).

That’s right. Google is blocked. The problems with this are so glaringly obvious that I will move on.

On to the next problem, not one that is unique to school IT, but nevertheless a problem at schools and far beyond. Yes, I’m going to do it. I’m going to write (part of) a blog post about how I hate Internet Explorer. And yes, particularly the 6th version of it, which I’m required by Internet Law to mention was released about a decade ago. And so on. So… Issue number two: IE6.

The following was to be a public response to a very polite and well-meaning message from a user who, judging by his email address, works in government and academia, informing me that a particular site is broken in IE6. I’ve gotten similar messages for sites we manage that are created both in house and by well-regarded professional designers (i.e. it’s not just my sloppy design). In the end, my response was not posted, owing to the better judgment of a colleague to whom I sent the message first. They decided it was not necessary and, I think, maybe it sounds a little defensive. Nevertheless, I think it’s an important issue and one that should not be taken lightly.

Thanks for the feedback. We get such messages from time to time, so please allow me to explain what we are thinking about this issue, which is somewhat more complicated than it may seem to some folks.

I cannot speak for [OMITTED], but our view [...] is that we can realistically only expect to support modern browsers in our smaller projects. Internet Explorer is not a modern browser, though the latest version (8) has made significant strides and is fully capable of rendering the new site visually and functionally. We serve a message to users of older browsers that they need to upgrade. If they choose not to, they will at least be aware of the source of their frustration. It is ours as well.

We make this compromise for a couple of reasons that I think are well-considered. For one, it is extremely time-consuming to debug for old versions of Internet Explorer and we value lower-cost projects. Second, if we “dumb down” our work to be 100% backwards compatible, we are cheating those visitors who use modern software and want a more modern experience. We cannot provide that service at our usual (very low) cost of publishing. Third, we believe that the time has come to give up on outdated browsers. Google and other major publishers and service providers have already made the decision to drop support for IE6. Microsoft does not even stand behind it’s older software in this regard and has expressed regret that it is still in use.

Finally, we trust that users are fully capable of taking responsibility for their web experience. Browsers are free. They are easy to install. New ones work better, look better, do more and provide greater protection against malware. The best browsers include auto-update features so you never have to worry about getting left behind. We understand that many work environments lock their employees into using the outdated software required to access their older enterprise systems. This is an unfortunate reality but one that we cannot control, trusting that market and research needs, as well as increasingly vocal employee dissatisfaction will take care of this over time. In the meantime, we always design for the latest version of IE, as well as Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera. This covers the great majority of users, including those that we track on our own analytics.

This is not to say that we do not continually look at this policy. We always appreciate feedback of any kind and if we are shown over time that we have erred in this approach, we will certainly do our best to adapt.

The question to my mind is, do we need to support every piece of hardware and software ever released (a decade is a long time for a piece of software, especially one that is freely replaceable), or should we focus our energies more wisely on following web standards and providing a better experience for users who employ appropriate software. You can’t open an iWork .pages file with Electric Pencil (or so I assume). You can’t play Modern Warfare 2 on an Atari 6400. If a site requires Flash, you either install Flash or you don’t use the site (or wait until you get home and use a laptop instead of your iPhone). I am okay with these limitations. How did Adobe and it’s publisher-users get consumers to agree to the Flash arrangement at a 90+ percent rate of adoption. I don’t know but it wasn’t by creating alternate, crippled, backward compatible versions of every Flash site (though as an iPhone user, sometimes I wish that were the case).

But these are essentially questions for designers and content creators, not for IT professionals. The questions for IT are different. The goal of IT, at schools or elsewhere, is to serve their communities’ needs while maintaining the security of both the users and the broader infrastructure. So why in the hell do many schools insist on continuing to run outdated browsers like IE6? If the answer is that they keep running IE6 because they need it to access other outdated enterprise systems, then they have doubly failed in their mission.

If the transition away from outmoded tech has been neglected due to financial constraints, then I don’t want to see that school running MS Office or BlackBoard or maybe even Windows. If money is that tight, I want to see OpenOffice.org. I want to see Linux Ubuntu. I want to see Moodle (or something better, but equally free). But I have not seen that happening. At a recent ed. tech conference I attended, the same teachers who were locked into shitty IT environments were all atwitter about tablets and clickers and robots and so on. The tech coordinators and district admins I met were most interested in gimmicky proprietary gadgets and LMSs that provide no justifiable value proposition. And meanwhile, the students can’t even access Google? The modern, connected, social web is off limits. The sites that get through are broken and dysfunctional due to outdated hardware and software. Where is the creativity?

I’m not trying to trash anyone, really (especially not an entire profession), but there is a cultural problem that is so readily apparent in how our schools deal with technology that I find it hard to be polite. Ditching IE6 is not going to change that culture, nor is better monitoring of filtering systems, nor new iMacs or clickers, nor anything else you can buy. And this doesn’t even begin to address the question of how/when/if we actually give students real tech instruction and who is qualified to do so. It’s not me. For the most part, at this moment, I’m just an onlooker to this mess. I don’t work in a public school district and I’m not a teacher and I’m not really in IT. I work in a university and deal in the (digital) humanities. I have autonomy (sometimes) and access to money (sometimes) and people that can help me (sometimes). But mostly, I try to be creative, I try to keep up to date, and I try to always be learning something new and useful so I can always be doing something new and useful. Take that for what it’s worth.

My experimentation with these concepts and methodologies has been occasional up until this year.  I’ve used primary source documents in class before and typically in a constructivist fashion.  Combining web 2.0 would allow students to publish their final products on a public medium.  I decided to start a Myspace page to serve this purpose. I know, I know, Rupert Murdoch has already purchased my soul and sold it to Bernard Madoff who in turn sold it to some Mormons in a bizarre pyramid scandal.  I’d estimate that about 60-70% of my students have Myspace pages and about half of those use Myspace seem to use Myspace as their primary internet activity.  In fact, about two years ago, a community center up the street from the high school had a computer lab where Myspace use was so rampant the center had to make certain times “Myspace free.”  In other words, the site seems extremely popular amongst my student population.  Regardless, I figured Myspace would be an easy way to trick kids into thinking I was playing in their world in hopes of greater participation.  And it worked…. kind of.

We had been studying the Civil Rights movement, and I really wanted students to figure out, using primary sources, how de-centralized the movement was.  I wanted them to grasp how normal folks, including students in high school like them, were moved to courageous action.  Young people are increasingly aware of leaders beyond Martin Luther King Jr. but knowledge of groups like SNCC is sparse.  I wanted to encourage my students to see beyond the master narrative of “I have a dream” speeches to understand just how involved folks their age were in this push for freedom.

Students were divided up into groups of three to four and given six front pages from 1957 editions of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette.  They had to use articles from these newspaper front pages to write a three paragraph blog entry on the Little Rock Nine and post it alongside their peers’ on my Myspace page. The results were an interesting mix from fairly terrible to pretty interesting.  None were shockingly brilliant, however.  This is not surprising though.  My guess is that few, if any, history teachers in these students’ classrooms have encouraged them to look at primary documents, decode them, and then “publish” a written recreation of their contents.  Take a look at your old college essay on the Vietnam before you’re too critical of these kids.

Nonetheless, there were some apparent obstacles that need to be considered for future activities of a similar nature.  First, the use of the articles as not just primary sources but the only sources they could use proved difficult and problematic at times.  Some groups really struggled to put together a coherent narrative beyond essentially cutting and pasting interesting facts from the newspaper.  Some failed to even do this chronologically.  One group stated, “After 8 Africans [sic] entered the school across the street. They tried to call other students to join them but they were pushed back by guards.”  This was after they already mentioned the students entering the building and members of the 101^st helping them.  While this might be intellectual Viagra for a few choice grad students looking to deconstruct the Western obsession with chronology as history, any educator would see it for what it is: an inability to properly read the articles together rather than as separate documents.

Additionally, several groups included sentences like, “As six negros tried to enter NLR high white students pushed them back because they did not want them at there school.” Frustrating grammar and spelling errors aside, I’m hoping you noticed the antiquated term “negro” in that depiction of the Little Rock Nine.  Seeing as how the kids in this group are all Puerto Rican and not rednecks, they were clearly just adopting the language of the 1957 Arkansas Gazette journalists.  While most groups did not make this mistake, it’s clear that more work needs to be done on the interpretation side of using primary sources.  Thinking historically does not necessitate using outdated language.

Another component that troubled me was the discussion of violence within the narratives.  Clearly, anyone with even a basic understanding of the Little Rock Nine case is aware of the intense mob violence that accompanied the desegregation of Central High School in 1957.  Some students failed to grasp the level of violence through these primary sources though.  “That caused a big chaos because at lest 100 parents of the students and other adults lined up on the side walk in front of the high school an hour before classes recessed for the noon hours.” [sic] There is no mention as to what these students and parents did once they lined up in front of the school and this is where the blog entry abruptly ends.  Lacking detail is to be expected, to a degree, in an assignment like this, but this clearly lacked understanding.  Did this group really go away thinking this racist family picnic mob was there to simply “be heard?”

The issue of responsibility also arose in the blog entries.  One group placed the white riots squarely on the Little Rock Nine’s boldness. “Due to court orders Faubus removed the National guard. After they were removed, the African Americans tried to enter the school causing the white young students to form a riot.” [sic]  Perhaps this is splitting hairs, but there is no discussion of white racism being the source of these riots in this entry.  I doubt the group of students, a racial mixture of whites, Puerto Ricans, and Arabs, meant for it to read this way.  The difficulty comes into getting students to grasp that how they phrase things is perhaps more important than what their intentions are.  This is an integral part of thinking and being able to write historically.  When others read your interpretation of the past they do so with their own understanding, not yours.  Getting students to convey their analysis of something as complex as the Little Rock Nine case is difficult but they should be encouraged to do so as clearly and thoroughly as possible.

One group attempted to retell the tale through the modern civil rights narrative which goes something like: “Black Americans worked hard to be recognized for their contributions and are now allowed the same opportunities as whites today.”  It’d be interesting to see if this was sparked by group members comparing their experiences today to that of the Little Rock Nine but alas, this was not the assignment.  The group concluded that “the students were allowed to go to the school with problems but at the same time they wre getting an oportuinty in life because some people dream of an opportunity while orthers wake up and work hard for it,” [sic].  I read this as an attempt to fit African-Americans into the American ethos of “hard work = success”, which is essentially what many watered down versions of the Civil Rights movement have become.  This view lacks a historical understanding of the barriers of white supremacy and the struggles of grassroots organizing.

Clearly there is much work to be done here.  Students need to engage and investigate primary sources much earlier on in order to be more comfortable and familiar with interpreting them.  Perhaps they also need a little more scaffolding to get to the point where they can take on similarly styled projects.  Nonetheless, the students did work with primary sources and did produce a piece of historical work on the topic.  Like getting President Obama to publicly condemn Cambridge police officers for acting “stupidly,” it’s a relatively small victory but an important one.  In doing so the participating students gained a greater understanding of the importance of historical interpretation, grassroots organizing during the Civil Rights movement, and their role in deciding what matters from the past.

BackStory:  BackStory is one of my favorite podcasts in any genre.  “On each show, renowned U.S. historians Ed Ayers, Peter Onuf, and Brian Balogh tear a topic from the headlines and plumb its historical depths.”  In addition to the hosts’ impressive knowledge, the show has NPR quality production values and a great sense of humor and relevance. The show is a product of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, who produce a couple other shows (which I’ve yet to hear) through their VFH Radio project.

StuffYouMissedInHistoryClass: This one is produced by HowStuffWorks.com, which initially made me a bit skeptical.  I was quickly won over though.  Historians Candace Gibson and Jane McGrath investigate “the stories behind the lines of your textbooks.”  The topics range from esoteric (e.g. the history of happiness) to  topical (“Historically inaccurate movies”) to explanations (“How the Marshall Plan worked”) and conversations appropriate for younger students (“Did Betsy Ross really make the first American Flag?”).

BingeThinkingHistory:  While the previous two podcasts are conversational and focus on American history, this project – a one man show by Tony Cocks -  is oriented toward British and European history.  Since I know very little about European history, I am both intrigued and confounded by the subject matter.   Luckily the host has a dignified English voice and a knack for telling history in a narrative, documentary style that makes good use of music and background audio (e.g. the sounds of battlefield artillery).  So I like it, even though I don’t really know what he’s talking about.

The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History has a wide selection of “eminent historians discussing major topics in American history”, which they release as audio podcasts.  My first impression of the project site was that this would be a stuffy, old-school academic series wherein pokey old coots discussed their own greatness by way of displaying their mad lecture skillz.  I also thought it would cater primarily to college students and other academics.  In fact, there are some really interesting and informative lectures here, and it serves as a really great resource for pretty much any group above maybe middle school.  I noticed a handful of  high school teacher comments on the project site, reminding me that some teachers actually challenge their students to do real historical thinking.  Imagine that.

HistoryPodcast/HistoryOnAir … “Jason Watts is the host of History Podcast and an amateur historian. It should be noted that he is not a professional.”  That’s what it says on the site, but ignore that (or sit and quietly appreciate it).  Jason does a good job of documenting his sources and telling historical stories, and has been doing it since 2005.  This is actually a nice little operation, and it looks like Jason is beginning to use video and visualization tools so this is one to watch.  Users can submit topics, ideas, and even scripts for new episodes.  Also of note is the provision of transcripts and citations for each episode, which is handy for students who might want to explore a topic in more detail.  There’s also a big list of additional podcasts you might want to check out.

So there’s a brief list.  I actually have a backlog of additional podcasts in my iTunes library that I haven’t had time to review, so I may add more to this post or continue the topic in a new post as I find more quality podcasts.   Please use the comments section to suggest some others you like.

Like any zealot, I spend weekends, evenings, social engagements, and holidays ranting about the things that really get on my nerves.  Today, July 4th, a day commemorating the birth of our glorious nation, I spent the early afternoon orating on the relative merits of the LMS in hopes of fomenting revolution.  I am currently taking an Information Architecture course, ironically offered only through BlackBoard, the arch-nemesis of all that is righteous and enlightened in higher education, a blithely tyrannical George III to Web 2.0′s promise of digital democracy, a naval blockade on usability and information seeking behavior, an unjust tax levied on the collective sanity of the student body.

Maybe I’m taking this too seriously, you say?  Well, what did you do to celebrate America today? Eat some hotdogs?  Listen to some Lee Greenwood tunes?  I think it’s clear who the real patriot is.  Hit the break for the full thread.  Names have been changed to protect the innocent, the neutral, and the obsequiously monarchical.

Click on the image for the full size view or scroll down for the transcript…

Click image for full size view

1. ME: Can we discuss the IA of Blackboard?  I’m not trying to complain.  I understand why it is useful for instructors, but it is pretty rough on student users (poor organization, poor labeling, poor navigation, seemingly no interest in student information needs/behaviors, etc.).   I think it might actually be an interesting case study.  Then again, I’ve been reading a lot of Jim Groom lately
2. STUDENT:I couldn’t agree with you more. Clunky and awkward at best isn’t it?
3. STUDENT:I agree, it could use a little better organization. Sometimes there are 2 left-hand navigation menus, that’s unusual.
4. STUDENT: Very good observation, because I was thinking about that when I first used the site. So context is covered, and content is covered, but it could be more USER friendly. This site is built for knot-item seeking. Once you learn the system, you can get to where you need to be and use the system.
5. INSTRUCTOR: It’s interesting to see what both student and faculty users have to say about Blackboard. I’ve yet to meet anyone who is thrilled with it. Here are a couple of items that might shed some light on why Blackboard is designed and arranged the way it is:1) The students don’t get to see this, but there are actually three sets of users who can interface with Blackboard: Course Designers, Instructors and Students. Depending upon roles to which you’ve been designated, there are three different “tabs” one could access: Build, Teach, and Student. Students don’t see these tabs because they only have one role — Student. All three roles/tabs have access to the same “Course Tools” (the first set of left-hand navigational choices). However, the next set of tools change depending upon the roles to which you have access. If you access the class as a designer, the bottom navigation is labeled “Designer Tools” and has a set of links unique to that role, if as an instructor, then “Instructor Tools”, if as a student then I believe it’s “My Tools.” Without knowing about the different roles, I can see how two, separate sets of global navigation would make no sense.2) Another part of Blackboard I think most users struggle with is the idea that the Course Tools don’t offer much other than a *completely* different way to access the content than offered through the Course Content home page. In building a class, the designer chooses the tools on the left, builds the assets, and then sets links to these assets in other places. Learning modules are sets of topical, sequential links to assets created using the other tools. Sound counter-intuitive? It is if you approach the course design and layout with a web/hyperlink mentality. And there’s the problem. This is elearning. We use the internet to access the training and we, as users, expect it to follow modicums similar to that of sites on the World Wide Web. And this is a fair expectation. However, Blackboard is instead arranged to give users access to the same material in a number of different ways, which is a good idea but read on.So based upon what we’ve been reading, why might users get frustrated with Blackboard. The first one is that even though it is a good idea to offer multiple roads to the same content, there is *no predominate organizational scheme*. Should I primarily use the global tools on the left because they never change? Should I navigate the course like a web site simply from the Course Content page? What is the main road? What if I’m serendipitous? How lost and confused could I become? Also the labels, while familiar, English words, may not be self-evident in their meaning. What is a “Learning module?” Where will that take me? I imagine that assignments will be part of the course content, but I’ve got this other button labeled “Course Content”, why should I choose one over the other?The good news is that the next iteration of Blackboard is seeking to address a number of these issues. Which is a good thing considering over 70% of all universities in the United States use Blackboard as their learning management system.
6. ME: There are many reasons why BlackBoard works for instructors and those listed are all relevant. I have designed courses, modules, and quizzes, and tracked student submissions, etc. in BlackBoard during my time as a graduate assistant for a professor who taught some “elearning” type courses.Aside from automating some administrative tasks (gradebooks, adding/tracking users, etc), I don’t see anything in BBs repertoire that justifies it’s poor usabiity and it’s high subscription cost to universities. For something so costly, you would think they would have invested in some user studies and maybe a post-1998 design upgrade. As far as I can tell, 95% of BBs functionality could be duplicated in WordPress (with a few plug-ins and maybe some creative use of GoogleDocs) or some other free/open source system. Of course, the university would have to support this with staff (maybe one guy and a server) and some minimal training for admins (probably less than what it takes to learn BB) and they would come out ahead over time (if not monetarily, then in staff development). Likewise, I’m not sure any LMS can devise a “learning environment” that suits real learning needs when they necessarily design around the generic admin/user. Plus, anecdotal evidence suggests that students are actually more engaged and interactive when they know they are working in the “open web” and not inside the BlackBoard blackbox.So I clearly have issues with BB that go beyond IA, but considering that I’m typing right now in a very tiny text box (maybe 80px high) with a broken editor (at least, using Firefox) inside a pop-up window, dreading the occasional BB-induced browser crash, etc.; the poor design just amplifies all the other issues I have with this system.I work in part as an educational technologist for the History Dept. (or at least for a few courses and workshops), so I know how hard it is to support unique projects and design around technological deficits (in software, user/admin ability, etc.), but I think we can do better than this.And again, I am not directing this at CSU (where I happily work) or the professor (who has limited, if any, choices when it comes to online course platforms). For anyone who is interested in exploring this topic, you can find some good debates online, many of which center around this guy:Jim Groom, Ed-Tech at Univ of Mary Washington, and inventor of “edupunk” movement. See his blog (http://bavatuesdays.com/) as well as interviews and stories in NYT and Chronicle of Higher Ed, among others. He of course is not the only person to voice dissatisfaction with BB, but he is by far the most visible.Sorry if I got carried away on this little side-topic, but I have seen many bright young minds crack under the weight of BlackBoard Happy 4th!

So, I really like the looks of this nifty little flowchart, though I’m not sure it’s logically consistent.  In fact, it kind of reminds me of the inscrutable maintenance manual that came with my Taiwanese scooter.   I’m feeling compelled to take it down and make some revisions, but I think it best to just move on to writing my little article about the challenges inherent in digital history at the institutional level.  So here it is…

Introduction

After reading through the latest issue of Perspectives on History (May 2009),  I’m thinking a lot about what exactly is meant by terms like “digital history” and “digital humanities.”  On the surface these seem like pretty intuitive ideas.  You can slap a “digital” in front of just about anything and the meaning conveyed is more or less “on the web.”  In general, the actual practice of digital history bears this out.  Every history professor has a blog, every city has its own digital archive (in Ohio, they seem to all be named “[yourCityOrState] Memory”), and every modern historical event has a commemorative website or two.  Increasingly, discreet areas of historical inquiry are also well-represented online.  Each of these has a value.  Some are well executed and well used.  Others are well meaning and… well… ignored.  The best projects engage both teachers and learners, as well as the general public, with tightly focused, organized and comprehensive research and presentations.  Many others struggle in ways that are predictable (notably aesthetic design, usability and information architecture, and an apparent failure to comprehend the strengths, weaknesses, and demands of the media they are working in).

Nevertheless, we want and need more of whatever digital history is or is going to be.  My impression is that many would-be digital historians jump into new and exciting projects without fully understanding what they are getting into and what it takes to realize their vision.  Most projects seem simple at the outset, but, as you can see from my totally mad flowchart, even projects with modest goals can be jarringly complicated.

Before I get into the nitty gritty I should point out here that I am not an educator — though I do plenty of staff training and instructional sessions.  Nor am I an academic in the conventional sense.  I have an undergraduate degree in History and a graduate degree in Library and Information Science, as well as a few years under my belt managing various oral, public and digital history projects, including some on-the-job training in website development.  My professional expertise in not in content creation, nor in technology, but rather in conceptualizing practical ways to bring the two together in an educational context.  With these qualifications and caveats in mind, I will attempt to describe what I see as the barriers to operationalizing digital history at the institutional level.

Note: I am operating on a university model in which professors set project goals, providing direction and instruction, and using class time, staff and/or student labor resources, as well as university or grant funding to achieve completion.  The end result being an online resource of some type.

Core Competencies for Teaching, Learning, and Doing Digital History

Content:  You need to know your stuff.  If you are creating a digital history exhibit about Content X, then all participants (those who conceptualize the project and those who populate it with content) must have a reasonably advanced understanding of Content X as well as an ability to communicate that knowledge.  The final content must be of publishable quality since it is more or less being published.

Technology:  Although it is often assumed that the current generation of students is more technically competent than their instructors, this is often not the case.  Just because a student brings a laptop to class and uses email and social networking sites does not mean he or she understand how to use complex software and publishing platforms.  Assuming that students will “pick it up as they go” misses the reality that technical learning requires the building of experience through use and training, along with ample time to explore, experiment and fail.

In most scenarios, students are the technological proletarians of the project, contributing the bulk of the content and spending the most time using the technology.  Thus, they need to know how to use the tools at their disposal.  Professors and other supervisors have the luxury of guiding outcomes and watching content amass, but also bear the burden of bigger picture and behind the scenes technological matters such as data security, workflow management, server and site administration, and perhaps even a healthy dose of coding, designing, and debugging.

Law and Ethics:  Digital history, like “regular” history, often involves collecting and analyzing primary and secondary sources.  Traditional history is typically filtered through rounds of vetting and editing before it reaches the public.  Digital history can be “published” without such constraints.  Professors and other supervisors are not always able to comb through all the content that students collect in the course of their research.  As a result, there is often a risk of unwittingly publishing someone else’s work.  Leaving the issue of blatant plagiarism aside, what students deem fair use and what actually is fair use can differ greatly.

In my experience I have seen many images taken from commercial websites (some with giant watermarks and embedded logos!) and embedded or reposted without attribution or permission.  Students must understand that they have a responsibility to not only respect relevant laws, but also to not do things that make the primary investigator look like a total jerk.  There are appropriate and inappropriate sources, and there are sources for which appropriate use depends entirely on the way and the context in which they are being used.  These issues are not self-evident and must be explored and codified at the outset.

Likewise, there are often ethical questions that should be fully addressed.  Consider the use of digital oral history files.  Due to their length, file size, and meandering nature; we often edit them down to excerpts or reframe them in new contexts such as film or video.  We do this for any number of reasons: to tell stories, to increase use and access, to accommodate bandwidth restrictions, etc.  But with each modification and recontextualization, we run the risk of betraying not only the historical integrity of the item, but also the trust of our subjects.  The mere act of cataloging an oral history in the library takes a new meaning in the digital age, when recorded political beliefs and entire life stories (sometimes in full text or streaming audio) are only a name search away.  The potential for harm cannot be ignored.

Organization of Information:  Surely one of the least discussed aspects of digital history.  Supposing your team has a strong understanding of content, is attentive to legal and ethical responsibilities, and is reasonably skilled at using technology;  a final gauntlet awaits.  Yes, I speak of the soul crushing demands of metadata and information architecture.

Historians, like others in the Humanities, pride themselves on weaving complex and idiosyncratic narratives, employing deep analysis and rich vocabularies in the process.  Librarians in contrast use plain and objective language to create clean, accessible resources that are predictably organized and easy to understand.   This famously boring approach to information is actually one of the most useful tools that libraries employ to create usable collections and resources.  Digital history projects are likely to involve any number of cataloging and metadata standards, which must be implemented consistently with the help of considerable documentation and training.

Information architecture is also important.  Just as metadata needs to be consistent, so too does the organization of websites and other interactive resources.  Navigation must be clear and intuitive, but defined according to project-specific needs and amenable to many different use scenarios.  Most of this is laid out in the planning and design stages, but must be continually monitored lest the system break down.  As a resource loses organization, it also loses value.

The Primary Challenges

Training:  Each of these core competencies requires some degree of training.  A common critique of digital humanities education has been its rotation between conventional history training (content mastery, research, writing, et al.) and “digital” training (technology, metadata, information theory, etc.).  This will be a necessary reality into the foreseeable future.  Thus, digital historians should expect pushback at the institutional level from those concerned with maintaining tradition in history education.  Furthermore, some history students will ruffle at the idea of being graded on such non-history competencies as the use of software, HTML, and Dublin Core.

Time:  Training takes time, as does the required planning and management.  Instructors need time to teach all that needs to be taught and have limited classroom time to do so.  Personal time is likely to become a consideration as well; as projects evolve, they can become unwieldy and demanding.  Other professional expectations (i.e. traditional publication activities) are often set aside, to the chagrin of tenure review boards. Students also have limited time in their day.  Most students today work at least part-time and also have family and social lives to maintain.  At my place of employment, the majority of students commute to and from full-time commitments at both work and school.  Unless a project has a regular paid support staff, time is certainly a major barrier.

Money:  Costs can add up.  Server space, domain names, web design, hardware and software, as well as administrative and other staff all cost money.  Though it is often possible to find alternate sources of finance (grants, fellowships, etc.), most funding is likely to originate at the institution.

Of course, it need not be this way.  At the risk of devaluing my own position as a facilitator, I suggest that most digital history projects could be accomplished cheaply and effectively by a small team of informed and devoted volunteers working outside of the institution.  Students often devise ambitious projects, but never follow through for lack of financial or intellectual support, time, and know-how.  A recent post by Dave Lester suggests the possible emergence of “digital history street teams.”  I really like this idea, which reflects a rising interest in DIY approaches to education and scholarship (the kids are calling it “edupunk” these days, and I heartily approve).   So while the barriers I outlined above are very real and require some serious thought, there are also alternatives for creative and motivated individuals and groups – both inside and outside the Ivory Tower.

Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call. For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task, refine or carry out the steps of an algorithm, or help capture, systematize or analyze large amounts of data… The term has become popular with business authors and journalists as shorthand for the trend of leveraging the mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals.

If you didn’t pick up on that right away, then maybe you should head over to wikipedia.org and tweak the punctuation, add some citations, or re-write the entire definition. That is the essence of crowdsourcing and it’s nothing new. The term has been around for at least a few years, serving as nom d’guerr for the so-called Web 2.0 revolution. The general idea is that many people will collectively do for free (or cheap) what one or a few people would do for money (i.e. a salary). In the case of Wikipedia, we all watched (some in glee, others in terror) as free user-generated content dethroned and then beheaded maligned publishing giants Encyclopedia Brittanica and Microsoft Encarta (Guardian, 2009).

Could a similar coup unseat scholars, teachers, and publishers in the humanities? Well, no. In fact, that’s a really stupid question. But you might want to pay attention anyway. Because for one thing, we can see from such events that students (and the public in general) are learning in different ways. They are consuming information, which one might argue is very different from learning, at a rate unimagined even by futurists such as H.G. Wells, who envisioned an integrated World Brain (Wells, 1938) capable of storing, indexing, and retrieving from the global knowledge base.

Even if one agrees that the Internet fullfills Wells’ prophecy – I don’t by the way – then a distinction must be made between knowledge and information. Without getting into the vast LIS literature the topic, we can generally agree that information is factual and verifiable, whereas knowledge is something more esoteric. It involves understanding that is not easily transmitted or received. It is an end result. The point being that you or your students may easily find and recite a list of every faction in the Spanish Civil War, but that doesn’t mean anyone truly understands what is going on (as case in point, I have been pondering why the Spanish anarchists refused tips for at least a decade… but then, I identified as an anarchist and worked for tips for nearly a decade). Lists, including names, timelines, and inventories (I’m talking to you, military history buff) are information at best (as opposed to data at worst). They are generally meaningless without contextual knowledge. So the teacher and the scholar (especially in the humanities one might argue) still have a central role in the creation, maintenance and transmission of knowledge. Until Google unleashes its sentient robot army, this will not change.

As learners and consumers of information, we will nonetheless continue down paths shaped by the Internet. If not in school, then everywhere else. Educators ignore real changes in our society at their own peril and to the disservice of their students. Just as the social and labor historians were both a culmination and a component of social and cultural change in the last century, so too will be digital historians and digital humanists. (This is not to suggest any comparably meaningful moral or ethical imperative). Classroom hardware has evolved from chalkboard to Powerpoint to whiteboard in the past decade, but the teacher is, as ever, at the front of the room projecting information. It can be interactive, surely. The best educators craft stories, start discussions, stoke debates, and facilitate hands-on experience. But they retain control over the parameters and content of the learning. They choose the text-books, design the syllabi, prepare the lectures, and grade the results. Crowdsourcing projects involve giving up some of this control – to students and also to strangers. As always, the specter of misinformation hangs over all information not controlled by authority (as if authority didn’t propagate its fair share of BS). Indeed, discussion of crowd sourcing content-creation and review, particularly in libraries, often hangs on the notion of “radical trust” – can online communities be trusted to create a quality product that is free from major errors and willful or accidental misinformation? It is an important question and, in the context of educational projects, one that can be addressed, like any other assignment, by applying appropriate degrees of control and setting clear parameters. Of course, there will still be issues with the end product.

Below is a very brief survey of some digital history and humanities projects that apply the crowdsourcing idea to various degrees. It is by no means comprehensive, or even very good. It’s just some things that come to mind in no particular order.

History Engine
http://historyengine.richmond.edu/pages/home
Description: A wiki-based “educational tool that gives students the opportunity to learn history by doing the work—researching, writing, and publishing—of a historian. The result is an ever-growing collection of historical articles or “episodes” that paints a wide-ranging portrait of life in the United States throughout its history and that is available to scholars, teachers, and the general public in our online database.” Students do all the work as part of course assignments and take part in the creation of an actual usable resource. Basically, a focused and controllable Wikipedia. Quality and completeness varies. Limited documentation and supervision required.

WhereYouThere?
http://www.wereyouthere.com/
Description: Social networking site collects firsthand accounts of historic moments (JFK assasination, 9/11/2001, First Lunar Landing, etc.) to create a resource for historical, journalistic and literary research on one hand, and schamltzy nostalgia and incoherent ramblings on the other. More noise than signal, but as someone who spends a lot of time with oral histories, I can say that this is a really interesting idea. Perhaps something like this could work on a smaller scale with some administrative control and narrower parameters. Speaking of which…

Hurricane Digital Memory Bank
http://hurricanearchive.org
Description: Uses Omeka “to collect, preserve, and present the stories and digital record of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. It contributes to the ongoing effort by historians and archivists to preserve the record of these storms by collecting first-hand accounts, on-scene images, blog postings, and podcasts.” No real way to verify information or control quality, but that’s not really the point. Succeeds in creating a focused archive of first-hand accounts on a topic that is emotionally and politically charged, and will be for years to come.

Australian Newspapers Digitisation Project
http://www.nla.gov.au/ndp
Description: “The National Library of Australia, in collaboration the Australian State and Territory libraries, has commenced a program to digitise out of copyright newspapers. We are creating a free online service that will enable full-text searching of newspaper articles… published in each state and territory from the 1800s to the mid-1950s, when copyright applies.” Users can add tags and comments, as well as correct the automatically-generated text transcriptions

The Commons on Flickr
http://www.flickr.com/commons
Description: “The key goals of The Commons on Flickr are to firstly show you hidden treasures in the world’s public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer.” Users are “invited to help describe the photographs you discover in The Commons on Flickr, either by adding tags or leaving comments.” Participants include the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institute, and the George Eastman House.

Dan Cohen’s Twitter Experiment
http://www.dancohen.org/2009/04/29/the-spider-and-the-web-results
Description: “…using Twitter to replicate digitally the traditional ‘author’s query,’ where a scholar asks readers of a journal for assistance with a research project. I believe the results of this experiment are instructive about the significant advantages—and some disadvantages—for academia of what has come to be known as crowdsourcing.” Go read the blog post for more. This is my favorite example, because it is so easy. It’s not a website, it’s not an educational resource; it’s more akin to performance art (performance history? or as Cohen says “stunt lecturing”?). Assuming you have a good handful of Twitter followers, you can organize and carry out little events like this on short notice and without any technological “overhead.”

Related Reading:

• Stephen Mihm in the Boston Globe: Everyone’s a Historian Now
• Crowdsourcing Blog: User-Generated Content in History
• Spellbound Blog: Crowdsourced Transcription and Collaborative Annotation
• Chronicle of Higher Ed. (Wired Campus): Management Prof. Uses Crowdsourcing to Write Textbook

There are many more projects and articles that apply to this topic. But this is a blog post, not a research paper. Feel free to share more resources and ideas in the comments.