For my first session at OETC2010 I am attending “Thinking Historically: Building a Primary Source Exhibit and Online Teaching Module with Omeka.” (There was an earlier session, but I was unable to remain in it…)
Presenters Gail Greenberg and Nadine Grimm discussed their digital exhibits project for encouraging students to higher-order thinking. Utilizing the free and open source Omeka, they built a virtual “primary source exhibit.”
Digitized history exhibits? What?
Drawing on maps, photos, documents and other primary sources and packaging them into interactive online learning using Web 2.0 tools.
George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media strives to “use digital media to preserve and present history online, transform scholarship across the humanities, and advance historical education and understanding.” They are in year 2 of a 3 year project partnership.
The project:
They built an interactive website to collect various digital media relating to history and to organize it into teaching modules that students can move through. The presenters showed us various images they had gathered from Schwebel (the bread company).
The presenters wanted to emphasize that their presentation was about a process and not just a product. They weren’t just sharing a useful Web 2.0 tool, but were exploring a strategy for teaching history online.
Mike’s take:
I felt they could have done a much better job explaining what advantages they found in creating/using Omeka versus other site-building products. Additionally, I would have liked more of a description of the project from the student perspective. How did they go through the course? What did their activity consist of? What were the results?
Omeka?
Omeka is open source software that makes it easy to share or layout goods in a collection. As such is was ideal for the creation of online exhibits. The project involved over 50 teachers and required orientation and training sessions to acclimate them to using Omeka.
Learn more:
Michael Edwards is an Instructional Designer for the 
2 Comments
Hi, thanks for the write up. Even though I wasn’t technically part of this presentation, I am involved as the “developer/designer” (in giant air quotes!) and tech instructionalist for the workshop, so I’ll try to address what I think are very valid critiques.
The great thing about Omeka is that it is a) open source and has a very active community b) very flexible in terms of design and feature extensibility (works more or less like WordPress) and c) is designed by and for historians/humanists to perform a specific task (digital collection, interpretation and exhibition of primary sources and other historical/cultural objects). Unlike CONTENTdm or other extremely expensive and complicated proprietary platforms, it can be customized by anyone with a moderate level of programming/design experience. Thus with very limited time and resources we were able to deploy the platform more or less out of the box and then make customizations based on use study, teacher requests and evolving instructional goals. Plus it is fairly easy to use from a teacher/student standpoint.
I cannot speak to how individual teachers have used the site in their classrooms but can say that the teachers in our TAH workshops have really embraced the technology. They have gone around to various archival collections, identify compelling images/documents and uploading them to the site. We task them with meeting our metadata standards when adding materials so that their students (and other users) can understand, cite and re-find the original objects. By adding the object to the archive, it becomes available for the entire user community to use in posters and exhibits. So far, most of the exhibits and posters have been created by university-level students and participants in our teacher workshops, but the end goal is to use the items to contextualize the primary source images and begin a discussion about historical thinking and image analysis. Many of the exhibits are constructed as image–>prompt. If you look at http://csudigitalhumanities.org/exhibits/ you’ll see a lot of teachers asking questions like “what does this mean or what does it say about topic x?” and so on. So not just presenting but discussing. We just added comments to the exhibits and don’t have many yet but that will be one way to collect student responses to both the images and the content of the interpretations.
This is a project that aims to teach the teachers as much as it teaches the students. I hope this adds to the overall picture. It can be hard to include all you want to include in a single session, or a blog comment for that matter, so feel free to follow up with me, or the primary investigator, Mark Tebeau ( http://marktebeau.com/ )
Thanks for the (robust!) followup, Erin.