Websites offer an endless variety of possible uses for teaching and classroom activities. They are fun to explore, they offer outstanding visual images and film clips, and they allow students to put information together in creative ways. Gone is the linear progression of books and articles or the teleological conclusion (or at least, sites don’t have to present info in this way). But do websites allow us to reach course objectives that we otherwise might fail to achieve? Based on the group of websites we explored this week, the answer is clear—absolutely. These websites provide the means to explore topics that are of interest to students using images and evidence that would otherwise be daunting to assemble. Websites provide assembled units that would take years for professors to develop.
Who Killed William Robinson? is an intriguing site. In an era of crime scene investigations and courtroom television dramas, few methods could be more appealing to students. Students get to read the opinions of people who were there and hear how people presented their arguments. In many ways, conversations and newspaper articles about crimes have not changed that much since the nineteenth century. Although the “past is a foreign country,” students can learn that people were not so different from them. The maps were interesting, although the number and detail could have been overwhelming for students.
My favorite part of the website was the student comments. It was amazing to see how students assembled and evaluated evidence to form a conclusion, and then offered arguments about their position. It was easy to see what learning objectives this website can help fulfill—technical skills like navigating websites, historical knowledge about a particular place, time, and people, and historical skills like interpreting primary sources and thinking about author motives. The most illuminating part of their comments was the assumptions that they brought to the evidence. Some students felt that simply asking the question of guilt meant that Tom’s conviction was wrong. Others assumed that racism or greed motivated the killing and the conviction. Some simply stated that no one could ever really know the truth and it was too hard to deal with the evidence. They focused on goods, race, place, and characters. The students demonstrated a wide range of historical thinking and also the challenging presumptions that students bring into the classroom. The site allowed students to navigate images and documents that would have been time-, resource-, and cost-prohibitive in paper form.
I really loved the curriculum modules on the Women in World History site. Not only did the site provide interesting primary documents and good interpretive questions, but it also made these somewhat remote topics more accessible to students. In the unit on Western Views of Chinese Women, the authors used gender as a way to help students connect with the daily lives of people who observed the Chinese women, as well as speculate about what the lives of the Chinese women may have actually been like. This unit took familiar concepts and used them to let students meet unknown people. Bridging World History added sound and other images to the mix. Not only were the learning objectives clear, but they could fit usefully into a world history class. Students could not only learn how to evaluate evidence, but could exhibit historical thinking. More than anything, these sites made teaching such subjects easier for the professor and more interesting for the students.
