1.) What have you learned about doing public history online from your peers’ reflections and comments?

2.) How will what you learned from this process shape your next online project?

3.) What is missing from our discussion about doing public history online?

Our last week is a slight change of pace. While we’ll still be talking about past projects, both successes and failures, our two contributors ask us to reflect on how we should train the next generation of public historians to take advantage of these new technologies and techniques. Kyle Roberts gives us a bird-eye view of the public history classroom, showing how he introduces his students to new media and other aspects of the digital humanities. Mitchell Koffman, reflecting on an effort to develop an online encyclopedia for the state of Arizona, reminds us that future public history projects will require contributions from stakeholders, designers, historians and programmers, and that public historians will need to learn how to communicate between these groups.

As before, participants should read and respond to this week’s posts here on the blog, in the comments field to this post, or through comments on the reflections themselves. Ask yourself — what can I learn from my peers’ experiences? Is there a common set of “best practices” for teaching public history online? Next week, we’ll explore ways to put all these reflections together.

Week 4: Bringing Digital History and New Media into the Classroom

• Kyle Roberts
• Mitchell Koffman

So far, we’ve spotlighted projects that revolve around local communities or museums. This week, we’ll change gears and discuss how digital technology is transforming scholarly communities and their presence online. Although many of the questions stay the same, scholarly communities create a unique set of challenges. Most academic cultures still revolve around print journals and conferences, with rather firm hierarchies and established modes of publication; the web, conversely, creates opportunities for new kinds of scholarship and interaction, but has almost no established standards and boundaries. By extension, scholarly communities with a Web 2.0 website could either break down or reify the barriers between “scholars” and the “public.”

Gerben Zaagsma introduces us to this topic through his experiences as a web developer building a new and improved website for the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands and the Royal Netherlands Historical Society using Drupal. Justin Olmstead, speaking with experience as both a high school history teacher and aspiring scholar, informs us about his experiences working with digital technology alongside other scholars. Both of their reflections should get us asking questions about the nature of online scholarly communities and their relationship to the other public history projects we’ve discussed.

As before, participants should read and respond to this week’s posts here on the blog, in the comments field to this post, or through comments on the reflections themselves. Ask yourself — what can I learn from my peers’ experiences? Is there a common set of “best practices” for creating a website for a scholarly community, or is every project different?

Week 3: Creating a Website with a Scholarly Community

• Gerben Zaagsma
• Justin Olmstead

Thanks for beginning the conversation! This week features two reflections looking at the challenges of designing websites that incorporate the “Web 2.0″ principles of participatory information sharing, online collaboration, interoperability, and user-centered design. Examples of Web 2.0 include blogs, wikis, and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Of particular concern to Catherine Lewis, Jordan Grant, and other working group participants is figuring out how best to interest, engage, and sustain target audiences using online tools, many of which hinge on Web 2.0 constructs.

With that in mind, Catherine Lewis explores the challenges of converting a global partnership between museums in Georgia and Morocco into an online exhibition that engages oral history participants, students, and their local communities. Similarly, Jordan Grant’s reflection outlines some of the difficulties in building a “pre-exhibition website” designed to break down barriers separating museums and the public. Both Jordan and Catherine are working on websites that will serve as models for future public historians eager to create virtual spaces that induce more meaningful contributions from and collaborations with the public.

Again, participants should read and respond to this week’s posts on the blog, in the comments field to this post, or through comments on the reflections themselves. Ask yourself — what can I learn from my peers’ experiences? Is there a common set of “best practices” for designing an exhibition website for Web 2.0, or is every project different?

Week 2: Designing an exhibition website for Web 2.0

• Catherine Lewis
• Jordan Grant

This is the first in what I hope will become a series of posts and conversations about the challenges of doing public history online. For our first week, we’ll be focusing on a particular kind of activity – building a digital project with local communities. The reflections we’ve grouped together give us variety of perspectives on that difficult task. Charles Romney and Will Tchakirides introduce us to projects in development that are still searching for ways to engage with their communities – both local and national. With Baltimore 68′, Jessica Elfenbein and Tom Hollowak show how local community members can push a digital project in new, unexpected directions. Finally, both Emily Pfotenahauer and Christopher Cantwell remind us that the web can  either reinforce or deconstruct economic inequalities and social divisions.

Participants should read and respond to this week’s posts, either here on the blog, in the comments field to this post, or through comments on the reflections themselves. Ask yourself — what can I learn from my peers’ experiences? Is there a common set of “best practices” for working with local communites online, or is every project different?

Week 1: Building a digital project with local communities

• Charles Romney
• Will Tchakirides
• Jessica Elfenbein and Tom Hollowak
• Emily Pfotenahauer
• Christopher Cantwell

Jordan and I are in the beginning stages of uploading your content to the website and look forward to getting the dialogue started! Reflections/case studies are coming in steadily and can be viewed on the “Reflections” page. Feel free to comment on individual reflections or write a post in the WordPress Dashboard regarding our thematic questions and points of interest (check previous email for username and password). You have the ability to create posts and comment as contributors. If you want to make changes to your reflections/case studies, simply email an updated copy to Jordan or myself noting where you made any modfications.

If you have not finished your reflection, now is the time to do so. The conference is only two-and-a-half months away, and we should have a healthy debate going by the time we all meet in person.

If you are new to creating a post on WordPress, check out this quick tutorial:
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYISfuPWPj4
 
Again, we recommend that you also create a gravatar at en.gravatar.com. This way, your pretty/handsome faces show up when you comment on a post or reflection. If you have not yet submitted a brief bio and picture, please do that as well.
 
I look forward to meeting you all in the Cream City!
 

For our group, we would like you to reflect on specific project or professional experiences where you grappled with the challenge of doing public history online.*

The operative word here is doing. While we welcome descriptions of theory and personal philosophies, please balance them with accounts of the day-to-day. For instance: How did you build a relationship with a community partner, and convert that into a digital initiative? How did you begin creating the newsletters and social media campaigns that constructed a novel community of scholars? How did you structure your class so students could take advantage of the opportunities presented by the web? In your statements, consider what worked, what didn’t work, and how you would do things differently in the future. Please consider the group’s major and supplementary questions as your draft your statement.

* If you’re still a newcomer to the field of digital history, and don’t have any experiences to reflect on, we would like you to investigate and report back on a public history project, initiative, or community that seems to be doing their work on the web well. There’s world of projects to choose from out there, but if you’d like some suggestions, Will and I would be happy to help. (Additionally, if you and other participants worked on the same project, feel free to collaborate on a single statement, but try to ensure that every team member includes his/her perspective. Collaborative statements can extend past than 3-4 pages).

As the questions above suggest, this working group welcomes a wide range of participants and projects. Participants should prepare case studies that describe attempts to foster real sharing and collaboration in a digital environment. We hope group members will be candid about both their successes and their failures. Case studies should consider both the technical and the institutional challenges that these digital projects present. We hope this session will be an opportunity for learning and discussion, and that it will spark larger conversations about how we can pursue public history in more meaningful ways online.