Author: lworking

I am a PhD Candidate at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln, with emphases in Women's History, the North American West, and Digital History.
Posted on

Getting ready for Oakland

Greetings!

A brief introduction to foreground my role as session facilitator: As a graduate student at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, I have had the privilege of working for Doug Seefeldt and Will Thomas on research-based digital projects and in the development of digital projects designed for classroom teaching. Among other things, we have helped students learn how to use the web responsibly (learning to distinguish “Joe’s Civil War Page” from the “Valley of the Shadow,” for example), to build wikis to improve research and writing skills, and showed them ways to develop digital content collections.

At our workshop on Saturday (and on this blog before Saturday – hint, hint) I would like to hear how you are using digital resources in your courses – Western history or otherwise.

Some areas for thought/discussion:

  • Which types of digital assignments have you found useful and why did they work well?
  • What hasn’t worked? Why?
  • What types of sites do you use and how much guidance do you give students about web resources?
  • What kind of tools do you have students using?
  • Have the assignments in your courses changed and how have they changed with the increasing availability of digital resources?

These are just a few questions to get the ball rolling – please contribute your thoughts and ideas here! I look forward to hearing from those able to attend the workshop in person and those who will be using this blog and/or twitter to follow the Digital History Workshop.

Posted on

Coming up on the Conference

What are people thinking about in terms of discussions/questions for the conference? I know I would like to hear about tools people have used successfully in any of the three areas of emphasis (teaching, public history, and research). I have had relatively good results with MIT’s Simile widgets (although I am currently wrestling with a weird code issue) and am thinking about other open source resources. Any one have any other tools to chat about?

Posted on

Welcome!

We are pleased to welcome you to a new blog created to support the Western History Association’s Digital History Workshop, planned for Thursday, October 14, 2010 (3:00-4:30) at Lake Tahoe.

The workshop is an opportunity for WHA members interested in the ways digital technologies can be (and are being) used in the classroom, in public history, and in research to gather virtually here on the blog and in person at the WHA Conference to discuss interests, concerns, and ideas. Whether tech guru or newbie, anyone interested in hearing about/discussing the increasingly significant roles digital technologies play in contemporary scholarship, teaching, and public history is welcome.

This blog is a place for potential attendees to begin the conversations and exchanges of ideas that they hope to continue in the workshop; we also ask contributors to share those resources, tools, examples of digital scholarship, online exhibits,  etc., that they have found noteworthy or helpful in their own work.