Presentation

1. Dr Richard Hawkins (University of Wolverhampton)
Dr Jamie Wood (University of Manchester)

2.  Aims of the session
 To think about why this is an important issue (more
broadly and for History discipline)
 To give an overview of technologies that are being
used (technology)
 To provide some specific examples of how they are
being used in teaching (pedagogy)
 To encourage you to think about how they relate to
your practice (and how you might apply them)
 Structure of the session

3.  Please spend 5 minutes discussing the theme of
e-learning with the person sitting next to you
 Think about the following questions:
 What are your prior experiences of using e-learning?
 What was good about it?
 What problems did you encounter?
 What more would you like to know?
 Write down your thoughts on post-it notes (1 per
post-it)
 Be ready to feed back at least one point to the
group

4.  When is e-Learning particularly appropriate and
effective in HE History teaching?
 What are the challenges of using e-learning?
 What are the benefits?
 Which technologies are most effective in terms
of students’ learning?
 Which pedagogies are best aligned with e-
learning?
 How do we assess engagement with e-learning?
 What support is needed to further staff
engagement with e-learning?

5.  Access to online resources (e.g. institutional
issues)
 Students’ skill levels
 Language skills
 Mathematical literacy
 Digital literacy: we shouldn’t expect students to
have same digital literacy skills either as we do or
as our children do

6.  Access to online resources
 E-books and e-journals from commercial
publishers are on a subscription basis
 Subscriptions can be cancelled and unlike with
traditional paper books and journals virtual
bookshelves will then be left bare
 So it is potentially bad teaching practice to base
an entire reading list on subscription based e-
books and e-journal articles

7.  Access to online resources
 Although most of the free online resources are
Microsoft compatible there are a few which
require the download of non-Microsoft
proprietary software which may require
permission to breach your institution’s firewall

8.  Language Skills
 Non-contemporary English-language resources are
likely to make use of archaic words
 Original hand-written manuscripts may be difficult for
students who do not hand write on a regular basis to
decipher
 Some foreign language handwriting, e.g. pre-20th
century German, present challenge because many of
the characters are significantly different from those
used in contemporary handwriting
 Students do not necessarily possess language skills
necessary to engage with primary sources (e.g. Latin
for medieval history)

9.  Mathematical Literacy
 Some countries have placed significant sets of
historical statistical data online such as in the case
of the United States
 However, many students may lack the
mathematical literacy to make even low level use
of this data such as creating graphs

10.  Digital Literacy
 There is a false belief that our students are digital
natives and that they will probably be more skilled
than we as teachers or researchers are in engaging
with online historical resources
 The skills needed to engage with these resources are
different from those required to engage with
Facebook or create a webpage
 Some students lack basic skills such that of knowing
how to do a keyword search
 Many students are unable to differentiate online
resources

11.  Encourages deeper learning
 Primary research
▪ Engaging with online archives: e.g. American Jewish Committee
http://www.ajcarchives.org/
 Promotes learning outside the classroom
 Promotes collaboration
 Develops discipline-specific and transferrable skills
▪ Research skills; writing (e.g. in different formats/ registers);
information literacy; collaboration; technical/ technological skills
 Broadened horizons
 Enables students to see broader/ social relevance/
applicability of the discipline and of their learning

12.  Structured design and delivery
 Planning and up-front effort are needed
 Makes the learning and teaching process more visible
 Aids transferability
 Flexible, asynchronous teaching/ learning
 Blended learning – complement rather than replace face-to-
face learning
 Can support a range of pedagogies
 Podcasts and YouTube can be used for transmission modes
 Possibly aligns better with certain pedagogies
▪ Constructivist approaches – students make meaning/ learning
▪ E.g. inquiry- and problem-based learning; group-work

13.  Foregrounding of design: makes pedagogy
explicit
 Online: easier to share
 Freely- and widely-available – e.g. Web2.0;
virtual learning environments
 Resource banks/ open educational resources:
 Facilitates sharing of resources/ activities
▪ HEA website resources centre:
http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources
▪ JISC learning resources:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/topics/learningresources.
aspx
▪ HUMBOX: http://humbox.ac.uk/

14.  Based on the experiences of the members of
your group, think about the following
questions:
 what factors inhibit student and staff
engagement with e-learning/ technology?
 what are the benefits of e-learning for staff and
students?
 You have ten minutes
 Be ready to feed back on the main points of
your discussion

15.  Cost of commercially available online
resources is potentially a significant issue
 However, both public sector and non-
governmental organisations are placing ever
increasing amounts of historical material
online
 In the case of books and other printed
material such as pamphlets there are now a
number of websites that provide free
resources

16.  Books, Government Documents and Serials
 There are several e-book collections available on a
subscription basis. But most of them are not history
focussed.
 Ebrary
 However, ProQuest’s Ebrary does include history
within its scope.
 It is very useful collection which is easy for staff and
students to use.
 It offers a good selection of history monographs
covering a wide range of geographical areas and
periods

17.  Books, Government Documents and Serials
 JISC Historic Books
 The following resources are available to UK HEIs on
payment of an annual service fee.
▪ Early English Books Online (EEBO)
▪ The scanned images and (increasingly) full-text digital versions of over
125,000 books published in English up to 1700.
▪ Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO)
▪ A digital collection of all the books published in Great Britain and its colonies
during the eighteenth century, comprising some 33 million pages from more
than 180,000 titles.
▪ Nineteenth Century Books from the British Library Collection
▪ Digitised versions of more than 65,000 first editions from the 19th century,
covering philosophy, history, poetry and literature.

18.  Books, Government Documents and Serials
 Internet Archive – www.archive.org
 This is a website has been created by an American NGO
 On this site can be found a wide variety of out of copyright
books and pamphlets aggregated from a wide variety of
sources including Google Books and Project Gutenberg
 While there is material from the 17th century on this site
the resources tend to from the collections of North
American university and public libraries and so there is a
much wider range of material for the 18th, 19th and early
20th centuries
 So the resources are particularly useful for the teaching of
American history

19.  Books, Government Documents and Serials
 Internet Archive – www.archive.org
 In the 19th and 18th centuries copyright was much
weaker and American publishers republished a wide
variety of British books and pamphlets
 So this website has a lot of useful material relevant to
the teaching of 18th and 19th century British history
 The downside of this website is that the search engine
only does keyword searches of titles
 It does not allow a keyword search of the texts

21. William Fox (1792)

22.  Books, Government Documents and Serials
 Google Books - http://books.google.co.uk/
 Although students do make use of this website very
few of the history books indexed are full view.
 Project Gutenberg -
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/
 Free ancient to modern history ebooks with a wide
geographical scope.
 The Core Historical Literature of Agriculture
http://chla.library.cornell.edu/
 This is an excellent Cornell University website devoted
to the history of agriculture.

23.  Books, Government Documents and Serials
 Hathi Trust Digital Library - http://www.hathitrust.org/
 About 30 per of the 10 million books, government reports and serials
available at this website are full view. The material is mostly North
American in focus. Good source for American State government
publications.
 Making of America -
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moagrp
http://ebooks.library.cornell.edu/m/moa/
 This project which is split between the Universities of Michigan and
Cornell is a digitised collection of books and serials published up to
1922 documenting the making of America.

24.  Digitised Newspapers
 British Library Newspapers 1600-1900
 This JISC funded resource provides a wide range of
national, provincial and local newspapers covering the period
1600-1900.
 It includes the 17th to 18th century Burney Collection
newspapers.
 This resource is available free of charge to UK HEIs but unlike
most comparable resources in other countries is not free of
charge to the public at large.
 There is also a further collection of British Library newspapers
that is being digitised in collaboration with a private
company, brightsolid.
 However, the British Newspaper Archive is not a free resource
and is only available on a pay per view basis.

25. (5HS006) The Social History of Victorian Britain c1850-c1901
Component 2: A 2000 word essay on one of the following questions (50%). Answer must
include material drawn from at least five Victorian newspapers.
 1. How much evidence is there for a significant improvement in public health in the
Victorian period?
 2. Discuss the treatment of the mentally ill in Victorian Britain.
 3. How far was the image of the Victorian woman as ‘angel in the house’ a reality?
 4. Examine the role of the prostitute in Victorian society.
 5. Critically examine newspaper coverage of one of the following: cholera, industrial
protest, crime, political conflict, popular culture.
 6. What does the Jack the Ripper case tell us about the East End of London in 1888?

26.  Digitised Newspapers
 Library of Congress - Chronicling America -
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/
 This free resource will include newspapers from every
part of the United States covering the period 1837-
1922.
 National Library of Australia – Trove –
http://trove.nla.gov.au/
 This free resource will include newspapers from across
Australia published between 1803 and the mid-1950s.

27.  Digitised Newspapers
 National Library of Singapore – NewspaperSG -
http://newspapers.nl.sg/
 This is a free digitised collection of Singapore and Malayan
newspapers published between 1831 and 2009.
 There are also a growing number of digitised historic
newspaper resources available on a subscription basis.
 In the case of Britain these newspapers include The
Times, The Financial Times, The Daily Mirror, Daily
Express and the Glasgow Herald.
 There are also British sectarian newspapers that have
been digitised such as the Jewish Chronicle and the
Catholic Herald

28. (6HS001) America: The Rise of a Superpower, 1890-1945
Assessment Tasks:
Component 1 (50%):
Choose one of the following:
 1. Use the Library of Congress Chronicling America website to compare and contrast the reaction
of the American press to the outbreak of the Spanish-American War. Your examples must include
newspapers from New York, District of Columbia, Minnesota, San Francisco and Texas. What do
the newspaper articles tell us about the American attitude toward imperialism?*
 2. Upton Sinclair’s documentary novel The Jungle (1906) exposing the appalling standards of
hygiene in the meat-packing industry played a major role in the successful enactment of a major
example of Progressive Era regulatory federal legislation, the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.
Use the Library of Congress Chronicling America website to compare and contrast the reaction of
the American press to the publication of The Jungle and the enactment of the Pure Food and
Drug Act of 1906. Your examples must include newspapers from New York, District of Columbia,
Minnesota, San Francisco and Texas.*
* USE A MINIMUM OF TWO ARTICLES FROM EACH CITY, DISTRICT, OR STATE

29.  Other Resources
 JISC was referred to earlier.
 This UK government body has also sought to
make available for teaching a wide range of
historical resources including pictures and
newsfilm at http://jiscmediahub.ac.uk/
 Visual media relating to the history of United
States and Australia are available respectively at
the following two sites:
http://www.loc.gov/library/libarch-digital.html
http://trove.nla.gov.au/

30. (5GK014) Genocide and the Emergence of Modern Human Rights
Component 2 (50%):
 Choose one of the following
 1. Use the news films available on the JISC MediaHub website to
identify news reports relating to one of the genocide case studies
covered in the lectures. Use the news reports to assess the role
played by the media in publicizing genocide. Did the publicity
have a positive impact?
 2. Critically analyse the operations of ONE of the major
international war crimes tribunals (Yugoslavia and Rwanda). Have
they been successful?

31.  Discussion boards and blogs:
 (group-work) Students discuss and
debate with one another
 (interacting with lecturer) Students
ask questions and offer feedback,
especially useful for revision
 (individually) Students reflect on
their learning or complete specific
tasks on a weekly basis
 (collaboratively) Students pose
questions on a weekly basis that are
used to structure

32.  Google Maps:
 (collaboratively) Students create maps of historical
events/ processes by adding ‘tags’ to Google Maps
and annotating them: The Spread of Lutheranism (1
seminar)
 Wikis, blogs and Google Sites:
 (individually or collaboratively) Students create a
website: Women in the Middle East (seminar series)
 Social bookmarking:
 (collaboratively) Students create a resource list (online
bibliography) for a module/ seminar (seminar series)

33.  Seminars on a 1st year
lecture-based module in
History at University of
Sheffield
 Social bookmarking: Internet
users manage bookmarks of
web pages using tags/
descriptions, not folders
 Active engagement – the
students have to do
something
 Online/ social element
enables collaboration and
sharing

34.  My perception:
 Lack of student preparation
 Or maybe: lack of engagement with reading, either at
home or in class
 Result:
 Difficult to plan seminars and to carry them out
 Over preparation; formulaic and rigid structure; double
preparation
 Solution:
 Use active learning – i.e. require the students to do
something outside class that I could see
 Students provide me with the materials/ questions to
plan seminars using social bookmarking

35.  Students
tag, describe and
share resources
based on weekly
reading
 They then post
questions based on
reading to
discussion forum
 I use resources and
questions to plan
seminars

36.  ‘diigo for
educators’ account
– private, separate
logins
 Highlighting
 Sticky-noting
 Sharing

37. Locating and bookmarking source(s)
• Find and bookmark primary/
secondary source
• Add description and tags Non-written sources
• Find and bookmark a non-
written source (YouTube;
Essay writing Flickr)
• Respond to feedback on • In description, explain why
essays by bookmarking a this source is relevant to the
relevant site seminar
• Revise thesis statement
from first essay and post
to discussion forum Highlighting
• Highlight and comment on relevant
sections of a document which I had
pre-selected
Questioning (weekly)
• Post a question based on reading
to the discussion forum

38. 1. Practical use in preparing
essays
2. Enjoyed the opportunity to
find own sources
3. Freedom: ‘There is more
freedom of choice about
what to read’
4. Different way of learning: ‘it
is much more
interesting, and because
you are not only reading, it
is easier to absorb
information’.

39. • ‘it has been good to see what other people
have put and there was probably more
variation in the questions than if the tutor was
to set them.’
• ‘it allows you to see a wider range of issues that
come up from sources - some that you may not
even have thought about.’
+ 12 out of 15 students felt that their research
skills had improved

40. • ‘it forces you to think about the source
material and be analytical in response to it’
• ‘it makes you think about what you're reading
a lot more, and opens up the area of reading to
different paths of thought.’
• Taking charge of learning: ‘I used to prefer having the
questions set for me but I think it has been more
useful setting them myself as it has made me think
about the reading more.’

41.  Develops range of
‘generic’ skills
(technology;
information literacy;
research)
 Models disciplinary
processes and develops
disciplinary skills
(summarising; using
sources) and
knowledge – reading
occurs

42.  GLOs: digital learning objects that can be customised, adapted,
edited or recombined (based on templates at http://glomaker.org/)
 DIY: we developed 2 GLOs based on the Evaluating Multiple
Interpretations (EMI) template
 Students presented with images and information about a physical
object
 Students complete various questions/ activities
 EMI revolves around audio footage of experts offering their
interpretations of various aspects of the physical object. Here are two
examples

43.  Teaching Pre-Modern History: E-Learning
Challenges and Opportunities (HEA Insights
Pamphlet): Antonella Luizzo-Scorpo and Jamie
Wood
Coming slightly less soon: an overview of e-
learning provision in UK HE History
teaching, drawing on research with students and
staff at 5-6 institutions

44.  Spend 15 minutes as a group designing an e-learning
activity that meets a specific learning objective or
solves a T&L problem
 Your activity must
1. Involve students engaging with a historical source online
2. Incorporate technology to support the process of learning
 Be ready to feedback (using technology, maybe...) on
the following:
 What objective/ problem are you addressing?
 What will the students do (i.e. how they will engage with the
technology)?

45.  When is e-Learning particularly appropriate and
effective in HE History teaching?
 What are the challenges of using e-learning?
 What are the benefits?
 Which technologies are most effective in terms of
students’ learning?
 Which pedagogies are best aligned with e-
learning?
 How do we assess engagement with e-learning?
 What support is needed to further staff
engagement with e-learning?