Incorporating Digital Literacy into History Methods Courses

Posted on September 9, 2012

By Jeffrey McClurken at techist

In the History and American Studies 2009 Departmental Strategic Plan my department said that, in addition to other skills and literacies, we wanted all majors to develop the following abilities:

Digital Literacy

  • The ability to find reliable, scholarly, information on topics:
    • Within gated, subscription databases and in the larger, disorganized online world.
    • In online archives, museums and institutions of higher education.
  • The ability to assess and evaluate the reliability of online sources bringing to this newer source of information the skills of judicious, critical skepticism that have long been an indispensable historical tool.
  • The ability to produce creative, scholarly materials for the digital world that require the same level of rigor historians have applied to writing and publishing traditional papers, presentations, and monographs

When we developed learning outcomes for the history major, we incorporated these concepts into 8 of the 14 objectives, including the most obvious one:

  • Ability to utilize technological resources in research, data analysis, and presentation.

Now, we are looking at revising our department’s long standing methods course, HIST 299, into a two semester class (HIST 297 — Colloquium and HIST 298 — Practicum) for a number of reasons, among them the desire to be able to fully integrate all of the aspects we believe necessary to be a successful history major in our upper-level classes, in graduate school, and beyond.

Read full post here (Originally posted September 5, 2012).

  • A PressForward Publication Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media In Collaboration with Hist.net

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