History is more than the memorization of dates and names and places. History is our connection with our social and cultural selves. Accordingly, the State of Connecticut includes a content standard for Applying History; for ensuring that educated students will be able to recognize the continuing importance of historical thinking and knowledge in their own lives and the world in which they live.
In other words, when we share history with our students, we empower them to a deeper and more significant understanding of the world around them. Ultimately, we are connecting and linking our children to the human experience. And to surely do so, we must bring the people of history alive.
Technology, by adding dimension and multisensual experience to communications is uniquely able to assist us to bring the events and people of history to full human dimension. Moreover how technology interacts with communications presents a unique opportunity to teaching and learning learning: inextricably intertwining the medium with the message. It enables us to meaningfully focus on the transfer of information, human communications as the common thread across history. We will learn how the changes in physical communications such as the building of roads and canals to the developments in symbolic communications such as the printing press, the telephone and the internet drive social movements and create events we call history.
We can see how the innovations in communications open information and knowledge to different audiences and how audiences come to identify their media with their messages. In the early Renaissance Latin was the language of the educated classes and of diplomacy. The rise of the nation-state was accompanied by the rise of the "vulgar" tongues and the controversial tranlsation of the Bible into indigenous languages. This was as momentous a societal and cultural shift among its contemporaries as the internet is to our world today. Entirely new groups of people were in communication and sharing new ideas.
History was made. And thus, history continues to be made every day and in every way intimately connected to how we communicate.
I enjoyed listening to your podcast. How do you propose your students use this as an active learning activity?
ReplyDeleteI would have students in groups of three research a topic they find analogous and important to understand in today's world. A key element of the research would be to find primary sources as well as quotations from people who experienced the "event." Their podcast would include music from the period, narration of the students' story they are telling, and the quotations that humanize the experience. To close the historical loop, they would find quotations or provide their own summary statements that link the events over time to contemporary issues.
ReplyDeleteGreat ideas, thanks. I like how you are pulling in several topics, such as music.
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