If you are searching for more information on an Ohio history research topic, you should check out the following journals in the Paul Laurence Dunbar Library:
Queen City heritage : the journal of the Cincinnati Historical Society (F486 .H653)
and, since 2001,
Ohio Valley history : the journal of the Cincinnati Historical Society and the Filson Historical Society (F486 .H579)
Timeline, the Ohio Historical Society’s magazine features heavily illustrated articles on a wide variety of topics (F486 .T55)
Ohio History: the journal of the Ohio Historical Society is available through the Electronic Journals Center at the WSU Library. Search under Electronic Journals for “Ohio History.” You will need to login to access the text of the journal articles.
Public television stations in Ohio regularly produce local history documentaries featuring stories about their cities and surroundings. In addition to the required readings, I ask you to watch three of the documentaries produced at ThinkTV Dayton Public Television. You will find these as streaming videos on ThinkTV’s “video on demand” web page.
May 12 “Wright Brothers’ Dayton”
May 19 “Goodbye, the Levee has broken, the Story of the Great Dayton Flood”
May 26 “When Dayton Went to War”
In addition, ThinkTV works with the Ohio Farm Bureau to produce the series, “Our Ohio” with a focus on rural Ohio. This series includes segments on Ohio history, historic sites, writers, and artists. You will find streaming videos for topics that include World War II, the National Road, canals, waterways, Sunwatch Village, the Underground Railroad, Ripley, the Ohio Amish, and Fort Ancient. ThinkTV also offers K-12 resources for teachers and students related to each of these video segments.
We will begin to read, analyze, and discuss historical evidence or primary sources in class. You may also analyze exhibit artifacts, documents discussed in class, or other evidence on your blog and there are several resources to help you get started. In historical research, historians examine the current scholarship related to the research question and then they dig deeper by studying historical documents that may shed light on the research question. These documents may include maps, census or government records, diaries and journals, old newspaper articles, political cartoons, paintings, tools, houses, furniture, landscapes, etc. Historical scholarship is derived from a synthesis of these and other sources of evidence.
One page worksheets for the analysis of written documents, artifacts, cartoons, maps, motion pictures, photographs, posters, and sound recordings are available to download from the National Archives.
History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web offers “Making Sense of History” a collection of tutorials and examples for the analysis and interpretation of these and other types of historical documents.
The American Memory Project Learning Page (the Library of Congress) also offers activities and lesson plans related to learning about American history with primary sources. In the “Port of Entry” activity, offers the following questions for analyzing written sources.
1. Who created the source and why? Was it created through a spur-of-the-moment act, a routine transaction, or a thoughtful, deliberate process?
2. Did the recorder have firsthand knowledge of the event, or did the recorder report what others saw or heard?
3. Was the information recorded during the event, immediately after the event, or after some lapse of time? How large a lapse of time?
4. Was the recorder a neutral party, or did the recorder have a position, opinions or interests that might have influenced what was recorded?
5. Did the recorder wish to inform or persuade others?
6. Was the source meant to be public or private? Was it produced for personal use, for one or more individuals, or for a large audience?
You will find primary sources for Ohio history by clicking on the Ohio History on Delicious heading on the lower right hand menu. I will add more to this list as we progress through Ohio history.
Dayton’s PBS station, ThinkTV/16, will air a four-part series this month, “Appalachia: a History of Mountains and People“–watch the trailer. The series,
“. . . offers a new and unprecedented history of the people and nature of this storied region.”
Part One, “Time and Terrain” airs on Wednesday, April 9, and explores the environment and traces the history of the region’s cultures up to the arrival of the Europeans. Part Two, “New Green World,” looks at the collision of cultures in the 18th and early 19th centuries. “Mountaintop Revolutions,” looks at the Civil War, and the industries–Railroads and Coal– that impacted the environment, economy, and peoples of Appalachia. Part Four, “Power and Place” tells the history of the region in the 20th Century. Appalachia stretches through Southeastern Ohio and it sounds like much of this series will be relevant to our study of Ohio history. “Appalachia: a History of Mountains and People” is produced by the non-profit James Agee Film Project.
Part I , April 9, 10 pm
Part II, April 16, 10 pm
Parts III & IV, April 30, 9 pm
The PBS series, American Experience, will run a five-part series “We Shall Remain” beginning this month. Episode 2, “Tecumseh’s Vision,” premieres April 14, 2009 at 9 P.M. Watch the trailer and read more about the film. You may also want to investigate the Teachers’ Guide as well as information on PBS Teachers and the National History Education Clearinghouse.
Check the ThinkTV (Dayton Public Television) broadcast schedule for details.
Students have asked for examples of student multimedia history projects.
Find examples of student projects linked to Cecilia Elizabeth O’Leary’s online poster, “Becoming Citizen Historians.”
I have written in the past about both Digital Storytelling and project based learning. The Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship at Georgetown University offers a portal to Digital Storytelling resources for teachers including three examples. The first, “Chocolate Innocence” is a good brief example of student media project.
National History Day offers 6-12th grade students opportunities to compete, much like a science fair, with research-based history papers, performances, exhibits, documentaries, and web sites. Take a look at this award winning 2007 collaborative middle school media project, “The Great Seattle Fire, Phoenix of the Northwest.”
For more ideas, read the National History Day guides and resources for producing both Documentaries and Web Sites. The judging guide and forms also provide a good check for the quality of your project. As you can see, the first NHD goal is to produce a high quality, research-based project. For future teachers, the Dayton Public Schools have participated in National History Day for the past six years – a model project may be a good item for your portfolio.
Please keep in mind that you may decide to use the WordPress platform itself and the skills that you learn from blogging to produce a digital exhibit for this project.
Course Design
In designing the course around student research, discovery, peer review and media production, I gave a lot of thought to ideas from a recent publication about the Visible Knowledge Project: Viet Nguyen “Multimedia as Composition: Research, Writing, and Creativity” as well as Peter Burkholder and Anne Cross, “Video Killed the Term Paper: Two Views.” I agree with Burkholder’s conclusions:
. . . having graded thousands of history papers, I am fully aware that students need help with their writing, and I firmly believe that papers have a central role to play in history courses. But this does not mean educators should shy away from building new paths to learning. . .
The first impetus for this approach to teaching came from following the Center for History and New Media’s Digital Campus podcasts and from reading a series of posts on “The End of Western Civilization as we Know It” from T. Mills Kelly’s blog Edwired.
Read about Wright State University Professor Robert Riordan’s recent archaeological research on the Hopewell culture in Southwest Ohio in “Examining the Mysteries of the Hopewell” from American Archaeologist, Winter, 2008-2009. This is a .pdf file that will download on to your computer. Learn more about studying archaeology and the WSU Summer Field School in Archaeology.
Tour the Ohio Historical Society’s online resource, “First Ohioans” and learn more about their archaeological projects and exhibits. Open Ohio History Central’s “Ohio’s Prehistoric Timeline” to learn about the chronology and cultures of Native peoples before European exploration and settlement in the Ohio Valley. You can save the timeline to your desktop and then open it and zoom in on different time periods.
Ohio History students will read and comment on blogs for members of their group each week. In order to keep track of each other’s blogs without searching all the time for updates, you can subscribe to the RSS (reader subscription service) for each blog. There are many different RSS Readers that will allow you to get updates from your friends’ and classmates’ blogs as well as the latest news. You may also subscribe to your friends’ facebook updates in an RSS Reader. I use Google Reader but you may want to try a different RSS Reader.
To set up Google Reader, you must first create a GMail account. Go to http://www.google.com, select IGoogle in the upper right hand corner, and follow the instructions to set up an account. You can then use your Gmail and password to log into other Google applications. Go to the Google Reader Tour to learn how to set up your reader and subscribe to your groups’ blog posts. I view GoogleReader through the IGoogle home page.
My IGoogle page.
This is what my RSS Reader looks like:
My RSS reader
.
To subscribe to an RSS feed, go to the blog or website that you want to follow. If there is an RSS feed, you will see a square blue button in the URL line. Click on the button and follow the links to add this subscription to your reader. If you want to read about history in the news, subscribe to Breaking News from the History News Network.
You can also watch “RSS in Plain English” in YouTube.
When you cite another Web page on your WORDPRESS blog, you can make the name of that page a link so that your reader can go and see what you are talking about. These are called “hyperlinks.”
In order to make a link:
-copy the URL for the page that you want to link to,
-select the HTML tab for your post,
-in your post, highlight or “select” the name of the site that you want to link to,
-click on the blue highlighted link button in the controls and a box will pop up,
When the HTML tab is selected, you can click on the blue link button.
-paste the complete URL for the Web page into the box and click “OK” (make sure that the entire URL beginning with http:// shows in the box).
Copy and paste the URL into this box and click OK.
Embedding an image from another site
To add images or media to your website, click where you want the image to appear in your post and then select an Upload/Insert media button above the tools.
Select add image or other media.
You can upload and add an image from your computer or you can embed an image from another URL.
Select an image from your computer.
Add an image from another web page by its URL.
The Dayton VA Medical Center (North of HWY 35 at Gettysburg) offers a fascinating “Virtual Museum” highlighting the site’s history as a National Military Home created to provide care for Civil War veterans. Visitors click on a bird’s eye view of the 1885 site to tour different buildings and areas.
When you click on an image inside the exhibit, you will be able to look at the full image on a separate page. This page gives you the image URL. You can embed the image in your page using this URL.
Grotto and Lakes, Virtual Museum, Dayton VA Medical Center.
The basic html code for an image looks like this:
html code to embed an image from another site
You should always cite the source and provide a link to the page if you are using their information, quoting their text, or showing one of their images.
Some museums and other sites do not offer a separate URL for images and media.
Check out WordPress Support for more guidance.
Students in some of my courses will be using blogs. Students may want to use blogs for a variety of purposes: create an e-portfolio of academic experiences, demonstrate skills to prospective employers, publish digital photographs or art work, share news about sports or a hobby, and/or promote social or political concerns. Many students already have blogs as facebook or myspace accounts. You may also subscribe to the RSS feed for your blog inside Facebook in order to share it with friends there.
Learn more about blogs from the YouTube video “Blogs in Plain English.”
Creating and Using a Blog
Blogs (web-logs) are web sites designed to share your own work or thoughts with wider audiences. A number of operations have sprung up that make available, for free, both server space and a blog application. These are sometimes businesses that use the “long tail” business model – providing free resources to entry-level users and then charging for more resource intensive users. Some blog applications like WordPress are open source, meaning that the code is openly available and that users can freely adapt or create extensions to the application. This gives rise to an active user community who, in turn, share feedback and new plug-ins, themes, and other tools that they have developed. WordPress thus has both a WordPress.org website (offering the software to download for free) and a WordPress.com site (offering a free blog account powered by WordPress). WordPress also offers online Support explaining how to create and develop your blog.
Setting up a blog
To set up a blog, go to WordPress.com (or Blogger, Blogspot, or an other platform) and click on “Sign Up Now!” –the process is easy and it takes about five minutes to launch a simple blog. These blogs always have a URL like: http://yourblogname.wordpress.com. Think about how you want to title your blog. Do not use your university id as part of either your blog title or address. Explore the settings on your blog-there is setting that allows you to keep the page “private” allowing others to see it only by invitation. If you do not black the related links, these will automatically show up in your blog as well.
Using the blog
With your log in, you should be able to open the “dashboard” or administrator work area for your blog. I’ll introduce how to set up the appearance of your blog and how to post to your blog; you should explore the dashboard to learn more about all of the functions.
Add a new post or edit previous posts.
Simply click on Posts->Add New in the left hand menu or “New Post” on the horizontal bar in order to write a new post for your blog. I encourage you to write the post and then copy and paste it into your blog under Post. Once you paste it in, you may need to separate paragraphs and you can add italics, create block quotes, and make lists. You can also add media. If you click on HTML, you will be able to add links easily (without knowing HTML). At the bottom of this page, there are options to add “tags” and “categories.” These allow you to index your blog in either a list of categories or a tag cloud or both. Visitors can then easily locate a post on a particular topic when you have many posts. You should Save your post as you work on it and then click Publish when you are ready to share it with the world. Use Preview to see how the post will look but remember to close the new tab that Preview opens or you may find it confusing. Your first blog post appears where you see “Hello World!”
Add or edit a page.
Go to Pages–> Add New to create new pages for your Project and Bibliography. Pages show up as tabs on your blog.
Back on your dashboard menu, a click on Pages->Edit or Posts->Edit will let you see either your Pages (Home, About) or earlier Posts. You can simply click on a page or post to reopen and edit it. When you roll your mouse over the title options to edit and delete will show up.
Click on Users to create new users who will also be able to post on the blog. You can assign each user a role; it is probably wiser to have only one administrator-yourself-on your personal blog. Editors can do many of the same things as administrators but Editors cannot create new users or close down the blog entirely.
Select appearance to change your theme or add a widget.
The Appearance option on your dashboard lets you change the look of your blog. Under design, you can select a new theme or graphic look with one, two, or three columns across. Some themes permit you to upload and edit your own banner photograph under Custom Image Header. Widgets refers to all the little options like tag clouds, categories, links, etc. that you can have appear in the columns on your blog. You can change it by simply opening theme and selecting a different appearance. WordPress functions as a content management system, the posts, pages, and related information will generally carry over when you choose a new theme. Change the title of your blog and the tag line for the blog under Settings.
You will receive notifications of Comments waiting for your approval in your email. WordPress uses Askimet to filter spam from your comments before these reach your email so make sure that is turned on under Settings. The email will contain links to approve or disapprove/delete a comment. The Comments button will also show the number of comments waiting for your approval; click Comments to review and moderate comments contributed by others to your blog. Make sure that Askimet is activated on your blog under setting; it will block most automatically generated comments much like your email settings will block nuisance emails.
For more information, you can click on “Help” in the upper right hand corner of your dashboard, search FAQ, or visit WordPress Support.
Get more usage information under “Blog Stats” on your dashboard.
This is pretty much what you need to know to get started. You may want to explore or even set up your own blog to experiment further. Here is an interesting Ohio History blog on WordPress, Firelands History Blog: “Sufferers’ Land” Tales by Dave Barton.
