After viewing the previous interviews, I learned that the process of revising and narrowing a lesson is the norm. During the project making process, I was a little worried that I was not getting my point across; and I continued to add more material. Celeste and Jeri mentions starting with an existing argument, and I thought about Dr. Kelly’s advice to narrow my focus on what part of the historical content does not make sense to my students. I will narrow my focus and not make it bigger than it should be. Also, I will select 1-3 primary sources to help my students think about history and make connections to the novel. Teaching students to access primary sources online from reliable websites is very important. Also, teaching students what to do with the primary sources is very challenging but exciting. The focus on digital media or digital resources are mentioned in all of the interviews. Maura Seale makes an excellent point about teaching students to engage with the primary sources by exposing them to archives and collections. Devon Hardy’s emphasis on Learning Objectives is spot on because she knows the importance of keeping the audience in mind while creating a digital history project. I added a few learning outcomes on my site. She also mentioned learning assessment, which is very important these days in education. For the future, I will have to consider a plan to design an assessment for my project’s learning outcomes.
Designing my project site will require a few more changes because I would like to use it as a supplement to my course in ecampus. It would be a good ready to go class as mentioned by Erin Bush. If ecampus (Blackboard) is down, then I can always refer to my project site without worries. Also, I can make additional changes without dealing with weekly and unwanted system updates. My project did not turn out what I wanted initially, but I enjoyed the process of creating it. Nate Sleeter also mentioned that his project did not come out exactly as he was hoping. Therefore, I came to the conclusion that digital history projects are work in progress due to changing times, advancing technology, differing perspectives, innovative teaching methods, broadening of diversity, and new ideas. There is always going to be something interesting to uncover when learning about the past, and in the field Digital Humanities, a digital history project is one of the means of engaging the general public, students, and/or scholars to explore, examine, and analyze the past.
