We
search constantly for ways to teach students better, to serve our discipline,
profession, and the broader public more fully, and to stay relevant in this
digital era. I would like to propose one strategy that has the potential to
advance our collective capacity on all of these fronts: a new method of digital
humanities-informed teaching and learning that I term class-sourcing. This
concept adapts the term crowdsourcing, meaning the outsourcing of tasks to a
wide group of volunteers, for instance the organization of information best
exemplified by Wikipedia. A related but distinct process, class-sourcing
consists of two elements, namely having students and faculty create online
digital artifacts that organize knowledge, subsequently publicizing, and conglomerating
these creations for the benefit of a widely diverse audience.
Class-sourcing
involves having faculty give class assignments
where students make publicly-accessible online digital artifacts, such as
wikis, websites, blogs, videos, podcasts, visual images, and others. These
projects aim to report on class to a broad audience in a visually appealing
fashion. This component of class-sourcing advances our ability to teach
students about history while conveying the skills of a liberal art education.
Similar to a paper, students conduct independent research on a specific topic
they chose, analyze the information they find, and organize and communicate
this data, which strengthens research, writing, and critical thinking, as well
as historical understanding. However, online digital artifacts provide
additional benefits, as they advance our ability to teach students digital
literacy skills relevant to professional and civic life in the modern digital
age. A
related advantage of class-sourcing comes from the capacity of digital
artifacts to improve student engagement and performance, due to the novel nature of this assignment and the
deployment and development of digital skills, which creates a constructive
classroom dynamic and enhances comprehension of course content. Additionally,
the public nature of the online projects results in improved academic
performance.
My proposals emerge from my own
experience asking those in my classes to create websites on Soviet and imperial
Russian history based on original primary source research. These students
produced websites on a variety of topics, such as “The KGB,” “Bloody Sunday,
1905,” and “Thaw-Era Films.” From the very beginning, students expressed
enthusiasm over these assignments. They have impressed me with their commitment
and the quality of their final product generally exceeded my expectations.
Furthermore, these digital artifacts have a clear impact, as you can see by
typing “Soviet History KGB” into Google, where my students’ website currently
comes up fourth in the search rankings. In-depth directions on
undertaking this activity and a list of student-created websites are available here.
After
my students created the websites, I checked them for accuracy and corrected
mistakes, as I would do for any assignment. Then, I assigned the best examples
among these websites as supplementary readings to students in my subsequent
classes.
Drawing
on my experience, I contend that this assignment produces content well suited
to teaching others, the second essential component of class-sourcing. In fact,
these and similar classsourced artifacts have the
potential to satisfy the demand among faculty and high school teachers for free
class materials, especially ones available on the internet where our students
spend so much of their time. Since faculty guide their creation, these products
can be specifically tailored to the needs of teaching and learning, in
comparison to crowdsourced sources such as Wikipedia. Moreover, since faculty
check and correct their students’ assignments, classsourced artifacts deserve
more trust than crowdsourced data that lacks such evaluation. Furthermore,
there can be many digital artifacts dealing with the same topic: by presenting
a diversity of perspectives and interpretations, classsourced materials can
offer a fuller and richer portrayal than the cohesive and unified narrative
style of either Wikipedia or textbooks.
Once enough have been created and
compiled together in an organized fashion, classsourced projects would serve as
a valuable informational resource for the public. Such efforts to organize
these artifacts can start at the level of individual faculty, as I did with my
personal webpage, and grow to span departments, universities, and eventually
the national and even international level. Faculty can partner with schools,
museums, governments, businesses, non-profit organizations, and other
institutions to create digital artifacts that serve the particular needs of
such external stakeholders. In this age of digital technology and tightening
budgets, class-sourcing would help ensure that history stays relevant and
demonstrates actively the value of academic contributions to society as a
whole.
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