Digital History: Boon To Increase Historical Knowledge By Expanding An Access To Historical Materials

Digital Tools and Technologies:

• Class Management and Communication

• Black Board

• Power point

• Digital Whiteboards

• Clickers

• Cloud file storage/transfer

• Plagiarism software

• Video Conferencing

• Skype

Information Resource Seeking: 

• Google Search 

• You Tube

•  Data bases

Sharing, Collaboration and Content generation: 

•  Blogs

• Wikis

• Social Networks

• Google Docs

Data Analysis:

• Mapping Software

• Language Translation Tools

• Data Analysis Software

• Interactive data Visualization tools

Virtual Reality:

• Virtual Acoustics Software

Content Production:

• Video Cameras

• Website Building Software 
  
  

Digital Technologies And Historical Thinking:

Experience: Virtual reality software enables students to experience past time and space. Recorded music of the period also evokes a sense of time and place

Context: Digital Resources support comprehension of historical context. Film in particular is an effective method of conveying time, place and action

History as construct: Contrasting historical literature with archival film footage and modern film adaptations demonstrates history as construct.

New Questions: Online availability of non-primary sources in particular has revolutionized teaching and prompted the design of new questions for teaching

Distant Reading: Digital tools enable distant reading of a large corpus, which can be used to challenge or support past research and identify new research questions.

Reflection: With more time reflection students may be more likely to draw on their broader backgrounds in an online forum than face-to-face.

Diversity: Multiple digital images can better demonstrate diversity across time and place than text. 

Merits Of Using Digital Tools:

Efficiency: Digital tools and technologies can also accelerate content delivery and aid evaluation. Wikiversity as a potential alternative to Black Board. 

Interactivity: Blogs and Wikis are used to supplement face-to-face teaching and it offers flexibility, allowing students to contribute content and post comments at any time. Content and discussion is more student-driven than face-to-face classes, and demonstrates how students can meaningfully contribute to knowledge creation for a wider audience. Social network such as Facebook also enable interactivity between students and serve as independent study groups for discussion and collaboration.

Course content: Digital access to obscure material can make a discipline more accessible and digital tools can enhance content presentation and enable content manipulation. Wikis and blogs are used to build up a knowledge base to supplement course content and follow up on issues raised in class. Cloud storage tools such as Drop box allow students to add course related content to share folders. Course content is also supplemented with online lectures by leading scholars via You Tube.

Relevance: Digital tools and technologies such as Google Drive are used to facilitate project based learning approaches that can empower students, and prepare them for practical, real-world applications. Website building and online communication skills for self-promotion are encouraged.

Learning: The main themes that emerged in relation to the benefits of digital tools and technologies for student learning were reflection, collaboration, engagement and learning style. Blog posts serves as reflective, post-lecture journal entries that are enhanced by student comments and discussion and wikis are used for collaborative work to practice critical thinking and writing skills. 

History As A Field Of Enquiry:

History as a field of enquiry it is starting on the edge of a conceptual precipice. Since popular advent of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s, scholars have been drawing attention to the potentials and pitfalls of electronic resources in historical studies. Seamus Ross has recognized that ‘the growing dependence of society upon digital information will change the fabric of source material available to historians’. For Terry Kunny,” We are moving into in an era where much of what we know today, much of what is coded and written electronically will be lost forever. We are to my mind living in the midst of digital dark ages”. Students studying history at university are now themselves digital born and take for granted that resources and communication not only are, but should be available on line.  

Friendly Tutorials To History Students

• ED Puzzle: Make any video your Lesson

• Assessing student growth with Google forms

• I Civics: A useful technology resource for the social studies classroom

• Educational Technology: Tools, Tutorials and Trails

• How to make an E-book using Google slides

• Google Docs

• Google Classroom

• Info graphics 

• Slack

• Prezi

• Go Class

• Actively Learn

• Book polis

• Windows movie maker

• Desmos Graphic Calculator

• Answer Garden

• Moby Max

• Stick Pick

• Class Dojo-Feed back

• •Brain Breaks

• Socrative

• School logy

• No red ink tutorial

• Today’s Meet 
  
  

Role Of History In Digital Age: 

Most historians are not digital Luddites. Scholars now use atleast some of digital resources, from email and internet to scholarly databases or discussion lists, alongside more traditional sources and methodologies. But for most historians the challenges of the digital age are not ones that are seen to directly concern their research of teaching. History in the digital age aims to engage traditional historians with some of the issues that are irrevocably changing the ways in which we do interact with the past. Digital history is an approach to examining and representing the past that works with the new communication technologies of the computer, the internet network, and software systems. On the one level digital history is an open area of scholarly production and communication, encompassing the development of new course materials and scholarly data collections. On the other hand it is 

a methodological approach framed by the hypertextual power of these technologies to make,define,query, and annotate associations in the human record of the past. 

To do digital history, then is to create a frame work, ontology, through the technology for people to experience, read and follow an argument about a historical problem. In other words digital history is directly engaged with the role new digital technologies can play in presenting and representing the past, both in terms of the utilization of such technologies in scholarship and teaching, but also in considering new methodologies resulting from them. Implicit in this definition is that digital history can frame new types of research question thanks to the unprecedented connectivity and interactivity of the digital age. Digital history is an exciting and forward-thinking field of enquiry, its very concentration on technology and digital tools means that it can be alienating to more traditional historians. The traditional forms of publication in history are suited to the fast-changing discourses of the digital age-demonstrated by the fact that most pure digital history texts tend to be in the form of websites, blogs and online articlesand journals rather than the traditional historical outlet of the monograph. 

Since digital technologies abound, surrounding us in every aspect of life, it can be easy and obvious to focus on these new technologies themselves rather thanthe bigger questions they pose forhistorical thought. Much digital history discusses, quiet rightly, the profound implications of preservation and access but there are also some fundamental issues which are often over looked with regard to the interaction between historians and historical record itself.  New technologies have long suggested new and different ways of exploring the past the print revolution of 19th century saw newly affordable publications claiming they would preserve ‘ the life of the times’ where it contents would serve the future scholar in order to teach him the truth about those that have gone before him. In 1880s the railways, telegraph and telephone had introduced such revolutionary changes to the speed in which communications to place that relations of time and distance had been so affected us to predict a degree of ambiguity will lead to complications in social and commercial affairs to errors in chronology and prove an increasing hindrance to human intercourse. Historians need to be thinking about how to research, write and teach in a world of unheard- of historical abundance and how to avoid future of record scarcity. Such a paradox creates conceptual challenges that where unthought of only few decades ago. For clarity let us list some of these challenges,

The preservation of original hard copy material by digitizing it (scanning , microfilm, photograph , etc., and storing in a database or other digital format)

The preservation of digital born material,(capturing a webpage with all its hyperlinks an interactions, text message , e-mail, a photograph , a word processed document , interactions on a social networking website)

Issues on migrations to the new formats including the rapid obseletion of hardware and software

Public history and public involvement (will the future role of professional historians be increasing public as well as scholarly? Do wikies and blogs and You Tube forms of dissemination help or hinder historical understanding)

Teaching history students about engaging with all of this digital experiences ( this requires a degree of application from historians themselves to value teaching such issues and in some cases , retraining an older generation of historians and educating them about the issues) 

PresentationOfArtifactsAndEvents Learning $ Arguementation Tools:

Recognizing the breath of presentation is separate from having trust worthy evaluation history faculty whose primary tool is archaeology has the ability to write methodological papers for specialist journals. If this patterns extends to digital history one should expect that a few departments will devote significance to the formal; training of digital history technicians , those who have programming skills and some disciplinary history background and that most departments will struggle to evaluate digital history projects except where professional awards clearly convey peer approval.

Tools To Present Artifacts:

The critical traits of an archival resource for historians include custodianship and proper sourcing, and the critical traits of an online presentation of historical artifact

Tools to Present Events:

A second general use of tools for digital history is the presentation of events. Smile tool that has been incorporated in Google docs or the easy timeline markup format for mediawiki software. The construction of historical maps has been an art form for centuries, generally beyond the recognized skill of academic historians. Hyper cities have attracted considerable attention in the few years of its development, because it allows the presentation of data in a form that is attractive, thought-provoking and conceptually simple, with successive layers representing change over time.

Tools for Teaching and Learning:

Classroom-focused digital history projects can encompass an expanded/ enriched textbook, a teaching portal with a rage of resources, or other configurations. The construction of any website around learning is more than the appending of lesson plans to an existing website.

Tools for Argumentation: 

Tools for constructing arguments have begun to catch up with other digital technologies. Blogs have been a tool for short-form argumentation that has made self-publishing of short commentary to individual scholars for more than a decade, but long-form or multimedia arguments have generally required specialized website construction until recently. Some blog tools, such as the Word Press plug-in Digress it, now allow the publication of book-length projects with open commentary as the projects evolve.Omeka is a tool for online public history exhibits discussed earlier.  

Challenges And Reason For Non-Adoption:

1. Digital Literacy

• Low level of digital literacy and lack of digital skills

• It cannot be assume that they are digital natives.

• Plagiarism

• Equality of Internet Access

2. Impact of Learning:

• Increases complexity for new students

• Non-traditional approaches confused them

• While demonstrate competence using software like Power Point and Prezi their
  presentations lack sufficient content and analysis.

3. Student use:

• Lack of genuine motivation

• Wikis stimulate little comment, blogs have suffered from lack of interaction and
  online content is rarely accessed

4. Time and Effort:

• Additional time and effort is required to use digital tools

5. Limited IT training and support

• Require additional training and support

• Use of innovative technologies are being driven by individual academics and attempts to scale up or roll out across the university can be problematic 
  
  

Conclusion:

It seems that the Internet has become the most popular one among all computer based instructional strategies in the history classroom. Berson (1996) asserts one of the major purposes of social studies is to promote effective citizens who possess the critical thinkingand decision making skills to function in a democratic society. It provides a wide variety of sources which represent different points of view. On the other hand other strategies like database development, multimedia, hypermedia, web quest and tele-collaboration also significantly contribute to students critical thinking, problem solving and decision making skills. All computer based instructional strategies somehow reinforce the constructivist classroom environment. However the teachers still not comfortable with applying all or some computer based instructional strategies. In addition there is need for research in the field of social studies particularly how the usage of new and innovative ways of integrating technology into the classroom impacts outcome learning.