The Leisurely Historian…

If I jam up your feed reader, sorry about that… I’ve decided to start giving a full-text RSS feed, because apparently, partial content feeds suck.

I know my blog has gone really geeky (well, tech-geeky) of late. It’s the inevitable result of trying to wrap my head around Wordpress, PhP, MySQL, SFTP clients, and about a dozen other things simultaneously; more strictly historical posts will be coming soon. I have a little piece on choice and identity formation in Jacksonian America that’s already in the pipes. (Read: it’s currently sitting in my “drafts” file, needing to be finished and polished up.)

BUT. That said. Another Digital Humanities post.
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National History Day has recently included web sites as an acceptable type of presentation.

Or, I probably should put it, they’ve recently included “web sites” as an acceptable type of presentation. The sites are required to be on a single CD-Rom– something I find somewhat problematic, as it doesn’t allow students to link to outside sources, use APIs or third party hosting… So putting Youtube videos in the site, or using the Google Maps API are out. In forcing the students to create sites that can’t have elements from other sites integrated, you’re taking a step back and forcing them to make very strictly Web 1.0 material. Actually, by creating sites that are completely self-contained– by putting them on CD rather than hosting them online– you’re actually killing part of the point of web 1.0… hypertext should be expansive, not self-contained.

I understand that they’re trying to make the project more inclusive, by removing the barriers presented to poorer students by not forcing them to pay for hosting services… but it kind of defeats the point of making a web page, if you ask me.

But this is all just a digression. National History Day puts together books about each type of presentation, introducing students to best methods, tricks of the trade, how to exploit the medium to its fullest, what have you. A friend of mine is helping to work on the new book for websites. A group of us were sitting around recently, with her, brainstorming about what should or should not be included. How do you explain to an audience of middle and high school students the real potential of digital history– especially with the limitations of making a web site with a limited word count that has to fit on a single disk? How much do you talk about HTML, CSS, etc, or do you assume that they’ll be using WYSIWYG design programs?

When the issue of how much to talk about coding came up, the group was pretty divided. How much can you explain? How rudimentary should you get? Personally, while I thought a “basics” section was relevant and important, I felt that design and theory should take prominence. There’s hundreds of pages offering HTML tutorials and “how to” guides for basic web design.

Moreover, I argued, they already use code. Anyone out there who has a relative in the 12-17 age range can tell you this– look at their MySpace pages. They’re all customized.

Another person in the group interjected: but they just copy and paste that code, for the most part. They’re not producing it. To some extent this is true. But if they’re spending any time on LiveJournal, Xanga, bulletin boards, or even, yes, MySpace, they’re learning the rudiments of HTML. It will look familiar to them.

What’s more important is to teach them what makes a web page look good, what makes it work well, what it does well as far as looking at history. Again, to look at MySpace: the kids are learning some code, but the design and functionality is horrible, and it doesn’t create a narrative. THESE are the skills that are more important to impart.

Of course, I’m not entirely informed on the topic. I keep in touch with a couple of my friends’ teenaged siblings– not surprisingly, via MySpace and Facebook– but it’s not like I hang out with fourteen-year-olds on the regular.

But today I stumbled upon a really cool project that shows how younger students can be engaged with digital scholarship. A teacher who I can only identify as Mr. Armstrong is doing a lot of really impressive stuff with his 8th grade US History class. His students are creating history podcasts, he’s got a class wiki, and the students are blogging class reviews.

The material is impressive. Armstrong makes use of a variety of different online tools available to limit cost and required technical knowledge, and the kids are really running with it.

Pushing thirty, I’m one of the oldest people you’ll meet who really grew up with a computer in the home. My father taught high school computer classes, and we were lucky enough to have one in the house before I began elementary school. I’ve been typing, rather than writing longhand, since I was eight. And there’s a real comfort gap between me and people a couple years older than me, when it comes to computers. Things that are intuitive to me are abstract to many people who are only five or ten years older.

In the next couple years, students are going to start coming into colleges whose parents had AOL before they were born. This new age group has a much higher comfort level with technology and networks. They may not have all the technical know-how, but it’s much less of a steep learning curve for them than it has been for someone like me. They’re going to be comfortable, also, using cheap and free on-and-off-line applications to fill in the gaps of their technical knowledge.

While making sure they get net literacy and the skills to work best with new media is important, I think we need to be a lot more worried that their teachers– unlike Mr. Armstrong– won’t be up to the task than worrying that they can’t figure out how to Google around and find some HTML code.

What does the Leisurely Historian do in his leisure time?

Well, given that I’m a grad student, there’s not a whole lot leisure time, to be honest. I spend most of it feeling guilty that I’m not working or reading.

But over winter break, I finally broke down and did something I’ve been wanting to do for a while. I bought a ukulele. I love the sound, it’s easy to play, it’s compact, the small neck is easy for my somewhat stubby and ungraceful fingers.

Playing the ukulele isn’t like playing guitar, though. There’s not as many people who play it. I have two friends who even own one– one lives over an hour away, in Baltimore, and the other lives in Texas. Lessons are out, too. When was the last time you looked at a bulletin board and saw someone advertising uke lessons?

So, being the nerd that I am, I turned to the internet. And let me tell you, the net is the friendliest place in the world for a fledgling ukulele player. The ukulele lessons on the newly-launched Ukulele Underground are amazingly well-done. Sheep Entertainment’s Ukulele Chord Finder was a godsend. I especially enjoy that the flash program itself can be downloaded onto your computer, so you don’t have to be online to remember what a D# 7sus4 looks like when you come across it in tablature.

There’s the rub, though– tablature. Most tabs you find online are for guitar, which has a different tuning. So my only recourse has been, when I’m not using the (limited, but still quite impressive in their variety) uke tabs on Ukulele Boogalloo, has been to find the guitar tabs, open up the chord finder, and figure it out from there.

Tom Smith, the author of The Let’s Play Ukulele Songbook, has done ukulele novices everywhere a serious solid, though, with his new site Let’s Play Ukulele. This is an inspired use of dynamic website design.

I haven’t bothered to look under the hood, but from what I can tell, the site mostly works to compile things found elsewhere. Guitar tab sheets– which can be found all over the web– are brought in, and (again, from what I can tell) metadata as to the artist, title, and chords used in each song are attached. Image files of the appropriate ukulele fingering for each chord are appended to the top of the file. One can search by song or artist, of course, but that’s too basic.

The really exciting search ability is to search based on the chords you know, so you can find songs that you can play immediately. The results are then ordered by the number of chords per song, so that the simplest songs come first. It’s rather brilliant, a great tool for people who are trying to learn the instrument.

However, the most exciting part is where Tom goes one step further. On the logic that the easiest songs to play are the ones you know, and know well, the site gives you the ability to put in your last.fm username, and provide you automatically with songs you actually listen to– again, in order of ease of play!

To give you some idea how this works, here’s my results page.

It’s certainly not “scholarly,” but I think this is an excellent example of what digital pedagogy is really capable of. Even getting personalized lessons, I wouldn’t be able to find a teacher who would be able to teach exclusively songs that are to my taste. The ability to search, to remix, to deal with large amounts of data, and to do so in a user-friendly, simple interface– this is really an indication of how digital media can be used to individualize, to tailor what we learn and how, to engage students…

It’s still in alpha, and it can be a little buggy, but this site is great, and really instructive. Even if you have no interest in playing the ukulele (though I’d argue you should reconsider that, as well) you should check it out, and play around with it a bit.

Just a couple days after I talked about Open Access book publishing, the incomparable danah boyd, in her blog, calls for the elimination of locked-down academic journals and databases.

I’m all for her idea– after all, we’re all accessing journals electronically at this point anyway, and server space is far cheaper and more flexible than the current publication/database model. I know that some academic libraries– including one of my former institutions– are so cash-strapped that all they can afford to do is maintain their database subscriptions, and have had to put book purchases on hold.

One question I would pose, however: the open-access model works much better going forward, as we look to our next publication. What kind of model can be made to replace or lower barriers to the “backwards-facing” (for lack of a better term) aspect of academic journal databases? Is there any way we can open up access to the vast array of old journal articles that are, to most of us, only accessible via databases like JStor, Ebsco, or Project MUSE?