Digital Technologies and Pedagogies.

NEW DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES AND MULTIMEDIA ARE TRANSFORMING HOW WE teach and learn. They are transforming our classrooms from spaces of delivery to spaces of active inquiry and authorship. New digital media are empowering students to become researchers, storytellers, historians, oral historians, and cultural theorists in their own right. Whether constructing their own life stories or interpreting the life stories of others, the digital format transforms students' capacity to synthesize, interpret, theorize, and create new cultural and historical knowledge. In this way, digital formats potentially democratize learning and produce critical subjects and authors. The four short essays that follow are snapshots of experiments with new media in our respective classrooms. They were presented at the Annual Meeting of the Oral History Association, in San Diego, California (October 2002), to a standing-room only audience. Tracey Weis' African American History students conduct archival research in Web-based historic sites and repositories, and construct collaborative interpretations in PowerPoint. Through their digital presentations, students become more conscious of, and reflective about, the power and responsibilities of historical synthesis and interpretation. Rina Benmayor incorporates Digital Storytelling in her Latina Life Stories class. Students, the majority of whom are Latina/o, author their own life stories digitally, combining voice, music, and images. Then, they theorize their digital stories, much the way Latina writers have done, exploring how to create new knowledge and theory. Cecilia O'Leary's students construct Digital Histories, many of which are family oral histories. The digital storytelling form authorizes them to lay claim to their own histories, their own voice, and to use primary sources in authoritative ways. Digital history-telling enables students to see themselves as citizen-historians. Bret Eynon works with a predominantly immigrant student body of color. His students conduct oral histories with their peers and develop electronic portfolios, in which hypertext facilitates multifaceted self-representation. The four of us are principal researchers in the Visible Knowledge Project (VKP). Headquartered at Georgetown University (see the site at http://crossroads.georgetown.edu/vkp), VKP is a five-year, multi-million-dollar project involving 70 faculty and 21 college and university campuses nationwide. It is one of the most significant projects in technology and learning, and the largest in the humanities, social sciences, and interdisciplinary culture fields. Through its focus on student learning and faculty development in technology-enhanced environments, faculty investigators are exploring effective pedagogies that incorporate new media technologies. Research projects focus on creating and researching models of teaching and learning that promote distributive learning, authentic tasks, complex inquiry, dialogic learning, constructive learning, public accountability, reflection, and critical thinking. Within VKP, the four of us comprise a Digital Storytelling Affinity Group. Through videoconferencing, we share our work with each other and with other faculty across the country; we discuss pedagogical strategies and tools, give workshops and conference presentations, and co-author articles such as this one. Gaining a Claim on the Past: Novice Historians Tell Stories About Race and Slavery at Our Nation's Historic Sites, by Tracey M. Weis FOR THE PAST FIVE YEARS, I HAVE BEEN INCORPORATING NEW MEDIA RESOURCES AND technologies into my courses. The immediate catalyst for this venture was my participation in the New Media Classroom summer institute, held in July 1997 and sponsored by the American Social History Project. In retrospect, however, this relatively recent innovation in my teaching had its origins in my experiences as a community organizer in the central Appalachian coalfields 20 years ago. …