Teaching Tuesday: Digital Natives, Digital History, and the Public

This semester I am once again running a digital history practicum. The goal of these practica is to introduce graduate students to the digital tools available to produce a digital history “exhibition”. The students who take this course mostly have a strong interest in public history and the exhibits we create tend to represent the public side of the historians’ craft. In 2009, we curated a photography exhibit called Topos/Chora which brought together Ryan Stander’s photographs of our work at the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project with a series of essays. In 2010, we created a online collection of early M.A. theses at the University of North Dakota, many of which contributed to the earliest professional history of the state.  This year, we’re preparing an online collection to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the Chester Fritz Library at the University of North Dakota.

The group of students working on this project include from three Ph.D. students (of various ages and digital literacies from a retired chief petty officer in the US Navy to a student who came directly through our program from undergraduate), a M.A. student, and a senior History major.  In terms of attitude and creativity, this group is a dream team. Moreover, many of them have had course work and real world experience in public history. In terms of experience with even the most basic digital tools, however, these students are far from digital natives. So, we’ve walked relatively slowly through the process of creating a Twitter feed, creating and uploading images to a Flickr account, and the technical aspects of the blogging and creating a collection in Omeka.

The most striking thing about this group, however, is that they have no sense of the pace of the digital world. In short, the students are not digital natives. While technical aspects have required some basic remediation, the students have struggled (at least so far) to recognize how quickly the digital world can move. The pace of content production in the digital world is not quite the same as the pace of production of in the world of paper, interlibrary loans, archives, and polished editing. Blog posts, Twitter feeds, and transmedia spaces like Omeka allow the creation of history in “perpetual beta“.

The Chester Fritz Library (photo: Tim Pasch)

The idea of public history in a digital context goes from history created for a pubic audience or with a public patron or a public goal, to history as a process made public. The editing, compiling, writing, thinking of historians laid bare before the public eye and, in the best situations, opened to public participation (the idea of public remixing or even public creation of historical narratives as well as content).

So with our project in very early beta, here are the component parts:

The Fritz at 50 Blog.

The Fritz at 50 Twitter Feed.

The Fritz at 50 on Flickr.

The Fritz at 50 on Omeka.

We’ll have them together in one place soon, but in the meantime, follow us on Twitter and check out our blog and watch our digital immigrants construct a public history (in public) of one of the most important institutions on any campus the Library.