Tiki-Toki Trials, Tribulations and Triumphs

For the past month I have been slowly working away at my final Digital Public History project. It has been a frustrating but rewarding journey learning to use the timeline tool called Tiki-Toki. Making a timeline was actually one of my last choices in platforms that I considered using for the project as I thought the timeline would be easy and straightforward. I was wrong. For those wanting to jump straight to the project and take a look, click here to learn about beauty and makeup throughout the decades.

When originally starting this project, I had several ideas of what I wanted to do. At first, I thought about making a podcast series since I really enjoyed making the last podcast project. I thought about doing various popular music artists through the decades and how their songs connected into events going on around them, or what influenced them to make the music they did. For example, Nina Simone got very involved with the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s and her music from that time largely reflects her work as an activist. I still really like this idea and think it would be interesting, however, for the project I wanted to try something totally new and so I decided to go in a different direction.

After much thought, I decided I wanted to make an online exhibit of the use, development and implications of makeup from the Victorian era up to modern times. Similar to the idea of music artists, I wanted to show how the absence or use of makeup and the ways in which it was applied reflected larger changes in the world. Since makeup trends tend to happen over time by decade and not necessarily by specific dates, I figured an online exhibit would work best. I would have images of advertisements or objects and next to them information about the time period, trends, new innovations etc.

This is where I ran into my first problem as there are not many options for free online exhibit makers. Omeka is one of the only online tools for exhibit creations out there that is offered for free. It is a bit complicated to get the hang of and with the free version you only have three template options. The template options really didn’t suit the look I was going for and I quickly realized I did not want to use omeka for the project. The other option readily available for online exhibit creation is to make a WordPress website. Again, I wanted to try something new and so decided against WordPress.

After a lot of online searching and signing up for random websites, I came back to a site called Tiki-Toki. While I was not thrilled with the idea of doing a timeline, it was the only site that really let me customize the colours and appearance of my project which was one of my main concerns. I figure a project based on beauty and makeup should have a colour scheme and look that match accordingly. In the end, this tool was much more frustrating and difficult to use than I had anticipated. It took many hours of fiddling with the settings, understanding how to link photographs in so that they would show up properly (if at all), the right amount of zoom so that only the year would appear in the date area and not months and a host of other concerns.

Once I got the hang of the settings and worked through the frustration, the website was actually simple and user friendly. The next and most difficult part of the project was combing through large amounts of information to find things that would fit into specific date ranges. I had several sources which were all organized by decade and so I assumed it would make inputting information into the timeline fairly straightforward. Again, I was wrong on this. Though the books are all organized by decade, they do in fact jump around a lot. They also tend to go by swaths of time and so finding something for a particular time took lots of searching and patience as I wanted it to resemble larger trends of the decades or be indicative of something important happening on a larger scale. The photographs that are attached to each story blurb also took lots of searching. Some images were easy to track down and use while others took literally hours of googling to find. I did not want the images I was using to be pulled straight from google search as it is nearly impossible to trace it back to the original source, nor can the description of the photograph be verified. For example, a simple search for a makeup ad will bring up tons of options, but you can’t tell where that advert came from, what time period it was or if the description is actually accurate at all. Therefore I used a lot of photographs from Getty Images as well as the Advertising Archives which were great despite having a watermark on them which is a little frustrating.

All in all, this was a fun and interesting project and I am really happy with the outcome. While I have only currently completed the timeline up to the 1950s (as I have said, it turned out to be much more time consuming and labour intensive than I imagined), I am hoping to get the rest completed sometime over the holidays so it goes up to the 1990s and I can say I have a fully completed project.

As it is the end of term (yay, I survived!), there will a rather long and restful radio silence so stay tuned in the new year. Wishing everyone a safe and happy holidays!

 

 

 

 

Writer’s Block at its Finest

Lately I have been having a case of writer’s block. I have been working on the same projects for quite a while and have come up blank with topics to actually blog about, hence the long radio silence. So, after watching a couple movies history related over the weekend, I have decided to go back to a topic we discussed in class a few weeks ago: are movies and games a good way to learn about history? Do inaccuracies matter?

In class, there was no clear cut agreement one way or the other though the general consensus seemed to be that if the movie, tv show or game was the only way a person was getting involved with history, then maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing. It also seemed to be that the majority of the class felt video games were much less likely to be a learning experience than movies as they have set outcomes, are always from one perspective or side, and do not really give you any broader context. For example, in video games based on war, the most that someone tends to learn about the actual event are what military strategies and weapons were used. This is not bad in itself, but it is a very basic and detached form of learning and one learns more about weapons than actual historical events or movements. Movies on the other hand, though often inaccurate, have the ability to impart historical knowledge, get a person interested in history in ways they may not have before, make historical events more accessible to the average person who does not study it and may teach someone a thing they did not know about prior to watching.

The movie that made me ponder this question, of the validity of fictional (or ‘based on a true story’) historical movies, was Their Finest. It’s set in 1940 during the Second World War and is adapted from the book Their Finest Hour and A Half  by Lissa Evans. The plot as given by IMDB is as follows:

“During the London Blitz of World War II, Catrin Cole is recruited by the British Ministry of Information to write scripts for propaganda films that the public will actually watch without scoffing. In the line of her new duties, Cole investigates the story of two young women who supposedly piloted a boat in the Dunkirk Evacuation. Although it proved a complete misapprehension, the story becomes the basis for a fictional film with some possible appeal. As Cole labors to write the script with her new colleagues such as Tom Buckley, veteran actor Ambrose Hilliard must accept that his days as a leading man are over as he joins the project. Together, this disparate trio must struggle against such complications such as sexism against Cole, jealous relatives, and political interference in their artistic decisions even as London endures the bombs of the enemy. In the face of those challenges, they share a hope to contribute something meaningful in this time of war and in their own lives.”

Personally, I loved this movie. Was it historically accurate? Yes and no. The life of Catrin Cole was not based on true events as far as I can gather but the costumes, emotions, trials and tribulations of the time period were all accurate and relevant. This includes sexism, filming, the fear of war and much more.

Having studied history I know the sexism women have faced in the past, and not necessarily in a vague ‘it happened’ way, but in more specific ways. For example, in the Victorian Era (1837 – 1901), the rise of sexologists (doctors/psychologists who studied female and male sex and sexuality) meant that doctors began to study the male and female body as separate entities. Prior to this, Christian belief dominated ideas of sex i.e. that Eve was made from Adam’s rib and therefore women were just inferior versions of men who had essentially the same sexual organs, just inverted inside their bodies (reading into this, women are a lesser version of man and are not well equipped to handle the difficulties of the world). With the rise of sexology, women and their organs were actually studied, and the parts of the female body labelled for the first time. Essentially, what sexologists did was say that the female was opposite but complementary to the male. That where men were cool, rational and well equipped for the public world, women were therefore weak, hot headed, emotional and fragile. Their female organs were the cause of their hysteria and women should not be educated or present in the public sphere as it would excite them too much. The long held ideas about the wayward and fragile state of females was now grounded in ‘scientific’ knowledge, giving it validity in the eyes of many. Today, we are still working to reverse these long held beliefs that women are ill equipped to handle the difficulties of the workforce, to not be seen as emotional or bossy when we have an opinion or are angry about something etc.

What I am getting to, in a very long way, is that the movie Their Finest did a marvelous job at showing the sexism women faced. There was a line in the movie that particularly stuck with me and was said by a female supervisor to the main character Catrine Cole, “A lot of men are scared we won’t go back into our boxes when this is all over – it makes them belligerent.” Other memorable moments include Catrin being told that obviously she couldn’t be paid the same amount as the chaps. That she was blatantly ignored when she tried to make a constructive comment to a male actor. When she was told that she should just go and be ‘feminine’ and tidy the office after getting in an argument with a fellow screenwriter because she wanted to feature two women as the heros which started a very long argument about how no one wanted to see women playing a man’s role, and that the heroic soldier had to be the saviour. The list really goes on and on, and though the main character did win small victories throughout the film, she had to constantly prove herself worthy despite a track record of having great and successful ideas.

Perhaps this is not shocking to me, but to someone that does not have a background in the ways in which sexism was obvious and blatant not so long ago, it may be an eyeopener. Especially in a time where we are seeing a resurgence of women’s rights activism in the face of a changing political climate. Many of the issues Catrin faced are not far off from what women face still today, just in less obvious ways.

Something else I learned, and many others probably learned, was the importance morale films had as a matter or national security. They were so important in the face of potentially losing the war and were something that people would go and see several times over to boost their spirits and provide an escape from the horrors of their everyday life. I had also never really imagined what filming was like at that time. They show the characters actually filming the movie with the cues for sound effects that would be added in, the clear board with drawings of ships they use so that when filming, ships look off in the distance (and are actually somewhat convincing in the final outcome) and the pool of water they use for the boat scenes. It was surprisingly interesting for me. Finally, you could really sympathize with the fear people must have had while the blitz was raging. Having to stay in underground tube stations all night listening to bombs above. At one point, Catrin stays late to work on a scene for the movie and hears bombings happening all around her while doing so. In the early hours of the morning she heads home only to find it had been hit and was now a pile of rubble. There were people at the site who were searching for her body, assuming it was under the rubble. You could empathize with the character and understand that that same situation happened to thousands of people who were not so lucky to have been out of the house when it happened, or who went out only to come home to nothing.

So do movies really need to be accurate to impart knowledge? No. I do have issues if it is based on an important event and the facts are so far from the truth that it leaves people having completely false ideas, but if the movie attempts to accurately show the time period with a few alterations for storytelling purposes is that so wrong? I thin not.  Watching historical movies allows you to witness particularly horrible parts of the past in a safe and interesting way. It allows a glimpse of the way humans used to live in a visual medium that things such as books or podcasts are unable to do. So, if you haven’t seen Their Finest, I would highly recommend! It has a very sudden and heart wrenching plot twist as well, if that peaks your interest.

And the Adventure Continues

 Well, safe to say grad school is challenging. There aren’t enough hours in the day lately with the various projects, volunteering, TA duties, readings, internship research, essays and classes. When one thing is finished another starts and three more are already in progress. But I suppose that’s the point. Learning to juggle a heavier workload and use programs and methods you’ve never encountered before. 

This was exemplified in our project which was handed in this morning and will be tested this afternoon on a group of undergraduate students. Our Public History class was tasked with making a walking tour in downtown London, ON. Our topic was the police force in London and it had to be 1 hour in length with various stops. The twist was that we needed to use a new application called Blippar. 

What I have learned from this experience is that working in one large group of 13 students who are all smart and opinionated is really quite difficult. Working in any group that size can rarely be easy. Coordinating that many people in a short amount of time took some work, however, once the tour stops were decided upon and delegated to individuals, the project really came together.

We all separated into groups of two, each group having a particular stop to research and record an audio clip for. Then, we had one member who was essentially our coordinator  map out our stops, compile our references and create a poster template which we would use to mark our stops. The posters all looked great and looked uniform in design and everyone simply had to change the stop number in the corner, add their own title and the photograph they wished to use as the center display and marker for Blippar. Then, in Blippar, we were able to use our stop’s central photograph as a marker and attach a soundcloud link to it which held the audio recording for the tour stop. Once it went ‘live’, someone with the Blippar app could scan the photograph and the link to soundcloud would pop up. They then just have to click the link and it takes them to the corresponding sound clip that plays the information for the stop.  

It sounds a bit confusing and creating the ‘Blip’ was definitely a learning curve but the finished product should ~hopefully~ go something like this: the tour group starts at stop #1 and scans the photograph on the poster, they then hear an audio track with an introduction to the tour and some information about the stop they are at. After that they head to the next stop on their map and repeat the process. Simple. 

Hopefully all worked as it was supposed to and I look forward to hearing how it all went and what the group thought about it. 

I had never heard of Blippar or augmented reality before doing this project but I can now see it implications and potential uses for museums and education purposes. While working on this walking tour I envisioned a museum exhibit with marked photographs and objects connected to Blippar or a similar app. You see one thing in particular you like or find interesting and you simply scan it to be taken to video or audio clips, some extra information or web pages you might like.  

After pondering on this, I did a quick google search and, not surprisingly, there are several large museums who have started using augmented reality for these purposes  (you can find a list in this article). The National Museum of Singapore has a neat flora and fauna exhibit which, similar to Pokemon Go, tells you what species are nearby. When you use the app to capture a photo of a species, it adds it to a collection which you can later go back and look through to learn some more information about the plants. 

The “Story of the Forest Art Installation” (Choo Yut Shing)

Another neat example is the Heroes and Legends complex at the Kennedy Space Center which explores and celebrates the men and women of America’s fledgling space program. They have added interactive pieces throughout the building so that, by scanning things with an app, you can hear NASA legends tell their stories. 

Art galleries have also been increasingly using augmented reality to bring life to artwork. 

 

As the video states, augmented reality seems to be where the future is headed. Anything from artwork to advertising can make use of these tools, but this also begs the question as to how much technology is too much?

I am a big fan of AR being used in museums to make them more interactive for younger audiences and those who like having the choice of finding out more and seeing what is hidden in plain sight. For those who prefer the traditional museum experience, they can easily choose not to engage with the digital app. At the same time, I have also heard arguments that being attached to a phone or tablet takes away from the learning experiences that a museum has to offer. That by looking at a screen instead of the actual items in front of you, you are not really gaining anything and are more involved with an app than the visit itself. 

To that I would say that digital experiences are where the majority of the world is heading. For those museums or museum goers who do not wish to take part, that is their choice. For those who want to make use of this new tool to bring in more visitors and to add to the complexity of the museum itself, then by all means. 

Digital apps do not work for everyone or every venue, but if it does for some than it can make for a fascinating and different experience. In particular, an experience not easily had at home and with the added bonus of learning a few things along the way.   

Pondering on Podcasts

As was mentioned in my previous post, last week I finished up and submitted my very first podcast for my course Digital Public History (listen to it here!). What seemed very daunting at first turned out to be quite an enjoyable experience. I had it in my mind that the hardest part of the project would be all of the recording, editing and figuring out how to actually use the program Audacity. What actually turned out to be the most difficult part of the whole process was coming up with the topic. Once I had the topic chosen it was smooth sailing.

Prior to choosing paris in the jazz age as my subject, I had thought to discuss morphine during the Victorian era in England. I vaguely knew that it was sold to the general public in the form of pills until the introduction of  a more pure form that could be injected using the new hypodermic syringe. I was hoping to uncover the relationship society and the medical community had with morphine as I remember reading (or watching a documentary) somewhere that there was a large portion of Victorian society who were either addicted to morphine or took it recreationally. I still think it would be an interesting topic to look into but as I started to read articles, I quickly realized that with the time constraints I had, it would be incredibly difficult to research, write and record something on a topic I knew nothing about. So with that in mind, I took another approach. I decided to go through essays I wrote in the past to find a topic that could make for an interesting podcast. Something that I had at least some prior research and understanding on.

Paris seemed like the perfect topic once I found the essay I wrote while studying in England. Not only do I love music in general, but I had taken a history of Paris course and visited the city twice while abroad. In short, I fell in love with Paris when I visited and so writing a script and finding the music for a podcast immediately went from stressful and tedious to interesting and fun.

Personally, I don’t really listen to podcasts unless I’m really having trouble sleeping. I find that I tend to zone out and miss what the person is actually saying even if I find the topic interesting. In class, we were told to make a podcast that we would actually want to listen to. Challenge accepted.

Choosing to do the jazz age became not only interesting, but I now had the perfect premise for adding in sound clips and music to make my podcast more entertaining and attention grabbing. I could break up long bits of talking with the relevant music or voice clips so that there would be a change of pace and, for those who are interested in old timey music, examples of the things I was speaking about like Josephine Baker’s first hit song J’ai Deux Amours where she is singing and not just dancing.

After writing the script, it was time to start recording. This was made easy for me because I already own a fairly good recording microphone that my parents had bought as a gift many years ago. Since I love to sing and play guitar, I have already played around (albeit only a little) with using the recording mic and Audacity, so when it came time to record I simply plugged the mic in and set about reading my script in small sections. I then found the music and voice clips that would best match via youtube and imported them into the program and placed them where I wanted piece by piece. Once everything was in its place, I played around with fading the music and clips in and out and moving them around until I was satisfied.

The very first thing I noticed with my clips is that because my speech was recorded in sections and the music came from different sources, they tended not to be the same volumes. One section would sound fine and then the next might be too loud or too soft. So I went to my trusty source Google to find some answers. After a quick look at tutorials on Youtube, it was an easy fix to change the volumes of the clips. Under the Edit tab there is a button that says ‘Amplify’. When I was first playing around with the program I assumed this would only make clips louder, but it turns out you can make them softer as well.

After I had all the sound and speech clips I wanted and they were all blended together nicely, the last item on the list was to edit out the little extra sounds. I found that aside from a few mic bumps, the sounds that were the most annoying to me were the big breaths of air before starting new sentences. So I went through and was able to silence them all. It is easier than it sounds because after the first few, you don’t even need to listen to the clips to spot them. Since Audacity is set up to show the actual sound waves or your recordings, you start to recognize what the breath before the sentence looks like and simply highlight and silence it. When all was said and done, I uploaded it to the PubHistoryPod Soundcloud page for the class (and whomever else!) to listen to.

All in all I enjoyed this project much more than I anticipated and am glad that it was assigned. I always vaguely knew how to use Audacity but now I know a bit more than just the basics. I also learned that it isn’t all that hard to make a simple podcast and this could be a very useful skill set to have for the future. Hopefully I get around the making another one in the near future, but for now the jazzy sounds of the Roaring Twenties will have to do!   

 

An Update

Things have settled down a little bit (finally) so here is a quick update on what’s been happening over the last two weeks.

I have begun research for my heritage designation project in which I have to research a house I have chosen in the area, and make a case for whether it should or should not be designated as a heritage home. The criteria for designating a home are 1) Physical or Design Value, 2) Historical or Associative Value and 3) Contextual Value. So far my research has told me that the home changed hands many times. The only resident who remained for more than a few years having stayed 20. The house was constructed in 1907 and completed in 1908. I have yet to determine what type of architecture style the house is and so that will be my next avenue of research. Though this does not seem like a lot of information, it took three days of sifting through London City Directories both in book and microfilm format from 2013 back to 1907 to figure out who lived there (in case anyone was of historical importance) and what year the home was built. I also went through the city’s fire insurance plans to determine if any additions had been made to the house. Then, on Tuesday, my class and I met with a local painting group who are painting some of our houses,to discuss what our research findings were. It has been a bit of tedious project thus far but I am interested to see what information will come to light in the future!

This week we also had the opportunity to go to the Goodman Lecture series to hear historian Charlotte Gray speak about popular history. The Goodman Lecture series is an annual event in which the University of Western Ontario invites a distinguished historian to present three public lectures to students, faculty and the community. Charlotte Gray is one of Canada’s best known popular historians and writer of acclaimed literary non-fiction. Her lectures explored the appeal of popular history to the public and how there can be both constructive and contentious relationships between successful popular historians and academic, university based historians. As an emerging public historian, it was very interesting to hear her thoughts on history in today’s world and its ever changing role.

Meanwhile, in Digital History, our class has been busy working away on our podcasts. I have just completed mine this morning and am quite proud of it. When it gets closer to the due date, I will post a copy and my thoughts on the process, so stay tuned! In class this week, we discussed the concept of video games that make use of history such as the release of the new Call of Duty game which will be set in WWII. Since I don’t have any background in playing these games it is difficult to make any statements on whether they are good or bad. Video games (as well as movies and books) that use history can be very inaccurate and so many find issue with the bending and changing of important events.  I will say however, that one thing I personally think would be interesting would be to see a game that employed history without it being war related. Most say that this isn’t possible but I’m not sure that anyone has actually even tried to create something of this nature so who knows.

As I said, this would be a quick update so that’s it for now!

Julia

Doors Open London Meets #MuseumHack ft. The Great Canadian Roadshow

You know it was a crazy weekend when your first chance to sit down and blog is on Tuesday. This past weekend was Doors Open London, an event in which various museum and heritage sites across London, Ontario open their doors to the public free of charge. This year was especially unique because a new and exciting program was brought in all the way from New York City. Museum Hack is a third party company that ‘hacks’ museums and brings in their own quirky and unconventional tours. With their own set of guides who often have some sort of background in performance, these tours feature the unkown highlights, their favourite interesting artifacts, strange and funny stories and ultimately bring a whole new spin to the world of museums. They first began these tours at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and since then have spread to San Francisco, Washington, DC, Chicago, Las Angeles and Philadelphia. With raving reviews on trip advisor and proven success in their numbers, we were all intrigued to see how this company would swoop in and take over our museums in just a matter of days.

It all began on Friday when many of us from the public history class attended a seminar that detailed what the program was all about, its success rates and a time to ask questions. It was an interesting talk and got me more excited for the program than the online videos had. Museum Hack is aimed at millennials, and being a millennial myself I could easily see how this type of tour would appeal to both me, the museum lover, and others who are not so much interested long historical tours. Museum Hack is almost wholly geared towards a younger audience though it can also appeal to older folks so long as they understand that this is no conventional tour (profanity and all) and are okay with that. After the seminar we all headed over to a local pub to have drinks and network.

Fast forward to Sunday (I will come back to Saturday at the Great Canadian Roadshow so bear with me) and I got to see Museum Hack in action. I was fairly sceptical about this program arriving in London simply because it is made for large museums with thousands of artefacts and hundreds of rooms to explore. The venues in London are mostly smaller historic houses and small to mid sized museums, which makes it more difficult to find hidden back stories or little known artefacts.

I was stationed at Banting House, the home where Sir Frederick Banting came up with the idea for insulin and saved millions of lives. This also happens to be where I am volunteering this semester and doing my Research Assistantship come the winter term. I was impressed by how well the program went. On one hand, there were several things that I thought should have been done differently but at the same time the guide utilized ideas that one would not normally see in a museum setting. Things such as the pace of the tour, its accessible content, volume levels and interactive games were a refreshing addition. To say the least, it was a learning experience. There are many things that I will be altering in order to make my own version of ‘museum hack’ for a potential fundraising event, but several ideas that I will make use of to change up the traditional tour. My aim will be to have a more interactive and engaging tour but somehow keep it enjoyable for the more traditional museum goers (who had the most issue with these new loud, profane and fast paced tours).  All in all it was a great learning opportunity and a fun way to get to know more about Sir Frederick Banting and his commemorative site which I will be spending so much time at this year.

 

Backtracking to Saturday, I spent the day volunteering with the Great Canadian Roadshow. A travelling group that does free appraisals of your personal antiques and, if worth some money, will offer to buy the item from you and then post it to their online database of private collectors. What I had originally thought was going to be a day of sitting at a desk or directing people to registration, soon turned into my colleague Brooke and I being thrown into the world of antiques. We had the opportunity to listen in to appraisal sessions, attempt to actually appraise some furniture from the 1930s, sit in on various workshops (and take part in them) and had the opportunity to really talk with the organizers of the event and hear their perspectives on the field. Having always loved antiques and antique stores, this was an awesome experience for me.

 

 

All in all it was a crazy and hectic weekend but worth all of the lost sleep and what will inevitably be a week’s worth of late nights trying to catch up on actual school projects.

Monument Conservation

After five years of undergraduate study, I finally got my hands on some physical history. This past friday (September 15th, 2017) myself and fellow public history crew got to spend some time digging in the dirt. What did we unearth? Beautiful tombstones from the late 1800s. As part of a learning initiative and to get some hands on experience, we got to take part in a monument conservation workshop at Woodland Cemetery. We spent the morning learning about different kinds of monuments, the proper (and improper) ways of restoring tombstones, materials you would normally use and important facts about the tombstones and mausoleums that can be found in the cemetery. In the afternoon we got to test out some of our knowledge by unearthing stones located in the far back corner of the cemetery. I felt like an amateur archeologist for the day and had a great time to say the least!

 

The Digital Classroom

Recently during my Digital History class, we discussed the concept of having digital media and technology in both the classroom and museums. The message that I got from the articles we read and discussed was that there really is no consensus on whether technology has aided or taken away from the learning environment. On one hand digital technology has made access to information easier, faster and more efficient. Those who have grown up with this information technology (often referred to as ‘digital natives’ or those born after the 1980s) tend to be fairly adept at learning to use this technology somewhat quickly and without much difficulty depending on the program they are trying to use. On the other hand, many would argue that the majority of these emergent technologies such as social media sites Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram, have led to a generation who are constantly distracted, unhappy and obsessed with their phones. So much so that they are taking away from their learning environments and therefore should leave technology out of the classroom.

There are many directions I could take with this topic and refer to all of the articles we read and the many subjects they covered. However, since this is a personal blog, I am going to share my general thoughts from my own perspective as a student and a millennial with regards to technology in the classroom.

Being in history and being lucky enough to have almost always had good professors, I do not have anything against powerpoint. But the number one complaint I have heard from other students in various disciplines is that professors now tend to simply read their powerpoint slides verbatim to the class. What’s more is many of them will also post these slides online afterwards. So students wonder why they should even bother going to the class if they are not actually being taught anything, and can self teach from the comfort of their own home. They often feel it is a waste of their money and that instead of paying for an education, they are simply paying for a final grade. Yet the topic of technology in the classroom almost always rests on students. That students are constantly on their phones and surfing the web when in class. While I do not disagree with this, the conversation of technology in the classroom should go both ways. Powerpoint can be a great tool, and better than older methods of chalkboard writing and overhead slides, but this reliance on technology by many academics has taken out the aspect of actually teaching and engaging with the students. As Jeffrey Young discusses in his article “When Computers Leave the Classrooms, So Does Boredom” he not only says professors should start ditching the powerpoint (or at least not rely on it so heavily), but also addresses the fact that what students tend to remember about their education is the times they were engaged in challenging debates and conversations and when they were able to think, learn and get excited about their subject. On this, I wholly agree. My favourite experiences in university were during discussions and seminars that happened in or around lectures. Not the lectures themselves.

While some students might avoid actually having to participate in classrooms, these are also the ones that tend not to be engaged no matter what format the class takes. Not everyone will be interested in every course and all subject matter and that is just a fact of life. But for those who are, there should be a larger effort to engage and challenge in the university setting especially for those in first and second year courses (though I admit this is difficult with large numbers of students).

From a personal learning perspective, I have had lectures both with and without powerpoint slides and all in all, it is the manner that the lecture is given, the amount of engagement and whether or not the professor actually wants to be there that makes or breaks the class. If there are no slides and the lecturer speaks quickly and uses complicated words, names and concepts that can’t be easily written down, then it is more difficult to learn. You get stressed out about keeping up and trying to figure out what to write down and in the end you completely miss absorbing and understanding the information. On the other hand, if there are no slides but the lecturer is taking care to reiterate important points, stop for any questions and write down names that may be difficult to spell or understand, then it almost always makes for a more engaging lecture. Powerpoints can be great for visual cues, to show what monuments or places look like or to add some audio visual stimulation to break up long periods of sitting and constantly writing or typing notes. On the whole, I do not dislike powerpoint. I dislike when it is used as a crutch and makes students feel as though they are spending thousands of dollars to sit and read slides.

On the other hand, there are many complaints that students are increasingly on their phone or laptop during class time but not for class purposes. On the whole, if they feel the class is boring then yes they will look to other media outlets. Some students simply went to college or university to get a degree they think they are supposed to have and don’t actually want to be there. This is just another fact of university and must be accepted. But the more engaging the content, the less likely students will be texting and scrolling. More recently, there have been further debates over whether laptops should be allowed in the classrooms at all. Some professors have moved to banning them in their lectures completely.

I understand that laptops can be distracting and that many times students use them for non lecture related purposes but I have a few problems with banning them from the classroom. The first being that we students are paying thousands of dollars and going into debt to attend the university and I believe that if we wish to use a laptop, then we should be able to whether it is for learning or not. We pay tuition so the professor can teach us and many of us find that using a laptop for notes is the best and easiest way to do so, especially if the professor is not going to post any slides or notes online. Why should all students in a class be penalized for something they may not even be doing when they are paying for their own education? Let those who wish to use their laptops for other purposes do so. If they fail the course it is on them and it is their own money and time that they have wasted. Personally, being able to use my laptop for note taking has completely changed my learning experience. I have always been a slow writer (and had difficulty learning how to write as a child) as well as have difficulty listening, writing and processing information all at the same time. Yet I am a fast typer and can do it mindlessly so that I am actually engaged with the information being taught, instead of stressed about keeping up and not missing important details. If laptops were to be completely banned because some students didn’t use them wisely it would severely affect my learning. Furthermore, there have been countless times where I either missed a name, concept or am not familiar with a major event and have easily been able to google it quickly while in lecture so that I do not get lost or confused. While I would like to say I am fearless in raising my hand and asking a potentially dumb question in front of all my peers, I am not.

So what other kinds of digital media are being used in the classroom? In my personal experience, not much. Perhaps in other classrooms there is more use being made of online lectures, podcasts, games and the like. I have heard from others that in elementary schools they use IPads, no longer learn to write cursive and are increasingly relying on digital technology for every aspect of learning. To these matters I cannot speak as I do not have any personal experience and one thing I find common in articles I have read, is that many wish to blanket statement ‘millennials’ in all sorts of ways. We are always on technology but don’t use it wisely, we tend not to have adequate social skills anymore, we either work too hard and are obsessed with money or aren’t trying enough because we live with our parents (the list goes on). So I will not attempt to make generalized statements about media use in other areas and generations until I actually have some first hand experience.

What I intended to be a short blog on the digital classroom has turned into a long ramble, but I hope it has left some food for thought on this increasingly important and prominent issue that has been cropping up in our ways of teaching and educating. Maybe low tech classrooms will be the way to go in an increasingly technological world.

 

New Beginnings

As a recent graduate of Carleton University with a B.A. Honours in History and minor in Philosophy, I am beginning a new journey into the domain of graduate studies. To say my first week at the University of Western was busy is an understatement. Moving to a new city, attending a new and unfamiliar school

and coping with the many demands I know grad school will bring has been overwhelming. With that being said, I am excited to discover what the world of public history has to offer me. So what exactly is public history? This is the question I am often confronted with when trying to explain my program to almost anyone who asks. Well, according to the National Council on Public History, it is history that can be applied to the real world, often outside of academia. Public historians strive to make history relevant, useful and accessible to the public sphere. There is no ‘one shoe fits’ when it comes to the career paths that public historians may pursue. They can be archivists, oral historians, curators, film and media producers, historical interpreters, historic preservationists, policy advisors and museum professionals just to name a few.

 

This brings me to the next major question I am frequently asked. What do you want to do with a Masters in Public History? The very simple and often disappointing answer to this is “I don’t know”. While I may not have a career path set in stone yet, I know that this is my field of interest and a journey that is worth putting my time, effort and passion into. The reason I chose Western’s program was to give me the broadest possible scope of experiences. It is difficult to decide what career path you want to pursue when you haven’t actually tried very much. I have some experience with archiving, researching, and exhibit preparation which I enjoyed immensely. Things that are completely new to me include digital history, oral history, heritage designations and the list goes on. So please join me on this public history adventure as I learn what it really means to practice public history. I will share my experiences, excitement and successes but also my frustrations, failures and disappointments.  The first of which was creating this blog.

 

Digital history (and social media aside from the basics) is all very new to me despite growing up in an increasingly digital age. While I am able to sort out the basics, changing themes, headings, linking to various webpages and social media platforms is proving to be time consuming and frustrating. This is perhaps what I am most apprehensive about in regards to the entire program. Archiving, writing, researching etc. are all things I can grasp and adapt to. Learning to edit audio recordings, creating podcasts, using GIS software and again, the list goes on, are things that I have no background in whatsoever. I can already tell that this will be my greatest challenge in the months to come, but will also likely be my greatest reward.

 

As the year progresses I will update this blog with the various projects and assignments I’m working on, interesting things I have found or read, my thoughts on conferences and lectures and all things public history related. So bear with me as I iron out the kinks of my blog and come along for the journey!