I decided to interview Dr. Tona Hangen, Assistant Professor at Worcester State University, a small public school in Massachusetts. According to Dr. Hangen, Worcester State University only has a small library and the students do not have access to archival materials on campus. It was her students’ inability to access the “raw materials of history” that prompted Dr. Hangen to create a digital environment that would allow her students to utilize real historical sources. She explained that print journals and even books are increasingly accessed via digital media; however, she also explained the need for students and historians to be able to access primary sources, secondary sources, and academic conversations.
Dr. Hangen strives to build assignments around digital resources so that her students learn to navigate around the digital world while mastering their historical content. Just as students must transform “from readers to makers of history” in the traditional classroom, Dr. Hangen hopes her students will “recognize digital material and use it as a legitimate source to recreate history.” In order to ensure her students utilize reliable digital sources, she teaches her students to recognize markers of authenticity online. In her freshmen courses, she has her students deconstruct a Wikipedia entry in its entirety to help them realize what really exists online and learn about what is going on behind the scenes. After her students deconstruct Wikipedia entries, they realize the importance of “reading Wikipedia from the bottom up” in order judge the entry’s authenticity based upon the sources used to create the entry.
After beginning teaching at Worcester State University, Dr. Hangen was perplexed with a question, “How can I get my students interested in what I do and get them involved in the world they live in?” She was able to make her dreams a reality when she created Digital Worcester, an online archive. Digital Worcester began as individual student projects on the post-industrial city of Worcester, Massachusetts. Dr. Hangen wanted to accumulate an archive of her student’s projects online, in order to preserve them instead of simply writing a paper and keeping it on file. Moreover, Dr. Hangen wanted future students, as well as members of the community and interested historians, to be able to access the information. Over time, Digital Worcester has evolved into a database combined with richer information, as around two hundred students’ projects have been added to date. Of utmost importance to Dr. Hangen, Digital Worcester “allows her students to engage with the world around them and learn” history in a digital age.
Another way Dr. Hangen engages her students in the classroom is by using GoogleMaps, GoogleDocs and other Google sites. As the Assistant Director of the Honors Program at Worcester State University, she utilizes GoogleDocs to create and disseminate surveys and forms. GoogleSpreadsheets helps her to manage the Honors Program as well as her many classes. She often schedules “workshop days” in her classes where everyone brings their laptops or tablets to collaboratively create and edit projects. Dr. Hangen also uses WikiSpaces to enhance her students’ learning through discovery, something her students respond very well to. Dr. Hangen clearly understands that students work best when they find the activities to be relevant to their own lives, something she demonstrates in the fact that she implements numerous digital aspects in her classroom.
With all of the technology Dr. Hangen implements, I assumed she must have had intense technological training while in school; however, I assumed wrong. Dr. Hangen had “almost no technological training” besides “reading and writing blogs” before teaching. She began working with the Omeka site shortly after starting to teach. While working with the Omeka site, she began coding through experimentation. She said that “working online is really a learning by doing experience,” that is to say, experimenting through trial and error. Dr. Hangen said one of the greatest benefits of the digital humanities is that “you must build things and experiment [by] getting your hands dirty.” The digital humanities are uncommercialized and they encourage collaboration on all academic levels. Keeping in line with the ethics of the digital humanities, Dr. Hangen is devoted to maintaining open resources for the online community of historians. I found it inspiring that Dr. Hangen taught herself how to work in the increasingly digital world, all the while ensuring the newfound information was implemented in her classroom.
As far as advice for a future educator hoping to utilize the digital world to liven history up, Dr. Hangen said “don’t be afraid to experiment,” “don’t just take the safe route,” and that “it is really a good thing to try new things, anything to enhance the learning environment is a good thing.” She also said that the most essential thing for effective teaching is to read about what actually works by combing through online blogs and archives. Moreover, Dr. Hangen said that “deep learning necessitates action and ownership!” Her work is truly an inspiration, an illustration of how a teacher who cares can truly impact their students by making history accessible through online networking.
Her website contains further information for anyone interested: http://www.tonahangen.com/.