I chose to interview Mills Kelly of George Mason University. Because I am studying to become a history teacher, and he is a professor of history working with technology, I thought he might give me some insight into what I need to know before I begin teaching in the digital age.
My first question for Mr. Kelly was what his biggest obstacles have been in working with the digital humanities. His response was time and funding. Apparently and unfortunately, there is a lack of grant agencies that are willing to fund projects in the digital humanities, especially those that are related to teaching. I find this extremely unsettling considering the increasing presence and importance of technology in today’s society. I find it even more unsettling that funds for projects specifically in education are even more scant. The quality of education today is what will define our society’s future, for the people making the decisions in 50 years are being educated now. Humans need to evolve with their technologies, and if those technologies are not used to help educate future generations, how can we expect our world to progress?
The second obstacle Kelly noted—time—may in fact be related to this lack of funding. Mr. Kelly teaches, runs a Global Affairs program and conducts his own historical research, so he hardly has time to work on his digital projects. It seems to me that if more funding went towards digital research and the people who conduct it, perhaps people like Mr. Kelly could find time for their projects without putting their livelihood at stake.
In addition to his history classes, Mr. Kelly has also taught a course similar to our Digital History course: Teaching and Learning History in the Digital age. I asked him what the biggest changes have been since he began teaching this course; his reply was “the advent of social media”. When he first started teaching this course, he says the closest thing the world had to a social network was “Friendster”.
My next question to Mr. Kelly was what he considered to be the most important thing for future teachers to know as they begin teaching in the digital age. He noted that there is a difference between understanding how students learn with technology, and understanding how they use it. He says it that “we place far too little emphasis on teaching teachers how to understand how their students learn” and that it is most important to understand how students learn with technology, so that it can be properly utilized in the classroom. In relation to this, I asked him what he thinks are the most useful technologies in helping students learn about history. As may be expected, he said it was the internet, adding that data analysis tools will become more and more important in helping students maneuver their way through overwhelming databases.
Currently, this issue of helping students learn is Mr. Kelly’s greatest area of interest. Specifically, “how technologies are transforming the ways that students learn about the past, how they use those technologies to create new ways of expressing historical arguments, and how they use technology to bind themselves together either briefly around an assignment, or over the long term to create colleague relationships with other learners around the world.” His current project is a web journal called Global Perspectives on Digital History (http://gpdh.org), which gathers material from a multitude of sources including the personal websites of scholars, institutional sites, and blogs. In addition, this journal monitors different types of social media to see what is being discussed by the community. This journal is available in English, German and French and on its way to incorporating many more languages so the information found on its pages may be shared across the world.
The project Mr. Kelly is most proud of is his 1989 project he did a few years back http://chnm.gmu.edu/1989 . This is a webpage with information about the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, including an introductory essay, primary sources, scholar interviews, teaching modules, and case studies. The webpage is easy to navigate and contains many useful sources. Not only can this site be useful to students, but it contains a variety of helpful resources for teachers. I can definitely see why Mr. Kelly is so proud of this project.