Sara Georgini at “The Junto” (a group blog of early American historians) has posted an interview with Patrick Jones and me on “Spring at The History Harvest.” The planning for The History Harvest is moving briskly and our interview focuses on where we are headed with the project in the coming months. Other questions include how we came up with the idea for the project, how it has changed our ideas about teaching, what our goals of “community-based” history are, and what technical and aesthetic challenges we face in developing The History Harvest digital project online. Great questions from The Junto! For our answers visit “The Junto” blog.
Author: William Thomas (page 4 of 21)
William G. Thomas III is a professor of history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the John and Catherine Angle Professor in the Humanities. He teaches digital humanities and digital history, 19th century U.S. history, the Civil War, and the history of slavery.
We are going to hold a “virtual” brainstorming session for all interested parties in the History Harvest this spring April 8 through April 12, culminating on that Friday April 12 with a NITLE seminar that Patrick Jones and I will lead (soon to be announced). We hope the blitz suggestions we receive will help shape future grant proposals and the project’s next steps.
The goal is to open our broader History Harvest idea out through social media for participation and feedback. We see this as kind of open strategic planning for the HH project. While we are glad to encourage everyone who leaps in and runs their own harvests (undoubtedly a good thing in the community), we are seeking ideas about a federated approach to this form of experiential learning and how to develop the cyberinfrastructure to support it.
We are looking for participation and suggestions not only from fellow historians (who may have seen our piece in Perspectives on History) but also from the Digital Humanities community and the broader community of K-12 educators, education researchers, and state humanities councils and partners. But we believe the platform for doing that will need to be completely different. So, during the upcoming “The History Harvest Blitz Week” on Twitter, Google Hangout, and other social media we will take suggestions and explain our project broadly. We will be capturing the suggestions and twitter stream for later reference and use.
To keep matters interesting each day of the blitz week, we will be releasing student produced work, including a short video introducing The History Harvest, and we hope to have a series of community radio “interstitials” for “The History Harvest Moment” that indicate what students can do and focus on one object/story from a harvest.
At long last, a year into the MOOC frenzy, here comes Thomas Friedman with an oped in yesterday’s New York Times, Revolution Hits the Universities. This breathlessly enthusiastic endorsement from Mr. Friedman (The World is Flat) should mark the high tide of the MOOC craze, and for all of us, I hope, the beginning of a more reasonable discussion of these new courses and the future of higher education. With Friedman’s late entry, perhaps we can safely say the MOOC bubble is about to burst.
One reason this seems likely is that his high profile piece in The New York Times elicited barely a whimper from the digital humanities community. Friedman’s oped came on a day in which the twitter stream among digital humanities lit up over MOOCs, but not one of these scholars paid attention to Friedman’s pandering sycophancy. Instead, the real issues came up in Cathy Davidson’s “Why MOOCs Are Not a BandAid For Higher Education’s Budgetary Woes,” “Spy v. Spy: A Response to the Chronicle of Higher Education”, and “If We Profs Don’t Reform Higher Education, We’ll Be Re-Formed (and we won’t like it).” (see #highered, #MOOC)
Friedman’s piece was just one of a string of “disruptive” “transformative” “revolutionary” flavored assessments about how MOOCs will “reinvent” the future of higher education. To get a sense of the panic MOOCs have brought on, we only need to look to the other side of the pond yesterday and see the Times Education Section‘s report on Cambridge University’s chancellor fretting that MOOCs will transform “the nature of higher education.” (“V-c warns of massive threat posed by MOOCs”)
Because of his public audience, Friedman certainly gets attention. His piece generated over 285 comments before the day was over. But it seems that the hard, serious questions about how to transform higher education with technology are taking place in the digital humanities twittersphere and other similar venues. Ryan Cordell at Northeastern (@ryancordell), Cathy Davidson at HASTAC (@CathyNDavidson), Adeline Koh at Duke (@adelinekoh), Siva Vaidhyanathan at the University of Virginia (@sivavaid), and Edward L. Ayers at Richmond (forthcoming piece on a “more radical online revolution”) among many others in digital humanities are writing thoughtful and fascinating pieces on the real changes underway in higher education–in teaching and learning using technology, of which MOOCs are a part but perhaps not necessarily the most important.
I could not ignore Friedman however. He does at least two things in yesterday’s piece that are very troubling. The first is his hook-line-and-sinker acceptance of Coursera’s sugary story that an autistic student and his parents appreciated the MOOC environment. Friedman and Coursera imply that the MOOC environment could transform opportunities for special needs students. But neither he nor Coursera seem willing to admit that such technologies could be used to exclude or profoundly limit access.
Before going further I should say that my youngest daughter has Down syndrome and so while I do not doubt that this autistic student found great value in the MOOC experience (and applaud that), I want to point out the subtle manipulation of those with disabilities at work in Friedman’s piece. He uses this story in the service of another agenda without any apparent concern for the implications. This sort of scenario occurs daily in the life of my daughter, and it has been discussed among parents of children with special needs regularly from Michael Berube’s brilliant and inspired Life as We Know It to yesterday’s thoughtful New York Times piece by George Estreich “A child with Down syndrome keeps his place at the table.” The frightening and retrograde idea that people with special needs can be set apart (to be special somewhere else) should be seen for what it is–exclusionary. The trade offs are vastly unequal: instead of school, here is an online link; instead of a professor, here is a video, instead of a place at the table, another table is set. Will the MOOCs mean less diversity in our institutions of higher learning? Perhaps. Does Coursera or any current MOOC provider seek to serve students with special needs in any real or meaningful way? Probably not–so why does Friedman bring it up? Why does Coursera offer this particular story to him? It makes those who do not confront the daily challenges of navigating the world with disabilities feel good about something they otherwise might find vaguely threatening–a revolution in higher education. It desensitizes us, however perversely, to the very issue we should be more alert to in this drama: access and equal opportunity.
Second, one of the real issues of concern is that privately capitalized corporations running MOOCs through consortia of elite institutions, as presently described by Friedman, might flatten the landscape of higher education in ways that limit, rather than expand, access to quality instruction. In the name of efficiency public higher education might be stripped of resources. Using the technology to appear accessible, the elite institutions secure their positions by placing the real engagement on campus ever further from the reach of other students. Across the broad second and third tier of institutions, students might find fewer pathways, not more, into the system of higher education, as all sorts of courses are cut from campuses. Then these courses would only be available virtually, “at scale.”
What is needed in this discussion, as Cathy Davidson, Siva Vaidhyanathan, and others in digital humanities so clearly recognize, is first and foremost to acknowledge the wider scope of online research and practice which the MOOC bubble has obscured. To the amazement of the digital humanities scholars who have been thinking about and building mechanisms to teach more effectively using technology for over fifteen years, the current MOOC model appears to be a puzzling throwback, like suggesting we all take up closed circuit television or organize correspondence courses.
In an episode of Seinfeld, Jerry assesses Kramer and Newman’s never-ending game of Risk as “a game of world domination being played by two guys who can barely run their own lives.” The character and tenor of MOOCs–their potential for realigning credit hours and their hundreds of thousands of “students”–might remind us of the game of Risk, and perhaps some of the leaders involved could appear to be a little bit like Kramer and Newman.
In higher education at the moment we find it difficult to see beyond the next budget cut, the next course enrollment battle, the next assessment strategy. But the debate over MOOCs in our departments and disciplines suggests a much broader opportunity and challenge before us: in the humanities we need to begin building pedagogy for the digital age. We have seen rapid growth in the availability of digital archives and digital projects, yet our classroom practices have changed little. Students are confronted with millions of digital texts, yet they need skills to navigate the World Wide Web and numerous proprietary databases. They need the disciplinary habits of mind in the humanities to interpret and evaluate digital information, yet they are given few opportunities to participate in the creation of new knowledge. Imagine if we reorganized our classroom experience both in large lecture courses and more intensive seminars to create less anonymity and more dynamic learning, to allow students truly to participate in a “community of scholars.” We will be doing precisely this in The History Harvest course soon–at least we are in the planning stages now for a MOOC-like distributed course next year with participating classes from other colleges, after my colleague Patrick Jones has run the first set of very successful History Harvest courses.
The vast changes in our classrooms and information technology have led to fundamental questions about our higher education enterprise, ones we should be asking. Why go to college when information is at your fingertips? What will we do with ten million books digitized online and searchable? What is a lecture course for? How can we use technology more effectively? The emergence of the MOOC offers another opportunity, one that humanities and STEM faculty should embrace. But the justifications Coursera and Friedman have offered ring hollow and the unrestrained hyperbole about the “reinvention” of higher education could have the reverse effect of shutting down experimentation with MOOCs, just when we need it most. That would be a shame.
The AHA Perspectives on History has published our piece describing The History Harvest project. We are currently formulating the next steps for this project and have been grateful for the outpouring of interest from all over higher education. Our immediate plans are to run a MOOC like course in Spring 2014 with participants from a variety of institutions. Possible partners have been contacting us. We encourage that so please let me know if you are interested. (updated January 22, 2013)
In late December Marc Parry ran a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus Blog on The History Harvest, a new project I have been developing. The piece has sparked a long series of tweets and responses — see Topsy’s record of the ongoing traffic about this concept. We will be updating our posts here and on The History Harvest site as we develop our next steps for the project.
Last night I went to Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln with my Civil War and Reconstruction class at the University of Nebraska. The theater was sold out for both showings. We actually had to sit in the very front row of the theater. I can’t remember the last time I sat in the front row–Live and Let Die, Starwars (the first, rather fourth)? Lincoln’s words and those of his opponents and supports have been in front of me lately because I am editing James A. Rawley’s last book, titled A Lincoln Dialogue. This compilation will be released posthumously next year by the University of Nebraska Press, and features many of the speeches included in Spielberg’s production.
It should be said that making biopics of presidents as commercial film is tricky business and no one has gotten it right perhaps until now. Spielberg’s Lincoln is a masterpiece of filmmaking. It is full of words, and yet it is gripping and humanizing. In many places it is laugh-out-loud funny. It avoids many (but not all) of the traps of this subject–such as overplaying the majesty of the office and presenting an ultimately unknowable leader. Lincoln makes none of these mistakes. Instead, this film makes us feel we know Lincoln better, more intimately, and more fully. Much of this is due to Daniel Day-Lewis, who turns in another brilliant performance here (after There Will Be Blood). When his Lincoln clasps the hand of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (Bruce McGill) as they wait in the telegraph office for the results to come in about the Battle of Wilmington, the physicality of their grip is not only authentic but truly moving. Day-Lewis has always excelled at this physical, kinesthetic acting. We too wait there with Lincoln and Stanton, and we too gradually realize that we would need another to hold us steady in the face of such anticipation of such news. This moment like so many in Lincoln is shorn of fist-pumping triumphalism. Instead, it works on our humility and common purpose. And it is spine-tingling.
Historians will be concerned that for so much of the film African American characters are observers rather than actors–they passively wait while the white politicians essentially vote them their freedom by a narrow margin. Emancipation, technically the end of slavery, is presented here as a gift to black Americans, one engineered only through shady political dealing. The subtle message is that all ennobling acts in American history, such as the passage of the 13th Amendment, are suffused with corruption, and yet therein lies the genius of the American political system, those who understand it (Lincoln), and those who created it (the Founders). In this respect Lincoln works to make many Americans proud of their history and government–indeed, the sold-out theater in Lincoln, Nebraska, last night applauded spontaneously and with gusto at the end of the film.
Black soldiers confront Lincoln in the opening scene of the film, one of them pressing for equality. A bedroom scene of an interracial “marriage” nearly closes the film–Thaddeus Stevens and his longtime lover and housekeeper Lydia Smith. Between the two scenes, however, black actors are marginal if not caricatured. Kate Masur has written about this in her recent New York Times Op-Ed on the film. Masur considers the film an “opportunity squandered.”
To my surprise Lincoln offered striking parallels to this post-election season. The film opens with his having won re-election, unsure of his second term agenda, winding down a major war, facing a recalcitrant House of Representatives, and seeing his major war measure (emancipation) open to court review and potential dismantling. Lincoln at one point says that the public had two years to consider emancipation and decided to re-elect him. The political infighting presented in Lincoln, while entertaining, suggests another missed opportunity. Secretary of State William Henry Seward (David Strathairn), a former Senator from New York, and longtime political operative in the Republican Party, organizes the campaign to turn Democratic votes. But the speeches and the patronage are presented as comedy rather than what they were–knife fights in the dark. Colorful personalities aside, the idea that American politics is light-hearted mischief, eventually redeemed by the process itself, ignores not only the brutal calculations of those involved but also the depth and power of those resistant to change.
The intense appeal of Lincoln, then, over the long run will derive not from its political scenes but from its portrayal of Lincoln’s attempt to manage the political and personal consequences of the war.
This blog post was initially published November 17, 2012 and updated November 18, 2012