Reflection... What an Iguana does best!

I can see the light at the end of the tunnel… Except Plaza Midwood doesn’t have a tunnel. (Maybe they could have used one under the railroad tracks on Central. That would have changed the area’s history!) The Plaza Midwood project draws to a close on Thursday with our final presentation of our online exhibit, From the Miracle Mile to Plaza Midwood. So how was the experience of researching and building an Omeka.net exhibit as a group? What did we learn about Plaza Midwood and its context within Charlotte?

...the ease of digital access could make us dumber--or not.

I Wrote Them Down in My Diary

I think of this line from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade often.  Unlike the elephant, I forget.  My iguana mate teasingly calls me his "little goldfish," playing off that animal's 3-second memory span.  I am the worst at remembering the title and author of a book I just read.  The ability to quickly Google that information, however, allows my seeming incompetence to quickly be reversed.  I've become very good at looking up information because of this.

...that Twitter is a tool for education, but not the strongest.

Beyond Bieber: Twitter improves student learning (Michigan State news release)

Christine Greenhow, an assistant professor of education at Michigan State, thinks so.  In Twitteracy: Tweeting as a New Literary Practice, she determines that "college students who tweet as part of their instruction are more engaged with the course content and with the teacher and other students, and have higher grades."

...try this new archival tool.

(The History Iguana has a confession.  She doesn't really pay much attention to the Grad Life emails.  It's mostly because she lives down on the beach, so going to the events is usually inconvenient.  However, HI does believe that the best way to learn is to do.)

An upcoming workshop is on the archival tool Zotero.  What is that?  It's an interface that helps you organize your digital files for research, brought to us from our friends at George Mason...  The same friends who have given us Omeka.

Since I won't be going to the workshop, I decided to try playing with it here at home.  I downloaded the standalone version, since the Firefox one didn't work for me.  It's surprisingly easy.

 

All you have to do is add an item, type in all the gooey information, link to a file, and VOILA! You can also organize your items by collection (sound familiar?).  

I decided to give this a go after attempting to organize my thesis research.

...What is digital history?

Before reading:

Digital history is the dissemination and exhibition of historical information through electronic means.  This includes TV and other forms of video production, websites and articles, blogs, radio, and social media postings.  In the last decade, digital history usage has exploded thanks to the Internet, especially due to high-speed accessibility and smartphones.  Digital history implies that history also has a permanent presentation, since pretty much everything posted on the Internet is, frankly, there forever.

So what do I have to add to this after the readings?

I have a few random thoughts.

Notice how I highlighted that last word.  What you put on the Internet, stays on the Internet.  I can only imagine if Facebook were around a few years earlier...  But I digress.  As far as the digital dissemination of history, is this a bad thing?  I think not. 

But there is a TON of information available out there.  The greatest challenge to the navigating all that stuff out there, I believe, is critical thinking.  Although Wikipedia may be completely slammed by academia as a resource, its presence, along with a healthy dose of skepticism, makes you really think about what's in those articles and if they're true/correct or not. 

We're putting more and more information on the web.  Now we need to present it in forms suitable for certain types of media--i.e. smart phones and tablets rather than just desktops.  In the last few years, information has become not only instantly available both temporally and spatially.  We can have it when we want it and where we want it (provided you don't have AT&T and are in Garinger, haha). 

I'd like to see, personally, if the currently available forms of social media will satisfy this requirement of right here, right now.  So here goes my immersion into digital history.