Tuesday, November 11, 2008

practical concerns and possibilities


During the 2007-08 academic year, I was invited to design and teach a couple of history courses at Boston University. The courses I taught (HI 570: History of U.S. Environmentalism and HI 351: Technology and U.S. Popular Culture) were the first courses in which I used blogger software as way to facilitate discussion outside of class. At the beginning of each of these classes, the blog functioned mainly as a way to post class announcements, remind people of upcoming assignments, etc.

I soon found, however, that some students were using the blog in a way that exceeded the limits of what I'd asked for or expected; these students were not only sharing relevant sources that they'd found on the Internet but were combining and interpreting these sources in ways that were original, engaging, and provocative. For example, this post explores the growing potential of "green car" technology while this post surveys the topic of bioethics in popular culture and contemporary politics by comparing a speech of by president George W. Bush with a scene from the film Jurassic Park and an article from Scientific American on cloning. While these posts would not be classed in the same category of scholarship as a research paper or an analytical paper, they clearly point to the potential of such forums for groundbreaking research and analysis by undergraduate students.

This year, while developing a course blog for HI 372: The 20th Century American Presidency, I've continued to be impressed by the potential of this medium in the hands of undergraduates. For example, this post takes a passage from Ronald Reagan's diary and relates it to the growing culture war over drug use in the 1980s, while this post attempts to place the recent Vice Presidential Debate in the broader context of the history of the GOP since the rise of the "southern strategy".

The ability of undergraduate students to combine new media with the analysis of print media sources has made me an incurable optimist about the future of digital scholarship at Boston University. In the area of practical concerns, the liabilities of the Internet have been lamented by professors and teaching assistants for over a decade now: it can be a tool for plagiarism, an endless reservoir of fourth-rate research and conspiracy theories, and an echo chamber for every form of partisanship and obsession. In the realm of possibilities, however, it can also be a place where students learn, teach, and create in ways that were never possible before. As indicated by the links on this site to growing projects for digital scholarship at Harvard and MIT, the best research universities now realize this and are advancing into this new field with abundant resources and determination.

RS Deese
History
rsdeese@bu.edu

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