All this sounds really cool… except it brought back bad memories of business school – marketing was not my thing.  For something so simple as posting a site on the web, getting people to look at it and use it seems rather complicated and labor intensive.

The mass e-mail thing sounds really simple.  If I ever get my site presentable enough, I’ll do that.  But I’m not sure who exactly would be interested in my personal research and family history.  I already belong to the web community on Ancestry.com, that’s where I’ve gotten most of my information.

Community involvement for on-line museums sounds wonderful.  After all, curators certainly have enough to do as it is without worrying about on-line exhibits.  Things get tagged in order to make them more searchable and easier to find, more people visit the site, the museum gets its name and collections out to the public…everyone is happy.  Except… even though volunteers would be doing the actual tagging of the exhibits, who’s going to check up on everything to make sure they are legit?  More importantly, who’s going to pay that person?  What are the implications of working all the kinks out of the programs first?  Can using these types of programs on a website guarantee increased on-site visitation (i.e. revenues)?

All of this increased access and community involvement sounds really nice, but it is something that is going to have to be tried and proved by bigger, better-funded, museums before it is adopted across the board. It should not present the same problems as Wikipedia because taggers will not really be adding new information, but the entries still have to be processed and monitored.  Things always get a little hairy when they are opened up for public comment.

Hey guys… check out my webpage and tell me what you think!

Check out my photo of Selina Gray.  She was the housekeeper at Arlington House before the Civil War.  You’ll have to go to My Website

Seems like Gutenburg-e got off you a rocky start. People just aren’t looking at them. It does not help that they have not been reviewed. I don’t know why they are not getting the same attention. I don’t mind reading a book on-line. Then again, I also like to have something in my hand to feel and write all over. Even though you supposedly can print these books out, 300 pages of material seems a little daunting to a personal printer, or to your stash of change for the library. Maybe they would have done better if they had done a limited hard copy release.

Also, some people don’t consider posting something to the web as truly publishing it, even if it is through a legitimate publishing house.

Seems like Gutenburg-e got off you a rocky start. People just aren’t looking at them. It does not help that they have not been reviewed. I don’t know why they are not getting the same attention. I don’t mind reading a book on-line. Then again, I also like to have something in my hand to feel and write all over. Even though you supposedly can pring these books out, 300 pages of material seems a little daunting to a personal printer, or to your stash of change for the library. Maybe they would have done better if they had done a limited hard copy release.

Also, some people don’t consider posting something to the web as truly publishing it, even if it is through a legitimate publishing house.

I currently work for the National Park Service at Arlington House, The Robert E. Lee Memorial.  The site is getting ready to close its doors for an indeterminate amount of time in order to install a climate control system and a new fire suppression system, and to also restore the slave quarter buildings.  I thought an annotated virtual tour of the site the way it looks now – a before shot – would be helpful to any visitors who show up within that indeterminate amount of time.  Otherwise they will only see the outside of the house, or even the inside with no furniture, and have to listen to rangers talk themselves silly without any visuals.  The site could put the virtual tour up on its website, or set up an orientation area to show visitors on some sort of projector screen.

Does this seem way too simple? or do you think it could work?

Digitization is a wonderful thing for researchers.  It can put primary sources right at your fingertips without you ever having to leave your house.  All of us enjoy doing research in our fuzzy slippers.  For a lot of us, however, we have no idea what goes into making these sources available.  There is a lot of time, effort, and cost involved in the smallest of digitization projects.  I hope some of us come away with more of an appreciation for those institutions who delve into the ever-changing digital world.

For most of us, these problems are not biggies.  I only have certain files that I would like to preserve – mostly text – that are reformatted everytime Microsoft comes out with a new version of Word.  Not really a big deal.  But, I do have certain things that I saved one Zip disks – anyone remember those??? – that I can only get to because I kept the external Zip drive that I paid an arm and a leg for.  I don’t even know if you can get a computer with an internal Zip anymore.  Now, my files are not all that important, but I can only imagine what the people at the Domesday Project went through!

All this means is that we need to be very careful and do our homework before we invest our life savings into a digitization project that might be completely obsolete in 2 years.  Oh, and always keep the originals!!!

The more the better.  The way this class is set up is excellent!  All the resources we need are in one place or just a click away.  They are much easier to find and to reference than having to go back and remember where you put that article or this paper.  It also allows for more visual learning, which helps me personally.  It also feels more hands on, like I have more agency in this class than in others.

Without getting into my feelings about the No Child Left Behind Act (that could be a novel in itself) this article hits the nail on the head of multiple choice tests.  As a former teacher, I do admit that Scantron is wonderful for saving time.  But you end up teaching the students things that college professors say are not all that important because you can just look them up somewhere.  Even the more thoughtful questions become regurgitation once the kids figure out how to take the test.  More essays in the primary and secondary classroom would kill two birds with one stone.  Not only do these students not know how to think about history, they don’t know how to structure and argument on paper either.  Some of my students (seniors in high school) could not put together a grammatically correct sentence.  Let them write!