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History, enriched lectures, and pedagogy.

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Abstract

This article offers some insight into the process of integrating multimedia enriched lectures into an undergraduate history curriculum, it highlights specifically some of the pedagogical advantages and benefits of a courseware package the author has designed at the University of New Brunswick in relation to his specialized field of Italian Fascist history, and it addresses the question of a hypermedia educational module (HEM) as possible area for future experimentation and development.

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Developments in the area of information science enable the use of new technologies in many areas, including education. Indeed, colleges and universities across the globe are being confronted daily with the immediate impact and long-term promise of multimedia technology on teaching and learning. Over the past decade the History Courseware Consortium at the University of Glasgow in the United Kingdom (Anderson 2002), and the Association for History and Computing in the United States (Greenstein 1996/97), have played the leading role in stimulating the discussion, development and the implementation of computer-based teaching tools for history. According to two enthusiastic advocates in the field, developments in information and communication technologies OCT) have come to occupy a central place within the discipline because they have dramatically transformed both the way historical documents are preserved, as well as the methods employed by professional historians in researching and writing about the past. To begin with, "paper-based, two dimensional manuscripts and texts--the staples of traditional history and archival research--now coexist with dynamic, multiform, digitally coded sources," and" material previously available to only a few, in relatively obscure or inaccessible archives, is now widely available to a large and ever-expanding public" (Zahavi and Zelizer 2000).

The implications of all these changes for research, publishing, as well as pedagogical methods are enormous. In regard specifically to the dissemination of knowledge, initiatives in ICT have given historians the chance to bring their research into the classroom and to offer history students an opportunity to view and analyze materials otherwise impossible to incorporate into traditional books, texts, articles and monographs. In classes, for example, digital coding and media streaming and compression techniques have permitted historians to compose and deliver enriched lectures with imbedded video clips, streaming videos, audio bites, HTML platforms, and a large volume of photographs and iconographic images that would be impossible, or at least too costly, to print and distribute as teaching aids. Supplementing traditional text documents with video, audio, and graphics, and adapting traditional scholarship to digital technologies, has also provided historians with an opportunity to experiment with innovative interactive media forms, to explore new ways of creatively utilizing in the classroom the same information and communication technologies they employ in the field when conducting their research or participating at learned conferences, and...

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