We could spend all day wringing our hands at the very idea that we’ve reached the stage where a public school district will change its curriculum because one parent objects to one assignment. But that’s a debate for other blogs.

Instead, I have to ask why it is that our children must be protected from the reality of the past?

Anne Frank’s story is well-known to almost everyone who grew up in the United States in the past several decades, because her Diary has been a standard assignment for students in the late middle or early high school years since at least the early 1970s. Hers is a story that is sad, glorious, poignant, raw, difficult, and in the end, tragic. But it’s not like the Holocaust was a happy story. And yet, in the midst of the mayhem of the period from 1933-1945, a young girl’s voice has spoken to generation after generation of school children because hers is an authentic voice, not one made up by writers in Hollywood or anywhere else. It is the reality of Anne Frank as a person–a teenager much like them except for the fact that she’s trapped in an attic and dies in a concentration camp–that speaks to young people.

And I’ve got news for the concerned parents of Culpeper County–your children are already having sex, so it’s not like the fact that Anne Frank mentions her vagina is going to result in a general moral decline among youth in the county. I make this statement not just based on the common sense assumption that teenagers are having sex in America, but based on data. According to the Virginia Division of Health Statistics, the number of teenage pregnancies in Culpeper County rose 20% from 2002 to 2008. Because the unedited version of Anne Frank’s Diary only recently made it into the curriculum–and then only for a short time–we can hardly blame Ms. Frank for the rapidly rising teen pregnancy rate in the county.

As I write this post my children are 10 and 13 and so of the age when they are confronting the bad side of humanity and the bad side of our past. My oldest has a close friend who can’t play outside because his neighborhood is too dangerous. My youngest has had to work his way through the sudden and unexplained death of a teammate’s mother last spring. They know life is hard and they know that humans can be cruel and capricious one day and loving and predictable the next.

Editing historical sources to sanitize them in ways that won’t offend one person or another does our children a grave disservice. As much as we’d like to keep them safe from the realities of life, they see through our attempts much more easily than we’d like to admit. Instead of hiding the reality of Anne Frank from them, we should teach them the reality, even the parts that might make us uncomfortable. How else are they going to learn?

The FRUS project has long been a model of government publication of important documents and this new web interface will be one that is very welcome to students, teachers, and scholars. The documents available on this site, when combined with the other diplomatic documents made available through the National Security Archive, will provide a very useful intro into the main collections of the State Department held at the National Archives. In fact, one could design a very interesting assignment in research methods for students by having them examine which documents the Office of the Historian chose to publish on a particular issue — say the U-2 incident (State|NSA — and then compare those to the documents acquired by the NSA through Freedom of Information Act requests. Why would the government choose to publish some documents, but not others? Why would the NSA choose to publish some, but not others? It is through these sorts of questions that history students will gain a greater awareness of what makes a digital archive and what doesn’t.

It turns out that a fellow blogger, writing at Do It Yourself Scholar, decided that the podcasts of my lectures from my course Nationalism in Eastern Europe (last given in the fall of 2007) were the best available on the web. These lectures are available via iTunesU and it was a surprise to me that anyone other than my students was listening. However, over the past few years I’ve heard from a few people who found the lectures, listened, and then offered laudatory or negative feedback.

I intend to offer this course again in the spring 2011 semester and when I do, I plan to use these (and a few others I have recorded) to set up class discussions. Rather than me giving the lectures again, I’ll have the students listen to them prior to class and then we’ll use the class time more productively discussing issues I raised in the lectures, etc. My hope is to do this with all of my courses so that eventually I don’t need to lecture much in class at all.

For those interested in podcasting, don’t be talked into fancy set ups. I made these recordings with my iPod Nano using an iTalk plug in microphone with a small lapel microphone plugged into that. Rather than investing in a serious recording system — as our university has done — I can just drop my Nano in my shirt pocket and blab away. I then do the post-production work in Audacity (free), a software program that took me about an hour to figure out how to use. My total investment, not counting the cost of the Nano, was less than $50.

Without such assessments we are forced to fall back on either (a) the nods and smiles of our students that are supposed to tell us that they “got it” today in class, (b) their performance on tests and essays that we give them that may or may not be tied to departmental learning objectives, or (c) end of semester student evaluations that, of course, are no measure of learning.

However, the experience we are having right now in my department is a perfect example of why faculty members want to run screaming from anyone who utters the dreaded word “assessment.” You may find this difficult to believe (or maybe you won’t), but we are currently having to undergo five separate assessments of learning in our undergraduate program. How can it be that one department could have to engage in five separate assessments simultaneously? I’ll try to explain…

1. We have our own assessment (one I helped design) that goes like this: All History majors must take History 300 (Historical Methods) and History 499 (Senior Research Seminar). Each semester we select a random sample of final papers from History 300, put them in a file, and the when those students complete History 499, we pull their final research papers. Then we convene as a group and score each pair of papers on a rubric of historical thinking skills to see if (a) our students are learning what we hope they will learn and (b) if, as a group, they are making progress over time. This is an on-going assessment of learning in our major and one we subject ourselves to.
2. Several years ago our Provost created an Academic Program Review process that, for us, began in 2008, and will continue every other year, apparently forever. This particular process uses a software platform called the “Weave”. Please don’t ask me to tell you how it works. My colleagues and I figured it out in 2008, but it has already been updated several times and apparently now works entirely differently. I won’t tell you the adjectives used to describe the Weave by a colleague in Cultural Studies (this is, after all, a family blog).
3. We are now in the first full phases of our decennial reaccreditation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS). For now the SACS process is all about making sure we collect credentials and syllabi from our faculty and about creating a Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP). I am part of the QEP steering committee for the University and the end result will be quite good. Getting to that result is going to be painful at times, but the benefits for our students will make it worthwhile.
4. We are undergoing an assessment of the general education curriculum. I haven’t been able to determine the mandate for this particular assessment, but for now I’ll refer you to my previous post for some insights into my thinking about general education. The short version is that I think distribution requirements are a good thing. Mandating particular courses (and thereby stifling student choice) is a bad thing.
5. The State Council for Higher Education for Virginia has mandated an assessment of how all colleges and universities in the state are helping our students become better writers. For this particular assessment a group of seven or eight faculty were asked to come together to use the rubric we use in our assessment of historical thinking skills (see #1 above) to assess student writing. I had to leave that meeting well before it was over, which is probably why I’m still unclear how a rubric designed to measure historical thinking can be used to measure writing. Moreover, I’m unclear how having each academic department in the University measure writing with their own rubrics will yield data that can be aggregated in some sort of meaningful way. But maybe that’s just me…

Okay, got all that? What we have here is one assessment generated by the department, two assessments coming from the Provost’s office, and two from outside agencies with some level of supervisor authority over us.

As much as I seem to be complaining (because I am) that we have so many assessments going on at once, I want to reiterate that I am sympathetic with the need for each one of these. I can’t argue with the need to know all the things that these different assessments are after.

But–and I think this is a very important but–the last time I checked, faculty members were first and foremost supposed to teach their students and second were supposed to produce high quality research. Of course, we also engage in lots of departmental, college, and university service (not to mention community service). Even with those mandates, we must make time for at least some assessment, but five assessments? All at once?

So far so good, right? As they say in Hollywood, that was then, this is now.

And as of now, there is still no sign of that course being available for our students. See the counter in the right hand sidebar for an exact count of the number of months, days, and soon to be years, since this course went to the George Mason general education committee for approval.

Why, you might ask, is this taking so long? I’m not a member of the general education committee, nor have I been invited to attend their meetings, but I do know that the process bogged down in the spring because the committee decided to rewrite the IT competency requirements that are part of our undergraduate general education curriculum. I even sat in on one meeting where we had a kind of free for all about those requirements. That was back in the spring and as far as I know, that process ran its course a while ago. My hopes rose in early August when the Dean’s office got an email from the general education committee in early August saying that the proposal would be reviewed during the fall. With only 12 days left until the start of winter, I’m not so confident that they’ll make the “fall” deadline.

As I have written previously, the Soviet apparatchiks would have loved our general education system here at Mason (and lots of other places). Because the entire revenue model of the university is predicated on academic units placing butts in seats, any change to the general education requirements — including a new course that allows students to meet the IT requirement — means that some of those butts will shift to seats in a department other than the one(s) they might have been in before the change. And that means lost revenue for the effected departments. For this reason, any change in the general education requirements is fraught with political and budgetary consequences on our campus.

Note that I said “political and budgetary consequences” and did not say “educational consequences.” Therein lies the problem. So long as colleges and universities build their budgets based on butts in seats, educational considerations will almost always be trumped by budgetary considerations.

And so, The Digital Past recedes further and further from our memories…But the counter will remain here until the course is approved.

DHN went online in early November using the Twittertim.es service to aggregate posts from more than 350 people tweeting away about digital humanities topics. As my friend and colleague Dan Cohen explains on his blog, he dreamed up DHN to “aggregate thousands of tweets and the hundreds of articles and projects those tweets point to, and boil everything down to the most-discussed items, with commentary from Twitter.” I wish I could have ideas this good.

Fortunately for me, DHN isn’t the thing that’s going to push me over the edge into the Twitterverse after all. I love the fact that DHN provides me with a convenient way to see what others are thinking about in my own area of interest. That’s the real tangible value of this experiment and I’m really glad my CHNM colleagues have made this happen. But the current version of the interface betrays all the hallmarks of people who have drunk the Twitter Koolaid in huge gulps.

Consider this item from December 2 letting readers know that the Zotero blog has announced a way to expand your storage on the Zotero servers. I needed to know that and because I read DHN before diving into the other feeds in my reader, I learned something I needed to know. Score one for DHN.

But the “commentary from Twitter” that is supposed to add value to the item reads like this:

Posted by these editors:
sherah1918: RT @zotero: Zotero storage accts now available up to 10 GB! Sync PDFs and other files to personal and group libraries http://bit.ly/5RF6L5  02.12.2009 21.13

edmj: RT @zotero: Zotero storage accounts now available up to 10 GB! Sync PDFs and other files to personal & group libraries http://bit.ly/5RF6L5  02.12.2009 21.26

clioweb: RT @zotero: Zotero storage accounts now available up to 10GB! Sync PDFs and other files to personal and group libraries http://bit.ly/5RF6L5  02.12.2009 21.11

ryancordell: RT @zotero: Zotero storage accts now available up to 10 GB! Sync PDFs and other files to personal and group libraries http://bit.ly/5RF6L5 02.12.2009 21.41

zotero:Zotero storage accounts now available up to 10 GB! Sync PDFs and other files to personal and group libraries http://bit.ly/5RF6L5  02.12.2009 21.08

jcmeloni:RT @zotero: Zotero storage accounts now available up to 10 GB! Sync PDFs & other files to personal and group libraries http://bit.ly/5RF6L5  02.12.2009 21.10

digitalhumanist:RT @zotero: Zotero storage accounts now available up to 10 GB! Sync PDFs & other files to personal and group libraries http://bit.ly/5RF6L5  02.12.2009 21.28

amndw2: RT @zotero Zotero storage accounts now available up to 10 GB! Sync PDFs and other files to personal & group libraries http://bit.ly/5RF6L5  02.12.2009 21.15

Posted by others:
mdiggory: GMail = 7GB free / 80GB for $20, Zotero’s 100MB free / 1GB for $20? Its more affordable just to email the files around! http://bit.ly/5pC6dF  03.12.2009 00.51

I got it the first time and really didn’t need the additional seven additional tweets and re-tweets of storage “now available up to 10 GB!” The only “commentary” in this item was the item posted by a non-editor. A quick scan of the other items in DHN betrays this same level of tweet-speak…chatter repeated without much discernible value being added. Maybe it’s just because I don’t tweet that I find all that “commentary” annoying and really just so much clutter on the screen.

It seems to me the whole enterprise would be vastly improved by having the first five to ten lines of text from the item everyone is tweeting about with two links reading “Tweets from editors” and “Tweets from others”. Then those of us who still haven’t drunk any of the Koolaid can get what we want — news from the world of digital humanities — and the tweeters out there can get their fix of endless re-tweets with a simple mouse click.

So count me in as a devoted reader of the DHN feed. But you can still count me out of Twitter.

• A site aimed at high school students in Virginia/West Virginia on the secession of the western counties of Virginia in the 1860s.
• A site aimed at high school and college history teachers that allows them to compare texts from world history textbooks from multiple national context, each dealing with the same topic (ten different versions of the French Revolution, for instance).
• A site that allows students and the general public to explore the shootings in the U.S. House of Representatives by Puerto Rican nationalists. This site includes many (and sometimes conflicting) oral histories that force visitors to negotiate their way through the different memories of those present.
• A site that invites students to consider why someone in the American colonies might or might not support independence in 1776. This site uses the biographies of a wide variety of people living in the colonies to help students understand the different motives that drove political choices.
• A site that focuses on the role of Free Masonry in the early American republic with a particular focus on George Washington.
• A site that is a platform for a GIS-based investigation of the history of two communities divided/united by a bridge between the republic of Moldova and Transnistria.

Now if we could just give them each a grant to develop these into fully functional projects that teachers and students could use…

The job crisis in academia has shattered many historians’ faith in the tangible rewards of scholarship. As if it were not traumatic enough, there is also great controversy about the content of history courses and the very nature of the historians’ craft. Such problems affect most humanistic fields these days, but it especially ironic that in the bicentennial year, the professional analysts of the past should be so troubled by unemployment and insecurities.

Anyone recently exposed to historical studies is award of hte swift changes in the field–the uneasy alliances with sociology, psychology, geography and other disciplines; the growing use of computers and quantitative analysis, and the fascination with ethnicity, sexism, popular culture and other fashionable themes…

There is a real danger that history could become a discipline adrift, thus losing both its audience and its identity as an exacting humanistic art.

The dilemma has emerged most clearly in the debates over history-teaching in elementary and secondary schools and community colleges. The emphasis on new themes and techniques has made many history courses more appealing and provocative–but at considerable cost in terms of students’ understanding of historical context and basic facts and dates. This experience has also shown that historical study cannot be “modernized” too much without losing its integrity and its value for non-specialists.

What makes these arguments so painful is the generall depression inteh liberal arts. Historians, like professors of literature and social scientists, are getting a belated education in the hard facts of academic economics and demography. The students who flooded the history departments a decade agao are now a crowd of hunger Ph.Ds who scramble after every temporary post and have little chance of securing tenured professorships at all. These days, not even the best proteges of the finest professors can count on finding academic work–and the situation is not likely to improve for a decade or more…

Sound familiar?

Speaking to my student today just before her show’s opening, it was clear that the internship accomplished everything that it should have. She gained a much greater understanding of a whole variety of issues related to both history and art history (we’re a combined department here at Mason). When I asked her what she thought was the most important thing she learned, she said it was the complexity of copyright issues in our two fields, particularly with respect to digital matters. Who knew that an internship in art history could end up helping a student learn a lot about copyright and fair use?

Needless to say, I’m very proud of my student and am already thinking about what new internships I can come up with. If you haven’t taken on an intern for this sort of one-on-one scholarly work, I highly recommend it as an alternative to the standard independent reading that is so ubiquitous in history departments around the country.