Technology of HIST 104 DCE

This page is not essential to your work in the course. It’s just a collection of information from Dr. Isern for those interested in how the course has been designed and packaged for distance delivery. Some of you may be interested in either the technical or the pedagogical aspects of this.

General Philosophy	In the basics I am pretty conservative. Books, lectures, discussion—these are the stuff of old-fashioned History, and I don’t discard any of them. At the same time I want to take advantage of digital communications in order to reach students that otherwise would not be served. In general I try to replicate at a distance, with digital media, what I do in a resident course on campus. I know it’s not the same. We lose something by not being able to converse face-to-face. I also know, however, that we gain some things from the dispersed nature of the student population and the innate possibilities of the digital media. So I hope to exploit these possibilities in lieu of the virtues of face-to-face contact.
Website	The website provides a reference and communications center for the course. It supersedes the old-fashioned syllabus and also does much more. I like to make a lot of information about the course available up front. The home page and certain other key pages are composed in an obsolete web composition program called HTML Writer. You can probably find a free copy on the web somewhere. I don’t like newfangled web design software, because I like to put the coding in myself and know where it is. (Not surprisingly, I also prefer a five-speed to automatic transmission.) Many of the support pages, like this one, are composed in Word and saved as web documents. It’s just the easiest way to handle documents that are mainly informational text. It’s not pretty, but it gets the stuff out there. Some students are accustomed to accessing course materials via Blackboard or some other such system. I don’t use those. I operate via world-readable websites, for a couple of reasons. First, I teach at a land-grant university, a type of institution that emphasizes open access. I’m happy to let anyone examine the course materials I am using. Second, Blackboard and systems like it are institutional adoptions, and I have no control over the choices made. I’m not going to invest time learning systems that might be changed by some committee. I was an early adopter of digital technologies for teaching, and I’m in it for the long haul.
Lectures	The lectures are contained in PowerPoint files. The slides provide outlines, illustrative images, and key terms. The lecture content—pretty much the same stuff I deliver in-person on campus—is recorded as a series of sound files, each of which is attached to the pertinent slide. I record the slides at home in my study, using a little home studio program called Cakewalk. From Cakewalk I export wav files, which are lightly edited if at all before being attached to the PPT files. (I’ll add a few more technical details about the sound later.) The sound may be rough at times, and I’m not a professional reader, but my aim is to convey content, and investing too much time in sound production produces only diminishing returns. Images: we’re using quite a few digital photos I have shot across the country. This is the way I like to go, because it involves no credits or permissions, and also because using photos I have shot in the present emphasizes the continuing imprint of history on the land. Other images are harvested from the web. The National Archives and the Library of Congress are go-to sites for images; in other cases we may search broadly, to specialized sites, for images and then seek permissions for them. The PPT slides are set up to be advanced manually by the student. Sound icons are placed visible on the slides. The sound starts automatically when the slide appears, the student does not have to initiate it, but the sound icon allows the student to repeat the sound for review while keeping the slide in place.
Quizzes	Description of the quiz-making process to be added.
E-Mail Lists	Every section of HIST 104 DCE has an e-mail list, a discussion list, powered by Listserv software. The list provides a place where students discuss their readings and other aspects of the course among themselves. Instructors monitor the lists, but take part in list transactions only occasionally.
Weblog	The weblog for the course, “HIST 104 DCE News,” is framed into the middle of the home page of the course website. The weblog is a place where instructors post announcements and updates and answer questions. It is not intended as an interactive venue; we use e-mail lists for that. The weblog, as you can see when you look at it, is powered by Blogger, a free weblog service provider, but hosted in my own folders on university servers.

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