Women in World History – online resource

I cam across the blog Edwired today – 'a weblog devoted to the teaching and learning of history online.'

There's a lot of interesting material there – it's definitely worth a look! The blog is written by staff at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

One of their projects (amongst many fascinating ones) is the Women in World History site. This site is:

an online curriculum resource center to help high school and college world history teachers and students find and analyze online primary sources on women in world history. Materials will encourage teachers to integrate recent scholarship and will give students a more sophisticated framework for understanding global women’s history.

The site includes 15 different modules:

• Bhakti Poets (6th – 11th c.)
• Writers of the Heian Era (8th – 12th c.)
• Islamic Empire (9th – 11th c.)
• Early Modern Period (13th – 17th c.)
• Sati (13th – 19th c.)
• Doña Marina, Cortés’ Translator (16th c.)
• Cultural Contact in Southern Africa (17th – 18th c.)
• British Empire (17th – 20th c.)
• Imperialism in North Africa (18th – 20th c.)
• Western Views of Chinese Women (19th c.)
• Health in Latin America (20th c.)
• Puerto Rican Labor Movement (20th c.)
• Southeast Asian Politics (20th c.)
• Soviet Dictatorship (20th c.)
• Spanish Civil War (20th c.)

For each module, there is:

• an introduction;
• a collection of primary sources (usually around 8-12 documents);
• teaching strategies;
• information about analyzing the material;
• a lesson plan (aimed for high school level);
• a document-based question (suitable for university level);
• a bibliography;
• information about the authors;and
• links to printable versions of the introductory and primary source materials.

The site also contains discussions by scholars about how they use primary evidence (presented in audio files with flash images), and case studies of how academics have used the primary source material from the site in their teaching strategies.

Using the Old Bailey Online database

Given the huge amount of information available online now, I’m interested in ways in which teachers can use existing databases and resources within their teaching.

There’s an interesting post over at Ancarett’s Abode about how she uses the Old Bailey Online database in her teaching.
The Old Bailey Online site is ‘A fully searchable online edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing accounts of over 100,000 criminal trials held at London’s central criminal court.’

Ancarett writes:

For the vital aspect of the website for my teaching application is not so much the materials of each individual account or the excellent bibliography, it’s the chance to let new scholars play in a historical database akin to a virtual sandbox. The function of generating reports in tables, bar charts or pie charts allows my students to try out all sorts of interpretive questions on for size: are women more likely to get off charges of murder than men? Are young people accused more often of property crimes or older people? Do violent crime outbreaks correlate to peacetime with the release of soldiers and sailors? The database is an engrossing tool that seems to suggest more avenues of enquiry the longer you tinker with it.

She further goes on to discuss how this activity is used within the limits of the program, and how she related the task of generate and analyzing two statistical searches from the Old Bailey Online database to the rest of the course and the required readings.

I firmly believe that activities using resources such as these enable students to actively engage in the discipline, rather than being observers. In the case of history, it enables history students to become historians. Which is a far more interesting approach, and a more in depth learning process, than many traditional learning tasks.

BibliOdyssey

A blog I love to check every week or so is BibliOdyssey – ‘Books~~Illustrations~~Science~~History~~Visual Materia Obscura~~Eclectic Bookart.’

This blog showcases images drawn from historical collections and publications that are now available on the web. As well as being visual bliss, it’s also a great resource for teachers who may wish to use historical images in their teaching – each posting explains the collection that the images are from, provides some basic details, and links to the web page of the collection.

Recent postings include images from the 14th century Das Buch der Natur (The Book of Nature); 18th and 19th century images of Printers’ Devices; and images from Racinet’s 19th century Complete Costume History.