Thursday, January 8, 7:30 p.m.
Presentation of the Inaugural Theodore Roosevelt-Woodrow Wilson Public Service Award

Friday, January 9, 9:30 a.m.
Looking Backward, Linking Together: Web-Based Archival Analysis and Presentation in Writing Assignments

This session included several presentations related to a web-based archival project at Davidson College--the Davidson College Digital Archive Project. The project provides support to digitize archival materials related to the history of the college and make them available over the World Wide Web. The Davidson College archivist, Jan Blodgett, has worked together with English instructor Shireen Campbell and instructional technologist Kristen Eshleman to create a course module that involves students in the project. Students have done archival research on the history of the college and presented their results in the form of websites, which have been posted as part of the Digital Archive website.

The Davidson College project is connected with a larger project, Beyond Books and Buildings: North Carolina's History of Higher Education Digital Project. Fayetteville State University is part of this project and has begun the process of digitizing portions of its archives (click to access FSU project website). I hope to encourage colleagues in American history to become involved in the project. (link to AHA program description)

Friday, January 9, 9:30 a.m.
Toward Common Practice: Broadening the Effective Use of Technology in Teaching

I was able to attend part of this session, sponsored by H-NET.  I found especially interesting the presentation of  From Innovation to Common Practice: How Faculty Networks are Spreading New Practices at Brooklyn College by Tim Shortell (Brooklyn College of the City University of New York).  (link to AHA program description)

Friday, January 9, 9:30 a.m.
Creating Alternatives to Assessment Regimes: A Standards and Outcomes Approach to Postsecondary History Education

I had hoped to attend part of this session.  Instead, I was able to get some of the handouts before the session began.  Georgia State University has funding from the Pew Foundation to study Quality in Undergraduate Education. The purpose of the study is to try to develop a set of learning outcomes and assessment tools for a set of  undergraduate majors, including history. Presenters discussed their efforts thus far. (link to AHA program description)

Friday, January 9, noon
Roundtable: Online History, the Students’ Perspective

This session brought together students who have participated in online programs at a variety of institutions. They reflected on their experiences and provided advice to faculty seeking to improve the effectiveness of online instructions. (link to AHA program description)

Friday, January 9, 2:30
Retrieving the Master's Degree from the Dustbin of History

The AHA Committee on the Master's Degree in History held an update on its study of the master's degree.  Philip Katz, the research director for the project, summarized the findings so far. There are between 340 and 435 MA programs in history in the United States.  There was an 18% decline in the number of master's degrees in history awarded between 1995 and 2001, despite a 15% increase in the total number of master's degrees awarded in all disciplines during the same period.  The Committee has identified four career paths of history M.A.'s: doctoral programs, community college instruction, secondary education teaching, and public history.  To these should be added the substantial number of students who have only an avocational interest in history.

The Committee is also working on identifying the elements of mastery that should characterize the historian with a master's degree.  These include basic historical knowledge, research and presentation skills, historical pedagogy, professional identity as a historian, and "thinking like a historian." This last has been difficult to define, but it has seemed important to the members of the Committee.

Dr. Katz reported that the historical profession still needs more information on the assessment of historians at the master's level, on the effectiveness of graduate courses and of the master's thesis. The Committee will draft a report by the end of Spring 2004.  The final report will be available sometime thereafter. (link to AHA program description)

Friday, January 9, 2:30 p.m.
Digital Scholarship and Its Possible Classroom Applications: Norfolk State University’s Race, Time, and Place Web-Based Historical Research Project

Faculty at Norfolk State University have received funding to create a fascinating web-based historical research project on Race, Time, and Place: African Americans in Tidewater Virginia. The project involved the collaboration of students and faculty. (link to AHA program description)

Saturday, January 10, 9:30 a.m.
Historical Research in the Digital Age: New Disciplines, New Approaches

This session featured two very interesting presentations.  One was on Exploring Book History in the Digital World: Collaboration, Exhibition, and Outreach, by Jessica Lacher-Feldman (University of Alabama).  Her department has received a grant to digitize nineteenth-century American book covers as part of an effort to make these resources available via the World Wide Web. The other presentation was A Practical Guide to Doing Historical Research in Our Internet World, by Mary Chalmers (Butler University). She described the book manuscript she is developing, which will be a hands-on guide for students.

Saturday, January 10, 2:30 p.m.
Envisioning and Revisioning History with Technology

This session included two presentations on online history courses, one at Florida Gulf Coast University and one at the University of Maryland University College (UMUC).  The University of Maryland presentation was especially interesting, because it described a complete online history degree program.  The Director, Bud Burkhard, reported that the program has grown spectacularly since its inception four years ago. 

This session also featured a report on a proposal for a GIS-based history master's program at Idaho State University. The history faculty are working with a university Center for Geographic Information Systems to develop a distinctive program that would create graduates capable of using GIS technology to assist in historical research. (link to AHA program description)

Sunday, January 11, 11:00 a.m.
Making History, Deconstructing the Disciplines

The final session I was able to attend included two very interesting examples of interdisciplinary scholarship. One project was a course developed at Northwestern University by faculty from history and from computer science.  This course required computer students to develop and use software to manage an online database project.  The history students used the software to develop a site about urban planning in early twentieth-century Chicago. The project uses images from the Chicago Historical Society, which is engaged in a massive effort to digitize its archives. 

The second presentation was by a graduate student in English who is producing her dissertation as a multimedia project. She recounted some of the challenges she has encountered as she attempts to reconceptualize the dissertation for the computer age. (link to AHA program description)

Conclusion

After attending the final session, I returned to Fayetteville Sunday afternoon, arriving at 8:30 p.m.

The sessions I attended revealed a couple of trends in the uses of computer technology in history. One trend is collaboration among faculty, archivists, and students on digitization projects. Another is the growth of online history programs, for which, contrary to expectations, there seems to be a substantial demand. These are both areas that FSU should explore.