history
Ancient History Encyclopedia
Ancient History Encyclopedia is a non-profit educational website founded in 2009 aiming to provide the best ancient history information on the internet for free.
With in-depth definitions, high-resolution illustrations, a broad range of articles, searchable timelines, interactive maps and a continually updated catalogue of books, the Ancient History Encyclopedia envisions itself as a guardian and supplier of exceptional resources, enhancing the public's knowledge of the ancient world.
All content materials on this Open Education Resource are reviewed for quality assurance before publication. A group of expert volunteers, many of whom are experts in their respective fields or pursuing advanced studies, peer-review the content of the website to ensure quality.
The Next Game Changer: The Historical Antecedents of the MOOC Movement in Education
Though the history of massive open online courses is very short, scholars can gain insights by looking at similar movements in the past. This paper examines several historical moments in education to develop an understanding of MOOCs and their future.
Specifically, this paper explores two developments that resemble the discourse surrounding MOOCs—the emergence of studia particulare and generale in medieval Europe and the monitorial educational systems of the early nineteenth century. It also looks at several other educational innovations that have been seen as disruptive to the status quo of education. These include land-grant institutions in the United States in addition to the University Without Walls and open education movements of the 1960s and 1970s. These previous movements are very instructive as proponents of MOOC educational systems develop strategies for promoting MOOCs and giving them lasting resonance in the digital age.
Manufacturing Pasts - Learning about industrial change in 20th century Britain
Manufacturing Pasts, a project led by the University of Leicester and funded by Jisc, offers hundreds of historical sources for learning and teaching. The resources tell the story of what life was like and how quickly it changed in British industrial cities during the second half of the 20th century.
Taking Leicester as an example of how British manufacturing has changed over the last 50 years, Manufacturing Pasts provides online access to previously hidden sources about the city’s industrial history, and a range of imaginative digital learning resources which can be easily used in teaching, research, and personal study. Sources include photographs, maps, architectural drawings, oral history interviews, company publications and newspaper articles.
“Manufacturing Pasts is relevant to higher education students at all levels – supporting both dissertations and projects exploring one of the historical themes”, comments Simon Gunn, professor of Urban History at the University of Leicester.
As well as being used in teaching, these resources are also intended to appeal to historians generally.
Selected resources from Manufacturing Pasts can also be viewed on the University of Leicester’s iTunes U site.
All the resources have been released under a Creative Commons open licence and can be re-used and adapted by anyone, providing the creator of the work is acknowledged and the use is for non-commercial purposes.
Observing the 80s
Observing the 1980s offers a unique and inspiring insight into the lives and opinions of British people from all social classes and regions during the 1980s decade. A lot of the material comprises the personal memories of people who lived through the Thatcher era, making this resource seem all the more resonant now.
The Observing the 1980s project brings together ‘voices’ from the Mass Observation Project and the British Library’s Oral history collections, alongside 1980s documents and ephemera such as public information leaflets, pamphlets, posters and tickets from the University of Sussex Library’s archives.
The value of digitising these collections and disseminating them as open educational resources is that currently no established historiography of the 1980s exists. The decade is largely represented as polarised and the work that does exist is similarly divided into oppositional camps.
By bringing together these resources, students and academics will be able to make and illustrate connections across and between these polarised approaches. Additionally, a key benefit for educators at all levels is in the raw nature of the information and its potential use across subject areas such as politics, sociology, oral history, cultural and media studies, linguistics, gender studies, narrative and memory studies, migration studies, folklore studies, anthropology and contemporary history.
The material is also embedded into the University of Sussex Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) using open Moodle software. A variety of open education resources have been created, including one titled “Thatcher's Britain: Observing the 1980s”, with videos, images and slides that can be accessed by anyone through a guest login with no need sign up. There are also several infographics covering the Falklands Conflict, unemployment, the miners’ strike and sexuality in Thatcher’s Britain.
The Observing the 1980s material will also be available through HumBox and JORUM as well as via other educational resource sites such as the British Library.
Organising a debate in the classroom: Internet, democratic life and the media
Académie de Besançon has produced a brief guide to help organise a classroom debate around the topic “The role of the Internet in democratic life – Public opinion and media”.
The goal of the suggested classroom debate is to work with students in the identification and analysis of news formats, compare them and learn to develop a critical vision of the different sources of information, including online media.
Literary and Historical Manuscripts Online
Manuscripts Online is a crowd-sourced respository of British primary resources that date from 1000 to 1500 A.D. The collection, available through library, archive, university, and publisher websites, amasses an ample supply of literary manuscripts, historical documents, and early printed books central to the study of English literature and history during the Middle Ages.
Multicultural Interdisciplinary Handbook: Tools for Learning History and Geography in a Multicultural Perspective
The aim of this Project is to build and share a set of tools that includes a HandBook, Digital Modules and a Teacher Training Course. They will offer a structured path through European Contemporary History and Geography where the countries concerned will be those of the Project partners.
Partners:
- University of Salamanca - GRIAL (Spain).
- Pädagogische Höchschule Tirol (Austria).
- Hafelekar Unternehmensberatung Schober GmbH – Innsbruck (Austria).
- Institut Universitaire de Formation des Maîtres – Créteil (France).
- Universität Augsburg (Germany).
- Universität Siegen (Germany).
- Università Ca’ Foscari di Venezia (Italy).
- Społeczna Wyższa Szkoła Przedsiębiorczości i Zarządzania (Poland).
Despite official educational guidelines, improved linguistic skills have been limited in all partner countries due to cuts in their national budgets. As a consequence CLIL experiences have been lessened, to the sole benefit of those involving English.
Another reason for this project resides in the difficulty in modifying the guidelines of national programmes, that are often short-sighted as far as other cultures are concerned.
Finally, all European reports point out the shortage of materials and ICT-based contests suitable for interdisciplinary and multicultural education in school.
The MIH (Multicultural Interdisciplinary HandBook) Project meets these needs by providing new tools that help teachers and pupils to plunge deeper into the culture and the language of another nation via its memorials, its history and its landscape/geography. Moreover, it intends to promote the common European identity, as it introduces a European perspective in the schools’ History and Geography programmes, which are usually confined to national borders.
The aim of this Project is to build and share a set of tools that includes a HandBook, Digital Modules and a Teacher Training Course. They will offer a structured path through European contemporary History and Geography where the countries concerned will be those of the Project partners.
Today, it is generally national guidelines that determine school programmes; school HandBooks and Didactics are based upon them. Going beyond the limits of the national programmes, and furthering the understanding amongst young people and their educators of the diversity of European culture, languages and values –the principal objective of the Comenius– we plan to operate at the level of the HandBooks and Didactics. The main purpose of the entire MIH project is to offer a tool for studying events through an approach that is both comparative and interdisciplinary: historical content will be organised based on underlying geographical realities dealing with such topics as borders, migrations, landscape and resources.
The cooperative work of selecting and drawing up the key topics, a major activity of the project’s core members, will provide the materials for designing a training course addressing current and future teachers that will emphasize the European dimension in teacher training.
The HandBook, available in the five languages of the partnership plus in English, can be used both by teachers interested in multicultural learning as well as by those involved in CLIL projects. In the latter case, teachers will have at their disposal the consistent path, the original documents and a general methodology that recent reports have shown to be missing. They will promote language learning.
The Digital Modules will be the final tool of the project. The modules will be available as free video podcasts, web-based contents (HTML) and standard-packaged Learning Objects (SCORM – IMS) in order to use them in any Virtual Learning Environment, so in class or for independent study by pupils; they will motivate pupils by supporting listening comprehension and oral production and represent an important contribution to the development of digital educational content.
The Project life is from October 2009 to September 2011. We expect to release the first beta products by September 2010.
MIH aims to:
- Further the development of a common European identity by having schools participate in the culture of other countries using their languages and their collective symbolic imagery.
- Contribute to the creation of a new generation of school HandBook and ICT-based contents that can support teachers involved in CLIL experiences, or who are simply interested in them.
- Implement digital educational contents in schools.
The results will be:
- A HandBook and Digital Materials, which deal with a choice of historical and geographical topics, selected among those that have had an important impact in the national imagery in the last two centuries. The final version of HandBook and Digital Modules will be available in all the languages of the partner countries.
- A Teacher Training Course addressed to both future and in-service teachers. The training develops the topics dealt by the HandBook and explains its methodology and issues.
IMPACT Centre of Competence in Digitisation
The IMPACT Centre of Competence in Digitisation is a not for profit organisation with the mission to make the digitisation of historical printed text “better, faster, cheaper”. It will provide tools, services and facilities to further advance the state-of-the-art in the field of document imaging, language technology and the processing of historic text.
Europeana Remix
Based on a short film that was produced as a result of a crowdsourcing project “The First World War in everyday documents”, the video now turns into a new enriching experience. Empowered with latest video technology and resources from Europeana and the web, the interactive video lets you browse through related content, share the video with your friends and interact with other users through comments that you can post at any moment of the film.