History instructors are taking advantage of this expanded access by incorporating digital primary documents into their courses and assignments. Some faculty are creating web sites that collect these rich historical resources, pointing their students directly to the best information on a subject, such as the Civil War and the American Presidency. Having access at one's fingertips allows instructors to broaden the scope of the research projects they assign, providing students with study topics that previously, because of travel requirements and limited access, were impractical.

Technology is not new to history instruction. For years historians have used slides, overhead projectors, films, and music as teaching aids. However, their tool chest has greatly expanded since the explosion of Internet and multimedia technologies. History instructors are creating PowerPoint presentations and web sites to show artwork and images from bygone eras, as well as to complement lectures with detailed maps that show the regions about which they are teaching. They are experimenting with virtual reality technologies to give students insight into what it was like to live during another time period, as well as to challenge student assumptions about historical events. Many of these technological strategies are pedagogically beneficial because they personalize large lower-division classes and provide a more active learning experience for the hundreds of students who take them.

Moving Beyond Textbooks
Ev Stanton, a teaching assistant and History PhD candidate at UC Irvine, uses online resources for assignments and in class, attempting to get students excited about history through a direct connection with historical artifacts.

"Internet access to primary documents allows students to work with them more like a professional historian would," says Stanton. "It is a much more hands-on and enriching experience for students. In many instances, they can even see problems like ink or writing surface anomalies that can make the historians job of translation and interpretation so difficult."

Having a wealth of resources available online is also saving students money, says Stanton, because faculty are relying less and less on expensive textbooks. Because so much useful information can be found online, especially through scholarly databases such as those provided through the California Digital Library, instructors are no longer beholden to outdated and sometimes inaccurate textbooks.

Stanton says that many of the professors he's assisted in the past couple of years have not used textbooks at all. Instead, they're asking students to buy selective texts and then everything else they can access for free online.

Putting Presidential Papers Online
UC Santa Barbara professor John Woolley and graduate student instructor Gerhard Peters have taken the use of online primary documents a step further. Because the documents they wanted students in their American Presidency course to access were not available online, they created their own digital collection. The result was the American Presidency Project web site ( www.presidency.ucsb.edu ), which houses 50,000 presidential papers and related documents from the Herbert Hoover to Bill Clinton administrations. The web site is now used as a resource by teachers, Presidential libraries, and newsgathering organizations throughout the United States.

"It started in 1999 as a very, very modest project," says Peters. "Professor Woolley wanted me to compile data on the American Presidency and create simple graphs and charts on things like approval ratings and number of vetoes. He wanted to use the web site in the classroom during lectures and to provide a resource for the students outside of class so they could more easily find data for their projects."

Because the presidential papers were not available anywhere else online, Peters went through the labor-intensive process of adding to the web site all of the documents, most of which need to be scanned while some simply needed to be transferred from CDROM.

As the site became more comprehensive, its use as a teaching aid became more tightly woven into the course. Most recently a feature was added that allows students to complete a methodological assignment in which they conduct research, classify documents, and input their findings into a database, which would not have been possible without the access that the Internet provides. Woolley and Peters integrated this feature last spring into an upper-division course for the first time.

"The site in its current form allowed us to embark on an ambitious methodological exercise, with an assignment that simply could not have been possible without web-based data entry forms," says Peters. "In ten weeks, we were able to teach a qualitatively rich course with a quantitative methodological component, which is something our department and the discipline in general is gravitating more towards."

All You Need to Know About The Civil War
When it comes to technology, Joan Waugh, a professor of history at UCLA, says she is a "dinosaur" in the classroom. In her course on the Civil War, she eschews PowerPoint, and instead uses slides and a projector to show historical images and relies on the lecture hall's old sound system to play music from the 19th Century.

However, when it comes to her course web site, she is anything but outdated. She has won campus teaching awards as well as student praise for her comprehensive course web site about the Civil War.

"Since I began teaching I have believed in using visuals and music, and have always used slides," says Waugh. "I used to create time-consuming handouts for each lecture. The slides, music, and handouts would be used to complement the lecture, which I believe is the heart of any course. Students learn in different ways and often a map, or picture, or song can bring home a point differently for different students."

In 1997 Waugh received her first Instructional Improvement Grant from the Office of Instructional Development at UCLA and used the funds to create a web site based on her extensive handouts. She hired Chris Bates, a former undergraduate student in her class, to create and maintain the web site, which continues to grow with new sections and resources added every quarter.

"I had no experience with doing anything on the web but already my students were very familiar with it and liked using it as way to do research and find information, whether I liked it or not," says Waugh. "I'm comfortable that the information on my web site is legitimate and scholarly and it gives students a place to do their research and find quotes. They very much like to use the web site and I've noticed that students will read original documents and use them in their papers with more regularity than they did before the web site was created."

An online bulletin board is also used extensively in Waugh's class. Students post questions for her during the quarter, especially after study sessions. Waugh sometimes brings up the questions in class for further discussion. Although the discussion boards start off slowly, by the end of the quarter the amount of online correspondence is five feet long, says Waugh.

A key to Waugh's success is that the web site material directly relates to her lectures and reading assignments. Waugh requires the students to visit the web site each week to access assignments, and often during lectures she refers them to the site for more information on a topic. "The only way you can get students to use a web site is to tie it to their course work," she says.

Immersing Students in the Past
At UC Santa Cruz, Alan Christy and Alice Yang Murray team-teach a large lecture course on Memories of World War II in which they use a variety of technologies to help students understand various perspectives of the conflict.

"Some people think about history as solely written text," says Yang Murray. "One of our goals is to get students to think about how history gets represented in many different forms. We look at how sources other than written words, such as visual sources, can be used to represent history."

Yang Murray and Christy used to use PowerPoint to display images and text during lectures, but have recently moved to Apple's Keynote program, which allows them to input Chinese characters and the Japanese syllabary, something PowerPoint could not do.

"Asian culture has created a wide variety of images and objects that are wonderful illustrations that represent issues," says Christy. "Using Keynote shows students that memories in Japan are being produced in another language and that this might contribute to a different understanding and memory. I wanted them to start to envision a place that is different and get them to think in a new way. We strategically use words and images to shake them out of presumptions that they are likely to carry around."

Yang Murray and Christy have tried over the years to make their large lecture course more experiential for students. "A large classroom is usually not conducive to historical instruction," says Christy. "Unlike a science or a math course we can't meaningfully use anonymous forms of testing. We're not interested in teaching facts but in teaching students how to analyze."

One way in which they accomplish this is to create virtual tours, such as "walk-throughs" of museums in which students can compare and contrast exhibits on World War II. These visual explorations in the classroom link with Christy's and Yang Murray's strategy of inviting guest lecturers to class, giving students yet another perspective and source of information. This all feeds their guiding principle of "making the classroom experience as alive as possible no matter how large the class gets."

"As the class gets bigger you worry about it becoming too anonymous," says Christy. "We felt it was the experiential moments of the virtual tours and guest speakers that made the students less likely to sink into the back row."

Christy and Yang Murray are also tying their research into the class experience. They are working on a project that is intended to produce written research publications for them as well as primary research material for student use. They are going to sites where memories of the war are salient to produce DVDs that include video of interviews, historical sites, and ceremonies of remembrance, as well as digitized documents. They will also create QuickTime virtual reality exhibits and memorials that students will be able to control and manipulate. "It's sort of like putting video at the editing stage into the hands of the students," says Christy.

Ev Stanton from UCI is also working on a virtual exploration project in which students could immerse themselves in another time and culture. He is assisting Professor Lamar Hill in creating a virtual "time travel" environment to teach students about what it was like to live in another era.

"For a history teacher one of the most important things is to get students to think outside of their own period and put them into an historical space," explains Stanton. "The goal of this would be to have them try to function in an historical context so they can make some critical thinking choices about the subject of the class."'

Hill and Stanton plan to create a virtual English village market square as it would have appeared in the early- to mid-16th century. "Students will be given the opportunity to create as historically accurate a character as they can and walk around as this character in a virtual environment and have to interact using linguistic cues, etc," explains Stanton. "Students would attach that environment to the issues and literature that we're working with in the classroom. It has to be tied back into the classroom."

Although they are still in the planning stages of the project and are far from having a finished product, Stanton is excited by the possibility that this "bleeding edge" technology holds to get students excited about history.

"It's a constant battle to get the love of history that scholars have into the students," says Stanton. "I think technology can go a long way towards giving students the 'goose bump' feeling that scholars get when they are in the presence of history."