We (in Cleveland State University’s History Department and the Center for Public History + Digital Humanities) have developed Teaching & Learning Cleveland as a way to transform the region into a learning laboratory for upper-level university courses, as well as regional K-12 classrooms. We use Omeka as the basis for our collecting, archiving, research, and storytelling process.  Among our teaching partnerships are two Teaching American History Grants: a) Sounds of American History and b) Constructing, Consuming, and Conserving American History; we’ve also partnered with the Ohio Historical Society on the Ohio Civil War 150 project.

Also, we developed Cleveland History Blogs as a way for faculty and community partners to blog about and document their work, from building course syllabi to developing project-based blogs. I use the blogs for my lower-level and upper-level teaching, for example my United States History Survey, History 111.

My questions, relative to these projects run the gamut, from the following: How do we build collaboration with students and communities, especially at the upper level? How do we develop spontaneous classrooms, that are not linear, at the lower level? How much is too much–meaning how do we direct an appropriate amount of resources to facilitate best practices teaching?

I’d like to to talk about building an online local history collection of audio and video interviews, photos, written narratives, recipes, records, etc. What is doable when there’s lots of interest but no budget or time, tech resources and skills are limited, and people are geographically dispersed?

Teaching at a small liberal arts college means that most of my digital humanities work focuses on the classroom. During the fall 2009 semester, both my Colonial Latin American History course and my Global History course built digital history exhibits using Omeka: Colonial Latin American Material Culture and Global History before 1000ce.  Both of these projects involved students curating a range of primary and secondary sources to build a larger historical argument.  During THATCamp, I’d like to share ideas about student learning through digital history projects.