Teaching History in the Digital Age

Although many humanities scholars have been talking and writing about the transition to the digital age for more than a decade, only in the last few years have we seen a convergence of the factors that make this transition possible: the spread of sufficient infrastructure on campuses, the creation of truly massive databases of humanities content, and a generation of students that has never known a world without easy Internet access.
 
Teaching History in the Digital Age serves as a guide for practitioners on how to fruitfully employ the transformative changes of digital media in the research, writing, and teaching of history. T. Mills Kelly synthesizes more than two decades of research in digital history, offering practical advice on how to make best use of the results of this synthesis in the classroom and new ways of thinking about pedagogy in the digital humanities.

“Kelly’s book may be directed at history teachers, but its message is more widely relevant. The operations that he explores—thinking critically about the way history (and other cultural knowledge) is constructed, learning how to find and evaluate information online, analyzing and making sense of what one finds, contributing to knowledge through new-media tools and forums—are all things most of us would love to master if only we had the right guidance and sufficient time.”
—Mary Taylor Huber, Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning 

“It is superb; something everyone interested in digital history will have to read.”
—Stanley Katz, Princeton University

“History educators have for the most part been slow to embrace the digital world inhabited by their students in their teaching. This book is part practical attempt to encourage and assist them to do so; part reflective meditation on what history ‘is’ and how historians think about fostering higher learning through history; and part impassioned appeal for historians to recast what they do in the classroom in the light of a changed student population.”
—Alan Booth, University of Nottingham 
 

T. Mills Kelly is Professor and an Associate Director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.