From The Theme
PUBLISH ON DEMAND

WHAT IF
What if active engagement in building stories of history helped students evaluate the sources of information and better understand the perspectives from which history is written?

WHAT WE SET OUT TO DO
We recast the history textbook as an edited on- demand, collaborative collection of historical narratives. Through a curriculum based on primary documents and student-constructed digital stories for tablet computers, we set out to build a use case to help schools, museums, libraries and media companies empower the educational development of young people and educators by using primary- source documents and interactive technology.

WHAT WE FOUND
High school students accessed our database of original videos, images and text to build their stories; they discussed the perspective taken by their choice of documents and explored how selecting alternative documents could change the story. With strong support from the teacher and school in which the pilot was conducted, the research team evaluated learning outcomes. We successfully demonstrated the requirements and feasibility for an on-demand digital history textbook.

LEARN MORE
mediaX Research Project Update, Fall 2013

mediaX Research Theme Update, Spring 2013

Watch Videos About This Project

Read the Stanford Report Announcement

mediaX Research Update, Fall 2013
PEOPLE BEHIND THE PROJECT
Sam Wineburg is the Margaret Jacks Professor of Education and of History (by courtesy), is the founder and Executive Director of the Stanford History Education Group and Stanford’s Ph.D. program in History Education. Current research includes: new forms of assessment to measure historical understanding, the creation of Web-based environments for the learning and teaching of history and a longitudinal study on the development of historical consciousness among adolescents in three communities.

Laura Moorhead is a doctoral student in the Learning Sciences & Technology Design program at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education. Her research interests consider the design and structuring of information, particularly in regard to primary source material, research, and scholarship. She works to improve educational practice in the areas of primary sources and technology and to help people find new ways of combining critical literacy and open access.

Molly Bullock is a doctoral student in the Learning Sciences & Technology Design program at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education. Her research interests include the integration of Design Thinking into K-12 education, particularly the emerging utility of the design process relative to the Common Core State Standards in Language Arts and Mathematics. Molly is also interested in the role of technology in K-12 mathematics instruction, particularly the affordances of interactive technologies and what makes them similar and different from current non-digital classroom practices and interventions.

Jeremy Jimenez is a Ph.D. Student at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education. His current research focuses on the development of empathy towards marginalized individuals and communities in history curriculum and pedagogy by examining hundreds of cross-national social studies textbooks during the past century as well as contemporary pedagogical practices in U.S. history classes. He also helps U.S. high school students develop their historical thinking and media literacy in authoring their own digital history textbooks.

Paul Franz is a doctoral student in the Learning Sciences & Technology Design program at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education. He’s currently interested in the way that technology is reshaping higher education, especially pedagogy and curriculum. For example, how will teaching in traditional humanities disciplines map onto the broad and open-access models that are becoming increasingly common in computer science and engineering?

Max Alexander leads the instructional design team at General Assembly in New York City. He received hi PhD from Stanford’s Graduate School of Education. He’s interested in creating engaging and innovative online learning experience, as well as how to blend the best of “offline” and “online” education, along with synchronous and asynchronous learning experiences.