Growing the New Technopolis

I just came across a Flash-based tool called PrimaryAccess, a slideshow application similar to VoiceThread. According to its website, “PrimaryAccess is a web-based tool that offers teachers and students frictionless access to digital images and materials that enable them to construct compelling personal narratives.” It was developed by Bill Ferster at the Virginia Center for Digital History. You can watch an introduction to it here.

There are a few things I really like about it:
- Unlike VoiceThread or Microsoft’s Photo Story, it’s open source.
- It provides a good introduction for students to the idea of using primary (media) documents for scholarship. Students use historical photos from a database that are already annotated with APA citation.
- It has an integrated “idea map” for planning movies. Mind-mapping is a new passion of mine. Non-linear approaches to project-planning offer students a flexible tool for getting their ideas together (vs traditional outlining or storyboarding, say).

In Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture, Henry Jenkins et al say:

…we do not want to see media literacy treated as an add-on subject. Rather, we should see it as a paradigm shift, one which, like multiculturalism or globalization, reshapes how we teach every existing subject. Media change is impacting every aspect of our contemporary experience and as a consequence, every school discipline needs to take responsibility for helping students to master the skills and knowledge they need to function in a hypermediated environment.

PrimaryAccess seems to hold great potential for working towards that goal in history curricula. What better way to learn history than contextualized through the primary photographical documents of an era?

Mike

This entry was posted on Friday, March 21st, 2008 at 2:40 pm and is filed under Recommended Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.