Is the Programming Historian 2 a MOOC?

'Evil Robot' by Jennifer Morrow (cc-by)

A few months ago I was asked if the Programming Historian 2 is a MOOC. For the uninitiated, a MOOC is a Massive OpenOnline Course. They’ve been popping up online for the past couple of years, principally at major American universities like MIT and Stanford, claiming to be able to teach thousands or even hundreds of thousands of students at the same time – for free. They’ve so far had mixed results but it seems most people in academia have an opinion on them – either, meh it’s a fad, damn we gotta get one of those at our school, or the robots have come for our jobs! Defend! Defend!

I can’t speak for the other editors of the Programming Historian 2 (PH2). But I can say: No. I don’t think the PH2 is a MOOC.  If you havn’t found us yet, the PH2 is an open access series of tutorials designed to let humanities researchers get their toes wet with computer programming. The lessons involve learning simple programming tasks that are immediately useful to ordinary working humanists. That might be automatically downloading historical recordsfrom the Internet, or analyzing a collection of sources with topic modeling. All of the lessons are online – like a MOOC – and there is no teacher in the room with you – like a MOOC.

So why no MOOC? For me, what sets a MOOC apart from a classroom-based course is a belief that the tutor-tutee relationship can be depersonalized and made redundant. MOOCs replace this relationship with a series of steps. If you learn the steps in the right order and engage actively with the material you learn what you need to know and who needs teacher?

I don’t think that’s what we’re about. Instead, some of the most exciting feedback we’ve got at the PH2 has been from academics who have used the PH2 as a teaching tool in their classroom. Either they’ve assigned lessons for their students to work through, they’ve challenged students to write lessons of their own, or they’ve used the PH2 to teach themselves a skill that they can then pass along to their students.

That’s not to say you can’t use the PH2 to teach yourself some programming if you havn’t got a teacher. It’s to say the PH2 is not the evil robot looking to take your job away. It’s the friendly robot looking to give your teaching toolkit a few more options, and maybe a new skill or two with which to impress your friends and colleagues. Not unlike a book. And Books havn’t put literature professors out of a job, but they have made English lit courses more interesting.

Interactive History Displays

I've been working on some projects for Bill Turkel recently that he likes to call "Interactive, Ambient and Tangible Devices for Knowledge Mobilization." In layman's terms, that's "Interactive History Displays."

The project I'm currently working on is an interactive ice core. It's not really ice, but it's a cylinder of plastic, cooled by a device called a "Peltier Junction." When a student touches the ice core, sensors determine where the finger touched and a monitor displays relevant information.

Our current prototype is a cardboard tube, but it's going to get way better, we swear. We have recently started working with a milling machine. This machine is essentially a 3D printer. You give it directions of what you want, put in a block of material - plastic for instance - and it creates your shape in relief.

For those of you interested in the technical details or who wish to follow along with our progress, you can do so here.

But, that's not why I'm posting. The purpose of this project is to demonstrate new ways to engage students with history.

Textbooks have their place, but so many children learn by touching or experiencing. And, because it's not very feasible to truck an ice core into a classroom, we're creating the next best thing. Perhaps better, since most children lack the university degree in paleoclimatology required to decipher ice core secrets.

The interactive display also gives students and educators more control over their learning experience. Students can choose to learn about only those aspects of the core that interest them, by deciding which parts of if to touch. If they are particularly interested in the bubbles which are trapped under the surface, they can focus their attention on that aspect. If they want to know about the dirty section near one end, they can do that too.

These displays can be made relatively inexpensively. The ice core will likely cost about the same as your average science textbook and could be used to teach an entire classroom.

Bill has already started work on a tree-ring which follows the same principles as the ice core.

I think this idea has a bit more potential. So, if anyone has a suggestion for something they would like to see, or that they think would be useful for teaching history, please leave a comment here or send me an email at adam_crymble@hotmail.com. I'd love to hear your ideas, and perhaps we can bring them to life.

Be creative: dinosaur bones, a castle, a dress. Anything is fair game.