Viewing America from your Web Site
Brian Balogh, History
1997 TTI Fellow
Email: bb9s@virginia.edu
Project website: http://cti.itc.virginia.edu/~bb9s/
Brian Balogh, Department of History, teaches a large undergraduate lecture course entitled Viewing America, which relies heavily on different types of media - particularly video - in its exploration of American politics and culture in the age of mass media. Professor Balogh proposes to use the very latest form of mass communication, the World Wide Web, as the vehicle for delivery of ideas about modern American culture. The core component of the Viewing America web site is an electronic sourcebook, which will serve as a guide to weekly discussion sections. The sourcebook will consolidate in one location: questions that will direct the students' reading; required primary sources (text, sound, and image); links to other relevant web sites; and discussion-based mailing lists for the students in each section. Viewing America will be rich in multimedia material, integrating text, still images, video clips, and audio clips in a easily navigable site. Long video segments will still be played from video tape in class (digitization of video is still a time-consuming enterprise resulting in large files which transfer slowly over the Internet). Shorter clips, however, will be included in the site as an introduction to the more complete resources. In addition, the site will contain a searchable interface with citations to all of the visual and audio material used in lecture, giving students retrieval information for the original sources. Professor Balogh's primary goal is to more actively engage students in the learning process. Viewing America will offer them the opportunity to explore a rich variety of media carefully chosen and presented to support specific course topics, and will encourage intellectually curious students to explore subjects of interest in greater depth.