Workshop 'Strategies for Using Digital Sources in the Classroom

Given the current abundance of available digital resources for historians (retro-digitized as well as born-digital materials), there is an urgent question of how to engage with these resources in the history classroom. How do we teach the differences between "online" and "offline" materials and they ways in which historians can approach them? How do we deal with issues of decontextualization and the changes brought about in historical research practices by working with digital objects?

The SourceLab project tackles these issues by letting students create digital editions of historical artefacts and thereby engage them in the making of history. The Ranke.2 project provides lessons that teaches students what digital source criticism is.

In this workshop we will discuss in what ways teachers use digital resources in the classroom, and what strategies, if any, they use to sensitize their students to the specificities of online materials as opposed to those found in the archive. The outcome could be a working paper which discusses the pros and cons of various approaches.