Consultant

A Pioneer in Instructional Uses of Web-based Course Management and

Creating Websites for Use in Higher Education

An Early Model for Instructional Use of Web-based Course Management

My early Homepages served as a portal to all of my Course Websites, CV, Personal Page, and more.

  • At first, I learned how to write the html myself.

  • I quickly received institutional support, grant money, and student help in writing the html for me.

  • Receiving hundreds of hits a month, I was contacted by professors, start-ups, and publishing companies moving to digital sources and services to consult on their projects.

  • The earliest course management systems, CourseInfo and Blackboard, consulted with me and used my ideas for their early model.

A Sample Early Homepage

My Course Webpages and Approach were an Early Model for Others

Creating University-based Digital History Websites

  • My Course Webpages included many Primary Sources Documents along with Questions for students to consider while reading and analyzing them, and Exams.

  • Twenty years ago, copyright law allowed me the free use of Secondary Sources such as scholarly articles and music, for the purposes of education, as long as the websites were not "searchable" on the Web. Only people who had the URL to my websites could find them at the time. Obviously, this quickly changed.

  • But we were a small community of historians creating such websites and word spread quickly about what each of us were doing and my links were passed along to professors, publishers, and start-up companies.

An Early Model and Consultant for Creating Digital History Websites

for Use by Students and Teachers

In 1999 I was contacted by Thomas Dublin and Kathryn Kish Sklar who were impressed with the model I had created for using student assignments to build a website which combined born-digital student-written analysis with primary documents and digital sources as both a learning module and a source for other students as well as the public. They received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant and I began consulting with them for the next four years.

Dublin's letter to me

The Women and Social Movements website was initially open and free. It eventually became a paid-for service, and not affordable for many smaller institutions and programs and independent teachers. It is considered one of the best repositories of primary source documents and resources for students and teachers for the history of women in the United States.

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Paid Consultant

  • Initially, my use of Course Websites were coupled with my deep belief in Democratic Learning - approaches that are accessible to all students and to the public and in which student take responsibility and direction for their learning, empowering themselves along the way while encouraging independence and lifelong learning.

  • Quickly, innovators, entrepreneurs, endowed institutions, and stakeholders (many in the publishing world who stood to lose from a move away from books and towards free access) moved towards creating much larger projects that required immense capital and technological know-how. The resulting online archives and easily usable course management systems are impressive.

  • I am quite pleased with the results, but not with the limited access. I chose to continue consulting with commercial enterprises because I wanted to be sure that the important sources were identified and properly contextualized, since history is highly politicized in the United States and often slanted in nationalistic, religious, and whitewashed ways.

  • I have made a difference and earned a good supplemental income as a consultant over the past twenty years.