Winter 2004

Talking History

History in the age of technology

Classroom projects now have the power to reach a global audience, reports ROSLYN TEIRNEY. In her inspiring story, four students from Tasmania created historical biographies of five women in leadership, built a website, won themselves a trip to London and became ‘leaders4tomorrow’.

The challenge of engaging and extending high school students is no less of an issue in the Information Age. Now that tasks like searching the Internet for resources on famous people are ‘hohum’, teachers must find motivating contexts to ensure that learning really does take place in class. A purpose for required research and a real audience for the finished product can make classrooms buzz with excitement.

Learning quests allow students to employ higher-order thinking skills. They can also be a rewarding way to publish historical biographies, as four students at Hobart’s Ogilvie High School have shown—particularly for students who like to blur subject boundaries and apply skills in information and communication technology to their mainstream classroom activities.

Faced with the challenge of exploring and writing about the concept of leadership, the Ogilvie girls opted for producing a learning quest on the theme ‘Women’s Winning Ways of Leadership’. Believing that women have played (and continue to play) important leadership roles in society, the students identified, researched and celebrated role models who showed a variety of leadership styles, and made a website inspired by their lives and legacies.

The leaders profiled are Shirl Smith, Australian mum; Marie Curie from the world of science; Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, courageous human rights activist; and Gloria Steinem and Oprah Winfrey, two Americans from different generations. By writing about the influence of these women, who became heroes in the eyes of others, the girls aimed to help visitors to their site to gain awareness of their personal leadership potential.

The website analyses the lives of the chosen role models with consistent headings: fast facts, early life, stages of achievement, lasting legacies and the traits and characteristics that make each one a great leader. There are also quizzes, crosswords, discussion forums and polls which allow young people to test their knowledge and express their opinions.

Team members identified points that their role models had in common: optimism, determination, perseverance; and the ability to learn from experience, to work in teams and to motivate others.

The girls not only discovered the theory of influencing others, but learnt that cooperation and communication are important factors for women striving to achieve leadership positions.

We had to work really hard at cooperating. At the beginning of making the website, we were all doing different things and not working as a team. To overcome this, we had to communicate with each other, letting all four team members have a say and giving each member a special responsibility.

With a number of government bodies and charity organisations providing incentives for student-designed original websites, the Ogilvie girls took their project beyond what was originally envisaged. They negotiated more time to achieving their goals in several school subjects and met outside of school hours to prepare their site for national and international competitions.

They were shortlisted in the ATOM (Australian Teachers of Media) awards in 2003 and travelled to Melbourne for the awards night at the Centre for the Moving Image. Though a national prize eluded them they found the stimulation of the occasion really energised them and provided them with a standard to aspire to.

The Global SchoolNet Foundation, a US non-profit organisation, provided further challenge and collaboration with students around the world. The ‘leaders4tomorrow’ team, as they had now called themselves, responded enthusiastically by developing their website for the Doors to Diplomacy challenge, which offered as its major prize a trip to the USA, funded by the US State Department. They won a certificate, and had the satisfaction of being placed in the top two in their category.

Doors to Diplomacy seeks to identify, support and encourage effective practices and programs that engage students in meaningful personal exchanges with people around the world to develop communication skills, create multicultural understanding, and prepare them for full participation as productive and effective citizens in an increasingly global economy.

The Doors to Diplomacy experience enabled a practical experience of diplomacy skills for all participating students through a carefully supported peer assessment process.

Eight months had passed since the ‘leaders4tomorrow’ project began. The site had attracted 11,000 hits and been visited by viewers on all continents. Schools in South Africa and the USA listed it as a recommended resource for their students, and while its creators went on with their lives without giving it much thought, the website started showing up high in searches on a number of search engines.

Then came an email that seemed too good to be true. The Project Manager of the Cable and Wireless Childnet Academy, based in London, had found ‘Women’s Winning Ways of Leadership’ on the web and wanted the team to apply for an international training session for young web developers. Selected teams would be flown to London for a week-long leadership program, bringing together young people from all around the world to learn from a team of Internet experts and mentors drawn from the worlds of education, media, business and the public and voluntary sectors. The goal was to take their technical skills to a new level and encourage them to continue to develop their online projects for the benefit of others.

Cable and Wireless, a British telecommunications company, had sponsored the Childnet Academy by establishing a web development fund of £30,000 to support inspiring Internet projects created exclusively by young people.

‘We thought it was a joke but we entered it anyway’, said 15-year-old Courtney Jones.

Six months further down the track, with the web counter now reading 17,906 hits, Courtney was in London, being interviewed live on ITN News while her team-mates, Ayda, Anneke and Anita, were in the EMR radio studios recording their own interviews, fed later that morning to commercial stations right around the British Isles.

What a source of pride for these young Australian students, to be respected as truly global contributors, and to spend time with their peers from the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, Italy, Taiwan, India, Panama, Jamaica and the USA.

No doubt the experience of these young Tasmanians will encourage their friends and many other young people to think widely and confidently; to grasp opportunities and, with the support of teachers who believe in them, convert traditional classroom assignments into genuine knowledge products; and perhaps to discover new knowledge that they can disseminate on a worldwide scale.

Roslyn Teirney teaches at Ogilvie High School in Tasmania. She is myinternet community mentor and a member of the AsiaEdNet Leaders Group.

The author owns the copyright in this article. For information related to the reuse of this work in any form please contact the publisher denise.quinn@curriculum.edu.au