My adventures in digital history

Thanks for posting this. I started teaching my first history lecture course this January and very quickly came up against what the author mentions - not only students but also teachers have a lot of trouble sustaining attention for more than 30-40 minutes of straight-ahead lecturing. It's a medium that I do think works well if the person doing it is a natural public speaker (I was watching James Baldwin's speech at Cambridge University the other day and was riveted the entire time [1]) but unfortunately there's virtually no training in public speaking provided by a typical PhD.

If anything PhDs are rewarded for learning how to speak in a way that doesn't work at all in a classroom - hyper-attuned to nuance but allergic to making the kind of memorable declarative statements that students seem to want for their notes. I noticed from grading midterms that my students fixated on phrases like "the Catholic Church is the ghost of the Roman Empire" or "Cogito ergo sum" but had trouble with things we spent a lot more time on, like the difference between natural philosophy and science.

I haven't taught a digital history-focused class yet but have been experimenting with interspersing my lectures with class periods where the students research an historical topic in groups and then present their findings to the class. One unexpected benefit I've noticed from doing this is that the act of physically getting up and moving around the classroom, then standing up to present seems to do wonders for maintaining their attention span and focus. Likewise with the knowledge that each student is going to have to say something at some point rather than just passively receive information.

[1] https://youtu.be/oFeoS41xe7w?t=14m4s