Studying history = conversation

I was at a parent meeting last night, discussing PrimaryAccess, and one parent raised a concern that by the kids being limited to only certain images, teachers would be able to present one-sided or otherwise too-limited takes on history.

Thoughts:

• First, PrimaryAccess is not in the business of preventing teachers from doing that. The teacher is working from the curriculum, and if the parent has a problem with the curriculum or the teacher's treatment of a subject, that's for the parent, teacher, and administration to talk about.
• That being said, I can think of two ways in which PrimaryAccess does help alleviate a situation like that:
1. Teaching with images is far less predictable than teaching from a text. Students can take an image in a whole different direction than what a teacher intended. Therefore, a teacher might offer a one-sided set of images and teach toward a specific interpretation, but I think there's a pretty good chance that the students, or some students, will take that visual evidence and use it to support a different interpretation. So I think it's harder for a teacher to constrain students' thinking when working from visuals. Of course, I could be wrong about this (e.g., every propaganda campaign ever relies upon powerful visuals), but my antennae are out for data. Note: I think video might have the OPPOSITE effect -- I think video is far more powerful than images and has a huge referential illusion effect, just like textbooks.
2. Since PrimaryAccess can play back over the web, the audience for students' work is far broader than usual -- parents (and grandparents and cousins and whoever else you want to send this to) can watch and respond and enter the conversation.
• And this is where I end up: ideally, history is a conversation between teacher and students, between past and present. PrimaryAccess broadens that conversation (potentially bringing in family/community via web playback) and deepens it (getting people right into powerful primary sources).
  

Social component to online work

This point takes three steps.

1. When people look at you, they immediately start making assumptions, filling in the backstory. For example, I've had students tell me that, upon first glance, they think I'm a Young Republican. Once they get to know me, this perception changes. These snap judgments say more about the judger than the judged (e.g., if I notice someone with a French accent and think 'Oh, he must hate America', I've just said a lot about me but nothing of consequence about Francophones), but they're are natural, inevitable, and important.

2. I think we make these assumptions/judgments because of our story-making nature. We live in a story, we talk in stories; our brain can't just tag a new individual with a variable ('I'll call this person x') and leave it at that until more data comes in. No: we have to rush in and fill the vaccuum with enough data to move along to the next action.

3. Why online community bogs down: WE DON'T HAVE ENOUGH DATA ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE TO MAKE THESE SNAP JUDGMENTS. Someone is just 'ThomasCH' or a tiny icon -- we can't relate to it, assign labels to it, weave it into the narrative. So we slough it off, unless something extraordinary happens.

So: If you want get an online community up and keep it running, it needs to provide lots of data about people. New members need to be able to quickly sketch in a mental impression of the folks they encounter, and current members need to be able to quickly grab data on new people as well.