The transformative power of digital humanities in teaching family history online

Abstract

This paper explores the transformative power of digital humanities in teaching family history online to large cohorts of Australian domestic students. It takes as a case study a unit developed specifically for students to learn about how to research their convict ancestors’ lives and how to situate their ancestors’ lived experiences within relevant wider contexts. Its focus is twofold. The convergence of rapidly expanding digital repositories and databases of family history-related information and increasingly sophisticated online teaching platforms and how this has facilitated a shift from face-to-face to fully online learning and teaching is examined. The ways in which this transformative change was engineered through the unit design, delivery, and evaluative processes are then canvassed. The case study demonstrates how, with thoughtful, well-structured, and innovative approaches to design and by adopting a bespoke delivery model for online delivery, students can readily learn to access and engage critically with extensive online resources and can be equipped with the digital tools to use these optimally and to their satisfaction.

Digital Crime Histories and Developing a Public Pedagogy of Criminal Justice

“…Crucially, much of this sense of discovery was self-led and student-led through shared digital forums rather than being received solely from the top down. In other UK-and Australia-based university courses, forms of assessment focused on creating convict biographies or other histories from below, often in an online format like a wiki or blog, close the circle from consumers to creators of digital history (Alker 2015;Harman 2018;Rogers 2015). As students become producers of knowledge about the past for a public audience, they engage directly with complex questions of representation and ethics that underscore key debates in the field at large (Godfrey 2016).…”