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TRACEY M. WEIS (e-mail: [email protected]) has been on the history faculty of Millersville University since 1992. Involved with the New Media Classroom program since 1997, Weis currently coordinates Millersville's New Media Classroom Regional Center, helping secondary school teachers and college professors integrate new media -- the latest technological tools -- into their humanities curriculum. RINA BENMAYOR (e-mail: [email protected]) is Professor in the Humanities and Co-Director of the Oral History and Community Memory Institute and Archive at California State University, Monterey Bay. Her most recently co-authored book, Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios, by the Latina Feminist Group (Duke University Press, 2001), received the 2002 Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights. Other co-authored books include Latino Cultural Citizenship (Beacon Press, 1997) and Migration and Identity, International Yearbook of Oral History and Life Stories, Volume 3 (Oxford University Press, 1994). CECILIA O'LEARY (e-mail: [email protected]) is a member of the Editorial Board of Social Justice and an Associate Professor of History at California State University, Monterey Bay. She authored To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism (Princeton University Press, 1999). BRET EYNON (e-mail: [email protected]) is a historian and educator, and serves as the Executive Director of the LaGuardia Center for Teaching and Learning, based at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY. The national co-director (with Randy Bass of Georgetown University) of the Visible Knowledge Project, Eynon's publications include Freedom's Unfinished Revolution: An Inquiry into the Civil War and Reconstruction, and Intentional Media: The Crossroads Conversations on Learning and Technology in Culture and History Classrooms.
NEW DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES AND MULTIMEDIA ARE TRANSFORMING HOW WE teach and learn. They are transforming our classrooms from spaces of delivery to spaces of active inquiry and authorship. New digital media are empowering students to become researchers, storytellers, historians, oral historians, and cultural theorists in their own right. Whether constructing their own life stories or interpreting the life stories of others, the digital format transforms students' capacity to synthesize, interpret, theorize, and create new cultural and historical knowledge. In this way, digital formats potentially democratize learning and produce critical subjects and authors.
The four short essays that follow are snapshots of experiments with new media in our respective classrooms. They were presented at the Annual...