" But Mine ' s Better ": Teaching History in a Remix Culture

Abstract

EVERYONE WHO TEACHES has had moments when students do, say, write, or create something that causes us to think about teaching in new ways. Sometimes, it is only with hindsight that we realize just how profound the effect of such moments was. Other times, what happens is so obvious that even if we try we can't ignore the impact it has on us. One such moment in my career as a history teacher came several years ago in my Westem Civilization course. Despite all the thinking I'd been doing on how digital media were (or were not) transforming student leaming about the past, one of my students forced me to recognize that I had missed a very significant change in the way my students thought about leaming, about the production of historical knowledge, and about the nature of historical evidence. With the advantage of hindsight, I think that the changes I had missed (despite looking for them) are important enough that we continue to ignore them at our peril.