| Oral history has a rich tradition of providing a view of history through the eyes of real people. Projects like Foxfire (Wigginton, 1985) have shown that oral history work can make history especially tangible for students and provide opportunities for deep learning by engaging them with real people whose life stories are part of history. While face-to-face oral history has significant learning potential, there is a significant cost as well since doing oral history is a time-consuming process. Interviewers must find interviewees, coordinate schedules, secure equipment, generate quality questions, do the interview and produce an artifact from it. The difficulty of doing oral history is increased significantly when one attempts to incorporate it into a middle-school classroom since teachers are already overwhelmed with work. How can we make this process easier for teachers?; In this thesis, I examine one way to approach solving this problem: doing oral history online. Specifically, I created an online environment called Palaver Tree Online (PTO) that supports kids interviewing elders (adult volunteers) on the Internet to build up a shared archive of oral history. I used the lessons learned from two early studies with e-mail to build PTO, a client interface and server infrastructure designed to better support the roles of kids, elders, and teachers as they work together to do online oral history.; This system was studied in two classrooms and the qualitative and quantitative analysis of the data from these studies forms the core of this thesis. Through the analysis of interactions between kids and elders in online oral history, I explore what one can use computing technology to bring elders' stories to the classroom and what the benefits might be. Thus, this thesis argues that online oral history is a viable way to integrate oral history into more classrooms. It provides a framework for doing such projects in the classroom and an analysis of the roles kids, elders, and teachers need to play. This thesis also provides design principles for building systems that support sustainable online oral history, and evidence that such systems may encourage the development of historical thought in students. |
