Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  The Power of Partnering: The Cooperative Creation of Digital Collections (08 Sep 2004) As part of the process of developing the grant proposal for the first phase of CHO, educators were enlisted to help define project goals. Bill Tally, director of the American Memory Project Fellows facilitated a meeting of project team members and a focus group of teachers from eight communities in March 1999. These educators were enthusiastic about the prospect of making primary source visual materials readily available for use in the classroom. They affirmed both the power of images to engage student interest, and the opportunity that working with them would afford for meaningful learning about the past. Access to these primary source materials would allow students to take on the role of historians, gaining understanding of the past through analysis and interpretation of its artifacts. The group suggested using thematic categories to select and organize the images so that connections between seemingly disparate objects could be discerned through appropriate lessons and activities and higher-order thinking fostered in students. Once several hundred catalog records had been created in phase I of the project, a pilot Web site was developed to test the functionality of the database and the usefulness of the content for the target audience of Grade 7-12 teachers and students. A second focus group of teachers was recruited to review and critique the pilot site. They, too, were excited at the prospect of having their students take on the role of historians, but felt that there needed to be more contextual information and some narrative content to illustrate how these discrete objects revealed information about the past, and also examples of how CHO might be used in instruction. They hoped that CHO would provide activities to develop the relevant skills of historical analysis and synthesis, and also some models of final products that might result from using images as primary sources. Article URL: http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v05/i03/Foulke/ Read 62 more articles from Journal of Digital Information sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Information Architecture Research     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy