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Bringing Students to a Virtual Past: Teaching Ottawa History With The 3D Historical Cities Project
- University of Ottawa Press
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Bringing Students to a Virtual Past: Teaching Ottawa History With The 3D Historical Cities Project John Bonnett I would be the first to admit that the history of Ottawa is an eminently worthy topic; I would also be the first to admit that this article has very little to do with the history of Ottawa at all,not in a conventional sense at any rate. Let me explain. Quite understandably, the authors and contributors of this volume have devoted themselves to providing a retrospective of the Ottawa that was. And it is hard not to agree with the spirit in which such retrospectives are usually offered. We stand on the verge of a new century and a new millennium. Our hope is that we are wiser than our counterparts who entered the 20th century. Our pretense is that we are less naive, that the experience we purchased in the past 100 years makes us better suited to face the next. Let us, therefore, have a final look at what the intersection of the individual and the social, the cultural and political, the industrial and the environmental have wrought since the time of Philemon Wright and Colonel By. Worthy goals all,but ones to which this study has little, for the present, to contribute. The concern of this paper is not Ottawa as asubject of history. The concern is, rather, how Ottawa and other cities can be used as a laboratory to teach the discipline of history, through a program which enables students to produce historical works, as opposed to merely reading them. Such an approach obviously differs quite markedly from the way history is taught at present. Thepremise ofthe 3DHistorical Cities Project, however, isthat such aprogram, which emphasizes the research and critical thinkingskillsprized by historians, andthe use of information technologies, has the potential to contribute towards the fulfillment of two critical objectives identified by Canadian policy makers and educators. The first concern is to find more engaging ways to teach Canadian history. While there is disagreement between members of the media and academia on -what Canadian history should be, there is marked agreement that the extent of Canadians' knowledge of their collective past is much lower than it should be. Current methods for conveying it are not working, and something should be done to either modify or supplement them. The second challenge is to find new,thoughtful ways to apply information technologies to existing high school and university curricula in order to heighten student engagement and stimulate the critical thinking skills educators and policy makers have deemed essential for students who will live and work in the 21st century. It is a task that will require considerable intellectual effort, starting with an informed recognition of what the computer can and cannot do. The computer will not revolutionize education by its mere presence in the classroom. Norbert Wiener, an early pioneer in the field of computing, warned that we should not expect the computer to automatically generate "a new land of hope and indolence in which the roast squab will fly into our mouths and fruit will fall off the trees besides wherewe lie [sic]."Wewould be wise to heed ToddOppenheimer's 484 Construire une capitale - Ottawa - Making a Capital warning that education policy be based on thoughtful application of teaching instruments, not hype. Historians and educators would be equally wise, however, to remain alert to the potential of the computer. Givenits abilityto represent and manipulatevisual, as opposed to textual,information, the computer presents the possibility of finding new ways to help students see the problematic relationship between evidentiary part and theoretical whole, a key attribute of critical thinking. Considering the problems even university students have in relating extensive series of documents with abstract historical processes, and the recent advent of inexpensive, easy to use threedimensional modeling software, historians would be well advised to explore this possibility. The 3DHistorical CitiesProject is one attempt to begin addressing the questions and challenges posed above. It is part of a larger initiative by the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) and Industry Canada's SchoolNet and Digital Collections programs designed to enable graduate students to develop educational materials that employ new information technologies, ones that can be disseminated over the Internet. The project began in 1998, and at the time of writing we have just completed the third revision of our instruction kit. Weare about to commence the third field test with partners from Industry Canada's Communication Research Centre and four Ottawa area...