POSITIVE HEURISTICS": TEACHING HISTORY AT THE TIME OF THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION
The digital revolution has also affected historical research and its dissemination, to the point that today we are facing a digital turn, as deep as that of the late nineteenth century, and not without, now as then, problematic aspects, consisting today of the criticality of network content: for example, the possible loss of authenticity and the volatility of documents, the destructuring of authorship in metaphors such as Google or in information built for sharing as in Wikipedia.
The proposal put forward by Noiret is that of public history, already experimented for thirty years in the USA and more recently in the Anglo-Saxon countries. It is a matter of integrating historical knowledge tout court and web history, in order to dominate the change taking place. Public history is transdisciplinary that derives its epistemological status from professional history, subjecting to scientific control the tools of Internet research, native digital sources and those of the vast archive repertoires digitized under the control of professionals in the discipline, as well as the multimedia historiography.
In an independent perspective with respect to the "public use of history", public history pursues the objective of dealing with the pervasiveness but also the extreme ambiguity of the references to history present in the network, to enhance and direct the communication of historical studies to selected publics, as can be the teaching staff.
Luisa Cigognetti spoke on the subject, presenting the results of the European project "Media and Community Culture", underway since 2006 and involving fourteen universities from as many EU countries. If, on the one hand, the scholar has detected the backwardness and limitations of Italian digital archives, on the other hand Serge Noiret has recalled excellent pilot experiences such as The Valley of the Shadow - an example of participatory site where the wealth of sources, historiography, maps, multimedia and hypertext documentation is continuously implemented by the contributions of scientifically screened users - and Ithaca, which takes care to document the state of digital historical science in the USA.
But how can teachers - overburdened with a huge daily workload - face on their own tasks of self-training and didactic mediation as demanding as those highlighted and fill the generational gap with their "digital native" students?
Not supported by support for their training - as Giovanni Biondi of Miur has also recognized - teachers risk reacting to the disorientation, induced by the abundance of information from surfing the net, in a conservative way or, on the contrary, enthusiastic and totally uncritical, cradling themselves in the idea of the neutrality of technological tools, of the self-teaching of the contents of the net, engaging in the patchwork of the so-called book in progress (Brusa).
to be continued in the next part