Digital History and Service Learning

Talk session proposal:  I would like to propose a session to discuss and/or brainstorm ways to use digital history tools to encourage students to engage with the history of their local community. As a reference point for the discussion, I am directing a service learning project this spring in which students will use wikispaces to document the history of our local community. Some questions to consider might be: What kinds of creative uses might there be for building history pages with wikispaces? What other digital tools might be used to connect students to the community? Conversely, how best to encourage community interest in students’ work? How to develop a collaborative project that might involve other departments or disciplines? While my interest is primarily in student learning and collaboration, I’d be happy to bring these questions to a larger discussion of collaboration in digital history as well.