About ASHP: Operations/General
September 8, 2015
In summer 2015, ASHP redesigned and updated The Lost Museum as well as our primary site. Both designs embrace modern web standards and improve browsing on mobile devices, along with general usabilty and accessibility.
Visitors to The Lost Museum are given the opportunity explore a 3D recreation of P. T. Barnum’s American Museum in mid-nineteenth century New York. The redesigned site, launched to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the fire that destroyed the museum, includes larger, higher-resolution graphics and easier navigation of the museum. Visitors also have the option to seek out clues to discover who, among suspects representing social and political figures of the period, may have set the fatal 1865 fire. The site’s annotated digital archive of materials from the American Museum is improved as well and is now mobile-friendly and more easily searched. The virtual museum first launched in 2000 and was produced by the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at the City University of New York Graduate Center and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
ASHP’s primary site was relaunched with the goal of providing easier navigation, especially for mobile users, and improving communication with our varied constituencies. Improvements include a cleaner home page, integration of news and featured content across the site, easier than ever shopping for ASHP’s documentaries, and a news section for updates between issues of our newsletter.
On August 19, 2014, ASHP-CML led its final Teaching American History (TAH) professional development workshop, hosted by the Museum of the City of New York. Funded by the U.S. Department of Education, the TAH program directed significant resources toward professional development for K-12 teachers of U.S. History around the country. This funding enabled ASHP-CML and many other cultural and university partners to work with local school districts and teachers.
Our first TAH workshop took place in Staten Island on March 5, 2004, and TAH-funded professional development programs have had a major impact on ASHP-CML over the past decade. In all, 11 current and former ASHP-CML staff members (Ellen Noonan, Frank Poje, Leah Potter, Isa Vasquez, Donna Thompson Ray, Madeleine Lopez, Abigail Lewis, Leah Nahmias, Ellen Zitani, Michele James, and Peter Mabli) worked independently and with seven partner organizations (Education Development Center, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Historical Society, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Queens College Program in Social Studies Education, Paley Center for Media, Museum of the City of New York) to plan and present a whopping 286 seminar and summer institute days for more than 500 New York City teachers (and a few in Pennsylvania). Beyond the prodigious human effort those numbers represent, TAH programs stretched ASHP-CML’s professional development work in new directions. We learned a great deal from our partners and teachers, and worked with large groups of middle school and elementary level educators for the first time. We also adapted our materials and approaches to the needs of English Language Learners (ELLs), special education students, and, eventually, to align with the Common Core standards. From TAH work grew the impetus and resources to create HERB: Social History for Every Classroom. So we raise a toast to TAH and await the next chapter in ASHP-CML’s K-12 professional development programs.
The first annual CUNY Games Festival, January 17-18, 2014, was a terrific success. One of the first academic conferences to explore game-based learning (GBL) in higher education, the two-day event attracted almost 200 registrants. Participants included faculty and students from 10 CUNY schools and dozens of universities and colleges across the country, along with game developers and other representatives from non-profit and for-profit technology sectors.
The first day of the conference, held at the CUNY Graduate Center, featured a full slate of presentations, “shorts,” posters, a game demo arcade, and a plenary session with John Black (Teachers College, Columbia University), Joey Lee (Teachers College, Columbia University), Anastasia Salter (University of Baltimore), and Eric Zimmerman (New York University). ASHP/CML’s Leah Potter presented “Truth is Where You Make It: Designing Historical Games” with co-presenter Carlos Hernandez (Borough of Manhattan Community College). Her presentation drew on experiences with the ongoing Channel 13 Mission US series for which ASHP/CML is the lead content developer. The second conference day, held at Borough of Manhattan Community College, was a game day during which participants playtested both commercial and educational tabletop/board games with guidance from game designers.
Game-based learning (GBL) refers to instructional practices that incorporate games with defined learning outcomes, or that adopt game learning principles over conventional pedagogies. Research shows the potential of GBL to foster student engagement and problem-solving, and to improve student performance across disciplines. While GBL is gradually gaining a foothold in colleges and universities, and attracting the attention of administrators, most of the public discourse and media spotlight on GBL is directed at the k-12 level, and much less so at higher education. The CUNY Games Festival fills this gap by focusing attention on the possibilities and challenges of integrating GBL in college classrooms, as well as the emerging field of game studies.
ASHP/CML was the primary sponsor of the event, which also received generous support from the CUNY Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative. The New Media Lab, Center for the Humanities, and Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate Program were also co-sponsors.
To learn more about the CUNY Games Festival, visit the conference website, or search Twitter for the hashtag #cgf2014.
We are excited to announce a new look to our website. After a year of hard work and many discussions, we are pleased to go public with a home page that highlights new material and current ASHP/CML projects. Also, items from HERB and our podcast series are featured right on the homepage.
We are pleased to announce that the Institute of Museum and Library Services awarded The American Antiquarian Society (AAS), in partnership with the American Social History Project, a National Leadership Planning Grant for Contextualizing the Visual Archive for Teaching. This project is designed to research and prototype an interactive online interface for archives and libraries that will help teachers use historical American images by linking them to rich contextual information as well as to full catalog records. During the planning phase of the grant, we will conduct research among potential users and program a sample set of test images for an online, open-source resource prototype that will demonstrate how visual images from any library or museum collection can be linked to collection records and teaching materials.
Planning to make a contribution to the CUNY Campaign? Help ASHP/CML continue to produce teaching materials and bring services to New York City’s history teachers. We are #2949 in the CUNY Campaign list of participating agencies, under “CUNY-Based Organizations.” Thank you!
ASHP/CML is delighted to announce that we are now distributing a version of our DVD documentary Up South: African American Migration in the Era of the Great War that has optional subtitles in Spanish. We have also created a Spanish script of the program that can be downloaded from the Up South web page. We hope this proves popular for use in other countries, in classrooms where Spanish is spoken, and for English Language Learners and their teachers.