TEACHING THE HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY TO TODAY'S STUDENTS
Frederik Nebeker
IEEE History Center, Rutgers University
Students today are different from students a generation ago, and we can be more effective
as teachers if we take that into account. Because today's students have grown up in fastpaced and stimulating environments, often with several things going on at once, they are
not good at receiving and retaining information, no matter how well presented, for the
hour or hour and a half that most college classes last. Nor is it necessary, with various
printed and online sources, to use the class period mainly for information transfer. It is
better to use this time to get the students active in assimilating, analyzing, and building
upon the factual and conceptual content of the course. What takes place in the classroom
should be more like athletic training, with constant demands on the students' skills, than a
traditional lecture. The class should, I believe, be fast-paced and involve various
activities.
In teaching history, by far the most important thing is to get the student intellectually
engaged with the past: being more conscious of the things one already knows, relating
new things to known ones, noticing more and more things in images, and wondering
constantly how the world of the past differed from ours today. The teacher can use the
classroom to present material that cannot be in textbooks, such as historical artifacts and
demonstrations. Whenever possible, it is valuable to let the students handle the artifacts,
as these can help bring the past to life in their minds. An important part of technological
history is the choice of materials, and being able to handle artifacts helps greatly to
appreciate the changes in this area. Working models of historically significant
technologies, such as an electrostatic generator, a telegraph relay, or a spark transmitter,
can enliven a class, as can scale models of historically significant technologies, such as of
a Conestoga wagon or a sailing ship.
Images often convey understanding of the past more effectively than words, and today it
is easy, using a computer projector, to present hundreds of images in a class period.
Especially effective, I believe, is to fix and enrich the knowledge the students have
acquired through the reading required for that class by running a slide show of 50 or more
images that illustrate that material. The teacher may use historical photos to challenge
the students to figure out what is going on, or historical photos to figure out the time
period show.
Students are likely to need assistance in learning to notice things in historical photos.
During the slide shows and while examining particular images, the instructor can point
out things in the background, such as lighting, signs, utility poles and wires, telephones,
windows, floor coverings, and many other things that frequently serve as time markers.
It is also easy to use film clips, from movies, documentaries, and television programs that
show some aspect of the past in motion. It can be effective to use a dozen or more short
film-clips, each 30 seconds or so, to illustrate points in the lecture. Film is, of course,
ideal for showing technologies in motion, such as factory production of telephone
switching. Audio from the past is also easy to use in teaching.
A fundamental technique is to get each student to respond to questions and challenges.
Frequent questions prod students to think for themselves. But asking the entire class is
not as effective as asking each student individually. The latter can be achieved with
electronic student-response systems. But this takes some time in setting up and, at many
universities, requires the students to buy the electronic response units. Another way is to
have them all write their responses. Some of the quizzes can be turned in for grading;
this is, I think, a good idea for those quizzes, such as ones covering the reading for that
class, that the students can be expected to do well on. Self-graded quizzes have the
advantage of immediate feedback, and if the students record them in a classroom
notebook it makes it more likely that they will make an effort to do as well as possible.
Besides reading quizzes, one can ask about historical photographs, either what is going
on in them or what period they are from. One can ask students to place artifacts or
photos of artifacts in historical order. One can ask students to guess the year in which
events took place, events carefully chosen to relate to things being studied. One can ask
students to identify the technologies shown in photographs or in film clips. One can ask
students what they imagine might have been the consequences of certain technological
changes.
Again, the objective is to get students intellectually engaged with the past and to make
the classroom a place where the students exercise their historical understanding, practice
seeing the historical dimension of things, and develop their ability to perceive and
analyze the social dimension of technologies. If they are constantly challenged
throughout the semester, they may begin to ask themselves such questions outside of
class. A strong historical sense and a curiosity about the past, since the past is with us
constantly, makes life more interesting, and, the teacher may hope, better able to deal
intelligently and sensitively with the present.