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Archives & Museum Informatics
2000

Teaching Minnesota Communities

Session: Achieving Educational Objectives

The Minnesota Communities web site is an effort to digitize primary source materials from the collections of the Minnesota Historical Society and organize them into units for students to use in studying Minnesota history. Contemporary standards in history education seek to downplay the "passive absorption of facts" and to emphasize the practice of "historic thinking" in which students are actively engaged in research and inquiry, leading to a better understanding of history. Each unit of the Minnesota Communities web site is a set of up to six historical documents which, when analyzed together, allow the students to begin to build an understanding of significant people, places, and events in Minnesota history.

The web site makes the best possible use of the Internet medium. It has been designed to present a contemporary look and interface while remaining sensitive to older technology that some schools may still be using. In addition to featuring interesting and entertaining technologies like Apple's QuickTime Virtual Reality, the site also presents simple yet powerful interface features like linking difficult terms in the site's content to online glossaries.

The project was made possible through a grant from the Minnesota Department of Children, Families, and Learning (DCFL). The development process has been unique and successful. It began with the hiring of instructional designers with backgrounds in both education and technology to work in-house to design the site, direct a team of researchers, and write the educational content. External developers with expertise in graphic design and coding were then brought on to create the look and feel for the web site, as well as to generate the page templates that would be used to build the site. After the content was reviewed by experts both internally and externally, the site was launched. The development cycle took approximately a year and a quarter, although there are plans to continue to add to the site. There are also plans to pilot the site with teachers across the state in the upcoming months to be certain that it is successfully meeting its goal of serving their needs.

The process of developing the Minnesota Communities web site has been an exciting and challenging one that has featured many achievements as well as mistakes that have led to greater understanding of potential pitfalls in the development cycle. It is our pleasure to offer our perspective and the story of experience to anyone interested in attempting a similar project.