TwHistory

“It was like watching a movie, but it was going on for a month,” says Jennifer Klein, World Civilizations teacher at the Open High School of Utah, an online charter school.

Welcome to the latest iteration of Twitter in education. Using TwHistory, a group of 12 of Klein’s students researched historical documents, took on a historical character, and Tweeted their actions to create a month-long reenactment of the 1961 Freedom Rides this May.

TwHistory co-founder Marion Jensen told her school about the project when it was in its earliest stages, Klein says. And since the Utah Education Network, which had given a grant to TwHistory, was pushing for coverage of the Freedom Riders in celebration of the movement’s 50th anniversary and a new PBS documentary, Klein and her students opted to have a Freedom Ride going at the same time that the Freedom Rides took place. They started on May 4th and went continually until June 2nd.

Her students used Google docs to create the Tweets about their character – the group ended up with 10 total – and then merged them in a single document at the end of a month of research. Since it was an early TwHistory experiment, the twelve students involved had to apply to be a part of the project and take care of all of their work as an extracurricular activity. But that was hardly a deterrent.

“They researched so much!” says Klein. “And I wasn’t able to hand-feed them; they had to do the research for themselves. Some went to the Salt Lake City library to look at microfilm from the time period. It was phenomenal because it forced them to really dive into primary source documents.”

Plus, this kind of in-depth, personal research brought history to life for students. If they were to Tweet from a character’s perspective, they had to really understand and embody that character. One student represented “the only white woman on the first bus ride. And she wrote 300 Tweets – she couldn’t stop, she had to tell this person’s story.” And one student “called me in tears,” Klein says, “asking, ‘Did you know that they beat up these people?’ Lots of students said, ‘It seems like a whole new world! It doesn’t seem like it would happen in America.’ But they saw the dates, they saw where this was happening. They understood that this was a real event. They were intrigued and excited to learn more.”

There were “a lot of intense things going on” during that period which made for a dramatic reenactment. For instance, a bunch of Tweets would come in at once, saying, “Uh-oh, there’s a mob coming,” but after that “no Tweets would come in because they were getting beaten. It was so heartfelt. This in-depth personal experience really made it come alive.”

Once they’d finished their research and used TwHistory to set the reenactment rolling in real time, “other students and teachers started to follow it in our school,” says Klein. “They were also blown away.”

Overall, it was an incredible project and Klein found great success with it, though she did learn a few lessons along the way. One thing she’d recommend to teachers and students interested in creating their own reenactments: Don’t make it a month long. After a good three weeks of continually Tweeting, “It was hard to keep them going,” she says. “They were so excited during those first two weeks – I saw so many Tweets! The third week was okay, but by the fourth, I had to be like, ‘Come on guys, just a few more!’” Likewise, the students and teachers at her school who were following the reenactment started to lose a little interest by that time, too.

Still, even without using the TwHistory platform, asking students to develop Tweets about historical events  as a single assignment got them interested. After the Freedom Riders project, she asked nearly 100 of her regular students to create 30 Tweets from Christopher Columbus’ perspective, using his journals that are simple to find online, and that was a great success, too.

“It all comes down to what you can get the most primary source documents from,” says Klein, “but someday I would love to do a big one, like the Continental Congress as they’re writing the Constitution. I think that would be really fun to do. Or World War II, with each student Tweeting from the perspective of a different country… well, the time zones could get a little crazy for that one.”

Read more about Twhistory here.

TwHistory

From following conferences to collaborative story-writing, there are plenty of exciting ways to use Twitter in school (see this lengthy list, for example).

But here’s one more: TwHistory, a new, free tool that encourages teachers and students to dig deep into history, get inside the heads of historical figures, and reenact historical events in real time.

What was the experience of those who fought the Battle of Waterloo? What would they have felt? What would they have feared? What if we could re-experience history as it unfolded?

That’s what TwHistory attempts to do. Anyone can follow various historical “reenactments” – from the sinking of the Titanic to the assassination of John F. Kennedy – or sign up for free and create their own. Participants choose a historical event, create Twitter accounts for individual characters, pore over primary source documents and think critically about the times, dates, and durations of events to create hundreds of Tweets as they might have been broadcast had Twitter existed before the 21st century. They then submit all those Tweets to the engineers at TwHistory, specifying a start date for their event, and then watch it unfold – over a day, a week, a month or more – reflecting the event’s actual duration.

“When I first got on Twitter, I thought – like a lot of folks did – that this was the biggest waste of time ever,” says TwHistory co-founder Marion Jensen. “I didn’t see any value to it. Then I found out about hash tags and followed a conference. I almost felt like I was there.” He thought, “You could almost tell a story using this… and then I got to thinking: History is full of stories.”

Shortly afterward, Jensen joined a group of researchers to develop the software for TwHistory, and as proof of concept they reenacted the Battle of Gettysburg. Grants from the Talis Incubator for Open Education and the Utah Education Network helped them continue their work, and now there are about twenty reenactments on the site, with several more in development. Although TwHistory is a recent creation (its current iteration is only about 6 months old), it has a lot of potential for education.

Usually when you learn something about history, Jensen says, “It’s outside of real time.” But when a group of high school students created a reenactment of the Cuban missile crisis, for instance, “I was following the tweets of John F. Kennedy.” The student portraying JFK was tweeting things like, “‘We saw missiles in Cuba, we talked with the Russians.’” Another student was playing the part of the New York Times and at one point he was Tweeting baseball scores. Jensen was confused for a moment, until he realized, given the time and date of the Tweet, “Oh, this hasn’t hit the press yet! Within four hours the New York Times was Tweeting about the Cuban missile crisis.” This can make you think about history differently: “All this was going on at the time and people were oblivious to it. It was one of those educational moments for the students. This is how it all unfolded.”

TwHistory

Another example Jensen offers was from a reenactment of a group of pioneers heading west in the mid-nineteenth century. “At one point, some Native Americans came into their camp early in the morning. Six Tweets came at the same time, ‘The alarm has sounded!’” But as a viewer of the reenactment, “You don’t know what happens after that; you have to sit there and wait. About twenty minutes later, Tweets came in like, ‘We shot off the cannon and they left.’ It’s a new way to represent history. You want to know what the resolution is, but you might not find out for three days.”

Following historical figures’ lives intimately helps bring it home for participants. One Civil War soldier that Jensen Tweeted for as part of the Battle of Gettysburg “was a guy who wrote letters home every day to his wife. In all of his letters, he was writing, ‘Kiss the baby for me, I can’t wait till I get home.’ But he was killed the very first day. I got to know this guy through his letters and it was hard to know that he died. To really come to know one person brought the point home.”

Although TwHistory’s amusing tagline is, “Those who forget history are doomed to re-Tweet it,” users are, in fact, encouraged to repeat reenactments indefinitely (“We’ve sunk the Titanic about twelve times,” says Jensen). All material is available through a Creative Commons license, so all of it is wide open for collective editing.

“Our goal someday is to have two or three thousand reenactments up there,” Jensen says, so that teachers, students, and history buff everywhere can either make them their own or “press play, sit back, and watch history.”