Conclusion

We have all pursued pedagogies of scarcity, especially in our survey courses, even though they necessarily gave our students a distorted view of history as a field of inquiry. Only in upper-level courses and seminars have we been able to introduce students to the challenges and satisfactions of doing history. The new media do not make the semester any longer. They do abolish the regime of scarcity in every other respect. Learning to teach with the new media will require us to rethink just about everything we do. In particular, abundance requires us to reexamine what we ask students to do. That is the reason for the detailed examples in this guide. They are NOT models. They are experiments. Their presence here is not to tell you what to do but to provoke a conversation across the discipline about what works and what doesn’t.