Writing the History of Education Online

The present overview of online resources on the history of education has demonstrated that only a few of the websites available are specifically designed by historians for historians.

In the worst case scenario, the sites serve only to occupy a URL and are entirely static, offering little to no practical application.

In other cases, when documents are available in e-text format, they are designed to meet ends which are far removed from those of academic research. Indeed, the great majority of sites are institutional, not academic, in origin.
 

The material on offer is almost always informative and descriptive (e.g. on the websites of school museums), generalised (e.g. online university courses) or governed by an internal logic (e.g. indicators provided by national and international government and research bodies).

All of which goes to say that they have not been prepared with a view to serving ends other than the institutional purposes they have been designed to serve.
 

The sources on offer have not been, and are not designed to be, processed for research purposes.

There are very few projects geared towards offering resources online for specifically historical purposes, and it is even rarer to find such sites dealing with the history of education.

This does not mean that educational historians may not take advantage of textual data bases compiled for other purposes, such as those containing biographies of pedagogues, philosophers and politicians.

However, these resources must be used knowingly, in full awareness of the criteria which determined their compilation.

All of the examples (including the BBF and the INRP) which have been exampled in the present overview have one characteristic in common. Websites dedicated to the history of education all keep original sources and historical narrative separate.

Moreover, online publications tend to follow traditional methods.

Although the medium changes, educational historians behave in much the same way when they are preparing a text for publication online as they would for a traditional publication. They rarely draw on the rich multimedia resources available on them hardly every offer hypertext links to the sources they draw on.

Indeed, online essays are themselves a rarity, and frequently simply reproduce works already in print or are more or less lost in the larger websites in which they occur.

It is no coincidence that the only essays easily available online are written for educational purposes and are published on university or secondary school websites.

As yet nothing has been written in the field of history of education which bears comparison to the e-texts written by Robert Darnton⁴⁸ and Edward Ayers⁴⁹.

The projects in existence rather represent an opportunity for researchers to meet each other online and publicise their findings.

The present portal has been aimed to address this issue – to experiment with new means of studying and writing educational history online⁵⁰. It is down to you, to the academic community making use of this research tool, to determine whether or not we have been successful.
 

⁴⁸ R. Darnton, An Early Information Society: News and the Media in the Eighteenth-Century Paris, in “The American Historical Review”, 105, 1, 2000, pp. 1-35, http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/105.1/ah000001.html.
⁴⁹ http://valley.vcdh.virginia.edu/.
⁵⁰ http://www.history-on-line.eu/.
 

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