Questions+for+LOC

=The Library of Congress= =Digital Preservation Video Series=

Teacher Paul Bogush and students of James H. Moran Middle School‎, Wallingford, CT
On May 18 and 19, a team from the Library of Congress will travel to the Moran Middle School in Wallingford, CT, to record video interviews with Paul Bogush and his students. Bogush and his students archived websites for the Library’s K-12 Web Archiving Program.

We expect that Bogush and the students will be interviewed in separate sessions. We will interview the students in small groups of maybe 3 to 5 each; because of her natural rapport as a teacher and mother of teenagers, Cheryl Lederle will interview them. It is also important to have them **do** something, not just be talking heads, so we will ask the students to demonstrate and comment on the web archiving process using Archive It.

Cheryl, who has worked with Bogush, made these observations about him: · He gives kids responsibility for the project and merely facilitates their work. He doesn’t just tell them what to do. If the students feel like they are more engaged, they take more away. · He integrates technology into their lessons in a natural way

Here is a draft of possible questions for Bogush · What subject do you teach? · Tell us about your background · Can you describe your experience with technology? · What role do you think technology plays in education? What’s the value of technology to your students? · Can you talk about the students’ podcasts and web casts? Who selects the interviewees? · What drew you to this web-archiving project? · Describe the biggest challenge you faced as a teacher in facilitating this project · How useful do you think this project was for your students? · What value does web archiving add to your course that nothing else can? Or was this just a research experiment? · What did the students take from it? · Has it affected the students’ world view? If so, how? · Before participating in this project, to what extent did students understand that, in the future, archived web sites will be viewed as primary sources documenting an era? · What surprised you about the project results? · What would you do differently the next time? · Do you work with just this one age group? How do you think this activity would differ for different age groups?

Cheryl made this observation about the kids: · They add descriptive text, metadata, to the sites they choose to archive, which is crucial to the activity. That’s where you come to understand the **world view** of the people (the students) who selected the URLs

Here are some possible questions for the kids: · Can you show us how you capture websites? Please describe the steps as you do them. · How did you choose what sites to archive? · Tell me what you selected in the project. What’s important to you? What’s your favorite? · What is the most important thing that you learned from this project? · What was most surprising or interesting to you about this project? · What was the least interesting aspect of this project? · How do your web site collections represent the sites that you and your friends use everyday? · Something about the metadata – perhaps. What do you hope that people in the future can learn about life in 21st century Connecticut from the metadata that they might not learn from looking at the sites by themselves? · Did this project cause you to think differently about the lifespan of web sites and other digital content? Why or why not? · What changes would you suggest to improve this type of project for future students? · If you had the opportunity to participate in this program again, would you? Why or why not?