Chapter 2: Retweeting History: Exploring the Intersection of Microblogging and Problem-based Learning for Historical Reenactments

History educators have increasingly been focused on finding ways to involve students in authentic practices associated with professionals who study and interpret the discipline of history (Hynd, Holschuh, & Hubbard, 2004; Spoehr & Spoehr, 1994; Wiley & Voss, 1996; Wineburg, 2001). This more practice-based approach to history teaching is motivated in part by calls made in recent standards documents (National Center for History in the Schools, 1996) and also by the belief that authentic activities mirroring the work done by professionals can result in more robust learning (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989; Wineburg, 2001). It is our view that newly emerging web technologies may provide an important new access point for students to participate in historical practices. For instance, the Internet is democratizing access to historical records and artifacts (Bass, Rosenzweig, & Mason, 1999). That access makes it possible for nearly anyone to work with and examine primary source materials from major historical events. Given the development of this new informational infrastructure along with the push toward development of authentic learning activities, we believe the time is ripe for considering ways in which new web-based tools and problem-based learning (PBL) principles can be combined to create an environment that promotes student interpretation of historical events. Specifically, we believe social media practices, like microblogging (Nardi, Schiano, Gumbrecht, & Swartz, 2004), could play a key role. This chapter describes a development and implementation framework for integrating microblogging and historical reenactment in a service called TwHistory.¹ In the sections below, we describe the TwHistory program, present an example from a high school classroom, and provide one teacher’s report of the experience of using TwHistory. We then consider ways in which what we have developed adheres to the core commitments of problem-based learning and offer some suggestions for how virtual historical reenactments could be designed in the future with additional alignment to PBL design principles.