On the 14th of May, EuroClio, Europeana and Platoniq organized a co-creation workshop entitled “History Education Beyond the Textbook”. History educators, web developers, designers and representatives of historical and cultural heritage institutes were all invited to come up with ideas about possible ways to use Europeana content and sources in history education in general, and in the a framework of Historiana in specific.

The day started with a couple of presentations on the purpose aims of the workshop, on Europeana Creative (a project aimed at the re-use of digitized sources on cultural heritage from European libraries, museums and archives within the Europeana database, a digital library/database containing primary European historical sources that allows the engagement of people with the European culture and history) and Historiana – Your Portal to the Past (EuroClios online multimedia tool for history and heritage education. These presentations incited discussions and preoperational thinking before lunch.

After lunch, all participants were asked to write down their ideas of on how they would like to use Europeana content in the classroom, how they would like to be able to use innovative technology and which learning outcomes they envisaged.

Before starting the next phase, the Historiana Editor-in-Chief Prof. dr.Robert Stradling held a presentation on the importance of the C- key words in history education: Context, Comparison, Contingency, Chronology, Consequence, Causality, Complexity, Continuity and Change. Then the participants were ready to start the workshop by forming six groups based on the most popular ideas which were identified by voting: “Critical Analysis of Sources”, “Compare and Create contrast”, “Dealing with Multiperspectivity”, “Encourage Historical Thinking”, “Migration” and “Innovative Ways to Tell a Historical Narrative”.

These groups got the task to develop a visualized visual concept for each of the six ideas, which led to the following outcomes:

  • Moving On: A world Map as a database source on migration
  • Keep in Touch, Bro: Analysing analyses of handwritten letters
  • Evolution of Leadership in Time: A tool to compare important European leaders by identifying their good and bad traits/policies.
  • Newspaper as the Tool for a multiperpective approach: To analyse newspapers and discover different ways of reporting the same event. One of the conditions for this concept is that non-english newspapers need an English transcription to make this tool better accessible in an international realm and to stimulate a cross-border teaching approach.
  • My Newsreal: Application to browse easily through different sources, to create one’s own news page item by selecting and combining sources and create the ability to share with others and embed the application in other websites.
  • Critical Analysis of Sources: An application that provides students with contextual information, interactive tools and comparative visual material to analyse and determine the reliability of a visual source on their own.

The Co-creating Co-creation workshop thus led to a range of interesting ideas and we would like to thank all the participants for their input and enthusiasm. The day ended with a nice dinner at Wicked Wines. To get a better impression of the day, click to see our photo album.