Sharon Leon has a PhD in American Studies from the University of Minnesota. Her research deals with US History in the Twentieth Century, with a focus on US Catholicism. She teaches generally about racial formation, gender politics and religion. As Associate Director of Education Projects at the Center for History and New Media, she is currently working on the following projects:
Omeka: Omeka is a the free and open-source software that provides museums, historical societies, libraries and individuals with an easy to use platform for publishing collections and creating attractive, standards-based, interoperable online exhibits. Omeka is designed to satisfy the needs of cultural institutions that lack technical staffs and large budgets. Bringing Web 2.0 technologies and approaches to small museum, historical society, and library websites, Omeka fosters the kind of user interaction and participation that is central the mission of those cultural institutions. Omeka is the recipient of a 2008 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award for Technology Collaboration.
Mobile for Museums: Mobile for Museums, funded by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, provides an overview of the current state of the art in the use of mobile technology by museums. The website includes a comprehensive collection of existing work on mobile technologies for cultural heritage institutions, provides a set of recommendations for moving forward with mobile work, and a set of implementation prototypes.
Digital-JumpStart: #djump is an in-conference unconference that brings facilitators with experience working on digital projects together with cultural heritage professionals who are new to digital work. The project is based on the notion that members of our community should capitalize on the wisdom of the crowd and our collective experience with free and open source technologies, agile development, and tricky institutional relationships. This is not about experts and novices. It is about building a community of practice that allows for sharing and innovation. These sessions will be most useful for those thinking about online exhibitions, mobile content delivery, collecting stories or photographs from different audiences, or creating a digital archive. We expect to engage a wide range of participants representing small to medium sized institutions, those new to museum technology work, and seasoned professionals willing to share their expertise and insight with the rest of the community.
Scripto: Crowdsourcing Documentary Transcription: This open source tool (expected launch: June 2011) will enable researchers to contribute document transcriptions and research notes to digital archival projects, thus harnessing the power of the community of users to improve the discoverability and usefulness of the archive. Digital archives and documentary projects need a viable solution that lowers both the cost and the investment of staff time involved with transcribing of large numbers of historical documents. There will be significant benefits for both the editorial staff and for interested users, whether they are scholarly researchers, students and teachers, or members of the general public. This work seeks to address these long-term resource challenges facing many digital documentary editing projects.
Bracero History Archive: The Bracero History Archive is an effort to collect, aggregate and make publicly available the documents and oral histories of the Bracero guest worker program between the United States and Mexico (1942-1964). The major content partners on the project are the Institute of Oral History at the University of Texas at El Paso, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, and the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Brown University. The Bracero History Archive is the recipient of the 2010 National Council on Public History’s Outstanding Public History Project Award.
Martha Washington: a Life: This public history project brings together archival research and material culture from the Mt. Vernon Estates and Gardens to present a biographical narrative of the nation’s first First Lady. The site will also include an extensive archive, and a number of teaching modules that focus on key objects and themes from the narrative.
National History Education Clearinghouse: The Clearinghouse will be a central place for information on pre-collegiate history education, featuring History Education News (weekly updates with the latest news, features, and information on history education); History Content (history web resources, reviews of secondary literature, and a directory of local historical places and museums); Teaching Materials (vetted lesson plans, database of state standards and a lesson plan finder tool0; Best Practices (exemplary instances of classroom teaching, historical thinking in action, and effective assessment); Policy and Research (discussions of history education policy issues and emerging scholarship on teaching and learning); Professional Development (a gateway to opportunities and materials); and Teaching American History Grants Central. The Clearinghouse is scheduled to launch February 1, 2008.
Historical Thinking Matters. HTM is a website focused on key topics in U.S. history, and is designed to teach students how to critically read primary sources and how to critique and construct historical narratives. This joint venture with the Stanford School of Education is a truly complex and innovative teaching tool. Much credit and thanks should go to the CHNM design and programming team who made it possible (Jeremy Boggs, Stephanie Hurter, Josh Greenberg, and Rikk Mulligan).
The Object of History: Behind the Scenes with the Curators at the National Museum of American History. Each month OOH features an artifact from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History’s collections related to a major topic in U.S. history such as the American Revolution or Civil Rights. Each object is also accompanied by a full array of teacher materials including: lesson plans, advice on how to use the site’s resources in the classroom, and additional Web resources that support instruction on the main historical topics.
World History Matters is a portal to world history on the web. It includes World History Sources, and Women in World History, two sites that provide resources to increase the use of primary sources in the world history classroom.
