In my recent history as a learner I took a new step in digital technology as a university student. In my Digital History course last year, my final project that I completed with three other classmates was a virtual map campus tour. As you pass buildings at York it would give you the historic information of the building, and could also work as a guide to find your next classes.
In doing this full year project, and working with so many technological mediums to understand history, I began to understand how technology is not only useful in the historical sphere but how it has, overtaken the understanding of normalcy in our daily lives. This event was a power up for me to understand my relationship with technology as a part of my culture. The simple understanding that Snapchat is augmented reality, and how to not only use this type of technology in education, but learn how to create it and re-create it into new tools that can be influential. What made this event powerful was how my contributions to the class were also contributions to public history. During the course we had to post a 360 photo to a Google maps location. I chose Vari Hall, and to this day, it is still a photo that is on Vari Hall’s google maps location, with over 30,000 views. During the course, I had the app open in my back pocket and realized my phone was speaking. I noticed that because I entered Vari Hall, it started playing my colleague’s recording about Vari Hall’s history. I noticed in that moment how useful this campus tour actually could be if students knew about this and used it. From feeling overwhelmed at the beginning of the course, to seeing how my groups’ work in understanding digital history, copyright, citations, virtual history, geo-spatial techniques all came together for a successful technology project that was impressive to our professor and ourselves.
