Constructing an understanding of any subject is most powerful when students are not the passive recipient of someone else's ideas, but instead can actively and concretely explore materials. Learning from a first person perspective makes the process and the understanding much more powerful. From this perspective I am suggesting that being a scientist is a more compelling way of learning science, being a mathematician is a more meaningful approach to learning mathematics, and similarly, being an historian is a significantly more powerful approach to learning history. In this manner students can better build an indepth understanding of the nuances of an historical event.
A digital learning story of an historical figure allows students to conduct an indepth inquiry into that individual, and to construct their own understanding of his/her life and impact on the world. Using multiple sources (preferably primary sources or as close as possible) students can bypass the traditional predigested analysis provided in textbooks and think independently. It provides a unique opportunity for students to operate at the higher levels of Bloom's taxonomy and to analyze and evaluate an individual's life, synthesizing this research into the creation of an interview. Once they have studied this person until they know him or her very well, then they can proceed to record information about the person's life organized in the form of a question and answer session. One of the unique and powerful elements of this approach and something I encourage for every project, is the asking of questions that it was never possible for the interviewee to have been asked. For example, "Mozart what is you favorite form of modern music", or "Babe Ruth, what do you think of the proliferation of steroids in baseball". When students have studied an historical figure carefully enough, they can get inside the head of this figure well enough to begin to postulate how he or she may have answered this question. Finally, the ability to take these questions and answers they have developed and put them together in an interactive dance fosters creativity, and in my experience is highly motivating.
