Revisioning History

The news is a great place to go for inspiration on lesson plans and assignments, especially when you're working on media projects. Today was the 40th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch, the first manned mission to land on the moon. This morning, NPR did a great story on the mystery of the original tapes, which were lost, or as the story explains, possibly taped over! (Yikes! And I thought it was bad when my mom taped over my old New Kids on the Block videos.)

Here are some thoughts about how you could use the Apollo 11 anniversary to lead a discussion about media representations of historical events. You can adapt these steps to any historical event captured by the media and then re-captured through digital enhancement or fictionalization.

1) Ask your students what they already know about the Apollo 11 landing and record these "keywords" on the board.

2) Then, use the "keywords" they generated to add context to the event through Internet research. For example, have them find out what else was happening in 1969. Continue to add information to the board as they suggest more keywords.

3) Listen to the NPR radio story, Houston, We Erased the Apollo 11 Tapes and/or the NPR video, Apollo 11 Landing: A New View, which shows the difference between the originally broadcast images and the digitally remastered version. Your students may even find these on their own through their Internet research.



4) Lead a discussion about the story. This could be a good opening to discuss the role of media in documenting history, the authenticity of digital enhancement and the importance of historical documentation and maintenance. (This is a great tie-in for our program at ITSRG, since many of our interns are working on projects about representing historical events, cataloging documents and creating media.)

You may pose the following questions:

What is the difference between the original and the digitally remastered video?
Which video is "the real thing?"
How do we evaluate media images for truth or authenticity?
Why is it important to preserve historical documents?
Who decides whose history will or will not be documented?
What role does the Internet play in documenting history?
What kind of digital footprint are you leaving behind?