Documenting history on DVD

The stark differences between how students work today and in 1949 struck me again yesterday when I watched eight DVD documentaries prepared by middle school students.

The students were competing to represent Missouri at the national National History Day contest in June.

In 1949 few children lived in homes with typewriters or televisions. Even in city schools office staff were the only ones with typewriters. Almost no schools had a television. Farm kids attended one-room schools through the eighth grade. They wrote with pencils and fountain pens, and the major research tool was World Book Encyclopedia.

Yesterday Ken Burns workalikes introduced documentaries on people who had made a difference. Only the voice-overs indicated the producers’ youth. They brought together

·      still photos—including Marie Curie as a child, medical practices in the late 1800s, Hiroshima the day after the atomic bomb,

·      news film—including blasts into space, America Football League games, and 1960s civil rights demonstrations,

·      numerous quotations and much information from books and online sources,

·      videotaped interviews—including a doctor, a presidential library curator, and a NASA official,

·      background music.

To pull all of these elements together in a meaningful, interesting narrative required many, many hours of work, culminating in manipulating sophisticated software. A few years ago only professionals could have produced documentaries as sophisticated as those presented by kids age 12 to 14.

Did the kids do the work themselves? I’m betting that they did. I don’t think their parents or teachers possess the skills.

—Carolyn Mulford