Kelly, T. Mills. “‘But Mine’s Better’: Teaching History in a Remix Culture.” (2011)

When a student in Kelly’s Western Civilization history course remixes a newsreel about the Nuremberg Trials, the class finds the new score, Mozart’s sad and serious Requiem, a better fit than the triumphant original. Kelly then tries to convince his class about the primacy of original documents, but as many as half still thought that even though the original should be used for research, the revised version should be used for teaching, because it makes a better point. He comes to the conclusion that “the future of history teaching depends on our ability and willingness to accommodate ourselves to the rapidly accelerating, technology-driven cycle of change that is transforming the teaching, learning, research, and production of historical knowledge” (371). He acknowledges that the student was altering a primary source to make a historical argument, which he suggests is just the beginning of a trend of students experimenting with new forms of historical knowledge production. If history teachers fail to start paying attention to and teaching with these new forms of knowledge production, he argues, students may fail to find any use in traditional history classrooms.