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The powerful, highly popular companion web site for A Biography of America, the PBS TV series and telecourse spearheaded by Donald L. Miller, Lafayette’s John Henry MacCracken Professor of History, has been honored as the nation’s best in its category by the influential Massachusetts Interactive Media Council (MIMC).
It was named top general education site at MIMC’s fifth annual awards ceremony last week at Boston’s Marriott Coplay Place Hotel. The event, attended by more than 1,200 members of the interactive media industry, was hosted by Penn Gillette of Penn and Teller.
Miller, the lead scholar and on-air host of the 26-part series airing throughout the country, conceptualized and named the series and helped recruit the other nationally-known historians who participated. He wrote 17 of the scripts, edited the others, and hosted on-air interviews with numerous historians and novelists. The series was produced by WGBH Boston in cooperation with the National Archives and Records Administration and the Library of Congress, and was funded by Annenberg/CPB.
The Web site, produced by WGBH Interactive, features content developed by Miller and his team of scholars.
David Pelizzari of Annenberg/CPB says, “The Biography of America site will have many millions of visitors. Learner.org, where the site is housed, is one of the most-visited educational sites on the Web, according to statistics published in the September 2000 issue of eSchool News.
“We’ve always been proud of the way Learner.org was taken to heart and put to use by educators across the country — put to use at an average level recently of 1.5 million hits per month,” he continues. “The recent eSchool News statistics show we’re up there with the White House, the Library of Congress, and NASA among the sites most used by K-12 educators.”
Pelizzari says Annenberg/CPB is promoting the Biography of America site aggressively with the nation’s top education and technology editors and writers and education trade journals. Journalists throughout the country regularly feature Learner.org’s activities and resources as top educational picks, he adds. In 1999, the site’s Journey North feature received the Webby Award – the “Oscar of the Internet” – as the best educational site in the nation.
The site is keyed to A Biography of America’s 26 video programs, but can also be used independently as a rich resource for students and teachers at all levels.
“A primary task of the Biography of America series is to provoke the critical thinking among teachers and students that historians consider crucial to an understanding of history – and the Web site has also taken this is as its chief goal,” Pelizzari says.
Each of the 26 chronological sections on the web provides a listing of key events of the period covered, a map relevant to the era, the transcript of the video program from the Biography of America series, a sophisticated bibliography, and a “Webography” offering an annotated set of Web links. Interactive features of four types help to tell the American story in a clear and authoritative way:
MIMC is a non-profit trade association created to help support and build the interactive media industry in New England. MIMC members, more than 2,500 to date, include New England’s leading developers, publishers, creative talent, e-commerce professionals, ISP’s, technologists, entrepreneurs, and leaders in the interactive media industry. MIMC is a hotbed of industry influencers, next-generation thinkers and high-tech innovators.