10-08 Oral History

10-08

Oral History

I will have to admit; at first, I did not understand why oral history was given an entire section. When I think of oral history, I think of a time long before print, even before legitimate handwriting. To me, it seems that just like physical script (hand written) history, that oral history was well on its way out and being replaced by advancements in technology.

Not surprisingly, I was wrong. As it turns out, technology is opening new doors into oral history. In the third link, the article discusses the benefits and opportunities reviving oral history with technology can accomplish. I can not argue that hearing stories, and history (anything for that matter) adds depth and heightens memory. Actually, seeing as though I always like to refer back to education, I think it would do schools a lot of good to incorporate more oral history into the classroom. If nothing else or for not other benefit, some students are audio learners which is a learning style much forgotten after story time in the first grade. Hearing a story about history allows for students to run in their imagination, follow along and see the story in their own minds as it is played out over the speaker system. This same article points out that databases of interviews, histories, etc. could be complied and strung together by common words and phrases. With just the few strokes of the keys one could narrow down their search and access to these interviews, an extremely helpful research tool that would enrich and expand knowledge. I know that there were many times in school where it was required for research that we complete interviews or listen to someone speak about our topic. Students would hem and haw about how to go about doing this and it was often left undone or taken off the requirements because of its impossibility.  Because of this, I think this kind of oral history would be wildly successful in the educational sense.

            One last bit though, maybe this is because I am a tad old fashion, but I am a bit saddened that physical oral history is seen less and less. Sure, it is much easier to type into a search engine to find a refugee talk about their experience, but how much better it is to see and hear. Like stories of the Indian tales passed down from generation to generation, hearing these from a computer would simply be missing something that can only be found in presence of the history itself.