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HISTORY NOW is a quarterly online journal for American history teachers and students, launched in September, 2004. All issues are archived below: Issue One, September 2004: Elections Issue Two, December 2004: Primary Sources on Slavery Issue Three, March 2005: Immigration Issue Four, June 2005: American National Holidays Issue Five, September 2005: Abolition Issue Six, December 2005: Lincoln Issue Seven, March 2006: Women's Suffrage Issue Eight, June 2006: The Civil Rights Movement Issue Nine, September 2006: The American West Issue Ten, December 2006: Nineteenth Century Technology Issue Eleven, March 2007: American Cities Issue Twelve, June 2007: The Age Of Exploration Issue Thirteen, September 2007: The Constitution Issue Fourteen, December 2007: World War II Issue Fifteen, April 2008: The Supreme Court Issue Sixteen, June 2008: Books that Changed History Issue Seventeen, September 2008: Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Era Issue

there may be levels of web learning maturation at work here: Childhood: people who are very new to using the web for learning tend to accept what is given to them, because they don’t really know what the options are. When online learning with the LMS was new, most people were in this category. Adulthood: people who use the web a great deal and in varied ways tend to do better in online classes, and assess the worth of the LMS (or any tool) based on how well it works for the course. Adolescence: in between are the adolescents. They know just enough to be dangerous. They have enough experience to want convenience and not enough to understand the larger issues of pedagogy, including the restrictiveness of an LMS on what the instructor wants to do. They can drive but have no sense of how traffic works.

Why it’s important to deal now with the “teen angst” of web-adolescence: 1. Not customizing the LMS to suit your pedagogy implies that we all teach the same way. If we all teach the same way, then a computer can do our work instead. (I’ve been reading Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind – he’s pretty clear that if a computer can do your job, eventually it will.) 2. Instructors should use the tools that best create the environment they want, and that increasingly means web applications that require multiple log-ins. Students should get accustomed to using separate tools for separate tasks, just like in the real world. 3. Acknowledging the teen view means taking it seriously, but it doesn’t mean developing policy around it. Just as parents try to mitigate the excesses of the teen diet and habits, we owe students our wisdom in creating the learning experience that is most appropriate. (Oh dear, I’m starting to sound like Edmund Burke again.)