LAMP: The Basic Idea

LAMP stands for the Living American Memory Project. Its basic idea is to use the fuel of web links to light up the past so that we better understand our present and future. LAMP seeks to involve entire communities in further developing their own local or "backyard" histories. Through LAMP, our educational system (elementary, middle, high and college) becomes a set of core problem solving teams that works with surrounding communities of problem makers and mentors to assemble this LAMP. It is "living" in the sense that new links to ongoing historical research are continually added. The overall goal is to facilitate ongoing construction of local, personal, "in your backyard" history which connects to broader themes of history at state level perspectives.

In time and with help, these histories are then to be connected to larger historical views of regions, states and nations. The web provides a cost-effective and efficient infrastructure for such an effort. Particular emphasis is given to multimedia perspectives such as sound, still images and digital video as the multiple authors of LAMP and the Internet itself acquire the skills and capacity to reasonably add such resources.

In this vision it should be possible to change historical scale or perspective with ease. A given date or period of time and activity should provide links to that date and activity in many different locales of a state. Further, one could become aware of the story of a local event, use web links to move outward to web pages that provide a larger context for the local event, link outward again for a national context and outward again for a global perspective. click outward public school students These state level themes can be connected to national and global themes.

In this model of LAMP, the vehicle of timeline is used to draw us back and forth in time. There is a strong emphasis on multimedia through images (photographs, drawings, slides, etc.), sounds, and video, but in many cases, images could not be found in the time my students had available. Those exploring current LAMP pages are invited to fill in the missing material. Please submit images, sounds, video and story contributions that can be inserted or connected to existing material and themes. Such effort is greatly appreciated and full credit will be given for such contributions. Equally of value, start your own themes on your own web servers and communicate so that we can link with each other. A side benefit then of LAMP is significant language arts development through the acquistion of new story telling skills. These new story telling skills merge telecomputer based communication skills utilizing the computer's significant communication, editing and publishing features.

Initially, I am particularly interested in themes that have strong appeal to fourth and eighth graders studying North Carolina history. We hope that LAMP models provide sufficient design ideas that teams in other states and nations will parallel this work and link with us. Teachers, classrooms, families, geneologists, and historians from around the globe are invited to help extend the threads through the creation of your own history projects, kept either on our Web server or through links to material on your local Internet servers.

Please help light up the LAMP. Keep in touch.
(Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Robert Houghton, WCU).
Last updated 3/14/97.

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