Kevin Kee, Nicki Darbyson, “Creating and Using Virtual Environments to Promote Historical Thinking”, in Penney Clark (ed.), New Possibilities for the Past: Shaping History Education in Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011).

How can historians and history teachers best use Virtual Environments (VEs) to support the teaching and learning of historical thinking? This question has received little attention from researchers. To most historians and history educators, “history” is expressed in words on paper. Yet in representing history via text alone, we turn the past into a sentence, in more ways than one – just ask a disengaged student in a traditional compulsory course. But the question deserves an answer for reasons beyond student engagement: VEs provide students with opportunities to encounter historical thinking in new and innovative ways. This chapter attempts to outline some of those opportunities.

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