About the Project
The Oriental Institute Museum, with two university collaborators will develop, test, and implement Ancient Mesopotamia: This History, Our History. This interactive project about ancient Mesopotamia, now present-day Iraq, will be developed for nationwide educational use. We anticipate that This History, Our History will become a model teaching and learning tool for use in classrooms across the nation. The project will feature three components; an interface with curriculum-based interactives; a searchable database of artifacts called a Learning Collection; and an online course for K—12 educators. Educators from diverse neighborhoods of the city of Chicago and two national committees will assist us with varied aspects of the development, evaluation and testing of all three components of the entire project. It is our goal to disseminate knowledge and awareness of this ancient civilization will lead to a better understanding of ourselves, others, and of current events, hence the project's title, Ancient Mesopotamia: This History, Our History.
     The first component, an interface with curriculum-based interactives, will be produced with Chicago WebDocent, a University of Chicago developer of online curriculum materials. Modeled after Life in Ancient Mesopotamia, our award-winning curriculum guide, the interface and interactives will incorporate Visual Thinking Strategies as the foundation of its learning theory. Chicago Public School teachers and Institute scholars originally developed the curriculum guide, a team approach that will continue with this project. The grade 6—12 student-focused interface and interactives will relay the concepts behind the science of archaeology, the discovery of Mesopotamian civilization, its artifacts, and our understanding of its history over time. Teacher-chosen artifacts from our Mesopotamian Gallery will be included within fourteen thematic sections of the interface.
     The Learning Collection, the second component of the project, will be created to support independent educational exploration of ancient Mesopotamian culture. This digital collection of museum artifacts will be searchable through metadata from museum records for the artifacts, as well as from teacher-developed contextual descriptions. The Learning Collection will be developed with our second collaborator, the eCUIP Digital Library, a project run by the University of Chicago Library's Digital Library Development Center, which is committed to developing a publicly available K-12 digital library.
     The third component of This History, Our History will be an online professional development course for K—12 educators nationwide who wish to enhance and broaden their knowledge of ancient Mesopotamia. This online course will initially offer state recertification and University credits to teachers at local and state levels, with the future goal of accrediting teachers across the nation over the course of time. This professional development opportunity will seek to examine the lineage and relationships between the distant past of ancient Mesopotamian society and our present-day reality. Institute scholars as well as Chicago Public School teachers will contribute to the content development, testing, and evaluation of this online course.

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