Peer Review

The Cold War, Episodes 1-24

Material Detail page

Reviewed:: Feb 23, 2003 by History

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Ratings

Overall Rating:

Content Quality:

Effectiveness:

Ease of Use:

Overview:: This fifteen-part interactive map site is a companion web site to the award-winning twenty-four episode documentary that appeared on television in 1998. The web site includes links to historical documents; interactive maps; profiles of key figures; a glossary; narratives about culture, the space race, espionage, and the bomb; images; transcripts of interviews with key figures, games; links to other sites; and transcripts of chats with journalists, scientists, and historians about the topics of each episode of the TV series. Some of the narratives are excerpts from "Cold War: An Illustrated History," the companion book to the TV series. The site was the winner of four awards: the 1998 Peabody for Multi-Part Series, the 1998 Sigma Delta Chi Award for Online Journalism, the 1999 Interactive Acheivement Award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, and the 1999 Interactive Achievement Award by the American Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences.
Type of Material:: Lecture/Presentation and collection of fifteen maps with photographs and brief summaries that the student can manipulate as a way of learning the military, diplomatic, and political changes that, over half a century, brought the origin and the end of the Cold War.
Recommended Uses:: To supplement classroom presentations introducing the cold war and the international history of the 20th century.
Technical Requirements:: Interactive IPEX for images
Windows Media Player for interviews
Apple's QuickTime 3 for QTVR images and video excerpts
Shockwave for games and Explorer 3.0.
Identify Major Learning Goals:: None stated, but it is an introduction to a comprehensive history of the Cold War via animated, useractivated maps.
Target Student Population:: High School
College
Adults interested in learning global history from 1939-1998.
Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:: An understanding of some of the main events and the importance of the cold war from the pre-World War II antagonism between the United States and the Soviet Union to the post-cold-war problem of nuclear proliferation and the end of American occupation of the Panama Canal.

Content Quality

Rating:
Strengths:: The web site covers a broad range of topics ranging from political changes
in Europe to the impact of the Cold War on film and fashion in the United
States. The profiles of Cold Warriors are informative short biographies of key
political figures. The interactive maps show changes over time in military
movements and political boundaries. The narratives in the "Cold War Experience"
section (on cultural impact, the space race, espionage, and the construction of
the bomb and opposition to it) are quite interesting. And the historical
documents in the Knowledge Bank could be a useful archive for students and
teachers. The web author does a good job of introducing and providing context
for the individual documents.
The site is an excellent way of gaining entry to the larger website, which offers archival documents, crisis summaries, biographical sketches, excerpts from interviews and recent books, interactive games, speeches, and explanation of contemporary relevance that illustrate the twenty-four separate episodes of the original series. The maps contain links to both descriptions and photographs of places associated with a particular episode and by clicking on the photograph and moving the cursor one can take a virtual tour of a particular site, whether the building in Warsaw where the agreements were signed separating Poland from Soviet rule or the Berlin Wall memorial park. The maps are dynamic, revealing the changes resulting from war and diplomacy. The one on the Korean War, for example, has elastic colored arrows that move to illustrate the war's ebb and flow of up and down the peninsula.
Concerns:: The lack of site maintenance undermines the quality of the content of this
web site. This reviewer could not access almost half of the maps, any of the
quizzes, the movie clips or other videos, many of the timelines, the user polls,
and some other individual pages. Furthermore, I could not get the interactive
features of the images to work. It would be nice if the site provided copies of the originals of the documents rather than just transcriptions.
The narrative descriptions in the windows, brief summaries, do not move much beyond a cursory statement of what happened, and why. The statements are thus rather superficial. The one on the Tonkin Gulf Incident, for example, while giving a brief overview, never reveals that the destroyer Maddox was engaged in intelligence gathering and support of South Vietnamese commado raids. If used as an entry to the larger cold war site, one can quickly become overwhelmed with the vast array of learning opportunities and exercises presented there-all of which, because of format, appear of equal importance.

Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool

Rating:
Strengths:: Buried within the "Educator Guide" section is an oral history project that
teachers might find useful. The lesson has students interview people in their
communities about the interviewees' experiences during the Cold War. The lesson
plan does a good job of covering the different steps in the process of doing
oral history from choosing a subject to the logistics of the interview to making
a record.
The site contains many primary documents, 1943-1991, that creative teachers
might use to fashion research assignments or use to teach Cold War lessons.
Unfortunately, the web site does not provide any lesson plans for teachers who
want to use these materials.
The interactive features of the site, when they work, are good tools for
conveying information to students. A fun feature of the site are the games
which test familiarity with particular political figures and Cold War
terminology.
Concerns:: The lack of site maintenance undermines the usefulness of this web site as
a teaching tool. Instructors cannot just turn students loose on the site,
because students would quickly become frustrated with the number of dead links.
And, among the dead links are those taking users to quizzes that test knowledge
about the Cold War.
The title of the "Educator's Guide" section promises more than it offers.
This section contains four subsections. The subsection entitled "Educator
Guide" does not offer any lessons plans for the web site. Instead it offers
information about guides teachers can buy on how to use the videos and CD-ROM
from the television show, an index to the episodes from the show, links to other
pages in the web site, and links to other sites about the Cold War. A second
subsection of the "Educator Guide" describes a sweepstakes, the deadline for
which has long passed. A third subsection takes users to a database, maintained
by the American Foreign Service Association, of experts in international affairs. One can search the database to find the names of individuals with
particular expertise. But how you might use this information is not explained.
Only the fourth subsection, the oral history project, offers users anything
approaching a lesson plan for the web site.
The student, working on his or her own, might feel, because of the "gee whiz" effect of actually being able to manipulate the effects of war and diplomacy, that the mpas, the fifteen subdivisions they were designed to illustrate, and their superficial descriptions are sufficient and final rather than an introduction and only one, perhaps arbitrary way to understand the history of the cold war.

Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty

Rating:
Strengths:: The drop-down menu that is in the left frame of most pages is very useful.
For the most part, the site does a good job of identifying the kinds of
materials to which the links will take users.
The teacher and/or student can access the maps, despite their being only one element of the CNN series, from the contents page containing the titles of all fifteen maps in one place. From there, one can go to other parts-including the webiste for the CNN cold war series-as curiosity is piqued.
Concerns:: Download time for some of the pages is slow. None of the pages include a
button to return to the home page. The search mechanism in the left frame does
not work. And, twice the web site uses the same name for two different pages,
potentially confusing users. One of the five major sections is called the
"Educator's Guide." Within the Educator's Guide are four subsections, one of
which is called the "Educator Guide." Another one of the five major sections if
the "Cold War Challenge." Within that section are some games to help students
learn about the Cold War. Within the major section called the "Educator Guide"
is another subsection entitled "Cold War Challenge." This page contains
information about a sweepstakes. This duplication of page names might lead
users to skip over a section, because they believe they have already seen it
Although the site provides copies of important historical documents, the
documents are not searchable. They are organized by episode of the TV series,
and one must move back and forth among the episode categories in order to
compare documents.
The biggest problem with this site, however, is that there is no evidence
of site maintenance since the end of 1998. The site still contains links to a
"Cold War Challenge" sweepstakes that had a deadline of December 31, 1998. And
many of the links or interactive features of the site no longer work. Users can
get into one of the five major sections of the site, "Episode-by-Episode," only
by going to the historical documents subsection in another one of the five
major section, the "Knowledge Bank," and clicking on the episode buttons at the
top of the list of documents for each episode. In order to see the photos, downloading iPIX plug-in may take as long as ten minutes.

Other Issues and Comments:: It is quite apparent that a lot of time and thought went into creating this
web site. Originally, the site was comprehensive in its coverage, provided
access to important primary materials, and provided information about the Cold
War in an accessible and interesting manner. Unfortunately, the failure of the
author to maintain the site makes this a difficult site for teachers to use in
the classroom.
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