A Google Chat with a Professional

As soon as my history teacher announced that my class would be having a google chat with a textile factory historian, I knew I was in for an interesting class. As exciting as it is learning history from a museum worker in England, it required a lot of preparation.  To start our investigation, we searched the museum website and read the most important articles in order to find out the general background of the textile industry and the MOSI Museum of Science and Industry.  Afterwards, my class watched a video in which Jamie (the professional we had the chat with) explained the general process of turning a piece of cotton into clothing.  We then used our recently learned google search skills to find definitions for the machine terminology Jamie used, so that we would understand when he used those words to talk to us on the video chat.  In groups of five or six, we thought of a bunch of questions about textiles to ask Jamie when we saw him the next day.  The prep work lasted a whole day, but if we hadn't done any of these steps, we would have been unprepared for the chat.

The next day we spent a whole class period on google chat with Jamie. We learned a ton about the textile industry and the lives of people who worked in factories in England during the Industrial Revolution.  I learned that the cottage industry and factory industry were very different from each other.  In the cottage industry, whole families would work together in their homes and use a machine called the hand loom to make clothes.  The women and children would prepare the cotton fibers by brushing them, while the men would do the actual weaving.   Most often, the looms were located in the attic of the house, where the most light could be found.  In contrast, the factory industry was noisy, unpleasant, and dangerous.  Children were hired to do the hard work, and since health and safety procedures didn't exist, many were injured.  They would move away from their safe family homes and work with machines like the water frame and spinning machine, on which they had to be careful not to chop their fingers off on the rollers used to stretch out cotton fibers.  The machines were dangerous enough, but children also had to worry about becoming ill from the terrible working conditions.  As the factory industry grew, industrialization began to progress really quickly, so houses were built fast.  Each house had small living quarters, and there were many families per building.  These appalling conditions, as well as the state of the factories, led many people to get diseases.  Families didn't want to send their kids to the factories, which led factory owners to force orphans to do the work instead.  In addition to learning this fascinating information, my class got to ask the questions we and prepared in class.  The video chat was one of the most interesting activities I have done in history class to date.

This image shows the process of making cloth from cotton, and is from the MOSI Museum of Science and Industry in England, the museum we had the google chat with.
http://www.mosi.org.uk/usercontrols/mosicontrols/thumbnail.aspx?mi=35091601&fn=copy%20of%20img_9306.jpg&w=180&h=198&f=auto-1571&o=1

I truly enjoyed the google chat and definitely hope we do it again with other experts during this school year.  It was amazing that I got to speak face to face with a professional from a textile gallery, and I feel that the information I learned is more genuine than information I have learned in the past.  I learned that history seems a lot more real if someone talks to you about it than if you just read about it out of a textbook.  I don't think I learned more from the chat than I would have otherwise, but I do feel like it was a lot more engaging this way.  I do wish that we had had the chance to go up close to the screen and take pictures of the machinery, because I wasn't able to take any from my position in the room.  Overall though, I really did enjoy the google chat with Jamie and would like to do it again.  Google chatting with an expert is a fun way to learn about history, and was a new experience for me.