Two years ago as a student teacher I took my tenth grade Canadian history class on a tour of Auschwitz-Birkenau. We started at the camp’s entrance – one teacher and twenty-eight students staring at a gate with its sly promise that “Work Will Make You Free.” From there we moved into the camp and spent the next hour exploring one of the most horrific examples of man’s inhumanity to man. And, while World War II’s worst extermination camp is located on a completely different continent, my students and I made the trip without ever leaving our school’s computer lab; the tour I took them on was a virtual one.Although my students enjoyed the lesson and seemed to learn a lot from it, using virtual tours as a method of communicating history to the public is not one without its flaws. As amazing as virtual tours are in their ability to capture the physical environment of a historical site such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, I still find that they are at their most effective when combined with other forms of learning. For instance, in my case the majority of my students had participated in a Jewish Symposium as part of the Niagara District School Board’s Holocaust Education Week efforts before taking the virtual tour of Auschwitz. At the symposium students were treated to a lecture on Jewish resistance to the Holocaust given by a guest speaker from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, they watched a film entitled Paper Clips (2004) and spent the afternoon listening to survivor testimonies. Because of their previous experience at the symposium, students were able to make connections during the virtual tour between what they were seeing and reading on their computer screen and what Bill had told them of his time in Dachau. Without that personal testimonial to draw from, however, the major downfall of virtual tours becomes readily apparent; they often lack the ability to make the sort of impact that really resonates with learners.
We should also be careful to remember that not all virtual tours are created equally. These days, most webmasters have the ability to slap a bunch of photographs together, walk a visitor through them in a particular order and call it a ‘tour’. We’ve all seen it done. In contrast, I’ve found the virtual tour of Auschwitz-Birkenau to be one of the better ones that I’ve taken of a historical site. The site’s creators at Remember.Org have thoughtfully supplemented the 360 degree tour of the physical camp grounds with art work from survivors and links to relevant photographs and information on third party websites. This allows visitors to the site to complete the tour at their own pace, choosing for themselves which aspects of camp life strike a cord and warrant further examination.
It's clear that virtual tours can never replace the experience of actually visiting a historical site like Auschwitz-Birkenau. However, they do provide a unique way for people bound by geographic, monetary or time constraints to interact with history in a modern, meaningful way.
