Were You There is a new website designed to record and share personal experiences related to significant events of roughly the last 75 years. The best way to describe Were You There is to call it a wiki of personal experiences built around recent history. Users of the service can share their personal experience regarding a significant event of the 20th or 21st century. The event could be an athletic event like the 1980 Winter Olympics or something serious like the assassination of Bobby Kennedy.

If you haven’t looked at it before, Wikibooks is a good place to find etexts on wide variety of historical topics. Visitors to the history section of Wikibooks will find etexts appropriate for students age eight and above.

Applications for Education
Were You There and Wikibooks both use the crowd sourcing concept to provide useful content for teachers and students. As is to be expected with any crowd souring project some topic pages on Were You There and Wikibooks are more developed than others. Wikibooks and Were You There would be good to use as part of lesson on fact checking and or detecting bias in writing.