More information and less meaning = need for teachers

Doug Johnson posted a video clip titled Information Deformation that I hadn’t seen before. Created by the Education for Well Being group, the clip talks about how we have access to tons of data but that we aren’t all that good about doing anything with it.

And while some may dismiss it as just another cheesy, eduverse, the world is different now kind of video, I think it’s got some merit.

Jean Baudrillard is quoted:

We live in a world where there is more and more information and less and less meaning.

It also has some nice stuff from David Orr’s The Nature of Design about fast and slow knowledge.

Fast knowledge is focused on solving problems, usually by one technological fix or another. Slow knowledge is focused on avoiding  problems in the first place.

I’ve been talking with teachers for years about the process that we need to follow when creating lessons and working with kids. The steps are pretty basic.

• data
• information
• knowledge
• wisdom

In basic terms and in the context of history, data is the dates and places and people. Information becomes data that kids organize into recognizable patterns. Knowledge is the “making sense” and application of those patterns. And finally, wisdom is the sharing of that “making sense” in a variety of ways and in a variety of places.

It’s all about the slow knowledge.

I think a lot of times, we as teachers forget the last couple of steps. We’re great at sharing data and probably even do a pretty job of finding ways to help kids organize that data. But I would agree with the premise of the video – we don’t do a very good at helping kids make meaning of the huge amounts of data that is available.

The Co-Intelligence Institute suggests that:

Wisdom involves seeing beyond immediate appearances into deeper, broader understandings of the big picture, the long term, the common good, fuller meanings, deeper causes, greater complexity, sublety and ambiquity, the fact that there is always more to it.

This what we as history teachers should be doing, providing ways for kids to find those “deeper and broader understandings.” We also need to realize that no matter how many cool tech tools we and our students mess with, there will always be work for us to do to help kids find a “fuller meaning.”

Howard Zinn 1922-2010

Howard Zinn 1922-2010

Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States published in 1980, passed away several weeks ago. And while I’ve had the chance to hear him speak several times, it’s not like we were that close.

But it’s still a bit of a shock.

Zinn, like him or not, changed the way we do history, how we think about and write about history. And the world is worse off because he’s gone.

Zinn was an author, professor at Boston University and Spelman College in Atlanta, civil rights activist, historian and a World War II Army Air Force bombardier.

He wrote many things including You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train but it was A People’s History for which he is most well-known. With only a 5,000 print first run, A People’s History probably seemed odd at first. It wasn’t the normal sort of book for 1980.

In a 2008 interview with BigThink, Zinn said that he wanted to

be remembered as somebody who gave people a feeling of hope and power that they didn’t have before.

Traditional histories of the time focused on “dead, white guys” with a top-down, political and military perspective. Zinn’s approach was bit different. He chose not to write about treaty signings, political debates and Founding Fathers. Instead, Zinn wrote about poor and hungry farmers, unionists, women, those who resisted slavery and folks who struggled against both big business and big government.

As a senior attending a western Kansas high school at the time, I . . . um . . . didn’t get to the book till later. Much later. (There are probably some in western Kansas who still haven’t heard of it. And if they have, refuse to read it. If you’re from western Kansas, I say this with love.)

But I did eventually get to it, as did many others. A People’s History has sold over two million copies. And it wasn’t that Zinn was necessarily the first to write from a social, “underdog” perspective that made his books intriguing to so many. It was the manner in which Zinn used that perspective to create a narrative tying major events together that made A People’s History popular.

“What Zinn did was bring history writing out of the academy, and he undid much of the frankly biased and prejudiced views that came before it,” said Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton University. “But he’s a popularizer, and his view of history is topsy-turvy, turning old villains into heroes, and after a while the glow gets unreal.”

That criticism barely raised a hair on Mr. Zinn’s neck. “It’s not an unbiased account; so what?” he said in the Times interview. “If you look at history from the perspective of the slaughtered and mutilated, it’s a different story.”

New York Times

Zinn’s work has encouraged others to continue thinking about and writing history from a variety of perspectives. A People’s History is

an example of how coming at a familiar set of historical facts from a different angle can completely change what we know about them. And today, historians of all stripes are applying that lesson in new and fascinating ways. These scholars are not the heirs of Zinn, politically or intellectually, but their work shares his conviction that we can and should see the past anew.

Boston Globe

It’s this legacy of “seeing the past anew” that Zinn leaves behind.

Tip of the Week – Creating a blank Facebook template

Several months ago, I cranked out a quick post that discussed using Facebook pages and Twitter posts to engage kids in historical thinking and conversation.

I really didn’t think that much about it. It seemed to work with the teachers and students I tried it with and so wanted to share the idea with all of you.

Well . . . that particular post is still getting lots of hits and I continue to get emails from teachers asking for blank Facebook pages or blank Facebook templates to use with their kids.

Of course, the best solution would be to actually create a Facebook page for Dwight Eisenhower or Benjamin Banneker or whomever. Then simply edit that page as if you are Ike or Ben.

But Facebook has gotten a bit touchy about that and will probably end up deleting your brand-new fake Ike page. Plus, I don’t know of very many schools that allow Facebook through their internet filters.

The next best thing? Some sort of off-line template.

So . . . today I’ll share a quick overview of what I do to create a blank page and then provide a sample or two.

1. Start by taking a screenshot of a Facebook profile page. If you don’t have a Facebook account, ask one your students to share their profile.

2. Paste the screenshot into some sort of word processing or presentation software. I use Pages on a Mac. But this would work with Powerpoint, MS Word, Keynote . . . just about any software that provides a way to paste in an image (the screenshot) and allows you to insert a text box or shape that can edited.

3. Create text boxes or shapes and place them over the areas of the Facebook screenshot that are specific to your profile. Be sure to leave the headers and titles of those areas visible as much as possible.

This is what the template looks like at this point. I still need to cover my pic and name but you get the idea.

4. Edit each text box or shape so that they have no borders and that the fill color is white.

It should now look something like this:

5. Once everything is covered with white shapes, you can begin to insert photos and boxes with appropriate text. You can do this yourself or you can simply give the kids a paper copy and have them fill in the spaces with pencil. Even better, share the digital template with them. They can then create their own version with pasted images and text boxes using whatever software is available.

If I were a kid, I would prefer to edit the page using digital tools. But that’s just me!

The beginnings of a Dwight D. Eisenhower page:

6. Obviously, you can start with a screenshot of any Facebook page such as the Photos or Info pages.

7. If you do a search on Google, you can find fonts that claim to be the official Facebook font. But I just use Lucinda Grande in my text boxes and it looks pretty good.

If you need a quick template to practice with, you’re welcome to this PDF version.

Have fun!

Historic Maps in the K-12 Classroom

If you’ve been looking for high-quality geography lesson plans that tie directly to American History, you need to head over to Maps in the K-12 Classroom: A Resource for Teaching the Geographic Dimensions of American History.

Maps in the K-12 Classroom is a project of the Newberry Library’s Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography with financial support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

I was lucky enough to run into the group at a conference several years ago and was able to snag a handful of CDs with their goodies on it. We were allowed to make copies of the CD and so have been handing them out left and right ever since. At the time, they hadn’t posted their stuff online and I never really thought to check. But it is definitely worth your time to visit.

The site has 18 maps in six major categories:

• Exploration and Encounter
• Migration and Settlement
• Environmental History
• The Historical Geography of Transportation
• Political and Military History
• The Geography of American Communities

Every map has four lesson plans at different grade levels for a total of 72 lessons. And while each lesson is designed for a specific grade level, they can easily be adapted to fit your needs.

Lessons are easily printed and the maps can be downloaded as PDFs. Each lesson also has links to supplementary materials and images as well as museum curator’s notes.

The site truly is a hidden treasure!

Black History Month resources and lesson plans

Finding Black History Month lesson plans and teaching resources is not that tough. Finding good ones . . . a bit more difficult.

Bessie Coleman, first ever licensed African-American pilot at Bio.com

So I’ve spent some time over the last few days, trying to sift through the hundreds of places that are posting Black History Month materials. And I think I’ve come up with a pretty good list. The stuff from the National Archives and the Library of Congress seems especially good.

African American History Month from the Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:

pays tribute to the generations of African Americans who struggled with adversity to achieve full citizenship in American society.

NARA has its own Black History Month site. New resources are clearly marked and all look great!

ThinkFinity, the great metasearch tool from the Verizon Foundation, put together a series of nine lesson plans.

eHow created an interesting take of the Black History Month lesson plan idea called How to Write Lesson Plans for Black History Month.

Education World offers a wide variety of resources including lesson plans, activities, games, recipes, sounds and resources.

The Teach-nology people have developed a very nice list of over 50 lesson plans, biographies and numerous worksheets that could lead to great conversation.

I also like the very extensive list of lesson plans posted by the LessonPlansPage. They also have nice list of additional resources.

And finally, the Bio.com folks have an awesome, interactive site with biographies, timelines, videos, games, photos and basic historical background section.

Good luck! And enjoy.