Here are several YouTube channels that tell stories about our history. There were compiled by Reddit user, Texas_Rockets.
Tag: History
Alphabetical Index for My Book
During my first semester of college I took a course that helped to prepare me for taking higher ed courses. One of the tips that I have carried through the decades was reading the the table of contents upon purchasing the textbook. This would give you a structural sense of the topic of the course. Scanning the index was another way to delve deeper into the what and who of the topic. Several days ago I posted the table of contents of A Quiet Revolution. Here, I’m providing the entire index, clickable to specific letters.
I’ve also compiled a list of the items that occurred at least ten times in the book, in descending order (Wikipedia appears 71 times).
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If you are reading this, there’s a pretty good chance that your name will appear in the index.
A –
B –
C –
D –
E –
F –
G –
H –
I –
J –
K –
L –
M
N –
O –
P –
Q –
R –
S –
T –
U –
V –
W –
XYZ
Quiet Revolution Promo Video 1
I will be producing little 2-minute videos over the next few weeks to promote my new book, The Days and Nights of a Quiet Revolution. This first one sets some context. When I was in high school, computers were giant machines that were installed with forklifts. My father use to take me to his work, a trucking company, to show me their Honeywell computers.
Even after I graduated from college, computers had nothing to do with education. I had no reason to believe that teaching would be changing in any substantial way over my assumed 30 years as a history teacher.
Video 1
Are We Worthy of Our Accomplishments?
I’ve just started reading “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” by Yuval Noah Harari. Every page teaches me something extraordinary. For instance, for 97% of the time that Homo (humans) have been walking upright, there were several species of human living simultaneously. Homo sapiens, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo erectus, Homo denisova, to mention only a few. It’s only recently, in evolutionary time, that Homo sapiens has emerged as the sole species of human to inhabit the earth.
I just scanned the Amazon description for Harari’s next book, “Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow,” and these sentences jumped out:
“Famine, plague and war have been transformed from incomprehensible and uncontrollable forces of nature into manageable challenges. For the first time in history, more people die today from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists, and criminals combined. The average American is a thousand times more likely to die from binging at McDonalds than from being blown up by Al Qaeda.”
It makes me wonder how we’ve accomplished so much to make our world more civil, and, apparently, so little to to civilize ourselves. Are we worthy of our accomplishments?
Left, Right, Up & Down in U.S. Politics
I ran across an incredible web site today. As someone who is interested in politics, and especially its ongoing evolution, this really scratched an itch. It’s voteview.com and they record all rollcall votes cast by the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, going back to the first congress of 1789-1791.
I was looking for data that I could visualize to indicate the degree to which Republicans and Democrats have crossed, implying times of compromise. But I found the following visualization on voteview.com that showed me exactly what I wanted to illustrate.
Click to Enlarge
I have marked the region between 1940, marking the beginning of the Roosevelt/Wallace administration and 1980, marking the beginning of the Reagan/Bush era. You notice a lot of crossover between Republicans and Democrats. The Liberal to Conservative scale was determined by the DW-NOMINATE or Dynamic Weighted NOMINAl Three-step Estimation. I call that period “the good old days,” because it is the period of U.S. political history with which I identify and measure current conditions.
Another interesting application of DW-NOMINATE is the geography data. You can enter your zip code and you see the ideology of your district’s representatives. The positions of the red or blue bars are based on the NOMINATE index value of your representatives during that particular congress. Below and left shows the ideologies of representatives from Raleigh, North Carolina going back to my graduation from high school. The right shows the ideologies of representatives from Cherryville, my home town, going back to high school. I just think this is cool!
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Lewis, Jeffrey B., Keith Poole, Howard Rosenthal, Adam Boche, Aaron Rudkin, and Luke Sonnet (2017). Voteview: Representing places through time. https://voteview.com/
Lewis, Jeffrey B., Keith Poole, Howard Rosenthal, Adam Boche, Aaron Rudkin, and Luke Sonnet (2017). Voteview: Parties Overview . https://voteview.com/
Look to Struggling Students for Your Future Leaders and Game-Changers
Karen Arnold, a Boston University researcher has conducted a 14 year longitudinal study of high school valedictorians, finding that they rarely achieve fame and fortune. To be sure, they usually finish college, many earn graduate degrees and about half rise to top tier positions.
“But how many of these number-one high-school performers go on to change the world, run the world, or impress the world?” Eric Barker is asking this question in his new book, “Barking Up the Wrong Tree.” He cites another study of 700 American millionaires, finding that their average high school GPA was 2.9. Of course, not all millionaires are game-changers.
Barker seems to believe that there is a disconnect between the kinds of students we reward and the kinds of graduates that a rapidly changing world needs. He suggests two reasons for this incongruity, both of which I touch on in “The Quiet Revolution.”
- “Schools reward students who consistently do what they are told” – and life rewards people who shake things up. Arnold says that in high school, “we are rewarding conformity and the willingness to go along with the system.Speaking to a group at Business Insider’s New York office, Baker said, “In school, rules are very clear. In life, rules are not so clear. So a certain amount of not playing by the rules is advantageous once you get out of a closed system like education.”
- “Schools Reward being a generalist” If you are passionate about political history, you have to restrain that passion for time to spend on your Math, Science, Health, and English homework. The real world rewards passion and expertise.
Surprisingly, Arnold’s study found that students “who genuinely enjoy learning tend to struggle in high school. They find the education system ‘stifling’ because it doesn’t allow them to pursue their passions deeply.”
Lebowitz, S. (2017, May 29). Why valedictorians rarely become rich and famous — and the average millionaire’s college GPA was 2.9. Business Insider. Retrieved from http://www.businessinsider.com/why-high-school-valedictorians-dont-become-really-successful-2017-5
Where Social Media Fails – It’s Us
Demographics, or demography, is the statistical study of populations. It encompasses the size, structure, and distribution of these populations. Demographics have long been used by decision makers in both government and commercial arenas.
Psychographics (a new word for me) is the study and classification of people according to their cognitive attitudes, aspirations, interests, opinions, beliefs and other psychological criteria.
Cambridge Analytica is a company that uses big data mining to accomplish, among other things, “psychographic profiling.” The company does this “..for political purposes, to identify “mean personality” and then segment personality types into yet more specific subgroups, using other variables, to create ever smaller groups susceptible to precisely targeted messages.” THEY DID THIS FOR THE DONALD TRUMP PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN.
Yesterday, ProPublica announced that they had successfully used Facebook, to direct mock articles directly to the newsfeeds of 2,300 people who’s psychographic profiles indicated interests in “Jew hater,” “How to burn jews,” or, “History of ‘why jews ruin the world’” – for $30. The anti-semitic categories were immediately removed. They had been created by computer algorithms, not by people. Facebook is exploring ways to fix the problem
For a long time I promoted and celebrated the people-power of social media, that it responds and behaves based on how we, people, use it. This characteristic is incredibly empowering and culture-enriching, and it can also be used to inflict great evil. For this reason, I also strongly urged educators and education leaders to refine their notions of what it is to be literate, that it is no long merely the ability to read and understand, but also the skills and habits of exposing what is true in the information that we encounter.
Sources:
Burleigh, N. (2017, June 8). How big data mines personal info to craft fake news and manipulate voters. Newsweek. Retrieved from http://www.newsweek.com/2017/06/16/big-data-mines-personal-info-manipulate-voters-623131.html
Angwin, J., Varner, M., & Tobin, A. (2017, September 14). Facebook enabled advertisers to reach ‘jew haters’ [Web log post]. Retrieved from https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-enabled-advertisers-to-reach-jew-haters
Demography: https://goo.gl/AkfHdt
Psychographics: https://goo.gl/pjxPiM
Use Your Department of Education to…
U.S. Constitution
Before this absurd presidential election is over and the chilling potentialities have faded, I want to urgently request something of our next president.
We are a great country with a wealth of resources, a rich culture that derives from its heritage of immigration and a government that has been carefully designed by some really smart people. We are greatest when we thrive to better ourselves based on the honorable principles that guided the best of our countries designers. As such, we have an immense responsibility to ourselves and to the world.
In recent months, I have also come to realize how fragile our country is — not because of a failure of resources, culture or even our government (surprise). It’s because we have forgotten what our country is about and the spirit behind its creation — and our education system deserves a large part of the blame. We endeavor to prepare our children for their future workplace, and rightly so. But we have increasingly worked toward this goal at the expense of preparing them to become knowledgeable and responsible citizens of a democratic society.
We have angrily express our dissatisfaction with how Congress, the President and the Supreme Court conduct governmental affairs. Yet, according to an Annenberg Public Policy Center study, only 36% of us could name all three branches of government. 35% could not name a single one. Only 27% knew that two-thirds of the House of Representatives and Senate could overturn a Presidential Veto. 21% believe that a 5-4 Supreme Court Decision is sent back to Congress.* Yet the constitution we apparently know so little about grants us the power to select those who will fill our offices of leadership.
Therefore, I earnestly beseech our next president to use his or her Department of Education to enact a complete overhaul of Social Studies education in America. We need to understand the history and heritage of our country, both our successes and our blunders. ..And, additionally, we will not be able to accomplish this without escaping the tyranny of high stakes testing and the multiple choice knowledge that it precipitates.
The United States has an exciting history that folds into an even more exciting world history, and it all influences nearly every aspect of our daily lives. Learning about that history and its social, cultural and economic implications should be just as exciting — and it can be.
It should be.
“Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” – George Santayana
..or worse, have it rewritten for them!
* Annenberg Public Policy Center. (2014). Americans know surprisingly little about their government, survey finds. Retrieved from http://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/americans-know-surprisingly-little-about-their-government-survey-finds/
I Just Learned a New Word
In my efforts to write this book about the history of educational technology (as I have witnessed it), I’m finding myself doing more reading than writing. I guess that’s normal for book-writing, though it surprises me since I am typing this mostly from my own recollections.
This morning, in my reading, I learned a new word. It’s mesofacts. These are facts that, when learned, seem to be dependable, longterm and applicable truths – when in fact, they are likely to change within a lifetime, and often within a few years.
In his Harvard Business Review article, Be Forwarned: Your Knowledge is Decaying Samuel Arbesman relates an example, a hedge fund manager saying in a conversation, “Since we all know that there are 4 billion people on the planet…” 4 billion people is what I learned when I was in school, and it still surprises me when I heard that it was up to 6 billion and now 7 billion.
Arbesman says that these mesofacts are far more common than we realize. It makes me wonder about how much of what we are expecting our students to memorize, will simply not be true in their adulthood, and may even be problematic.
This all supports something that I heard someone say a few years ago.
Any question, whose answer can be googled,
should not be on any test.
Another epiphanic statement, which may or may not be attributable to John Dewey is,
If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s,
we rob them of their tomorrow.
Another word I learned is scientometrics. Its the study of the shape of how knowledge grows and spreads through a population.
Arbesman, S. (2012). Be forewarned: Your knowledge is decaying. Harvard Business Review, Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2012/11/be-forewarned-your-knowledge-i
20 Mbps & We’re Still Searching for the Same Stuff
I’ve been doing a lot of deep digging while working on my book about the history of technology in education – as I’ve seen it. This afternoon, I happened upon some online handouts for one of my first keynotes and its slidedeck. The address was called, “The Three Ts of Teaching in the Twenty-First Century.” It appears to have been delivered in November of 2000.
On one of the opening slides, I had listed the ten most searched for terms of that month. As a comparison, I found the top ten searches on Google in 2014, and have listed them as well.
| November 2000 | 2014 | |||
| 10 | Pokemon | 10 | Sochi Olympics | |
| 91 | Napster | 91 | Frozen | |
| 81 | Playstation 2 | 81 | ISIS | |
| 71 | NFL | 7 | Conchita Wurst | |
| 6 | Florida Recount | 6 | Flappy Bird | |
| 5 | Britney Spears | 5 | ALS Ice Bucket Challenge | |
| 4 | Thanksgiving | 4 | Malaysia Airlines | |
| 3 | Dragonball | 3 | Ebola | |
| 2 | Election 2000 | 2 | World Cup | |
| 1 | Christmas | 1 | Robin Williams | |
I was actually surprised how little it’s changed? We have video games, sports, entertainment with a peppering of world-shaping issues.