Tag: Social Studies

One of my Early Computer Programs

My brother found this at my parents’ house the other day. First off, for those of you who are wondering, it’s perforated printer paper. The holes (originally on both sides) are grabbed by the printer’s tractor cogs that pull the paper in to be typed on. The perforations enabled you to remove the hole strips and divide the conveyor of paper into 8 1/2 by 11 sheets. Since computers mostly delt with columns and rows of data back then, the green stripes made reading them easier.

Click Image to Enlarge

But what I’m excited about is what’s printed on the paper, a computer program that I wrote in 1983, when I was still teaching Social Studies in South Carolina. The program is a database application for our TRS-80 (Radio Shack) computers. It enabled students to create datasets for the counties of SC or states of the U.S., or animals by phylum and genus, and then run analyses on them.

I wish that I could find printouts of some of my games. It was such an exciting time when we were free to push the technology, writing and adapting software to support new ideas about learning, because no one else knew what we were doing. It was just computers.

Alphabetical Index for My Book

Small Book Image
Click to visit the book’s web site.

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).

  1. Wikipedia
  2. Internet
  3. Apple Macintosh Computers
  4. Math (Subject)
  5. World Wide Web
  6. Science (Subject)
  7. Blog, Blogging, etc
  8. Art (subject)
  9. Apple II Computers
  1. Literacy (Subject)
  2. Social Studies (Subject)
  3. History (Subject)
  4. Video Games
  5. Google
  6. NCDPI
  7. Reading (Subject)
  8. English (Subject)
  9. Internet Archive (Website)
  1. NCLB
  2. Donovan Harper
  3. Al Rogers
  4. Virtual Environments
  5. FrEdMail
  6. Twitter
  7. Writing (Subject)
  8. America Online (AOL) (Online Service)

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

Use Your Department of Education to…

Consitution

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/

A New Education Environment

The best of my teaching resources

 When I taught Middle School Social Studies in the 1970s, I used a five-year-old textbook, a few old maps and globe, which predated WWII, a well managed but tiny school library and two stacks of ancient National Geographic Magazines, inherited from my grandparents and cut to pieces for the pictures. The New York Public Library’s upcoming release of 180,000 documents to the digital public domain is a small contribution to the vast infoscape that we learn in today. I taught with information scarcity. Today’s teachers teach in information abundance. This dramatically changes how we teach, what education looks like, and even what it means to be educated. 

A Visualization of Science “Brain Drain”

This is one of the infographics that is not so easy to read, but well worth the effort.  It maps out the flow of scientific research talent across 16 countries.  Created by information designer, Giorgia Lupi and here team in Italy, as a follow-up to several celebrated graphics (this and this), it was not initially apparent to me that it is […]

This is one of the infographics that is not so easy to read, but well worth the effort.  It maps out the flow of scientific research talent across 16 countries.  Created by information designer, Giorgia Lupi and here team in Italy, as a follow-up to several celebrated graphics (this and this), it was not initially apparent to me that it is a scatter plot.  

Some things are better discovered than obvious.  

The X axis represents the percent of the country’s GDP that is invested in research and development, with Sweden, Japan, Denmark and Switzerland leading the field.  The Y axis represents the number of researchers in the country for ever one million people.  At the top here are Denmark, Japan, Sweden and the U.S.A.

The lines show the migration of scientific researchers.  For instance, Denmark exports talent to Great Britain and the U.S.  The U.S. exports to Canada, Germany, Great Britain and Australia.  Just about everybody exports to the U.S.

Of particular interest are the percent of foreigner and emigrant researchers in the countries compared to the  total foreign and emigrant residents.

All in all, it’s worth a study by teachers and STEM and social studies students.

A Perspective on Time

There are a few things that are really difficult to convey to students. I remember how hard it was to help my social studies students understand what caused the seasons. Yes, I taught a lot of science while teaching social studies. Distance and time, on the outset, seem simple. But comprehending the vastness of time, […]

There are a few things that are really difficult to convey to students. I remember how hard it was to help my social studies students understand what caused the seasons. Yes, I taught a lot of science while teaching social studies. Distance and time, on the outset, seem simple. But comprehending the vastness of time, when looking at history, and distance, when looking at science (or visa-versa), are hard for us to comprehend. In the words of the source blog for this infographic,

Humans are good at a lot of things, but putting time in perspective is not one of them. It’s not our fault – the span of time in human history, and even more so in natural history, are so vast compared to the span of our life and recent history that it’s almost impossible to get a handle on it.

There are lots of great infographics and visualizations that help to compare all manner of vastness, and here’s one.