What We Are Doing Today in Class

by Shelly Blake-Plock

Our AP Euro class is currently discussing the French Revolution. And, of course, a topic of interest has been similarities and dis-similarities to what has been happening in Egypt since Jan 25.

Below is a brief outline of what we're doing in class today. We would love readers to leave comments and questions for us to think about and discuss. We'd also love to talk to people on the ground in Egypt about what they are experiencing right now. Please get in touch @TeachPaperless on Twitter.

***

We are going to be looking for similarities and dis-similarities between the French Revolution and the current revolution in Egypt.

French Revolution // Egyptian Revolution

Essentials:


1. Compare / Contrast Louis XVI and Mubarak.
2. In each case, WHY were the people protesting? (Cite primary sources).
3. What role did women play?
4. What concerns are their about the current situation in Egypt? How might they relate to the days following the fall of Louis XVI?
5. How did/are people express(ing) their views?
6. Are the current protests violent?
7. What do people on the ground in Cairo think is going to happen now? (Directly contact reporters and bloggers in Egypt via Twitter during this class period).
8. Based on your study of the French Revolution and your current observations of the situation in Egypt, what do you think are possible outcomes? How are the possible outcomes in Egypt alike or different with outcomes in France -- both in the short and long term.


Sources:


Sources on French Revolution


http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/modsbook13.html




Sources on Egypt


Al Jazeera
http://english.aljazeera.net/
http://blogs.aljazeera.net/middle-east/2011/02/10/live-blog-feb-11-egypt-protests


New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/latest-updates-on-day-18-of-egypt-protests/?hp


NPR
http://www.npr.org/?refresh=true
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/02/11/133675132/live-blog-latest-on-events-in-egypt


CNN
http://www.cnn.com/?refresh=1


NBC
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/
http://worldblog.msnbc.msn.com/egypt


Twitter Search
http://search.twitter.com/search?had_popular=true&q=%23Egypt&result_type=recent

Making History with Issuu, a Paperless Magazine Maker

The students in my West Civ class just published a series of "Year in Review" history magazines. Exported as pdfs to Issuu.com, I think they make an impressive case for opting for digital over paper in student publishing.

Thought I'd share an example with you!



Check out the 'works cited' page at the end; the student editors of this edition found some excellent resources online (we've been working on increasing the quality of our source and reference material). A primary source compendium that's become standard in our class is the Internet History Sourcebooks Project -- it and the BBC History site have literally made history textbooks in our classroom... well... history.

Best of all, the kids loved making these magazines. For the past couple of days, our room has been transformed into a virtual publishing house. And when technology and content together can foster that kind of engagement, you know you're on the right track.

Introducing the Middle Ages to Freshmen History Students via Online Gaming

What's loud, crude, bloody, and educational?

Why, I do believe it's the 1066 game from Channel4.

Summing up the three major battles over England in the year 1066, the game lets the player experience warfare from the point-of-view of Viking, Anglo-Saxon, and Norman warriors.

I particularly like the Flash sequences between battles which tell the story of the Viking and Norman invasions in an accessible format easy for students to pick up on.

The battle sequences liberally splatter the blood around, so I'd tend to save this one for the older kids. But for the 'older kids' among us, it sure is fun.

And to extend the logic of medieval warfare beyond the historical battles, the game also allows players to create their own scenarios and play against one another online.

One thing's for certain: it surely did grab the attention of my Freshmen like no textbook description of the battles ever has.

Thanks to Emily, one of my former students (and now a Classics geek in college), for the showing me the game to begin with.

Skyping History

Today, my 9th grade history class took a digital detour to Scandinavia. A good friend of mine from Stockholm skyped into our class session on Vikings.

American history curricula teach Scandinavian history as if its only contribution to the world was plunder and horned helmets (which of course, as some of my students pointed out yesterday on their West Civ Proj blog, they didn't even wear). So, I wanted to give them a view of what Scandinavian history is really like by having a conversation with someone who actually was born and lives there.

My friend Joel is a world-class musician and he's spent the last few years working on NGO projects using music as a way of empowering kids in the forgotten cities of the world. A native of Sweden, he was a perfect choice for a brief conversation with my kids here in Maryland.

First he pointed out the different ways Scandinavians think about their ancestors. On the one hand, they were admittedly brutal and severe. One the other, however, they were industrious people who wanted to better their lives and who survived much hardship in the face of climates and limited resources few of us could imagine.

Someone asked what Sweden was like today, and Joel described their schools and government as well as the general attitudes of Swedes towards world affairs. And you could see in the faces of some kids a difficulty lining up the modern society he was describing with the limited knowledge they had always carried around about the land of the Vikings.

Each week, I give the students a question to ponder. This week's question is: "Who is Good? Who is Bad?" We collect these questions, along with many others, on our class wiki; and we crowdsource for more via Twitter. These questions -- not the facts from some filtered-down textbook -- form the basis of our class dialog.

The kids are learning history via the questions we ask about it.

And so, after an eight-minute conversation with a stranger a quarter of a world away -- a conversation that threw some theoretical complications into the mix regarding Vikings (Good, Bad, and Otherwise) -- I look forward to seeing how my kids answer the question this week.

And just as an aside, I'm gonna say that I'm just so happy that I'm living in a time where I can bring the world to my kids and bring my kids to the world.

Because the History Classroom Just Ain't What It Used To Be

No sooner did I ask you all to check out my students' new West Civ blog than Andrew B. Watt delivers a comment that turns our student editor's argument on its head.

Fantastic.

Imagine being 15-years-old and putting your work out there for criticism and argument. And imagine receiving criticism and argument almost immediately from some source -- some real person -- beyond the walls of your classroom. Imagine having to think about that and deal with it. And having to do all that in a public sphere.

This is what learning looks like in the 21st century.

I was talking to @schickbob about it earlier, and he nailed it: "The learning starts when commenters start disagreeing with them".

That's what it's all about.

Authentic experiences. Real blogging. Authentic learning. In public.

And learning that you've got to back up what you say and that there's more than one angle to every story.

We can't just pat kids on the head for making a blog. If we do that, we're gonna end up just as inauthentic as the teachers who patted us on the head for writing crappy poetry and putting together cookie-cutter science fair tri-folds. Rather, we've got to use blogs and the connection to the world that the Internet provides to engage our students in real ways to live up to the potential of their convictions while likewise having the humility and sense of civility to provide a forum for discourse.

Thanks to all of you who have supported us along the way to initiating this project and thanks to those of you today who commented on the posts. We plan to post often and we've got some surprises in store as well.

Our tagline is: "Because history just ain't what it used to be". But it might as well be: "Because the history classroom just ain't what it used to be".

Thoughts on History and the "Important Questions"

Following EduCon, readers on Will Richardson's blog voted on several questions that we might deem the "important questions" regarding education today. The top ten being:

1. How do we support the changing role of teacher?
2. What is the role of the teacher?
3. How do we help students discover their passions?
4. What is the essential learning that schools impart to students?
5. What is the purpose of school?
6. How do we adapt our curriculum to the technologies that kids are already using?
7. What does and educated person look like today?
8. How do we change policy to support more flexible time and place learning?
9. What are the essential practices of teachers in a system where students are learning outside of school?
10. How do we ensure those without privilege have equal access to quality education and opportunity?

This is an interesting list and it  especially interests me in terms of a common thread through the questions, namely: the intersection of identity and purpose.

The first two questions clearly have to do with the identity of a teacher. What is it that a teacher "does"? And how has what a teacher "does" changed/is-changing? Historically, we might say that teachers generally "do" three things. They impart wisdom and offer systems of understanding -- I'm thinking Plato and Aristotle as well as the Classical Raga gurus. They also serve society by preparing citizens for the demands that work and service will put on them -- here we have the teacher of "skills" whether we talk about the Medieval Guild system or elements of contemporary public education. Third, we have teachers as the generational constituents of the transmission of ideas, arguments, and concepts -- and here I see the Rabbinical tradition as a rich example.

As for the question of how to support the change that teachers are going through, I'd first suggest we define the change itself. More often then not, education finds itself in the position of responding to rather than initiating cultural change. This makes sense, given that so much of what we do in education is in using historical precedent to help students develop ways of knowing. All the more important then that in this era of rapid change, we should not forget that our educational predecessors have long grappled with societal paradigm shifts.

In fact, I would make the argument that a rather good way to consider the questions raised by the Weblogg-ed readers is through the lens of historical analysis. For these are important questions; they are questions dealing with the fundamentals of identity within an era of dramatic shift. And for that reason, we should look back into dramatic shifts in history and examine how -- or whether -- education itself rode out those storms.

Over the next few months, I will be examining the historical nature of shift and the way in which education has responded to it (or how it has occasionally shaped it). I started generating a list of ideas this morning, and have already found some interesting parallels. For instance, at the same time that the experiment in democracy is occurring in 5th century Athens, the leading ethical philosophers of the age are making arguments against what had become a tradition of hawking educational ideas and rhetorical constructs for cash in the Stoa. Later during the Roman Empire, education becomes a commodity somewhat reflecting imperial values as well as turning certain locales into what we might call the first "college towns". In the wake of the decentralization of Roman governmental authority in the early Middle Ages, education becomes (literally) cloistered in the abbeys; five hundred or so years later, the universities arise with Latin as the lingua franca and a new class of intellectual elites that even later, with the rise of dialectical theory, will begin the movement towards educational celebrity as professors become seemingly as important as their disciplines and education again becomes peripatetic. In the Renaissance, we will see the further societal split in the intellectual tradition with the Guilds taking the arts and the private tutors of rich aristocrats taking the humanities. All this leads into the greatest pre-Industrial shift since the Agricultural Revolution -- the development of the printing press and the rise of the literate masses.

In short, the history of education is a history of responses to cultural shift.

Which means that the history of teachers is a history of responses to shifting demands upon identity.

How did the identity of teachers change through each of these shifts? Is it too much to think that our own era of digital shift is not something new, but rather the next phase in an ongoing process of historical dialectic? Is it even worth it to think in these terms? Or should we be focusing on the day-to-day work of "changing" schools?

Well, in my thinking, the questions raised by the readers hit on big themes: identity, passion, essentiality, purpose, adaptation, environment, and exclusivity. If I can play one small role in this conversation, I'd like to be the historian. I'd like to help give context to each of those big issues from an historical perspective, not in that the history itself will necessarily change what's going on in the day-to-day, but in that closer examination of the history might help us think about how we are answering the questions.

Many of us in education -- myself included -- tend to be pragmatists; we work with what we've got, and for the most part theory and history are often a diversion rather than a primary function within our practice. We talk about practice and policy in the story of "now" and we work scrappily to make things happen in the "now". And that's fine. But it leaves me personally feeling that the work of education all too often is forced to exist within the confines of politics and finances rather than in the sphere of the re-enchantment of the spirit where it belongs.

And for that reason, I'm very excited to be one small part of this broader conversation on the "important" questions -- as well as the importance of having questions -- that the sphere of educators revolving around the new digital paradigm brings to the debate. And I'm happy to put on my historian hat and I invite anyone interested in looking at the historical currents arisen by these themes to get in touch; let's think together and write together. Do our small part to help create a substantial context for the discussion.

Visiting Monticello (or, at least Thom Jefferson’s new parking lot)

From the road.

Feeding off the local Wi-Fi from the Loretta Lynn Kitchen somewhere between Nashville and Memphis. Here's a dispatch I wrote last night from a mountainside in eastern Tennessee.

***

Started out from Baltimore today on the family road trip. Got around the DC beltway in record time and headed straight for Charlottesville, VA -- home of Monticello.

Between my wife’s love of architecture and my own love of history, we were looking forward to showing our three kids the pride of Virginian Neoclassicism. We’d been through the old house years ago back when we started dating; I like to think Thom had something to do with convincing her that I was an alright guy. Back in those days we were even more strapped for cash than we are now, which made our discovery at entering the new ‘Monticello Welcome Center’ such a harsh surprise.

Turns out that for two adults and three elementary schoolers to check out the old joint would cost about $65.

For those of you, like me, who are bad with numbers, that’s: sixty-five dollars.

Are you kidding?

Isn’t Thomas Jefferson the father of our ‘free’ public school system? You think old Thom might think $20 a head and 8 bucks a tyke is a bit much?

I understand, I understand. They do have to pay for the new welcome center building (where you can buy a Thom Jefferson decanter set and any number of Declaration of Independence replicas). But really. The irony.

The cruelty.

It is just plain wrong to price folks out of their own history. My wife lost it when the ranger wouldn’t even let us visit Jefferson’s grave.

Is this how little we, as a people, respect our history? To turn a president’s house into a giftshop for the entitled and to charge a thief’s ransom to travelers too tired to turn around and leave?

So we ate lunch in the parking lot and taught the kids about the real meaning of democracy.

- Written on Cumberland Mtn. near Crossville, TN on Tuesday, July 14, 2009 at 9:24PM