Universal Design Concept Map

I was most taken with the three principles that put the student's ability to learn at the heart of the dialog. After a long and strange career in communications and marketing, I've worked in many capacities with the three principles that emphasize the one-to-one connection of recognition, affective engagement and expression (both of teacher and student, marketer and audience, parent and child, etc.). These are central to awareness and persuasion which is what, at the end of the day, the teacher wishes to convey. Importantly, these three principles rest on the conviction that the person learning comes to the process with individual abilities, inclinations and information incorporation styles. As long as we respect the students, we have a start to develop an effective dialog.

Concept Mapping and Social Studies

The beauty of concept mapping is its interactivity which is not fabulously conveyed in a static screen shot. Thus, I've done two screen shots...a before and after of sorts.

I built this concept map as a visual aid for presentation to dimensionalize how and why social studies and social sciences can be merged and amplified to develop a meaningful secondary curriculum focus to better prepare students to understand the social contract in the world around them. Communications is the key nexus which ties us all to the floating continuum of human history. Thus, communications in multiple links is the center of the main idea that defines Social Sciences Studies and connects the many disciplines and study areas to one another. Communications from the most basic physical form of human touch to the most symbolic form of cyber-social media is how we share the belief systems that form the social contract.

Social Sciences Studies embraces and is visually linked to the primary study disciplines of Economics, Government, Geography and History. Each of these recognized study areas is further visually defined by the components that comprise their study. These components are certainly not all-inclusive but are representative.

Adjunct links which overlap across the four primary above include Cultural Studies, Philosophy, Ecology and Religion and serve to demonstrate how varied the human experience is over time, geography and culture. These adjunct links provide the context in which human interaction drives behaviors and belief systems.

These eight study areas all theoretically connect to one another through communications at the center. It is how we share them that builds communities of practice between and among individuals and groups of people.

Providing deeper understanding of these essential links are the rich disciplines of Psychology, Anthropology, Arts, Sociology and Science & Technology. These disciplines intersect and overlap through communications to help us understand the richness of the human experience.

In an interactive setting with a smartboard, or pre-designed through a dynamic presentation, the the audience either participates in or visually sees how the studies are populated with their components and how they all link together. For example, we see through the links that the study of Cultural Anthropology and Linguistics connects us to Religion and Philosophy and is manifest in the Arts, perhaps in architecture and literature. As we learn more, we see that other, seemingly distinct ares, such as Science & Technology and Religion are, in fact, connected through how and what they communicate about a people. A primary demonstration of this would be architecture, which though commonly associated with the Arts, embodies cultural and social aesthetic, religion, government, sociology, ecology and technology in the construction of the great temples over the millennia of human history.

The design for this is expressly to reconnect the social sciences with each other, and to merge social studies with the social sciences. This is to elevate them in the secondary curriculum which is slowly becoming an instrument of math and science to the exclusion of the richer cultural studies. Moreover, we see how math, science, technology, innovation are enmeshed within social systems and how communications enable us to demonstrate them.

The second slide, would be ideally interactive as the audience and the presenter populate the map with real visuals of the varied symbolic components for each of the disciplines. Thus we have the written word, flags, bridges, family structure and commerce all of which are demonstrations of how we communicate with another.

It is essential for all students to be able to read, write and perform necessary mathematical functions. For some, it may even be valuable to know what a mole is (in chemistry and biology). But, unless our students know how they connect to human history, we have scant hope for a better future.

LOVE this....www.wordle.com!

Yesterday and Today and Tomorrow?

Some more conflated pictures. The "old" ones, AKA Before, were taken by my father in Shanghai in 1945 where he was stationed after the allied victory there. The afters were found in the public domain... :) These can be great inspirations for kids to look at their own family history and geography and look for changes and sameness over time. The use of historical pictures of famous cites, places and events and their juxtaposition with current imagery can reinforce the continuity of time and students' connection to history.

Photoshop and Living History

History is the recording of experience along the human continuum across time. Here we see in both the physical and symbolic world how time co-exists with the human experience that comprises history.

This is my great grandfather, Solomon Milton Schatzkin in Egypt in the 1920s, I believe. He is the Teddy Roosevelt-ish fellow on the camel to the left. I have superimposed my parents sitting on the sand. This picture is from their honeymoon in 1994. To demonstrate how technology connects time and people, I have superimposed a satellite dish on the Great Pyramid as well as a stealth fighter. The pictures I have used are from dreamtimesfree.com and are copyright free images.

I am fortunate that I have all of my family pictures from the 40s onward digitized and I have great, great fun with Photoshop Elements. More to come for sure.

Multi-Media, Multi-tasking @ 1955

A boy, a globe, a book.

History pod-cast

History is more than the memorization of dates and names and places. History is our connection with our social and cultural selves. Accordingly, the State of Connecticut includes a content standard for Applying History; for ensuring that educated students will be able to recognize the continuing importance of historical thinking and knowledge in their own lives and the world in which they live.

In other words, when we share history with our students, we empower them to a deeper and more significant understanding of the world around them. Ultimately, we are connecting and linking our children to the human experience. And to surely do so, we must bring the people of history alive.

Technology, by adding dimension and multisensual experience to communications is uniquely able to assist us to bring the events and people of history to full human dimension. Moreover how technology interacts with communications presents a unique opportunity to teaching and learning learning: inextricably intertwining the medium with the message. It enables us to meaningfully focus on the transfer of information, human communications as the common thread across history. We will learn how the changes in physical communications such as the building of roads and canals to the developments in symbolic communications such as the printing press, the telephone and the internet drive social movements and create events we call history.

We can see how the innovations in communications open information and knowledge to different audiences and how audiences come to identify their media with their messages. In the early Renaissance Latin was the language of the educated classes and of diplomacy. The rise of the nation-state was accompanied by the rise of the "vulgar" tongues and the controversial tranlsation of the Bible into indigenous languages. This was as momentous a societal and cultural shift among its contemporaries as the internet is to our world today. Entirely new groups of people were in communication and sharing new ideas.

History was made. And thus, history continues to be made every day and in every way intimately connected to how we communicate.

Curriculum Standards--Why Social Studies?

I was born in 1954 (mid-century to the modern generation) and thus was the first generation that grew up with TV. My parents were pretty skeptical about the long term intellectual value of TV and I was allowed to watch one program only during Monday through Thursday; I chose the Flintstones. I also loved anything about the olden days. From fairy tales to stories about my mother's youth in the thirties to stories about the colonial days, I gobbled anything historical. My favorite exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City is the armor exhibit. I find it simply spellbinding.

Thus, when I selected the Flintstones, I at age 8 had already combined my love for media with my love for history.

As a history lover, I am always saddened and dismayed by the contempt and utter boredom with which my millennial children and the gen-X'ers hold history. I do not blame them. It has been abysmally taught with scant an ear or eye to how and why what came before is inextricably tied to what is now. I feel an abiding need to be part of the change of curriculum which will bring social sciences, including history, to the forefront of curriculum in secondary school. More specifically, I believe if we can demonstrate for students and assist students to uncover for themselves how the transfer of information has led social movements over time then we can begin to link the Internet to hieroglyphics and perhaps awaken a latent interest in human history.

There is in the Connecticut Social Studies Curriculum Framework (www.ctsocialstudies.org/standards.htm) a very specific standard that is ideal for enhancing the teaching and learning of social studies/history:

Content Standard 3: Historical Themes--"Students will apply their understanding of historical periods, issues and trends to examine such historical themes as ideals, beliefs and institutions; conflict and conflict resolutions; human movement and interaction; and science and technology in order to understand how the world came to be the way it is."

Within this standard are a few sub-standards that give this context, and have the potential to bring history alive for students:

Sub (15) "Explain how a civilization/nation's arts, architecture, music and literature reflect its culture and history."

Sub (16) "Explain the significance of globalization on the world's nations and societies (e.g. cross border migrations, economic trade, cultural exchange)."

Sub (22) "Analyze the impact of technological and scientific change on world civilizations, (e.g. printing press, gun powder, vaccines, computers)."

Sub (26) "Evaluate the impact of major belief systems on societies and nations, ( e.g. religions, philosophies, political theories)."

Each of these sub-standards reflects a respect for the patterns of information transfer among and between people as the nexus of movement and change over time.

Bringing these alive with technology is an unparallelled opportunity to both inculcate the use of technology into the everyday lives of students as well as adding dimension and human experience to the past.

Some curriculum enhancing ideas using technology include (and are not limited to):

Video

1. Embedding video into lessons. PBS and and many education sites have a plethora of well done and educative videos that will enhance the learning experience
2. Many old films reflect biases that have been acknowledged and questioned over time; students can create their own videos revising and revisiting old mythology that has newer interpretations

Audio

1. Music has always been a marvelous connection to the sentiments of a time. Lyrics, instruments, musical beats and tempos, and the performers tell us about the social movements of the time. Having students look for musical themes that unite disparate time periods will both open their ears to music in a new way as well as connecting music both to history and to today.
2. Having students create social movement music for today.

Time and Space

Every development in information transfer alters perceptions of time and space. It is said that a trip to Mars would take six months with today's technology. In 1497, it took Vasco DeGama over months to reach Calcutta from Lisbon.

1. Using GIS and GPS technology students today can calculate routes all around the map using different transportation systems and thus "feel" what it was like to receive a letter, a newspaper and goods from different continents over the centuries versus the instant gratification of today. Moreover, within context, they can begin to understand what instant gratification felt like in 1600, versus 1700, 1800, 1850, etc.
2. Time has changed its meaning over history. Combing mathematics, statistical modeling, and data about the timeline for information transfer, students can begin to develop models for how social movements accelerate their diffusion over time and the implications this has for conflict resolution and political process.

Blogging is....Slogging?

Blogging is for old folks--too much time, too many words, too many bloggers. Personally, I find all the blogs out there, including my own, overwhelming and numbing. Alvin Toffler, here we come.

http://tinyurl.com/yfbzdgv

Thought for the day

English spelling was not codified until the mid 18th century. So "proper" spelling is only about 250 years old. Shakespeare pre-dates it. The words of Petrarch, Erasmus, Machiavelli, Queen Elizabeth, Henry VIII, and well, you get it, all were spelled phonetically by whomever transcribed them. And think of the brilliance they conveyed. All the inventions realized and new worlds discover
ed. Does spelling really matter all that much? It sure didn't stop Einstein. We all (mostly) know what we mean with the words we write, even if we spell them incorektlee. And we have spell-check, for better or for worse.

We all use our calculators now to do division. We don't think twice about it. Why not use computers to spell-check words that are nonsensically spelled anyway? While, wily? Not, knot? Knew, gnu? Whom, wham? It's all goofy. Night, knight, site, cite, sight. Might is right or might could be? It's all a bit of a bother.

So , I vote for modernizing education and technology and stop spending so much time on spelling and testing it and lets find out if anyone actually understands what we mean rather than how we spell. As Mark Twain said....

I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.