Poster Session at the History of Ed

At the beginning of the year I was asked to participate in a poster session for the History of Education Society’s Annual Meeting. I have done a few things with maps, so I was asked to share resources and ideas for using maps with teaching history.

Not too many people came by, so I only spoke with two people. I had this list of resources for working with and teaching with maps:

History and Maps

Selected Websites

http://chnm.gmu.edu/worldhistorysources/unpacking/mapsmain.html (CHNM’s site on using maps in the classroom)
http://echo.gmu.edu/search/node/map (A list of map resources on the web, collected by GMU’s Echo project)
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gmdhtml/ (Library of Congress Map Collections)
http://www.besthistorysites.net/Maps.shtml (A long list of map related websites for teaching history)
http://explorethemed.com/Default.asp (Historical Atlas of the Mediterranean)
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/ (Tons of maps sponsored by University of Texas at Austin)
http://www.flu.gov/whereyoulive/healthmap/ (US Gov. Flu Map)
http://www.unc.edu/awmc/index.html (Ancient World Mapping Center)
http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/ (Hundreds of posts about strange maps. Very good discussion starters.)

Selected Bibliography

Brown, Lloyd Arnold. The Story of Maps. New York: Dover Publications, 1979.
Bruckner, Martin. The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity. Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture by University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
Field Museum of Natural History, and Newberry Library. Maps: Finding Our Place in the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Knowles, Anne Kelly, and Amy Hillier. Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship. Pap/Cdr. ESRI Press, 2008.
Pickles, John. A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping, and the Geo-Coded World. London: Routledge, 2004.
Turnbull, David, and Deakin University. Maps Are Territories: Science Is an Atlas: A Portfolio of Exhibits. University of Chicago Press ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Virga, Vincent, and Library of Congress. Cartographia: Mapping Civilizations. Little, Brown and Company, 2007.

And this Keynote playing on my laptop:

Weekly Tips, Tricks, Gadgets and Goodies #5

Well, so much for doing this weekly. But here’s another go at it!

Prezi.comFor making some pretty snazy presentations, or graphical representations of data, you can use http://prezi.com/ From their site: “With the help of Prezi you can create maps of texts, images, videos, PDFs, drawings and present in a nonlinear way. Move beyond the slide, it only takes 5 minutes to learn how to use Prezi.” I imagine this being very useful for historians as a way to visualize their narrative. Move from quote to image to video to audio. You could take a book and condense it down into a 10 minute presentation, using appropriate quotes, some images, and movies if you got em. A good way to introduce a topic, I would think. Perhaps I’ll throw together something and post it back later.

quietubeQuietube – send links to youtube, but without all of the comments, ads, and other videos to clutter and distract. When you visit a youtube video, just click the quietube link you previously added to your bookmarks folder. All of the distractions vanish!

bkkeeprAn interesting way to let others know where you are in a book, and which books you are reading. You can use it for yourself too, if you don’t have one of those old fashioned paper book marks.From their site: “ lets you track your reading and bookmark on the go, via the web and SMS. Want to remember what you read? Want to share your dog-eared pages, and see what everyone else dog-eared? Love LibraryThing, but are always forgetting to add your books? helps you do it, wherever you are.” So, basically, a way to let a website keep track of what books you’re reading and where you are in the books, made simple by sending a quick SMS.

Finished 1989 Flash Map

I had to dig this out of the depths of my computer today, and a quick search showed that I never posted the final version. So here it is in all it’s glory. 1989 Events

[kml_flashembed fversion=”8.0.0″ movie=”http://chnm.gmu.edu/staff/ammon/1989/1989events.swf” targetclass=”flashmovie” publishmethod=”static” width=”540″ height=”360″]Get Adobe Flash player

[/kml_flashembed]

Weekly Tips, Tricks, Gadgets and Goodies #2

So, here it is. The second week of TTGG. I found a bunch of things this week. Enjoy!

Goodies #1: There’s a lot of hype lately about Twitter. Don’t understand it? Here’s a video that explains it in plain English. [Google Video] It still seems a little tooooo much for me. I don’t want to know what someone is doing every minute of the day, and I don’t want to have to update my info all of the time too. I’m an old fashioned tech-noob.

WiredScience
Goodies #2: We’ve got no T.V. at home. It’s a conscious and wise decision. It means more time to spend with each other, reading books etc. But we get the hankerin’ for some media entertainment every once in a while. I looked on pbs.org last night and found a cool show with good quality video feeds: Wired Science. The best were the “What’s Inside” segments featuring Chris Hardwick. He’s a pretty funny guy.

Scribd
Gadgets #1: http://www.scribd.com/ This is a cool project for getting your documents in a viewable format without having to worry about programs. It will take a pdf, word document, power point, and anything from OpenOffice or the OpenDocument format, and display it in your web browser (using Flash and JavaScript). I’m thinking this will be ideal for letting people view research papers and such on a digital historians site. It would be cool to see this in JStor as well. Their current interface is a little clunky (one page at a time, slow loads, no text copy, etc). It would probably be even easier for them to get content on their site. Come to think of it, this would be great for any online journal.

iPaper
They call it iPaper (everybody’s on this “i” bandwagon), and have a platform version available for you to embed the service on your own website. Look for it here one of these days.

newDock2
Tip #1: Change your Leopard Dock even more using the LeopardDocks App from LeopardDocks.com I like the jet black look.

Trick #1: (not really sure what the difference between a tip and a trick is, but it allowed alliteration and acronyms to work) Take a quick snapshot of your screen in Mac OS X. Hit the Command-Shift-4 keys at the same time, and your mouse becomes a cross hair. Click some where, drag the box, and bing-o! a picture on your desktop appears. Quick and easy!

TipTrick #2: Get different languages in your Mac OSX dictionary. It makes looking up words in other languages easy. And, for the second part of this tiptrick, some people use QuickSilver for fast application launching and fancy program work. I haven’t had the time to figure it out, but stumbled upon an easy built in tool that works similar: SpotLight. Hit Command-SpaceBar and start typing. Type “Firef” and Firefox is your first result, hit enter and it opens the application right up! You can change the preferences as to what shows up first, and what shows at all. Type in a word, and SpotLight will give you a definition. Nice! Now the fingers seldom leave the keyboard!