humanities – Ammon Shepherd

History Lab: rethinking the Western Civ course

So, I finally get to teach a college course this semester. Way excited! But I refuse to do the normal lecture format. Seriously, we are still stuck on that teaching method after all the research and scholarship about the best ways to teach? (These all came up as results for searching in Google Scholar with the terms “how students learn” and “scholarship of teaching and learning”, which returned over 3.7 million results.)

Screen Shot 2013-09-06 at 12.38.57 PM — over 600,000 results for “scholarship of teaching and learning” on Google Scholar

Screen Shot 2013-09-06 at 12.07.19 PM — Over 3 million hits for “how students learn” on Google Scholar. You’d think we would know how students learn by now…

I still believe the “learning pyramid” has merit despite it’s obvious over-generalizations and fabricated percentages. Lecturing has it’s place, but not in my class room. If anything, I want to be less boring. 🙂

Apparently false learning pyramid, created by me.

So, I got to thinking, what format do I want to use for my Monday-Wednesday-Friday, History 100 Western Civilization class? I landed on a discussion based lecture format for Monday and Wednesday, and what I’m calling a History Lab for Friday. The sciences have this same format. Lecture on two days a week, then go to a lab where you practice what was preached. I figured we could do the same thing with critical thinking skills taught by the humanities. Monday and Wednesday will be a bit of me talking about the time period, with a healthy dose of questions and comments from the students based on the reading they have done. Then on Friday we have a History Lab where we critically examine a primary document from the time period we are learning about. I’m open to other ideas on what to do during the History Lab. I’m excited to see if any students offer suggestions.

Today was our first History Lab, and it went very well, I think. I will get the students opinion on Monday, to make this exercise an all around learning experience. For today’s History Lab I divided the students into groups of five (any more than that gets a bit unmanageable). They each picked a popsicle stick I had in a cup at the front of the desk. There were five popsicle sticks with the same color, but a different “filter” written on each of the five sticks. The filters are the biases, or lenses through which to look at history. They included race, gender, science/technology, social class, art, religion, and politics/government. After the students organize into groups, I give them a primary source document to read together, then discuss the document based on the filter that they have. After enough time to allow individual groups to discuss, we discuss altogether as a class. To track participation, attendance and provide accountability, each group had to write a summary of their discussion on the back of the paper, including their names and which filter they had, to be turned in at the end of class.

This seemed to work out pretty well, and the students had great comments. We looked at “The Spartan Creed”, a poem written by Tyrtaeus in the 7th Century B.C. (unfortunately no reliable source found, just this post in a forum). The most noticeable thing about this document is how heavily male centric it is. Granted, it’s a man writing about war, but there is absolutely no mention of a female. It can be implied by the use of the word “children”, but no fighting for the protection of wife and family, just city and children. Here are some of the comments the students made on their papers for a few of the filters.

2013-09-06 10.23.17 — Directions are an absolute necessity for group work to function well.

Gender: Men are dominant, only men are warriors. No reference to women. The society was very male dominated. Women had no role in the Spartan military, so the code is less relevant to them. Females are not even mentioned in the creed, so men are obviously the dominant gender. Among the men, they are expected to be strong, courageous, honorable, every trait that makes them a mighty soldier, a protector of their city-state.

Art: War is their art, the structure of their army, how they fought, etc. It doesn’t specifically say anything about art, but the way this is written is a form of art and the way the author makes out a man to be is like a piece of art.

Religion: War was treated as a religion. Soldiers were treated as gods when they returned. In death, a Spartan man becomes immortal as his memory is honored as if he is a god. To understand this one must know that in his life he was worshiped for being a good fighter and so that is carried over in a glorious death. Religion and personal values seem to all be related to war; gods are mentioned but the creed is centered around the personal honor of a warrior.

I was pleased with the results. All of the students were engaged in the group work and came up with something intelligent to write about. The beauty of this model is that each student has a focused purpose to look at a historical document, and then is held accountable for sharing something.

Do you have ideas for what we can do in our History Lab? Leave a comment below, and I’ll give it a try!

[Post image from Wikimedia Commons: Glass containers, experimental magnifiers and chemical or alchemy paraphernalia in the Lavoisier Lab 1775 by Jorge Royan. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Munich_-_Deutsches_Museum_-_07-9631.jpg]

3D printing in the field of history

I was asked to lead a discussion on the current status of 3D printing in the humanities, particularly the field of history with a great group of fellow PhD students here at GMU during one of their classes.

Here is what we came up with.

First of all, 3D printing (in general, but specifically for history) can be summarized by the following formula.

3D printing for history now = HTML for history in the early 1990's

2013-08-27 14.01.13 — A replica of the Antikythera Machine, a 1 BCE clockwork device discovered on a shipwreck near Greece in the early 1900’s.

There is much that can be done, but using a 3D printer for historical research, study, learning, etc, is still very much in a nascent stage. So the question are, what can be done with 3D printing and how does it help us learn about history? We came up with a few ideas.

First, what can we print with a 3D printer? The limits are just about endless, as long as then are condensed to a 5-inch x 11-inch x 12-inch box.

The bigger question is what do 3D printed objects help us learn about history? Here we had some good ideas. Printing buildings to scale, along with figurines, can help us determine the scale of real life objects. Determining scale can help us analyze why some things are larger than others, for instance monuments. Why would the Lincoln monument be larger than the Jefferson, and what does that say about our views (or the creators views) about the subject? Life size objects can show true size that are often distorted or masked when never seen in person, like the Mona Lisa, for example, which is remarkably small.

Preserving rare, fragile, or expensive artifacts has obvious benefits in that it keeps things from getting lost, broken or stolen. 3D historical prints also put physical objects in the hands of students, especially those who might never have the opportunity to handle a real civil war cannonball, a Roman sword, a model of the Antikythera Mechanism, or a scale model of the Titanic. A physical object also offers the additional learning opportunity of tactile feedback over images in a book or on screen.

3D printing also offers the opportunity to create inventions that may never have made it into production, such as those from old patents. We even got to look at one, a chop-stick holder from 1967.

Using a 3D printer and associated hardware and software in a history classroom provides yet another opportunity to combine multiple disciplines in an educational atmosphere. Everybody benefits when science, engineering, math, technology and the humanities combine (as was noted about a high school class that built a trebuchet).

We also talked about the ramifications of 3D printing on the future. Interestingly, similar issues that have voiced throughout history to the introduction of new technology, were also raised during the discussion. What happens when we move production of items back to the individual and away from factories? How do we cope with the replacement of humans by technology?

At present, the cost to own a printer in your home is still a bit much, but definitely within reach. Three different printers range from $800 (the do-it-yourself RepRap) to $2500 (Makerbot Replicator 2), with a middle priced option by Cubify at $1500. Filament, the plastic line used to create objects, costs around $50 a spool.

Items printed:

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:22849 – chopstick holder

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:32413 – Antikythera machine

Have an idea how 3D printers can be used in education? Add a comment below.

THATCamp 2012

Believe it or not, this was my first ever THATCamp experience. Seems hard to imagine since I have worked at CHNM since before the inception of THATCamp. Ah, well, the stars finally aligned, and was able to attend this year. And it was great.

I attended three workshops on Friday, and a couple of sessions on Saturday. Here are some thoughts…

Digital Data Mining with Weka: This was a neat crash course on what data mining is and is not, and one free tool to help do some of that. It was more of a “here’s what’s out there, how does it apply to the humanities” than a hands on, hands dirty, do some real work type of work shop. But it was good in that it opened up the possibility to do some data mining in the future. Since they were relatively small, here my notes:

What is data mining?

examples:

recommend ads, products to users based on purchases
finding patterns in large amounts of text (writing algorithms to find those patterns)

Goal of data mining is to predict what users/people will do based on data from other users/people

Data mining Tasks: classification, clustering, association rule discovery, sequential pattern discovery, regression, deviation detection

Goal is to predict the classification (or whatever) of future data, based on the current data that you analyze.

Cross validation (when done correctly you get true results, when not done correctly you get false results)

have multiple sets of data, one for training and the other for testing. Build the algorithm on the training data, then run it on the test. Then cycle through each testing data set and have it act as a training set. Do this way because you know the results for each, so you can tell if your algorithm is correct. When it’s good then you can use it on future data where you don’t know the result.

Interesting Things You Can Do With Git: This one was highly anticipated. I have been wanting/needing to learn git for a while now. For being in the IT field, having written some code, and even having a GitHub account with code on it, I’m ashamed to say I still don’t know how to use git effectively. There is not much you can do in 1.5 hours, and this was more a theoretical “here are some ideas”, than a “here is how to do it” approach.

The session on using blogs as assignments was maybe a bit premature for me. The session was really good, great ideas, tips, etc. But me teaching is still too far away for me to have put the mental effort in to following along much. I spent most of the time trying to find a good twitter client, but in the end just stuck with Adium.

Then I took some time to enjoy the hacker space. I decided it was time, and this was the perfect place to set up a transcription tool for my dissertation archive. So sitting at the very table where it is coded, I installed the Scripto plugin for Omeka. That’s a bit of a misnomer, since it is really a wrapper that lets Omeka and a Wikimedia install play nicely together. I went ahead and transcribed one of the documents in the archive as well. The archive is just in the testing phase, but here it is anyways: http://nazitunnels.org/archive

Screen Shot 2012-06-18 at 4.50.06 PM — Nazi Tunnels Archive

The final event of THATCamp for me was one last session proposed by a fellow “camper”. She wanted help learning about the shell/terminal/command line. So I volunteered to help out with that. It ended up that there were about eight people that wanted help learning the command line, and four of us that knew what we were doing. So it ended up being a great ratio of help needed to those who could offer it. We started with the very basics, didn’t get much past a few commands (ls, cd, rm, nano, grep, cat), but we went slow enough that everybody who was trying to follow along was able to, and they all left with a clearer understanding of what the shell is for, and why it is useful. The proposer found a great tutorial/book for learning the command line that I’ll have to go through as well. You can always learn something new.

What was also great about that session, since it was basically ran by those who needed the help, I saw how those who struggle with these concepts learn them, so I will hopefully be better able to teach them to others in the future.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention the many cool sites and projects mentioned during Saturday morning’s Dork Shorts. Here’s a list of the ones I took notice of.

http://afripod.aodl.org/
https://github.com/AramZS/twitter-search-shortcode
http://cowriting.trincoll.edu/
http://www.digitalculture.org/2012/06/15/dcw-volume-1-issue-4-lib-report-mlaoa-and-e-lit-pedagogy/
http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/BINDINGS~1~1
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/gradhacker
http://hacking.fugitivetexts.net/
http://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/
http://www.neh.gov/
http://penn.museum/
http://www.playthepast.org/
http://anglicanhistory.org/
http://podcast.gradhacker.org/
http://dhcommons.org/
http://ulyssesseen.com/
http://m.thehenryford.org/

Writing is like carving in stone

Cross posted at NaziTunnels.org.

Like a block of stone

I recently finished writing and rewriting and writing again the essays for several scholarship applications. It is probably a good thing, but that was the most time and effort I have ever spent writing three pages of text. I went through several revisions of each essay, had the wonderful Fulbright advisers at George Mason read and reread the essays, and even went to the vastly underused (by me anyways) campus writing center.

Roughing it out

My personal essay started out as being a little too personal, as in informal. At the writing center, I also realized that the opening paragraph was too negative. I wanted to show how as a child I deeply disliked school. In first and second grades, in order to avoid going to school I would often hide in the backyard or somewhere in the house, and generally make a big stink every morning. One time my mom drove me to school (two blocks away) and when we got there I jumped out of the car and ran off into the neighborhood for an hour or so. The rest of elementary school through high school was better; I did not put up as much of a stink, but I still did not like school. I was convinced that I would never have anything to do with school again once I graduated from high school. That’s how my essay started out, a general idea of what I wanted to write about. Like a big block of stone that I hacked away at.

Adding Detail

I wanted to convey all of that in a couple of sentences, all to point to the irony that I am now pursuing the highest degree one can attain in school, and that I am still in school 16 years later, with another three years to go (I did have three years off in there, though). But the gal at the writing center was right. It was a bit too negative. Instead I focused on my strengths as an historian and my technical skills. This worked out much better, since this is one of the major focuses of the dissertation. Through this constant revision and insight from others my project started to take shape.

Finishing

One of the other really neat things about spending so much effort on an essay (especially one about my dissertation research) is that I was really able to focus my arguments and tighten up my thoughts on what I hope to accomplish. Through this process of constant revision I realized three things that I wanted to focus on in my dissertation: the story of the underground dispersal projects; how the projects are memorialized or not, and what that says about Vergangenheitsbewältigung; and an argument for the change in what is considered scholarship in the historical profession. Going through the constant revisions has changed my focus in some small ways from my original proposal in the dissertation prospectus, but that is to be expected. I feel that I now have a much more polished and obtainable goal.

All images courtesy of Akbar Simonse, who photographed Mark Rietmeijer sculpture. http://www.flickr.com/photos/simeon_barkas/sets/72157600224554402/

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:

THAT podcast

Check out THAT podcast (THAT = The Humanities And Technology). It’s a new video pod cast put on by a couple of co-workers at CHNM. They interview someone in the technical field about software that helps those of us in the humanities.

The first episode includes an interview with Matt Mullenweg, creator of WordPress (the software running this site!) and shows you how to install and configure ScholarPress (a plug-in to WordPress written by Jeremy Boggs).

It’s great stuff, check it out!