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Just when I think I’ve got things in order and I’m happy with the trajectory of a unit, I end up dreaming up some new assignment that occupies my evening. Sigh.

Tonight’s antagonist (though not an unwelcome one) is an assignment I developed for my government classes that get them to compare different media portrayal of the same event from White House news sources and from two other newspapers of their choosing. We read about how the White House use of the media evolved over the 20th century, and I thought this would be a nice assignment to get students to examine the nature and extent (or presence at all, perhaps) of media bias, and juxtapose that with official White House portrayals of those events. Moreover, I hope it yields some insights into how the modern presidency uses media — both traditional and social — in a way that is quite distinct from some of its historical predecessors.

For your collective edification, I’ve shared the assignment below:

The Presidency and the Media – A Comparative Analysis

Purpose:

Building off the reading about the media from our text, the goal of this assignment is to explore and analyze the different portrayals of particular topics, events, issues, and the like, from the perspective of the White House press secretary and other official media, and two other newspapers.

As a result of the comparison, you should be able to analyze and dissect the different portrayals of the same issue from the varied sources and then offer an assessment of the significance of those differences in terms of impact on the public and reliability of reporting.

Process:

1. Select a topic that official White House media and other newspapers address. Once you’ve found a topic, post it to either the A Period TodaysMeet discussion group or the B Period TodaysMeet discussion group. Your topic should be clear and specific, and if it isn’t, then I’ll give you that feedback so you can properly refine it before doing further research and analysis of the presentation of that issue.
   1. The TodaysMeet discussion rooms are a venue to ask questions, share resources, get insights from classmates, etc. Please use proper decorum and a scholarly tone in this forum.
2. Once your topic has been approved, you can then explore that topic on official White House news sources and on TWO other news sources.
   1. White House Briefing Room
   2. Google News — a launching point to find other newspapers; not an end in itself.
3. Try to find at least two different articles on each subject from the different papers. The goal of this requirement is to get a wider sample that will be more representative of the way each news outlet presents its view of the particular issue, event, topic, etc.
4. Closely read the article to identify the different perspectives on the topic and consider what interpretation you have about the significance of the difference (or lack thereof) amongst the various sources on the same topic. Work to develop ~3 key points of significance that you can illustrate and support with specific pieces of evidence from the different sources.
5. Using a Screencast website (Screenr, Screencast-o-Matic, or another), record a narrative of your explanation/argument about these different sources and the significance of their presentations of this topic.
   1. Make sure that you are clear about your sources and their authorship. Remember, this is as vital (if not a more vital) element of a source than the source’s content.
   2. You should use the screencast features to visually highlight particular pieces of evidence, sequence of evidence, etc. and share that with the viewers.
6. The screencasts can be a maximum of FIVE minutes. Once you’re done with your screencast, which conveys your argument verbally and illustrates it visually, then embed it into your class group on Edmodo (see these instructions for Screenr).

Learning Standards for Evaluation:

• Student used research and prep time in class effectively and in a focused way.
• Student developed a clear topic of investigation and got approval for it on the TodaysMeet discussion forum.
• Student found appropriate and adequate newspaper articles and White House releases from reputable newspapers and from the official White House news outlet.
• Student developed a clear argument and conveyed it persuasively via the narration on the screencast. The student presented this argument in five minutes or less on the screencast.
• Student recorded a clear screencast the mentioned the specific details of the sources with the audience via the screencast. Student used the screencast’s visual elements to highlight particular pieces of evidence that supported his or her argument.
• The student properly embedded his or her screencast to the appropriate class page on Edmodo.

Please share any thoughts or feedback you might have about the design, goals, implementation, missing resources, etc. I haven’t rolled this assignment out yet, so there’s still time to crowdsource this thing up to MacArthur Genius Grant level!

Today’s focus has to do with some great visualizations of U.S. political parties and their evolution over time. I encountered these timelines this past fall from Michael Berkowitz’s Trinity School American History webpage, and now that I’m about to teach about the history and function of political parties with my AP Government class, I thought they’d be great for that as well.

The timelines come from the University of North Carolina‘s LearnNC website, which seems like a valuable resource I need to explore more thoroughly. In any event, someone really clever there designed these nice timelines that illustrate the emergence, transformation, and evolution of political parties in the United States. I particularly like the way that it demonstrates how third and minor parties become subsumed into the major parties before and after critical elections. For example, the story of the Republican Party’s emergence can often be a pretty muddled one in standard textbook accounts, but I think these timelines do a great job of making that process clear.

Here they are — hope you find them helpful for U.S. History or a government class (or just for pure aesthetic and design enjoyment!).

Parties in the New Nation, courtesy of LearnNC.org

Parties in the Antebellum Era, Courtesy of LearnNC.org

Parties in the Gilded Age, Courtesy of LearnNC.org

Parties in the Early 20th Century, Courtesy of LearnNC.org

As a way to lead into this discussion, and as a way to reinforce some of the historiographical discussion we’ve had in the past few days, I’m planning on talking about the historiography of Reconstruction before delving into the details of the era in question. Perhaps it’s a result of having taken two classes with Eric Foner in college, but I’m particularly struck by the obviousness with which the moment that historians studied and wrote about Reconstruction so clearly shaped their attitudes toward this twelve-year period. For instance, here’s a particularly telling clip from D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation:

Also, I’ve still got my (impressively) thorough (if I may say so!) notes from those classes, which provides a nice basis on which to build and lead this discussion.

In preparing for this, and as a way to help make the students’ notetaking more structured, I creating two timelines related to Reconstruction — one designed to trace the historiography and one to trace the history of the era itself.

I ended up spending way more time than I should have fine tuning the location of lines and text boxes in Microsoft Word, and I’m sure there’s a more efficient way to create what I’ve generated here, but in any event, this is what I was able to figure out, so this is what I’ve made. In short, my poor use of time is, perhaps, your gain!

NB: (If anyone has suggestions for nice tools that create clean-looking blank timelines in a relatively short amount of time, please let me know).

Nevertheless, as a way to prompt myself into wrapping up one of this week’s grad school assignments, I thought I’d post a recent assignment I worked through with my U.S. History class.

We’ve been looking at the early nineteenth century and examining some of the traditional narratives about presidents, political parties, and other developments of this era from a variety of historians’ perspectives. Keeping in this trend, we read an article by Seth Rockman about the significance of slavery in the Market Revolution. As the article (link included below) highlighted some of the important transatlantic connections that characterized the Market Revolution and situated the U.S. in a broader context (the leitmotif of my graduate studies at UT-Arlington), I thought I’d challenge my students to explore how Rockman makes these connections in his article by visually representing the phenomena he discusses on a blank map of the Atlantic basin.

Map of the North Atlantic - courtesy of d-maps.com

Not only did this assignment fall into one of my favorite pedagogical strategies of information reorganization, but it also provided an impetus to push the students to read the text more closely before we had our discussion on the reading. Now, before I end up rewriting the assignment in prose, I’ll go ahead and post it below:

Constructing Meaning in the Market Revolution, 1793-1860

Purpose and Learning Objectives:
The goal of this assignment is to get you to practice the skills of identifying arguments, assessing the type of evidence and method a historian uses, and to take that information and reorganize it in a meaningful manner. In particular, this assignment will get you thinking about interconnections and linkages and how those played out in the space of the North Atlantic during the first half of the nineteenth century.

Process:

1. Actively read the Seth Rockman article, “Liberty is Land and Slaves: The Great Contradiction.”
2. As you read, focus on the author’s a) argument; b) type and use of evidence; and, c) the way in which the author discusses the interconnections and linkages between the different parts of the Atlantic World that developed during the Market Revolution (esp. the years 1793-1860).
3. Using the included outline map of the North Atlantic world, work to creatively reorganize the information presented in the article onto the map. Use the list of categories below to get yourself thinking about what type of information to include.

Elements/Categories to illustrate visually:

• Movement of people (slaves, Indians, migrants — internal and external)
• Movement of goods (manufactured, raw materials, food crops)
• Transportation networks
• Important natural features (e.g. rivers, canals, mountains, etc.)
• Demographic information and links to social hierarchy
• Important dates marking key developments

CONSIDER: How will you visually distinguish these elements?

There you have it! Fairly short, sweet, and straight-forward. What other strategies or approaches have people used to challenge their students to engage with a text in a more in-depth or different way? What suggestions or ideas do people have about ways to refine or improve an assignment like this?

So the last few weeks has been pretty crazy, and while I’ve got a number of good things to write about and some assignments that I’ve developed to share, my time is pretty well occupied with learning the minutiae of diaper changes and the significance of different timbres of cries. While learning to be a new parent is exhausting, it’s also great!

Yamacraw Creek Native Americans meet with the Trustee of the colony of Georgia in England, July 1734 - Image via Wikipedia

This past week I had my US History students looking at the variety of developments, economic systems, political arrangements, and connections with Native Americans that took place in the North American English colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries. To prepare for this, the students read background tertiary source overviews about New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and the Carolinas and Georgia from the University of Houston‘s online textbook, Digital History.

Then, with their readings and annotations in hand, I wanted the students to gain a broad understanding of these different colonies, think about the similarities and differences amongst them, and draw some conclusions about the dominant features of colonial life in these varied geographic and cultural contexts.

While I’d ordinarily have students meet in small groups, condense their findings about these colonies in terms of a few different categories (in this case, social and religious context, relations with Native Americans, economic systems, and political structures), present these elements to one another, and draw synthetic conclusions about these pieces of evidence, I realized my grand ambitions outstripped my 45-minute class period.

So, rather than work to get only part way there, I decided to instead seek out a venue where this collection and synthesis of information could take place simultaneously, which would then allow a bit of time at the end for follow-up, and would also provide the students with a comprehensive condensation of this evidence that they could then use for studying later on. Only one venue really seemed obvious to me: Google Docs!

I booked class time in one of the library’s computer labs, set up a Google Doc (as opposed to a spreadsheet or presentation), populated it with a few different tables — one for the comparison of the colonies, one for significant similarities and differences, and one for synthesis of major trends — and then created a shared link for the document and posted it to Edmodo.

When the students came in, I explained what we’d be doing, what the goals were, and then divided them into four different groups, each of which would work to create a comprehensive profile for one of the different colonies based on the categories I’d provided. Using the link from Edmodo was seamless and my first class got right to work.

The one downside I experienced was that each contributor to the document was labeled “Anonymous User ###” rather than their Google username, which many of them had used to log into Google. Nevertheless, it seemed that accessing the document via the publicly shared link meant that they couldn’t attach their contributions to their Google account. As a result of everyone being an “Anonymous User,” it seemed that we were unable to use the “Restore Previous Version” feature as extensively as one could when one is actually logged into the document and it registers a username. This lack of connection with specific usernames meant that when we experienced a slight hiccup and had an accidental deletion of someone’s entry, we couldn’t quickly restore it as that deletion wasn’t attached to a specific user’s account. While I’m not positive that that’s what was going on, that’s my supposition. If anyone knows the actual explanation, I’d love to have some insight.

Nevertheless, the process went pretty smoothly overall, and I managed to take a screencast of the contributions in action. Here it is:

Since I last experimented with a whole class working on Google Docs, it seems like the stability of the website has improved dramatically. Twelve students were able to simultaneously contribute, revise, and read one another’s work without any document crashes or any other catastrophic failures. While I need to remember to warn classes about the dangers of deleting one another’s work (and in general goofing around by highlighting random sections and clicking cursors around wildly, which can lead to accidental deletions of student work), I was pretty pleased with the amount of compilation and writing that the students accomplished in a short class period.

Certainly, I need to continue reiterating that digital academic spaces are just like physical academic spaces, in that all the same rules of decorum, discourse, and respect for one another’s work applies. However, I like finding ways to get students to process material and generate useful products for themselves and for each other in synchronous digital venues that they couldn’t do in the asynchronous classroom environment. While this approach isn’t a silver bullet for all types of material coverage, I think it worked well here and is something I’ll likely visit again (and encourage the students to construct independently amongst themselves) throughout the course of the year.

What experiences do others have in using Google Docs, or other collaborative digital tools, like this or in other ways?

Labor Day Parade, Union Square, New York City, 1882 - Image via Wikipedia

It’s Labor Day, so I shouldn’t really be writing too much here (given that I’m a unionized historian/teacher blogger), but I did just come across this interesting story about learning styles and the scientific veracity (or lack thereof) to support that concept. Have a listen:

It’s nice to know that many of my observations and approaches, which I’ve really developed simply based on experience and anecdotal observations, seem to be supported here by the scientific research. For instance, I’m a big fan of changing things up (ergo, my borderline irrational vitriol targeted toward PowerPoint Presentations with words), and I’m a major advocate of getting people to learn the same concept in more than one way, which I see being something that students can successfully accomplish be reorganizing information in meaningful ways.

In any event, enjoy the rest of the long weekend, and I hope that reading this and listening to the story isn’t so taxing as to violate the spirit of the holiday.

Image via Wikipedia

I’m giving my first test in my American Government class next Thursday, and am currently encouraging my students to begin thinking about organizing their materials and preparing for that assessment.

However, as this group of students is sophomores, I’m striving to encourage them to develop more accountability in terms of determining which concepts and terms are the most significant ones from our unit of study. Certainly, I’ve encouraged them to do this as we’ve progressed through the readings; however, I think many students are familiar and comfortable with the “Review Sheet” format where they are given everything they have to know for the test, which I fear might encourage them to put off developing those skills of saliency determination in the course of a unit.

So, as an experiment, I’m trying to split the difference of giving the students access to a review sheet, but simultaneously asking them to be the ones who generate the content of what is on that review sheet. For this task, I’ve employed a publicly accessible Google Doc, which I think will be new for many of the students. I’m not requiring any sign in information (though I may do that in the future) and am not making contributing to or even using the review sheet a mandate. However, I do think that this collaborative writing venue makes good sense for the task of building a review sheet, and I like the fact that Google Docs allows recovery of any prior draft of the document in case something tragic happens.

In order to help the students get a sense of the ethics of using one of these online collaborative writing venues for compiling a review, I added a rather lengthy disclaimer about how the use the document, which I’ll share here.

READ THIS FIRST

Instructions for and Ethics about the Use of this Document: For this collectively developed review, I encourage you to add key terms, concepts, ideas, etc. that we’ve discussed throughout this unit and define them if you so choose.

I’ll provide the general categories we covered below, and then leave it up to you to work to identify which specific terms belong in each heading. Also, if you choose to define these terms, please explain both what the term is and, more importantly, why it is significant.

I intend this document to be helpful to each of you, but if you choose to add a term, please put your name in parentheses after the term and/or definition that you add. Also note that because this a productive, public, academic space, I expect that the guidelines and decorum that holds in my classroom will also hold here. This expectation means that you are to use this space for academic purposes and no others.

Finally, each of you who uses this document needs to be a critical consumer of the information that’s posted here. I hope this venue will be helpful for your review, but I can’t vouch for the accuracy or preciseness of the interpretations and analyses of significance that you or your peers post here. Therefore, if you’re uncertain about a term or concept, please consult the readings and discuss these terms face-to-face with your classmates or with me during our review day.

Have others done something similar in terms of having students build a collective review sheet? What tools or resources did you use? What emphases did you give to your students? Did the unmonitored access to the document yield any problems that I haven’t anticipated here?

(To get a sense of those discussions and some of my quibbles with the positivist assumptions, click here to read that post).

However, I was reminded of my conversations from this past week (and those from last year), when I came across this cartoon from the ever-witty Married to the Sea webcomic:

"Run out of Fuel," Married to the Sea - http://www.marriedtothesea.com

So, what do people think? Is the horse-riding gentleman a well-versed historian whose study of earlier civilizations’ fuel sources and consumption patterns allowed him to warn these intrepid (albeit short-sighted) Iron Horse charioteers of their descendants’ impending doom? Or might this just be good satire?

In any event, the fact that this cartoon even gets made indicates the extent to which George Santayana and his pithy “axioms” have permeated popular culture. To quote the modern parlance of hashtag afficionados: “#smh”.

An official organ of the History Channel decides to follow my musings!

I guess in spite of this blog’s titular protestations I was unable to persuade the History Channel folks that my views were antithetical to their own in every way. (Actually, I know so little about the History Channel, aside from the general foci of their programming, that I’m unable to say with much certainty whether or not they’d agree with most of what I say here.)

In any event, welcome @HISTORYmag! I hope we can look past titles to find some common ground.