If you are a history teacher (or really just a teacher) with a desire to help make the world a better place and have some time on your hands this summer (or next), I highly recommend a stint as a volunteer with Teachers Across Borders. This very worthy NGO is currently seeking volunteer teachers to help with their project in Cambodia. I went to Cambodia as a volunteer myself two years ago and had a marvelous experience, both with Teachers Across Borders as the facilitator of my work and with the Cambodian teachers I was working with. Anyone with several years of teaching experience can make a difference in a school system that was essentially destroyed in the 1970s by the Khmer Rouge and has struggled to recover ever since. To find out more, visit the Teachers Across Borders website linked here.
Help Change the World
June 1st, 2009So It’s Come to This?
May 28th, 2009Who knew that history educators could be put in the unenviable position to fighting to keep a standardized multiple choice test that is inflicted on third graders here in Virginia? For as long as the test’m till they drop mentality has been governing history instruction at the K-12 level, history teachers have been complaining about having to “teach to the test.” The primary complaint, of course, has been that the tests privilege a particular type of history, namely the version that is all about memorizing names and dates.
Three years ago I had some very critical things to say about the Florida legislature’s desire to impose the Sgt. Joe Friday approach to history on the schools in Florida (one of my favorite posts of all time in case you’re keeping track).
Now, though, it seems the worm has turned…Today’s Washington Post reports that some history teachers and/or social studies administrators in Virginia are opposed to the state’s proposal to drop the third grade history test administered state-wide (a “standard of learning” test or, ironically, an SOL). A couple of those quoted in the article worry that if there is no history test for third graders then history will be devalued as a subject in the schools.
As the parent to two school-age children (one of whom took his fourth grade SOL in history this morning), I want to make it very clear that I’m with whoever it is who wants to drop the third grade test. I spend a lot of time working with history teachers at all grade levels in the public schools and my impression is that the vast, vast majority are very committed to the idea that history has a central place in the school curriculum at all grade levels, so I’m not worried that teachers are going to suddenly drop history like a stone just because there isn’t a state wide test.
And I’m equally sure that no school district anywhere in the United States could get away with cutting much more history from the curriculum than has already been cut in the past 20 or 30 years. To do so strikes me as a political third rail.
So I say let the Florida legislators try to transform their state into Belarus. Here in Virginia I say we can live without a history test or two.
Why Wolfram Alpha Won’t Work for Historians
May 26th, 2009In our most recent episode of Digital Campus one of the news items I had a particularly caustic view of was the new search engine Wolfram Alpha. My broader pronouncement in the podcast that WA will “sink like a stone” is predicated on the incredibly clunkiness of the interface and the fact that when the engine doesn’t understand your question or simply has no data to work with, it offers no help…just the statement “Wolfram Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input.” This alone will send users running back to Google or Yahoo.
But I am sympathetic to the attempt to bring more computational strategies to bear on the search and retrieval of information online. As databases of historical information get larger and larger we are going to need tools like WA (I can’t keep writing Wolfram Alpha) to help us crunch through those databases. So, for instance, I recently wrote something for our 1989 website on the economic causes of the collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and needed some good old fashioned economic data to work with.
Here’s one reason WA won’t work for historians: Taking the data presented in the source I just linked to, one finds that a 1992 edition of World Bank Facts gives Hungary’s GDP per capita in 1989 as $2,580 (USD). To see what WA comes up with for the same question, I used the query “Hungary gdp per capita in 1989“. When you try this search, the result is a problem. WA offers a different result ($3,097) and a nice graph of Hungary’s GDP per capita between 1970 and the present.
How then can a historian (or student) reconcile the difference between the World Bank’s number and WA’s number? The obvious solution, and the one we teach all of our students, is to check WA’s sources. Here’s what I found–a list of around 30 sources (you’ll have to go to the site and click on Source Information to see them all) with the following disclaimer: “This list is intended as a guide to further sources. The inclusion of an item in this list does not necessarily mean that its content was necessarily used for any Wolfram Alpha result.”
Would you accept a paper from a student with no footnotes but a disclaimer like this one at the top of the bibliography page? No, I didn’t think so. Unfortunately, if my students actually knew that WA existed and I asked them to tell me Hungary’s GDP per capita in 1989, I’m willing to bet the answer I’d get is $3,097 not $2,580. And don’t ven think of asking WA for the GDP per capita or East Germany in 1989. Apparently East Germany never existed and even worse, the GDP per capita result for Germany offers no reference/mention of the fact that East and West Germany merged after 1989.
So, I now have to add WA to my list of websites and web tools to teach my students about in the “these resources have serious problems for historians” category.
Reality Check
May 26th, 2009The latest installment of Digital Campus is now up online for your listening pleasure. In this episode (#42 if you’re counting), Tom, Dan, and I consider what happens when reputable publishers of scholarly journals publish journals that are, well, not so reputable. We also take a look at the latest attempt to take some of Google’s market share in the world of search. My assessement of Wolfram Alpha? Let’s just say I didn’t mince any words on the podcast. So, give us a listen and don’t forget to stalk us (sorry, follow us) on Twitter.