More Mixed Media
Lessons Learned the Hard Way – this could be a lot of fun with literary and historical figures.
Real Life Fodder for Copyright Conversations
Participate in primary source research in real life. Geography, history, science.
Help scientists recover worldwide weather observations made by Royal Navy ships around the time of World War I. These transcriptions will contribute to climate model projections and improve a database of weather extremes. Historians will use your work to track past ship movements and the stories of the people on board.
Related posts
Step Up Your Vocab: The Musical
cc licensed flickr photo shared by bionicteaching This is pretty simple and likely to be pretty fun. It probably fits best in an English classroomAlthough breaking down the pieces of the “reading level” algorithm as an exercise in logical thinking would be interesting in science or maybe math. I’m not sure how I’d start this . . . I think I’d go this route. I’d show the kids a bunch of article headlines and quotes complaining about the deterioration of today’s society and how today’s music sucks. This is really just to get them riled up and interested in proving they’re not the brain dead people being described. The kids pick their favorite favorite song and go find the lyrics. Then you have the kids run they lyrics through something like this site which calculates reading levels. This one isn’t great for this purpose but it’ll do for this demonstration. We just want some sort of number that quantifies the sophistication of the lyrics. The challenge for the kids is to increase the reading level as high as possible while maintaining the spirit of the song and it’s rhyme scheme (if any). So they have to really figure out what makes the reading level go up or down and then apply what they learn. They’ll be working with vocabulary, sentence […]
Celebrity Punnett Squares
Well, not quite. As you can see, the product ended up being more like New Math than a Punnet square but I liked the original title and have no idea what I’d call this post. Anyway, this idea would give students a totally different view of a character if you did it and it would show their understanding of the character (historical or literary) if they did it. Throw in some subtraction, squares or division and things could get a lot more complex. It certainly beats most character analysis/biographical sketches I’ve seen. You can see the progression of my thoughts below. So the original inspiration was this XKCD comic that had been bouncing around in my head for a few days and I woke up one morning with an idea. You could have a lot of fun crossbreeding famous people to get literary or historical characters (or the other way round). And, yes, I do often wake up thinking about crossbreeding famous people for educational purposes. As I looked up Punnet square information (it has been a while) I realized a few things. One, it isn’t spelled punnit square. Two, I’d forgotten that they were either really simple or fairly complex, at least for the limited use I wanted them for. So I scratched that idea but I still wanted […]
Markov Chains, Horse e-Books and Margins
In discussing trajectories, elements of engineered serendipity, “thought vectors in concept space” with Gardner and Jon yesterday the following occurred. Gardner shared this video (which is well worth watching and I rarely have the patience for videos). That led to a discussion about creating and using a MOOC/hashtag specific Twitterbot (like horse e-books but realReally fake, I mean. I guess.) using Markov ChainsI’m not really sure if that should be pluralized or not. to create algorithmically driven conversations/connections that occur in the margins of intention and result.There’s a whole additional piece where you think about larger scale curricular design which incorporates random elements and assignments that use algorithms to push people in new directions. That starts to get really interesting. I am considering how the assignment and maybe a browser plugin could create contextual variables based on what site you were on at the moment that would then be incorporated into the larger assignment- kind of a #ds106 remix on contextual steroids. So I began messing with the idea last night. Given I have a completely illusionary knowledge of programming I looked for people to tell me how to do this. I found the metaphor a minute tutorial which will help me out with the Twitterbot end of things in the near future. I also found this PHP based Markov […]