Fun & Exciting Stuff

Besides the fact that the choice of color for all these Walmarts is on the *ahem* “snotty” side, this is a pretty neat map. Sad, but neat.

I am reading a couple of different books, but books that I think have value to Social Studies teachers:

Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed by Jared Diamond. Societies have made societal choices that ultimately led to thier downfall. It wasn’t like Monday everything is fine and Tuesday the place is a ghost town, but over the course of 50 to 100 years, these societies fal and are completely gone. Opened my eyes to the situations in Montana and with the Maya.

The other is: The Worst Hard Time: The untold story of those who escaped the great American Dustbowl by Timothy Egan. First person accounts of life in the Texas/Oklahoma panhandle, NE New Mexico, SE Colorado during the Great Depression. A very haunting book. I wouldn’t know what to do with a black cloud of dust that could penetrate every opening. And it isn’t just one or two storms. Roughly 8 years of them.

Not the most uplifting books, but great life lessons and you can see how people perservered through extremly challenging situations.

Karl Fisch brings up some great points about what we should be teaching in Social Studies.

Past and present activities.

Organizations of people associated together for [various] purposes.

Human society past and present.

Informed and reasoned decisions for the public good . . . in an interdependent world.

I think we need to look at how much we “cover” and how we can adjust to the changing world.

Wired magazine has this interesting article on the site Wikileaks.org Wikileaks is “…the net’s premiere document-leaking site.” Basically, if you have a secret about your place of business, government, even religion, this is the place to share that secret with the world. The problem is, that,

If Assange is unflustered by criticism of Wikileaks, he acknowledges that one of its founding ideas has not panned out. As conceived, Wikileaks would employ an army of volunteers to collaboratively evaluate the documents it leaks — that’s the “wiki” in Wikileaks. But despite the site’s growing reputation and its emergence as a cause celebre on the net, nobody’s shown much interest in poring over pages of documents that reveal the world’s secret workings.

So information is put out to the world at large, but no one is doing any kind of fact checking. I like it, but I don’t like it. It exposes secrets, but there are some secrets that don’t need exposing. The article talks about a US missile system Wikileaks exposed. That sort of thing doesn’t need to be out there.

A Letter from D.B. Cooper. I like one of the commenters: “Fake. What 89 year old knows how to use the web??” Its fiction wise guy, just enjoy it.

I have written previously about the new Civil War course I am creating. In my research, I found this blog: Teaching the Civil War with Technology I hope I will be able to use some of the resources demonstrated there. Check it out!