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Daniel, I find three challenges with Jr. High students "doing" much with history. 1) they have so little experience with adult life that it is impossible for them to map historical lessons onto modern life. 2) their modern life is so different fro...
on Wednesday
Mike left a comment for Ed Jones
October 19
Ed Jones left a comment for Mike
October 19
Hi Ed, Good to see your by-line again. I'm an Australian muggins trampling on special- hallowed ground here - of which Bruce Catton wrote. But my wondering is - how external were the African Americans to the conflict? The issue (at least one of th...
August 10
Hi Ed! Long time, no see!!! And hi Mike, I am really excited to hear about the success of your daughter's class in History through Film. I'll confess that I find history books almost impossible to read, but I love (LOVE) good historical movies. ...
August 8
Ed Jones added a discussion
Hi, All. Its been awhile, hope all are well. My short summer travels have impressed upon me a question, and I'd really like to hear the answers from this community!! Why are there no African Americans at Gettysburg? I'm not talking living there, ...
August 7
Mike, God bless your heart, but... Why is it every time someone suggests that improvements to public education can and should be part of the solution, ... it's "an attack on public education". We're not all daft, you know, though so many status q...
May 3
Ed Jones added a blog post
Few of us recalled Sunday the heinous capture, torture, and beheading of Daniel Pearl, a reporter investigating the shoe bomber, al Quaeda, and ISI. It was seven years this month that we followed his horrible experience. Here, Pearl's father, a pr...
February 3

Profile Information

Tell about your involvement in education, and your ideals for collegial sharing
Regardless of what other issues you care about, the dreadful status quo of education in our cities and among minorities is holding us back. We need more doctors, lawyers, technicians, priests, diplomats, bankers, and skilled carpenters, to come from urban minorities (there the local majority!).

Web media can help us break around the long standing barriers to reform. It helps us share ideas quickly, can help us evaluate, and hopefully make learning more fun and efficient.
About Me:
I run OpenHistoryproject.org. I hope you'll stop and contribute.
Website:
http://openhistoryproject.org

Ed Jones's Blog

Ed Jones

Academia, Obama, and the Legacy of Daniel Pearl

Few of us recalled Sunday the heinous capture, torture, and beheading of Daniel Pearl, a reporter investigating the shoe bomber, al Quaeda, and ISI. It was seven years this month that we followed his horrible experience.


Here, Pearl's father, a professor of computer science (scientists are ba… Continue

Posted on February 3, 2009 at 8:30am — 1 Comment

Ed Jones

Civilization Regressing - On Zimbabwe, Pirates, More.

We're supposed to be going forward, making the world more civilized. Today a couple takes on places where things have been sliding.

And yes, I blame a lack of sophistication in education--primary, secondary, post-secondary, and graduate.

Zimbabwe on the Verge of Collapse Op-FOR

"This is just sad. Not just sad, but tragic. Students of history weigh-in: is this the most drastic peacetime collapse of a nation-state ever… Continue

Posted on November 25, 2008 at 7:36am — 2 Comments

Ed Jones

Image of the Day

Posted on November 5, 2008 at 8:31pm — 5 Comments

Ed Jones

Obama and Testing / Portfolios /...Something!

This late column by Fordham's Mike Petrelli examines some of the Obama campaign staff's embracing of portfolios as a method of measuring childrens' progress.
No campaign education advisor left behind

While I agree that students should be measured in many different ways; it also seems that schools' and parents expectations from children vary so much that making the ruler even more complex is not likely to lead to any consensus.

Be… Continue

Posted on October 27, 2008 at 1:26pm — 6 Comments

Ed Jones

Worth Knowing? Two Battles That Saved the West: Lepanto 1571 and Vienna 1683

Just looking for ed events, and stumbled upon: Two Battles That Saved the West: Lepanto 1571 and Vienna 1683 Michael Novak delivering the lectures.

Why should we care about these? I certainly didn't know -- never heard of either of them. (OK, my formal battle education includes Lexington and Concord, Antietam, and maybe Fallen Timbers). So, here are the Wikipedia summaries:
The battle broke
Continue

Posted on October 20, 2008 at 12:52pm — 4 Comments

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At 2:56pm on October 19, 2009, Mike said…
Hi Ed... hope this finds you well!

Thanks for the reference... i will certainly get a hold of it and check it out!! Glad you are enjoying Hope and Despair....

Certainly we both have a passion for turning education toward a more positive experience for all kids!

Be well.... mike
At 2:09pm on January 12, 2009, Josh Anderson said…
Ed, thanks for the reply. I get the feeling that I don't know enough about the people that push for certain methodologies over others. I'm interested in learning more about how like you said, it's humanities majors who want more critical thinking. Do you think this is because this is the type of thinking required for humanities types of fields, or, that they feel they missed out on learning this skill in their own educations, which is what I think is your point. But does that mean that the humanities don't require critical thinking? I guess some more so than others, right? :)

When I think back to the days when I was being unconventionally schooled at home and left to my own devices I remember doing small projects on my own and learning a lot that way. Thankfully my parents did buy me the nerdy toys from the "brain kid" store. I have a feeling that I learned a lot of really important basic skills just through trying to build a little remote control car. It was very slow, but I think it's hard to teach someone quickly how to figure things out by themselves.

But I agree, that type of project based/case based learning is really not taken full advantage of in schools. If I understand correctly that is, I feel like project based is pretty similar to the scenario you mentioned that students will work with in business school. You're given pieces (a car / business model) and your job is to perform certain operations on the pieces.

Before I knew of terms like project based learning or case based methods I used to call it "peripheral learning," which is a term made strictly out of ignorance. The idea was that it always seemed to me that most of the learning happened outside the main focus. The main focus is just a goal that needs to be accomplished and you learn all of these smaller things in order to accomplish this goal. It's almost learning without you knowing it, which I think is something that makes it so powerful from a psychological perspective. It would take advantage of episodic and implicit memory rather than relying mostly on semantic or explicit memory. Basically, and I don't have any research to back this up, it seems like if you involve more of the whole range of memory types that a person is capable of there would be an encoding of that memory that is more like a memory learned from a real life experience.

Just a thought :) Great topic to discuss further :)
At 3:20pm on December 9, 2008, Luke King said…
Ed,
Just got out of a brief from the President himself, it was great, I figured since he was part of your favorite things, you'd want to know. Thanks for the support too.
At 1:00pm on December 5, 2008, Josh Anderson said…
Ed, thank you for the warm welcome!

Interesting question you asked me there. I don't know much about the case method as I believe it's taught in law school or to doctors. I do know about it from the side of computer science though, if that it is in fact a variant of the case method.

One of my classes, Object Oriented Design and Programming, barrows a concept from architecture called Patterns. It's a basic if-then-rule type of concept that's been semi-formalized. Any one pattern contains a simple name, a description of a problem or challenge that happens in a system, and a recommended solution.

A basic example is the "Iterator" pattern. The challenge is going through a set of elements and accessing them all one at a time. The solution is to design a standardized object that can go through a standardized set one at a time.

That description is full of a lot of jargon but basically once you know these patterns you can see them pop up in the challenges and problems in designing or modifying a system. The objective then becomes less of making new structures up on the fly and a little more about recognizing when you stumble onto a previously known situation. In that respect I would say it's like the case method. I think it's great step towards organizing situations but it's a little unclear sometimes how these structures relate to one another. Because the overall structure is a little unclear it's hard to see where exactly one pattern ends and another begins or whether or not one pattern is really a kind, or subpattern, of another. I don't think that's anything that's wrong with the case method by any means, just its application as I've experienced in computer science :)

Thanks again for the welcome :)
At 11:22am on December 4, 2008, Connie Weber said…
Thanks, Ed--I'll check out the book recommendation. I really appreciate your thoughts. Spent a good amount of time checking out The Krugman Recipe for Depression and wondering if I should buy his book The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008. Have you read it?
At 2:18am on December 4, 2008, Ian Carmichael said…
Ed, you may not have seen this: an oral history project for West Point soldiers' stories. Thought you'd be interested. Here's the link. http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3497/west-point-oral-history-project-will-make-soldiers-stories-available-online.
At 12:53pm on November 19, 2008, Janet Navarro said…
Ed,

I was in Columbus last weekend. Thought of you, though didn't really know who I was thinking about. It's weird, this online stuff. We had a fun time -- looking around the enormous campus and staying with some people in Upper Arlington. They are a stone's throw from some farm field that if you walk through it you are pretty much at the stadium. Near the corner of North Star and Lane Ave.

Purpose of the trip was actually to go back to Ohio Wesleyan and look around but we got an OSU tour in too.
At 1:43pm on November 4, 2008, Chris Warren said…
Thanks for the warm welcome Ed! I'm glad to be here.
At 1:56pm on October 23, 2008, Janet Navarro said…
Hey, I enjoyed playing around a little bit in the open history project website. I will look at it some more when I have some more time.

Just so you know....I went to Ohio Wesleyan and spent some extra time in Delaware, OH. I loved Ohio -- although my upbringing in Michigan will not allow me to be an OSU fan....like the band though. Glad everyone in EL was friendly.
At 4:10pm on October 21, 2008, Connie Weber said…
Hi Ed,
How do I access the print form of the talk you wrote to me about on my wall? Can't listen right now, but can read...Hey, thanks for the news. Was the talk interesting? What was said about Fireside?
 
 

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