Project-Based, Across Disciplines, Ancient Civilizations. What's Not To Love?
7 min read
This Saturday, I will be facilitating a conversation at Educon focused on building the structure to support an openly licensed Ancient Civilizations course. The planned conversation is really one small piece of a longer process - during the session, we will split our time between working, identifying useful sources to incorporate into the course, identifying potential projects to help ground the work in interdisciplinary project-based learning, and identifying other people who might be interested in working on the course. At the risk of stating the obvious, the work required to do this right has started well before this event, and will continue well past. The conversation at Educon is somewhere in the middle of the process.
It's worth noting at the outset: using the term "course" for this work doesn't feel accurate. It's probably more accurate to say that we are working on a toolkit to help inform creating the daily work within a course - the toolkit will contain a full set of readings, projects, resources, and a structure that can be used to frame inquiry into studying a civilization. As mentioned briefly above, one goal of this work is to identify resources that can be used to incorporate literature, math, science, art, and maker-based projects into the learning process. Ideally, elements of the toolkit will be applicable and useful across grade levels - for example, Mesopotamian art can be discussed in elementary, high school, or college level courses; the discussions would vary widely, but having ready access to a range of base materials will help teachers as they plan the specifics of what they want to cover in their courses.
If you are interested in participating, please feel free to skip to the end. If you're interested in learning more about the background, read on!
A Little Backstory
Last fall, I put together a presentation for K12 Open Ed on taking an initial idea and developing that idea into openly licensed learning resources. The presentation took an idea I got while hanging out with my daughter - making butter from cream - and using that as part of a project in a World Civilizations course. The planning around developing a set of resources unified several elements from work we regularly do: open content authoring events, technical assistance around writing open content, open content advocacy, making sure that information can be read and distributed via existing open formats, in addition to developing software supporting authors, and building student- and peer-led learning spaces.
Additionally, back in the day when I was teaching, I taught several versions of World Civilizations over the years - my favorite version of the course was a multidisciplinary approach, and over the course of my teaching career I wrote the course from scratch at least twice, and modified versions of the course annually based on student feedback and my observations. But, with all that said, it has been close to ten years since I had the opportunity to personally work on developing a course from start to finish. With EduCon on the horizon providing a hard and fast deadline, I wanted to take the opportunity to dive in and work on building something from scratch, and remaining involved in the process from start to finish.
I've also been interested in evaluating the viability (or not) of decentralized authorship, or getting as many people as possible involved in the process of contributing pieces (as much or as little as they want) to a larger project. From being active in both open source and open content communities, I've experienced some of these issues firsthand, but over the last few years, norms have shifted, and now I'm curious: will distributed authorship of a group of volunteers work differently now than it did five years ago? Two years ago?
Participating, Part 1
As mentioned above, this toolkit will be released under an open license. This is not actually very relevant in our planning, as much of the structure of this toolkit will link out to other resources, but as we work on this I want it to be completely clear that anyone will be able to use this work, remix it as needed, and redistribute it to meet their needs.
All work created during this project will be stored on Google Docs - on a personal level, I would prefer an open source tool, but in the interest of storing this on a site that combines familiarity, relative ease of use, accessibility, portability, and universally useful formats, Google Docs is a decent middle ground.
Right now, we are in the early stages - using these steps, we are in the phase where we are collecting resources. As one of the goals of this project is to create a multidisciplinary approach, we'd love to get input from people with varied interests.
- For folks with math inclinations: Mesopotamian cultures used base 60 for calculations, developed some initial calendars, had a system of weights, measures, and counting tokens - what are some projects that could bring these habits to life?
- For folks with technical and scientific inclinations: Mesopotamian cultures pioneered use of the wheel, used irrigation, used cosmetics, had sewers,
- For folks with an inclination toward fine art: what museums have good online exhibits? How could the art of Mesopotamia be incorporated into art classes? How could cuneiform, steles, counting tokens, or bevel rimmed bowls be integrated into projects?
- For folks inclined to Maker spaces - what types of projects could be constructed and built? Ziggurats? Irrigation systems? Could sections of architectural sites get built? Model sailboats?
- For folks with literary inclinations - any one have a great set of resources on the Enuma Elish, Gilgamesh, or parallels between Mesoptamian texts and Biblical texts? What other parallels exist/can be drawn?
- And, because we don't want to be re-inventing the wheel (pun intended) - if any teachers have curriculum or activities - at any grade level - that they are willing to share, please do!
At the risk of stating the obvious, we also would benefit from people with an organizational/editorial mindset - there are a lot of ideas here, and a lot of possibilities, but they need to be corralled into a usable structure.
Participating, Part 2
Participating in this project can be done in many ways.
- If you have resources that you want to share and are on twitter, tweet them to me (I'm @funnymonkey) with the hashtag #mesopotamia. We'll review them and incorporate them into the work, or link to them.
- If you want to help write/contribute/review the curriculum but aren't going to be at Educon, that's fine! Email me (bill at funnymonkey dot com), check out the working document, and I'll add you as an author.
- If you are going to be at Educon, come to the session and work with us. As noted in the description, this will be a working session, with the bulk of our time spent breaking doing the actual work of building the resource.
- If you know someone who might be interested, send them our way! One of the goals of this session is to connect up with other people looking to do similar work.
What does success look like?
For this project, "success" has a few different facets - some short term, some long term, some content related, some less so.
If more people develop greater confidence in their ability to share their work, that's success.
If more people begin to see how openly licensed resources can both replace and fit alongside works limited by copyright, that's success.
If people use the resources assembled during this work in their classes, that's success.
If, by June 2014, we have a fully fleshed out set of resources for Mesopotamia, that's success.
If we get a solid blend of activities that mix art, technology, science, math, and literature into projects that more resemble life than school, that's success.
If people fork this work, modify it, use it, and make it their own, that's success.
If, through the process of creating their own course material, people begin to think about the difference between teaching what you make versus teaching what you're given, that's success.
There are other ways success can be measured as well, but these are some of the things I'll be looking at.
If you're in Philadelphia at Educon, come join us! If you're not, come join us!
See you there!
