Historical Context Model
One of the problems of using only primary source documents is that it is difficult for students to garner the necessary contextual information from the resources alone. It is necessary to provide some scaffolding, which can be in the form of timelines, FAQ’s, secondary and tertiary documents, and essays. Unfortunately, the amount of time and effort required to produce these materials is huge in order to support a wide range of historical questions.
One possibility would be to create a knowledge base that provided this information organized in a manner that students could visually see the connections between the seemingly disparate bits of information, and get a better understanding of what may have happened.
Below is a first cut at trying to put a structure that can store some of the historical information that will be available as contextual background to students. Each item is made up of one of five basic types; a person, a group, an event, a thing, or a concept.
The goal in categorizing this information is that students will be able to look at materials and their connections with the contextual background and be able to visually see the connections between items of their choosing through a number of different “lenses” (i.e. time, politics, location, discovery).
These items contain structured information that is pertinent to that type of item, but share some common fields:
Name defines the label it is known by.
Type contains the descriptive category.
Location specifies the physical location of the item.
Time Frame specifies the time in which the item references, including the start and end times, our certainty of the date’s accuracy, and any nicknames the time period may be known as.
Summary contains a brief text summary about the item.
Importance allows for scanning the information at various levels of detail.
See Also provides links to other items and build a network of relations
Relation allows items to link themselves to other items in a number of ways: People can be related to other people through their degree of affinity, enmity, etc. People can be related to groups by their Role in the group, events to people and groups, etc.
Link:
www.digitalschoolbook.org/hist/contextmodel.htm
One possibility would be to create a knowledge base that provided this information organized in a manner that students could visually see the connections between the seemingly disparate bits of information, and get a better understanding of what may have happened.
Below is a first cut at trying to put a structure that can store some of the historical information that will be available as contextual background to students. Each item is made up of one of five basic types; a person, a group, an event, a thing, or a concept.
The goal in categorizing this information is that students will be able to look at materials and their connections with the contextual background and be able to visually see the connections between items of their choosing through a number of different “lenses” (i.e. time, politics, location, discovery).
These items contain structured information that is pertinent to that type of item, but share some common fields:
Name defines the label it is known by.
Type contains the descriptive category.
Location specifies the physical location of the item.
Time Frame specifies the time in which the item references, including the start and end times, our certainty of the date’s accuracy, and any nicknames the time period may be known as.
Summary contains a brief text summary about the item.
Importance allows for scanning the information at various levels of detail.
See Also provides links to other items and build a network of relations
Relation allows items to link themselves to other items in a number of ways: People can be related to other people through their degree of affinity, enmity, etc. People can be related to groups by their Role in the group, events to people and groups, etc.
Link:
www.digitalschoolbook.org/hist/contextmodel.htm
posted by Bill Ferster at 7:20 PM
1 Comments:
Adam,
I like your idea about using the structure to progressively un-scaffold them as they get more experienced.
This whole knowledge modeling concept can get very abstract, but in practice, it should offer more support than it would be feasible doing it by hand.
We need to talk more about rubrics, but In suspect the stucture can help generate rubrics.
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