I decided this week that I would get straight to the assignment that's set for our next class rather than leaving it until last minute as always! I started working on the census at about half past twelve today and it's taken me three hours to muddle through it! I thought at first i must be doing it wrong because basically all I was doing was flicking over and back between the census information on the national archive website and the spreadsheet i was putting it into. Then i looked at the example we had been learning from in class today and mine looked fairly similar and I'm now quite proud that I have something to show before the weekend comes!
The layout of my spreadsheet is a little different to what we looked at today because the blank forms on blackboard list the colums in a different order (I didn't realise this until I was half way through and was afraid to go tampering with them incase I lost the work I had just done). I also forgot to bring my usb key to the library so I'm just hoping the email I sent myself with it as an attachment is the right format for my computer at home!
Anyway now for the technical bit. I looked at three areas of Ballymodan, Co Cork; Corravreeda West, Garranbeg and Knockanreagh. I got a little bit stuck calculating the mode and the median. I'm managed to throw up some figures, not sure if they're right but I'll give it another look later in the week.
The results that struck me the most about the six house I looked at were that there were only two families in which both parents were still alive. The most common situation was that a widowed father was looking after the children and the farm with the help of two or three servants. Five of the houses in question were landowning farmers and the remaining family also worked on a farm though they did not own it. I also noticed that for the Cogan and Buckley families, the occupation of the eldest child was either farmer's son or farmers daughter and nothing else.
These are just some of the things i noticed at a glance so I hope to edit this post later when I've thought about them more thoroughly.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Cork City's Historical Sites
I have to say that when we were first given this assignment, I thought it was going to be one of the easiest ones that I have ever been set throughout three years in college. It was easy in the sense that we had to walk around and take pictures as opposed to sitting in the library for days and days churning out two thousand words of referenced opinion. On the other hand it was difficult, because we have all become immune to the heritage of our local areas it was hard to know where to start.
My favourite pictures from the day I spent walking around the city like a tourist are the ones I have of the National Monument on Grand Parade. Honestly, I had skimmed over a few google hits on Cork City's historical sites and when I read this one I could never recall even seeing it. On the other hand i hand walked passed this giant statue on that part of Grand Parade where "the skaters hang around" a thousand times on my way to the bus station and never taken any notice of it. It wasn't until I was there with my camera that I realised they were the same thing.
The structure was built in 1906 to commemorate the uprisings against the British in 1798 and 1867. On it's four corners are statues of O'Neill Crowley, Dwyer, Davis and of the most well known of the three, Wolfe Tone. At it it's sides are lists of names who the statue is also dedicated to including the famous Father John Mitchell. The statue was erected by the Cork Young Ireland society in honour of the rebels who had fought for the same cause that they were now fighting for themselves.
I think the entire idea of virtual tourism is fantastic. Some may say that it is ruining the experience of actually visiting heritage sites and historical places but I think not. I read the post on the the new location based game Gowalla and looked into the game itself and thought it was great. Not only can people millions of miles away enjoy the heritage sites here in Cork City, but those of us living here can learn more about them too. Time spent on virtual tourism is more productive than the hours people spend waiting for crops to grow on farmville!!
Friday, October 8, 2010
Web Logs and Online Discussions as Tools to Promote Reflective Practice
This piece is aimed at both current teachers and future teachers and it's objective is to deal with the lack of communication between the different levels of the education system. Throughout the article, blogs and online discussions are highlighted as a proposed remedy to this problem as they encourage collaboration and reflective practice.
He says that school teachers today arrive into their profession with expectations that differ greatly to the reality of their work. What they subsequently find is that, they do not have any control over what or how they teach their students. They are confined by deadlines and a strict curriculum in most instances. The result is that many abandon the profession within their first five years of qualifying. To prevent this from happening, graduates from teaching programs, or any discipline for that matter, need to learn independently how to become more than just information transmitters.
We are already learning in our classes that technology is the way to close the gap between academic professionals around the world and that it also helps to make intellectual discussions and research available to a wider network. Now we can also see that not only does it allow us to participate in a larger community but that it can also aid in our own personal development. This article helps to explain to our class why blogs and online discussions are so relevant to us as historians. We can evaluate and reflect on our work and eventually learn how to be more independently productive students.
He explains how electronic media is vital in today's education system, not only because it benefits us personally but because it crosses the barriers of time, scheduling and geography. Blogs and discussion groups are generally in the public forum so the author faces a "potentially large and unknown audience". He explains, and I agree, that this is a key motivating factor for students to engage with the work and also means that they are less likely to write just what the instructor wants to hear if they know that their peers will be reading it too. For teachers, online discussions allow them to work outside the confines of the classroom. According to the references in this article many teachers feel that they are in an isolated job with a "heavy burden of private responsibility". Hopefully the new methods being used will help to change this opinion.
He talks in detail for a while about a class of 56 students that created online blogs as part of their university coursework. Overall the experiment appears to have been a success. The students were taught the values of the different types of electronic communication, their posts turned out to be of high quality and they ultimately developed the sense that they too could be considered as real contributers to the academic world.
I think that online blogs are a great idea especially for larger classes. We can learn to present ourselves with confidence and voice our ideas even if we are too shy to speak out in class.
He says that school teachers today arrive into their profession with expectations that differ greatly to the reality of their work. What they subsequently find is that, they do not have any control over what or how they teach their students. They are confined by deadlines and a strict curriculum in most instances. The result is that many abandon the profession within their first five years of qualifying. To prevent this from happening, graduates from teaching programs, or any discipline for that matter, need to learn independently how to become more than just information transmitters.
We are already learning in our classes that technology is the way to close the gap between academic professionals around the world and that it also helps to make intellectual discussions and research available to a wider network. Now we can also see that not only does it allow us to participate in a larger community but that it can also aid in our own personal development. This article helps to explain to our class why blogs and online discussions are so relevant to us as historians. We can evaluate and reflect on our work and eventually learn how to be more independently productive students.
He explains how electronic media is vital in today's education system, not only because it benefits us personally but because it crosses the barriers of time, scheduling and geography. Blogs and discussion groups are generally in the public forum so the author faces a "potentially large and unknown audience". He explains, and I agree, that this is a key motivating factor for students to engage with the work and also means that they are less likely to write just what the instructor wants to hear if they know that their peers will be reading it too. For teachers, online discussions allow them to work outside the confines of the classroom. According to the references in this article many teachers feel that they are in an isolated job with a "heavy burden of private responsibility". Hopefully the new methods being used will help to change this opinion.
He talks in detail for a while about a class of 56 students that created online blogs as part of their university coursework. Overall the experiment appears to have been a success. The students were taught the values of the different types of electronic communication, their posts turned out to be of high quality and they ultimately developed the sense that they too could be considered as real contributers to the academic world.
I think that online blogs are a great idea especially for larger classes. We can learn to present ourselves with confidence and voice our ideas even if we are too shy to speak out in class.
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Cohen and Rosenzweig
I read Cohen and Rosenzweig's Digital History: A guide to gathering, preserving and presenting the past on the web. As with any historical publication, or any book at all for that matter, it takes a couple of reads to really take in the information being presented but I think the authors have done a great job. The book is practically a step by step guide and I think it suits our course perfectly, no detail is left uncovered. Everything we mentioned in our first class is dealt with somewhere in the book, making it reliable to fall back on if all this technology gets to be a bit too much! The authors are not academic snobs, anyone could follow the designs and plans that are set out which is important for maximum accessibility, something which is very important to them where sharing knowledge is concerned.
They outline the computer as the central tool for today's historian, and denounce the classroom as irrelevant in the world of information technology, thus making their book a must read...very clever marketing! I think it's true though. Ten to fifteen years ago computers were relatively unknown and almost feared. I remember our first P.C. that had little else to do other than solitaire yet I was under constant supervision when using it. Today our house would be cut off without the internet, our neighbors house seems like miles away, it's so much easier to facebook! According to Cohen and Rosenzweig, personal use of computers and the internet has developed at literally the same speed as academic use, maybe even faster. They say that ten years ago historians were curious about computers, the technology was intriguing yet not vitally important. Today, a yahoo search gives out 39,959 historical sites, and that's just the best of the crop which ignores all the hypertext links that lead all the way down the academic scale. Really it's madness how much information is out there!
I like how they present the advantages of the internet age as they move through the chapters. All these advantages are concerned both with the mass audience and the mass volume of information that can be presented. The sheer storage capacity available and the different formats it's available in, mean that today's history will never be forgotten. Hopefully that means that eventually there will be no such thing as trawling through pages and pages of illegible chicken scratch in order to find one fact or quote...we can always hope! Interactivity between all realms of society means that history is no longer confined to those that can afford to study it, I think this is the greatest advantage. If someone has a passion for history, there should be no price on it.
Of course the authors don't ignore the fact that the internet is not always the most trustworthy source, the quantity of information available threatens it's quality and even misspelled words will give out hundreds of search words. I think that's a small price to pay considering we can now reach the other side of the world with the click of a button.
The book outlines challenges for todays historians who now have no choice but to go digital. In the course of the chapters it helps with the basic skills needed and obstacles that may be encountered. Everything from design to copyright is covered as well as a quick glimpse into what the future may hold for historical research. Over-all, it's the perfect companion to a digital history course, especially for those of us that have not completely mastered the ins and outs of everything the internet is capable of!
They outline the computer as the central tool for today's historian, and denounce the classroom as irrelevant in the world of information technology, thus making their book a must read...very clever marketing! I think it's true though. Ten to fifteen years ago computers were relatively unknown and almost feared. I remember our first P.C. that had little else to do other than solitaire yet I was under constant supervision when using it. Today our house would be cut off without the internet, our neighbors house seems like miles away, it's so much easier to facebook! According to Cohen and Rosenzweig, personal use of computers and the internet has developed at literally the same speed as academic use, maybe even faster. They say that ten years ago historians were curious about computers, the technology was intriguing yet not vitally important. Today, a yahoo search gives out 39,959 historical sites, and that's just the best of the crop which ignores all the hypertext links that lead all the way down the academic scale. Really it's madness how much information is out there!
I like how they present the advantages of the internet age as they move through the chapters. All these advantages are concerned both with the mass audience and the mass volume of information that can be presented. The sheer storage capacity available and the different formats it's available in, mean that today's history will never be forgotten. Hopefully that means that eventually there will be no such thing as trawling through pages and pages of illegible chicken scratch in order to find one fact or quote...we can always hope! Interactivity between all realms of society means that history is no longer confined to those that can afford to study it, I think this is the greatest advantage. If someone has a passion for history, there should be no price on it.
Of course the authors don't ignore the fact that the internet is not always the most trustworthy source, the quantity of information available threatens it's quality and even misspelled words will give out hundreds of search words. I think that's a small price to pay considering we can now reach the other side of the world with the click of a button.
The book outlines challenges for todays historians who now have no choice but to go digital. In the course of the chapters it helps with the basic skills needed and obstacles that may be encountered. Everything from design to copyright is covered as well as a quick glimpse into what the future may hold for historical research. Over-all, it's the perfect companion to a digital history course, especially for those of us that have not completely mastered the ins and outs of everything the internet is capable of!
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