Homework answers / question archive / Learning Objectives promote "deep learning" of historical events and movements met in textbook & lectures construct a creative master narrative of medieval history conceptualize the historical changes across medieval cultures and periods What is a concept map? Think of a concept map as "data visualization

Learning Objectives promote "deep learning" of historical events and movements met in textbook & lectures construct a creative master narrative of medieval history conceptualize the historical changes across medieval cultures and periods What is a concept map? Think of a concept map as "data visualization

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Learning Objectives promote "deep learning" of historical events and movements met in textbook & lectures construct a creative master narrative of medieval history conceptualize the historical changes across medieval cultures and periods What is a concept map? Think of a concept map as "data visualization." The primary goal of data visualization is to communicate clearly and efficiently. Effective visualization helps users analyze and reason about large quantities of data. Data visualization is a new twentieth-first century skill. It is both an art and a science. Data visualization is increasingly important in a world in which the microchip revolution has rapidly increased the amount and rate of information available. Project Instructions (300CE to 900CE) Construct a concept-map which visuals the main historical changes from the late Roman Empire through the medieval history of Byzantium, Europe, and Islamic society (c. 300 CE to c. 900 CE) and shows connections, parallels, and differences across these 3 medieval civilizations. 1) Identify the most important historical changes. (In other words you construct "the facts.") 2) Think through how these changes are related; they might be related directly through cause & effect or they might be parallels. 3) Visualize this data for an audience that doesn't know medieval history. Two elements are important for success: defining the historical changes & relating them to each other. Step 1: Choose a medium. The classic form for a concept-map is a flow chart or diagram on a large poster. This medium is ideal for visualization of relations between concepts. But you are free to experiment with other creative mediums – comics, videos, games, animation, time capsules, or . . . Students in previous semesters have done all of these successfully. There are no limits on the creative possibilities. Students have been particularly successful with the mediums of large poster boards and Prezis, which are their digital equivalent. While you are free to choose any medium, remember that not all mediums are good devices for data visualization. Particularly problematic ones that I suggest you steer away from are: a PowerPoint, a traditional unidimensional time-line, and an essay. A unidimensional timeline does not conceptualize the information or compare and contrast civilizations. PowerPoints breaks up information into small bites; while a concept map build connections between small bits of information. An essay doesn't lend itself to visualizing date. Remember: The main goal is to communicate the big story of medieval history clearly and efficiently. A successful project presents the data in a highly conceptualized way that focuses on big concepts and their relationships. Two elements are important for success: defining the historical changes you choose & relating them to each other. Step 2: Identify the most important historical changes. Working with A Short History of the Middle Ages, identify the "facts" of medieval history. (Remember that in our lesson "What is History?" we discovered that the historian constructs the facts of history. That's what you are doing here.) To get started you might look for the concepts that would be major headings on an outline of the chapter. You might also go culture by culture –– late Roman, Byzantium, European, Islamic –- identifying the major turning points in their histories. You might also think across these essential historical categories: the history of politics, religion, culture & intellectual life, economy, and family & gender. For all 3 sibling cultures, you should have some items in all categories. Step 3: Define the facts you identified. Summarize in a few lines 1) who or what? 2) when? and 3) why each historical change is significant in the narrative of medieval history. Step 4: Conceptualize these changes Think through how these changes are connected. What leads to what? What causes what? What is similar across cultures and what is different? Where, when, why do the cultures interact? In other words, construct the historical themes and create the historical periods of the narrative. Ask yourself: What is the story behind the details? Step 5: Visualize the historical narrative Visual the information in the medium of your choice. Remember that placement, color, and images are all visual clues that communicate information. Think about how time flows through your project– right to left? up to down? from the inner point of a spiral to the outer? How are the 3 cultures (European, Byzantine, Islamic) laid out on the page? Are they slices of pie? Are they parallel columns flowing from the late Roman Empire? Or will the project use other rubrics such as politics & religion to organize the project and use color to mark out the various cultures? Think carefully about the design elements. And CREATE! Step 6: Document outside sources, images, and maps Our textbook A Short History of the Middle Ages should be your main source. You do not need to provide citations for it. If you include images or maps from the web, you do need to cite your source. If you consult additional materials on the web and paraphrase or quote from them, you need to cite your source. Please stick as closely as possible to historically representative images. That means, use art and material objects created in the medieval period, not idealized 19c paintings of vikings or medieval courtly lovers. High tech or no tech You may use paper and pencil. Or you may use cool, high tech software, or something in-between. The instructor cares first about intellectual content and quality, not about flashy and snazzy (though you will get credit for this too). Some excellent conceptual work has been done with a pencil and 23 sheets of 8-1/2 x 11 paper. These were lean, mean, and highly intellectual! But colored pencils became a tool for conceptualization. So, think carefully about design. Form shapes content. Design communicates meaning. Be aware that the form you chose will have limits: be prepared to work around these. For instance, a timeline, a traditional visualization used in history, only communicates chronological order. It emphasizes 'the trees rather than the forest.' Therefore, it is a very poor way to conceptualize historical changes. A flow chart that orders information chronologically in fact incorporates the timeline, but also conceptualizes the historical changes by showing causality, parallelism, etc. Two tools that I do NOT (repeat do NOT) recommend unless you use them really carefully are: Timelines (like Dipity) and PowerPoint. Dipity (and other timeline tools) allow you to create only 1 flat timeline. PowerPoint chunks information into little bits, rather than grouping into big concepts. Don't get caught in the spider's WEB! In general, the web is a vast boggy morass. Don't sink in the uncritical and undocumented information and misinformation. Stick close to our textbook (Rosenwein) and use high quality sources only (such as the British Museum or the MET). Just because something is posted online does not mean it is correct. Even the History Channel is often not up to academic standards on basic historical information. But if you do use the web, check several different sources to make sure the information you collect is accurate. REMEMBER! If you take a sentence, phrase, or a paragraph directly from another website you must add quotes and a citation, otherwise this is PLAGARISM! Example: