Technology and Good vs. Evil

My Farm or Factory Fake Facebook pages were presented on Monday and they were quite good! I think the students are not as excited because the real facebook has changed its look so much that they can't relate as well to the template. I need to find one that is setup the way facebook is now and use that in the future I think. Having said that, I did still see some of the creativity in the conversations that gave a sense for the tension over immigration, changing roles for women, and the mysteries of industrialization. It was great fun!

I introduced the $35 dollar bill project this week to US history classes. In this project students must nominate someone to be put on this new dollar bill. Its 35 so we are not kicking anyone off of current money and 35 is half way between 20 and 50. For this project, students need to pick someone who had a major influence on the United States. Then write a biography of them focusing on 3 major ways they influenced the US. Then they have to create the design for the dollar bill, dress up like their person, and deliver a 4-6 minute presentation to class defending their nominee for the bill. While working on this, we study Andrew Jackson and analyze whether or not he deserves to be on the $20 dollar bill. So we spent some time this week getting to know Jackson. Jackson was a wildly popular "Tough Guy" who was in over 100 duels in his life, killed a British Solider when he was 12, and had bullets still in his chest while serving as President. As my friend said in reference to Jackson's life "Man's game". Yet there is plenty of evidence to suggest that a man like that in the Presidency may not be such a good thing! His interactions with Native Americans and the Trial of Tears is just one such example!

In Ethics we are discussing torture. We explored this week both sides of the debate. We looked at evidence around what can be gained from torture and how important that may be. We also looked at the act of torture itself and delved into an exploration of evil a bit. Here we crossed the Psychology line a little and looked at a couple of famous experiments that shed some light onto evil. The Milgram Obedience Experiment is a classic! Stanley Milgram invited ordinary people to monitor a "Shock Machine" with various switches. The last few switches were labeled "dangerous" and the last one had a skull and crossbones image. The people who were recruited for this would listen to a "learner" give answers and deliver a shock for each wrong answer, increasing the intensity of the shock each time. Amazingly 90% of the people (this includes, women, and all ethnic backgrounds) went all the way to the skull and crossbones. In most cases the learner would cry out in pain and plead with the person to stop shocking them. Because the head of the study was there watching and kept telling the person delivering the shock "It's ok, we are responsible here not you" they kept going. As it turns out the "learner" was an actor paid to pretend they were being shocked and the shock machine didn't actually deliver a shock. But how interesting it is that most people would push the switch that seemed to indicate death just because someone told them they are not responsible! We also looked at the Stanford Prison Experiment whereby College students were randomly assigned to be a guard or a prisoner for 2 weeks to study how prison life effects people. The experiment was stopped after 6 days because of the breakdowns occurring among the fake prisoners. In just a few days the guards resorted to all levels of humiliation, and psychological abuse to get the fake prisoners in line. It was incredible how quickly they lost sight of this as an experiment and how real it all felt. They did these things all seemingly because they were put in a situation with little oversight or training and told to keep the prisoners in line. It was eerily prophetic of the Abu Grahib atrocities committed in 2004. All of this comes out the book The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo. His theory is that what creates this evil is the system, not the person. He also concludes that ethics education is the best way to combat this phenomenon so that kids learn about Moral Courage. Great PR for this course!!

(This image is good in that it shows the guards with the sunglasses. Zimbardo's research indicates that the covering of the face with a mask, sunglasses, helmet, etc. can help to psychologically convince one you are no longer an individual but representing a larger organization and just doing what they tell you to do)

Lastly this week in History v. Hollywood, students presented their iMovie Historical Film Trailers. I knew they would be good and they were. But I was blown away by a handful of students who created such an amazing piece of art in 2 minutes! (The trailers are anywhere from 1 minute 15 seconds to 2 minutes long). These few actually gave me a chill I was so impressed with how they connected mood and specific plot points from the film to their trailer and used creativity to make it realistic and easy to relate to. Great stuff! All because of the iPads!! In connection to this, I also stumbled onto a great little media kit that you can snap your iPad into and it becomes a little high quality movie camera!! I'm going to pursue a grant to see if I can get this iographer!

Next week is the annual Maine Council for the Social Studies Conference that I am attending and immensely excited about! I will also be attending the Cross Discipline Literacy Network "Dine and Discuss" seminar to kick off our attempt to improve literacy and implement the Common Core in multiple disciplines!