Remember the earlier post on this?
Robert Krulwich at ABC thought it was neat, too — see this video, and you can see the artist who created the maps. Does this mean there will be more?
Toldja
August 8, 2007
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Brain learning, Creativity, Geography - Economic, Geography - Physical, Maps, Presentations, Technology, Transportation | 
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Posted by Ed Darrell
Cool tool: Tag clouds of presidents’ thoughts
August 5, 2007Only Crook pointed this out in a comment — and it’s neat enough to raise to a headline:
. . . have you seen the U.S. Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud http://chir.ag/phernalia/preztags/ I happened upon a speech by Millard Fillmore, so naturally I thought of this blog. I can’t link you directly to the speech I looked at, which was his 1850 State of the Union Address, (you have to use the slider to get there) but these were the most common words in that speech according to the tag cloud:
appropriations california constitution negotiation pacific ports revenue territory treasury treaty war
Go try it out. It’s a very interesting tool for the visual portrayal of information — visual portrayals that I don’t know how to copy for display here.
For example, notice the arrival of the word “California” in presidential speeches, circa 1848. Note how the word grows over the next few years, but then disappears just prior to the Civil War — what might that suggest to students about events in California, compared to events in the rest of the U.S.? Or, track the word “Constitution” from the earliest speeches/writings listed to the latest. Or track the use of the word “Iraq” in President Bush’s speeches, between 2000 and 2007.
The tool is ahead of its time, a fun device now. The key question is, how should we be using such information?
Chirag Mehta created the program. Browsing his site will give teachers good ideas about what can be done by a decent programmer. Does any school have a programmer to make such things for the classroom? And we’re supposed to be using technology? (Mehta’s stuff may be as good as it looks — see this article about the tag cloud device, in the Wall Street Journal, no less.)
1 Comment | Historic documents, History, On-line education, On-line learning, Politics, Presentations, Student projects, Technology, Technology in the classroom | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
When things get tough, the patriotic listen to Barbara Jordan
August 2, 2007Whose voice do you hear, really, when you read material that is supposed to be spoken by God? Morgan Freeman is a popular choice — he’s played God at least twice now, racing George Burns for the title of having played God most often in a movie. James Earl Jones?
Statue of Rep. Barbara Jordan at the Austin, Texas airport that bears her name. Photo by Meghan Lamberti, via Accenture.com
For substance as well as tone, I nominate Barbara Jordan’s as the voice you should hear.
I’m not alone. Bill Moyers famously said:
When Max Sherman called me to tell me that Barbara was dying and wanted me to speak at this service, I had been reading a story in that morning’s New York Times about the discovery of forty billion new galaxies deep in the inner sanctum of the universe. Forty billion new galaxies to go with the ten billion we already knew about. As I put the phone down, I thought: it will take an infinite cosmic vista to accommodate a soul this great. The universe has been getting ready for her.
Now, at last, she has an amplifying system equal to that voice. As we gather in her memory, I can imagine the cadences of her eloquence echoing at the speed of light past orbiting planets and pulsars, past black holes and white dwarfs and hundreds of millions of sun-like stars, until the whole cosmic spectrum stretching out to the far fringes of space towards the very origins of time resonates to her presence.
Virgotext carried a series of posts earlier in the year, commemorating what would have been Jordan’s 71st birthday on February 21. (Virgotext also pointed me to the Moyers quote, above.)
Now, when the nation seriously ponders impeachment of a president, for the third time in just over a generation, Ms. Jordan’s words have more salience, urgency, and wisdom. It’s a good time to revisit Barbara Jordan’s wisdom, in the series of posts at Virgotext.
“There is no president of the United States that can veto that decision.”
“My faith in the Constitution is whole.”
“We know the nature of Impeachment. We’ve been talking about it a while now.”
“Indignation so great as to overgrow party interests.”
And finally:
The rest of the hearing remarks are all here. It’s a longer clip than the others but honestly, there is not a good place to cut it.
This is Barbara Jordan on the killing floor.
This was a woman who understands history, who illustrates time and again that we are, with every action, with every syllable, cutting the past away from the present.
She never mentions Nixon by name. There is the Constitution. There is the office of the Presidency. But Richard Nixon the president has already ceased to exist. By the time she finishes speaking, he is history.
“A President is impeachable if he attempts to subvert the Constitution.”
Also see, and hear:
Virgotext’s collection of Barbara Jordan stories and quotes is an excellent source for students on Watergate, impeachment, great oratory, and Barbara Jordan herself. Bookmark that site.
Rep. Barbara Jordan sitting calmly among tension, at a House Committee meeting (probably House Judiciary Committee in 1974).
Update 2019: Here is the full audio of Barbara Jordan’s speech. It is still salient, and if you listen to it you will understand better what is going on in Congress today.
Barbara Jordan, Statement on the Articles of Impeachment, at AmericanRhetori.com.
3 Comments | Barbara Jordan, Democracy, Ethics, Famous quotes, Free press, Good Quotes, Heroes, History, History audio sources, Justice, Leadership, Patriotism, Presentations, Presidents, Quotes, Reason, Scandals, Texas, Texas history, Texas Lege, U.S. Constitution, U.S. House of Representatives, Watergate scandal | Tagged: Barbara Jordan, Democracy, Ethics, Famous quotes, Heroes, History, Texas | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
PowerPoint templates for students
June 18, 2007I really don’t like assignments to “do a PowerPoint presentation” for kids who are not expert at all on their subjects — there is too much room for too much unintentional mischief when people who know little about a topic are to use a tool designed for people who know too much about a topic.
Among other things, kids who have never had to do a five-page report, nor an outline of a report, do not have the experience to stick to five bullets of less than five words per slide. And don’t get me going on “fireworks” animation of letters to explain things like the death of Medgar Evers, or the evils of child labor.
But if you want some ideas, the Paducah, Kentucky, school system offers some templates for student reports, and a few presentations teachers could use as foundations, here at “Connecting Teachers and Students.” There is advice, too. *
Use these as starting points, please. If you can’t improve on them, you’re not trying (no offense, Paducah — I hope).
A good exercise for you would be to spend an hour reading suggestions from Presentation Zen, and then edit a couple of those presentations from Paducah to make them more, um, zen reflective.
Remember, “template” is just a part of “contemplate.”
(I hope I don’t regret having pointed out that Paducah site to you.)
Update, November 24, 2007: Take a look at the video included in this post to see an effective use of a presentation tool like PowerPoint — though this one was done with Apple’s Keynote. Check the links in the post, too.
Update March 8, 2008: Paducah’s school district archived the PowerPoint stuff. I have changed the links above to link to the archive sites. I replaced “www” with “old” in the URL.
7 Comments | Accuracy, Classroom technology, Editing, Pedagogy, Presentations, Student projects, Technology, Technology in the classroom | Tagged: PowerPoint, slide templates, student presentations, Technology | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Turning Point Presentations: Nixon’s “Checkers” speech
October 7, 2006During one of my phase-shift transitions between universities and public schools yesterday, I caught a snippet of a commentary that I thought was on Richard Nixon’s 1952 speech that kept him on the ticket with Dwight Eisenhower. Public reaction was reported to be overwhelmingly warm, the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket won the 1952 election, won again in 1956, and Nixon eventually took the presidency for his own in 1968.
Shouldn’t that speech be considered one of the greater presentations of the 20th century, at least? It probably should, especially when we consider what history might have looked like had Nixon left the ticket — no Nixon nomination in 1960 against John Kennedy, no later Nixon presidency, Nixon continuing in the Senate . . . gee, which path is more gloomy?
The Checkers speech does not wear well, I think. Reading it today, I see the origins of smear campaign tactics and diversionary tactics that mar so much of today’s election campaigns and policy discussions.
This all comes up because the transcripts of the famous 1977 interview series newsman/comedian David Frost did with Nixon is the basis for a new play in London, “Frost/Nixon” by Peter Morgan, with Frank Langella playing Nixon and Michael Sheen as Frost — a play that is already being made into a movie for Universal Pictures by Academy Award winning director Ron Howard, but after a Broadway run in 2007.
Nixon’s mea culpa answer to Frost on the entirety of the Watergate scandal — “I made so many mistakes” — in the NPR piece voiced by Langella, sounded exactly like Nixon. I mistakenly thought it a recording of the Checkers speech, hearing just a snippet. The Frost/Nixon interviews would probably never have been necessary, had the Checkers speech not been a success. Surely there is a direct line from the Checkers speech to Nixon’s attempt to revive his reputation in the Frost interviews.
Watergate on Broadway, with a movie in the works, should offer good opportunities especially for high school history teachers to bring Watergate to a new generation. Too many people today fail to understand the depth of the damage done to Constitutional institutions in that crisis, and how lucky our nation was to have survived it. There are many lessons there for us in our current Constitutional crisis.
A lesson awaits, also, in the career of David Frost, who crossed from news to comedy and back. Many kids today use comedians as their chief source of political news. We should not be surprised — but let us hope that today’s comedians have as much a sense of public duty as David Frost did in 1977, even while using his public service interview to revive his own career.
Sometimes free markets work spectacularly, don’t they?
4 Comments | Ethics, Famous quotes, History, Lesson plans, Movies, Presentations, Presidents, Quotes, Turning Points, Watergate scandal | Tagged: Ethics, Famous quotes, History, Lesson plans, Movies, Presentations, Presidents, Quotes, Richard M. Nixon, Watergate scandal | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 