Biodiversity refers to the many species of plants and animals that live and interact in the various biomes of the Earth. As a result of human actions, many of these species are today threatened with extinction. Your task is to select a plant or animal species that is classified as endangered, conduct research, and to present a report on your blog about this endangered species. In your report you must provide information on the following:
Describe the climate and physical terrain of the biome in which this species is found.
Explain how this species interacts with its ecosystem. What does it consume, and what does it produce in this ecosystem? How would the ecosystem be affected if this species became extinct?
Explain what are the main factors threatening this species.
Outline the measures that we (humans) need to take in order to preserve this species.
You can improve the presentation of your report by including pictures of the species in its native habitat and graphs of it population trends, etc. It is important that you reference your source material at the end of your report and provide hyperlinks to web references.
I know many year 10 students are feeling a little uncertain as to where to start with the rather complex topic of societal collapse. Understanding the patterns of history at this level is a little bit like trying to learn a foreign language. At first nothing makes sense. My advice is the same as for learning a foreign language - just get started. The pieces of the puzzle will come together as you conduct your investigations.
So where to start? Well, the task, in a sense, has two intertwined aspects. One is about developing a conceptual understanding of why societies collapse, the other is about understanding the events and causes that led to one particular society collapsing. Here are a few brief suggestions...
I've just started bookmarking sites related to collapse, so you may want to go there. If you do a web search, you will need to be a little more specific. But if you search for "societal collapse" you'll get some interesting results. I have often pointed students in the direction of Wikipedia, not as an inherently reliable source itself, but because it usually offers a useful overview of a topic (much like an encyclopedia would), but more importantly, it will have links to useful internet and print sources of information. This was how, for instance, I discovered articles on the Decline of the Roman Empire and Deforestation during the Roman period. The first article is useful because it outlines many of the different theories as to why Rome collapsed, the second because it provides useful information which would contribute to the environmental causes of the collapse of Rome (which would be very useful to a student studying Rome and using Jared Diamond's five point framework). It's worth noting that both articles are extensively linked and referenced, so providing a pathway to further information. I also found an article harshly critiquing Jared Diamond's "geographical determinism" which may be of interest to anyone looking for alternatives to the framework which we've learned about in class.
So feel assured that for most chosen topics, there is plenty of source material available.
Finally, I would recommend that students go for breadth prior to depth. Get an overview of the topic. Skim read or read the introductions to a few different historians or sources of information first. Try to get a rough idea of the explanations for collapse offered by each author. Jot down some dot points. Then select 2 or 3 of what seem the most reliable sources and explore them in greater depth. If needed you can extract pieces of information from other sources as needed in addition to this.
Remember that this is your report. You need to develop your own conclusions based on the evidence and arguments made by others.
For students in my year 10 GATE Society & Environment class, here is an outline of the task (complete with external links) to the task due on 20 March.
Definition: History provides many examples of societal collapse. Jared Diamond defines collapse as “a drastic decrease in human population size and/or political/economic/social complexity, over a considerable area, for an extended time.” Full scale collapse – evidenced by dramatic loss of complexity and population for a prolonged period – should be distinguished from a minor decline which may involve conquest by another power or short-term decline caused by natural disaster, famine, etc.
Examples: Mycenean Greece, the Greenland Norse, the Mayans, the Western Roman Empire, the Khmer Empire surrounding Angkor, the Han and Tang Dynasties of China, the Olmec, the Mauryan and Gupta states of India, and many more...
Task: Investigate one example of societal collapse in order to better understand the causes of collapse and the modes of societal response. In order to develop a structured understand of the collapse you may want to use Jared Diamond's five point framework for understanding collapse. And you may want to refer to Joseph Tainter's three modes of societal response to collapse. However, even if you use these conceptual frameworks to understand the collapse that you investigate, you do not need to be bound by it (unless you think that the framework is completely applicable), but should investigate the source material carefully to understand the exact causes and modes of societal response in the face of collapse.
Optional extra: In the main part of your report draw comparisons between the collapse of your chosen society and at least one other society. Explain salient similarities and/or differences. Then write a final section to your report which answers the question, “what can contemporary society learn from the collapse of this past society?”. Draw links between collapses of the past and the potential threats of collapse in future. Note that this optional extra section must be done in order to attain level 6!
Format: Type up your conclusions in report format on your blog. You may include tables and pictures if appropriate, and should aim to write between 1200 – 1600 words (no more than an extra 500 words for optional task). (Please note that more words does not mean higher levels!) Please ensure that there is a reference list (bibliography) at the end of the article and that web sources are linked for quick easy access to your internet sources.
Humanity's presence is now felt the world over - even in our deepest oceans. Of the 2/3 of the Earth's surface covered by ocean, only 4% remains unaffected by human actions. These actions include pollution, over-fishing, and climate change. The earth's oceans are in a sorry state and likely to get worse unless we change the ways that we are exploiting the oceans.
Take a look at this article on the BBC and the map of the world's oceans and which areas have been most impacted by human civilization.
On top of that the ABC is reporting on the "great north Pacific plastic soup". Ocean currents are causing the masses of plastic bags and floating detritus to gather in an enormous swirling area in the north Pacific off the coast of California. Those who have seen it have been shocked by its enormity. And scientists believe that because large areas of ocean are not often traversed by ships that there could be other similar plastic soups gathering in the world's oceans. Chilean scientists have received early reports of a similar plastic soup in the Southern Pacific near Antarctica.
In a previous post I discussed how we (as a society) are transitioning from the Industrial Age to the Information Age. This is beginning to become apparent in Australian public schools. Previously students would be directed by a teacher and approved text books as to what it was they needed to learn. The style of learning was rote learning. Students copied information from books or from a blackboard into their paper files using hand writing. These were hallmarks of learning in the industrial era.
We are currently transitioning to the information age. It's still not clear what the typical learning environment or school of the information age will look like, but we are already beginning to get some ideas. Certainly it will involve students using more of their own initiative to search for and select information from the plethora of sources offered by the internet. They will not just be able to copy verbatim from a book or the blackboard, but will have to critically evaluate the accuracy of information first. And when they record information, it won't just be ink on paper, but will be digital. This means that they will be able to use graphics, videos, and audio, as well as typed text to produce their own knowledge.
But where will they record this information?
I believe that student blogs will be one of the main repositories of student work and knowledge. Using blogs, students will be able to demonstrate to themselves and others how their learning has progressed and matured over time.
Blogs have many advantages to previous forms of student knowledge repositories (e.g.: the old lever arch file). Firstly they can easily be personalised (e.g.: the style and presentation of the blog can be customized to the student's personal preference). This is important because I believe that people need to feel a sense of ownership and take pride in their work.
One of the greatest advantages of blogs is that they are publicly available. This means that parents, teachers and friends can review student progress. Students can learn from one another by reading each other's blogs. And blogs can easily link to source information thereby providing a trail to the source of information. So blogs have many advantages and I'm now encouraging my students to start their own blogs and to record some of what they have learned and their assessments online on their blogs.
Here is a video explaining just what blogs are and how people can use them to communicate:
If you'd like to start your own blog you can go over to Blogger or Wordpress to start your own. Don't forget to include links to the blogs of your friends and classmates. In this way you'll create a community of bloggers who are sharing what they learn.
If you're a frequent web surfer like me, you'll inevitably come across the problem of where to save all the great links you come across. If you save them using your web browser's bookmarks, you'll soon find these bookmarks becoming cluttered and disorganised. And then if you're away from your computer you don't have access to them. There has to be a better way to organise your favourite links, right?
There is, and it's called social bookmarking. There are several sites sites (web applications) that offer this social bookmarking service. These social bookmarking sites allow you to save your favourite links and to organise them use tags. The reason they are social is because they are publicly available. This means you can access them when you're away from your computer, and so can your friends and colleagues.
You will notice in there is a block in the right hand side of this blog titled "my delicious links". This contains tags of sites that I've favourited using the Delicious social bookmarking service. You can also check out my bookmarks by going here. I'm encouraging all my students to use social bookmarking as a way of keeping track of useful and interesting sites they have visited. To find out more about social bookmarking and how to get started with Delicious, watch this excellent video from Common Craft first:
Now you know a bit about what Web 2.0 is, we can take another step. Important technological innovations in the past have changed the way that we think about the world and ourselves, and it has changed human social behaviour. For instance, the development of agriculture and domestication of animals allowed humans to produce more food, and this in turn caused a division of labour and the creation of larger settlements including towns and cities. The development of transoceanic shipping allowed people to move across the world and people from different cultures to come into contact and to trade with one another.
Today there are many technological innovations shaping our world and society. One of them are a group of technologies collectively referred to as Web 2.0. These are principally social networking technologies. For the first time in history we can quickly and easily connect with people anywhere in the world. For instance, businesses are finding customers in other parts of the world. Some people are even finding their ideal marriage partner from other parts of the world using Web 2.0 technologies to connect.
To find out more about social networking using Web 2.0 technologies and what this means to people, watch this video brought to you by Common Craft:
Most teenagers these days are very familiar with a variety of Web 2.0 applications which they use every day. But they may not be aware that these applications are amongst a new generation of web applications collectively referred to as "Web 2.0".
So what is Web 2.0?
Well, in the beginning, the World Wide Web (or just "web" for short), was a one way street. People, who usually possessed specialist programming skills constructed their web pages in HTML (hyper-text markup language) and posted them on their web servers. It was a one-way form of communication. Those who owned a web server could communicate with the rest of the world, but not the other way around.
Around 2003/2004 a new generation of web applications began to be developed (based on technologies like AJAX) that allowed web users to interact more easily and in a larger variety of ways with the site. This facilitated greater information sharing and communication. Sites like Wikipedia and Flickr are considered to be "Web 2.0" because the information on these sites was put their by the sites users, not only by the sites owners. It's easy to forget that some of the most popular Web 2.0 sites today - like MySpace and Facebook - are less than five years old!
Anyway, others can explain Web 2.0 better than I can, so here are a couple of videos (from the most successful Web 2.0 video sharing site YouTube) that will explain the concept in more detail.
Firstly, a video to give a clear definition from Utech:
Next a more animated video to give you a feel for what Web 2.0 is - but pay attention or you'll miss it!
I want to start 2008 by explaining a rather complicated historical concept. This is the notion of "ages" or "eras". An age or era is a period in human history characterized by broad categories of lifestyle, culture and technology. Whilst it's a rather simplistic way of categorizing history, we can think of history as having five major eras (so far!).
The Prehistoric Era The Prehistoric Era is so named because it was the era prior to the human invention of writing. Therefore there was no history recorded in writing (although it's important to remember that prehistoric tribes and communities did have oral histories - that is, that remembered their local histories and spread them from one generation to the next through telling stories orally). In this era technology was still very simple. Humans used stones, bones and other naturally occurring products as tools. There were no domesticated animals or crops. People lived in small bands or tribes and were hunters and gatherers. This means they lived directly off the land. When the food and water supply in one area depleted, they moved on to another area. The main source of energy for these people was food and human muscle.
The Ancient Era This is the era when agriculture began to be adopted on a large scale by many societies. Some of the earliest agricultural societies occurred in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), the Indus Valley (modern Pakistan), the Ganges Valley (modern northern India), central China, the Aztec in central America, and around the Mediterranean, notably Greece and Rome (modern Italy). Farming allowed human communities to store food (known as a surplus). This meant also that not everyone needed to be involved in food production and allowed for some people to pursue specialized trades like for instance blacksmiths that made metal products. Early agricultural societies were responsible for the earliest forms of writing, and hence we have some written records from these ancient peoples.
Because agricultural societies had a surplus of food and specialization of labour, many people chose to settle in ever enlarging cities. These cities were the first in the world, but were not as big as today's metropolises. Because ancient people had access to and were able to work out how to domesticate certain animals (e.g.: horses, cows, chickens, pigs) and crops (e.g.: wheat, rice, barley, olives, potatoes, apples) they were able to increase the food supply and use animal power to increase their productivity. A horse or ox could plough more fields more quickly than a man. So animal power became more important than human power alone.
Industrial Era The Industrial Era began in northern Europe in the late 18th Century. It was brought about by the invention of machines and in particular the steam engine. The steam engine allowed humans to harness enormous amounts of energy deposited in coal to be used to power machines in factories that could produce far greater quantities of goods than ever before. Later the internal combustion engine, jet engine and nuclear reactor allowed humans to convert the energy in oil and uranium to be used to power larger machines, and to produce electricity. This much greater degree of production of food and goods led to an exponential increase in the human population. There was greater specialization of the work force and more urbanization (meaning more and more people came to work in cities in factories and stores instead of being farmers).
Where are we now? Currently we are living on the fuzzy boundary between two ages: the end of the industrial age and the beginning of the Information Age. The Information Age is still in formation so it's still not too easy to know what it will look like. But we can say a few things about it. Increasing use of complex technology is transforming society and leading to even greater specialization of the work force. Many of the jobs that are in demand today didn't even exist 30 or 40 years ago (e.g.: computer programmers, medical imagers, nanotech engineers, futures traders). Society is more complex than ever before. The Information Era is also the era of globalization. Instantaneous and ubiquitous communications to any part of the world is now available for virtually no cost via the internet (including VoIP telephony, email, instant messaging, teleconferencing).
Yet for the most part we're still using the same forms of energy. But this cannot continue for too long because we will soon run out of oil, then uranium, then coal. Already many societies are investing more in the production of renewable forms of energy. Indeed, renewable forms of energy will replace the non-renewable sources of energy used during the industrial era.
What does this mean to me? Well, you are living at a time of unprecedented technological change. There are many perils facing human civilization because the current world population cannot be sustained by the earth's limited resources. Pollution, resource depletion and climate change threaten the way we live and the prosperity we enjoy. Tough decisions and clever solutions are needed for us to continue living this way. But if we understand how we got here, and the nature of the challenges we face, we will be able to make the changes necessary to live in harmony with the earth and each other. Are you ready for this challenge?
I am a teacher in Perth, Western Australia and I've started this blog in order to start a conversation and share ideas with my students and anyone else out there that shares an interest in topics like climate change, peak oil & resource depletion, world history, alternative energy, internet and the WWW, global culture, and the changing patterns of work as we arrive at the threshold of either the Infromation Age or a New Dark Age.
