I’m currently reading Sam Wineburg’s pivotal volume – Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past. The book looks at traditional views of how history is and has been taught, but ultimately at what history instruction has the potential to be – a vehicle for fostering high-level critical thinking skills and establishing a strong sense of personal place in the story of humanity. Quoting Wineburg from the introduction to the book:

The essays in this book begin with the basic assumption that history teaches us a way to make choices, to balance opinions, to tell stories, and to become uneasy—when necessary—about the stories we tell.

Undoubtedly these are invaluable skills that we would like for all students to possess.

I’m going to be sharing my thoughts on this volume as I read it and would welcome thoughts from others in the Presidential Timeline community (if you’ve somehow happened upon this blog and find something of value here, consider yourself to be part of this community). Keep in mind that all of this comes from a guy whose background consists of undergraduate and graduate study in the natural sciences, 11 years teaching secondary level physics, 7 years developing educational applications, mostly in math, computer science, and the natural sciences – seemingly somewhat dubious qualifications for my current area of focus, the Presidential Timeline project.

I am delighted to announce that we have added several hundred new objects to the Presidential Timeline.

Initial additions were made to the Carter timelines, many of them related to the Iran hostage crisis, but also including some others from Early Life and Career. These objects were added entirely “by hand” which took somewhere in the vicinity of 20 to 30 minutes each (and that does refer to EACH page of a multipage document).

For some time, we have been working on a tool (a php application, for those who care) to automate some of this process. We first tried the tool with 78 new images and 15 new audio files for the FDR timeline, then followed up by adding 119 objects (a total of 380 pages) to the Ford timelines.

The tool worked quite well, doing its part of the processing at the rate of about 10 seconds per page. Keep in mind that there are SEVEN different versions of each page/image in the system – two different sizes of thumbnails, two different sizes of images in the Flash version, and three different sizes of images in the html version. All told, it took about 15 hours to add these objects to the timeline. (There’s more work beyond that which the tool accomplishes.)

The bottom line is that we now have a total of 944 objects on the Presidential Timeline, up by 226 since the initial rollout (718 objects)!