Hi, again. It’s me, Dylan.

Today, I’m going to be talking about our latest project, How It Started/How It’s Going. It was a really cool project and I enjoyed going back to humanities after a quarter of Scimatics and French. Not to say I didn’t enjoy Scimatics – I did – but I found what we learned about Medieval and Renaissance times to be quite intriguing, which brings me to the start of the project.

The start of the project

On the first day of the project, we were given exactly eight minutes to create a meme that would show how we were in September at the start of the school year and how we were at the time of making the meme. I didn’t realize the potential of what I could do with this and chose a boring picture of myself taken around the time where school started and a picture of me from the day before I made the meme. Now, this whole idea of making a piece of art that would show “how it started” and “how it’s going” was the main idea that we would focus on throughout the project. In this project, our driving question was “What can we learn from the past and how does that influence us today?”.

We also learned about worldview and how it changed from Medieval times to now and how that is represented in their art. We learned about the seven aspects of worldview: time, society, beliefs, geography, knowledge, economy, and values. We also studied the story mountain and story spine. After we made our memes we also made a collage that would represent how our worldview had changed from when we were born to today. Here is mine:

This collage shows how things like travelling to other countries and acting have been extremely influential on my current worldview.

Cornell notes

During this project, we learned about a style of note taking called Cornell notes. It is a style of note taking where you take abbreviated notes about what you are studying. You also write down some cues (questions, main ideas) about what you are studying. After you take all your notes, you summarize and reflect about everything you learned. This helps you commit everything to memory.

History test

After we made our collages, we had a history test, which, despite not being as interesting, was quite fun. I hadn’t had a normal test in a while, so it was cool to have one again (I never thought I would be genuinely happy about having a test). For our history test, we wrote about how a historical event had influenced an aspect of our worldview. I wrote about the first mechanical clock and the first printing press. The reason the mechanical clock was so important was that before its invention, everything was unscheduled. Peasants worked on fields all day and didn’t get paid. This meant that if they started working in their field late, they would get less food. The clock changed this, meaning peasants would know when it was a good time to get up to work on their field and when they should go home. I also somehow found a way to connect the invention of the mechanical clock to the world having lower cancer rates: (excerpt from my history test) “Another use for this style of measuring time is timers. Timers help with electronics and are used in stoves and microwaves. If we didn’t have timers in these, we’d have to watch our food cook and try to see through the metal mesh over the microwave. This metal mesh blocks microwaves, a form of radiation, from entering our body. Prolonged exposure to radiation can lead to an increased risk of cancer. If we had to watch our food in the microwave, instead of using a timer, this mesh most likely wouldn’t be applied to the doors of microwaves, letting the radiation through. So if you think about it, without this invention, cancer rates would probably be higher!”.

I focused mainly on the invention and popularity of the mechanical clock, and I now realize that it would have been a better idea to only write about the clock and not incorporate the printing press, because I would probably have had more time to go in-depth about the clock.

We were also allowed to bring our Cornell notes into the test but not the actual textbook pages. We were told we were allowed to do this, which made us focus a lot more on taking notes.

Final memes

A few days after the test, we were put into groups that would focus on a certain aspect of worldview. We were mainly placed into groups based on what aspect of worldview we wrote about in our test. I was put into the time group. We took what we knew about the story spine, found pictures on Google Arts and Culture and made the pictures into a ridiculous Keynote presentation story about time. We talked about a fictional character who studied time and was ridiculed for his studies, but then build a giant clock on an elephant and then everyone liked him. This was around the time when we waded into our goal for the project, which I have yet to mention. We needed to make a virtual museum about worldview.

Now, for this museum, we would be finding a picture we used in our Keynote presentation and editing it to show how the worldview of people in Medieval and/or Renaissance times and how my worldview and the western worldview have changed from then to today. Each member of every group would make one of these memes and they would all relate to the aspect of worldview they were focusing on. For my meme, I chose the painting “Saint Jerome In His Cell”. We also took a group picture that would mimic a picture from the Renaissance or Medieval times which reflected on our aspect of worldview.

To make the meme, we used SuperimposeX, a program I was familiar with, since I had spent some time playing with the app prior to us starting this project. We had to superimpose ourselves into our Medieval/Renaissance painting, and we had to change some things about the painting. Here is my finalized meme (all of the images used that were not taken by me were public domain):

The first thing you will probably notice is how I switched the man in the painting’s face out for my own. This was to show how the right side is the side which represents my worldview. I added tools to my hands and a clock in front of me to represent the invention of the mechanical clock. It also represents how we are still interested in learning about ancient ways of telling time. I switched the animals in the foreground out for my cat Percival, a briefcase and a stack of dirty dishes. This represents how in Medieval and Renaissance times, people used to get up early to take care of their animals and things on their field. Today, we get up early to go to work, take care of our pets, and clean up around the house. In the Renaissance clocks were very expensive, making them symbols of people’s status, similar to today’s iPhone. I added a phone behind the clock to show this. I edited a sandwich onto the table where there the clock is sitting on to show how the clock let peasants know when to start working on their field, therefore giving them the opportunity to get more food. Something I am really proud of is how I edited the Vancouver cityscape out the window. Having a modern day skyline in the window of a Renaissance painting represents the change in time between these two eras. I am not proud of how long it took me to realize how to move the picture of the skyline down a layer (around twenty minutes of me being very tired and confused, only to realize that all I needed to do was drag the layer down).

Final goal

We also used Book Creator to make a book containing all of our collages and a little statement about them. Here is the book if you want to check it out:

 

Now this brings us to the final goal of our project: our virtual art gallery. We used a program called Artsteps, used to create virtual museum/art galleries. We had eight rooms, each for a different aspect of worldview, and one as the entrance. The entrance room also contained all of our group photos that mimicked a Medieval/Renaissance photos. In each room, we had all of our memes with matching picture frames.

I also haven’t mentioned that in our worldview aspect groups, we were all given roles. I chose to me the writer for the time group. This meant that I had the responsibility of writing the guided tour of our room. A few days before the live launch of the project, we were all grouped together by role, and we had to write a script for the launch. We talked about how we contributed to our groups and all the things we learned.

We launched the museum on a zoom call and besides a few cut-outs, I’d say it went quite well. I am very proud of all the work I did for this project and I feel like I learned a ton.

Click here if you want to take a look around the museum.

Answering the driving question

It’s gotten to the end of this blog post, which means it’s time to answer the driving question: What can we learn from the past, and how can that influence us today?

We can learn a lot from the past. We can learn about ancient societies and about how some of the world’s oldest technologies emerged. But that’s obvious and we can learn about so many other things, most not what you would first expect. As I have been talking about throughout this post, we can learn about the worldview of ancient people, and how that influenced society today. We can learn about how historically significant events changed how we view the world and we can learn about how everything we believe in, value, and know about has roots somewhere in the past.

I hope you enjoyed all 1756 words of this blog post and I’ll see you next time!

Bye,

Dylan.