Tag: ebook

The Fear Factor

Hello my dear readers,

I write to inform you of the developments from my most recent Humanities project, Fear Factor. This project has the driving question of How has fear been used as a political, defensive, and cultural tool to shape our society?, and  the content was mainly surrounding the Cold War. I really enjoyed that the topics of this class were a continuation on from the knowledge we built in our Manhattan project project recently. Now I am able to have a very cohesive timeline in my head of the significant events from those eras and have a more extensive understanding of the context involved. Fear obviously also played the part in the Manhattan Project and the droppings of the bomb so it it was really interesting to be able to focus on fear going forward. 

Before I get into my reflections and learnings, here’s a brief overview of the project. Over the course of the project we were learning to build a Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) system using the principles of a “Zettlekasten”. And you may be thinking, “What the heck is a Zettlekasten?!”, and the short answer is simple, a collection of notes and information, ranging from fleeting notes to profound permanent ideas linked to other knowledge. I’ll talk more about my Zettlekasten later. We also read 2 books over the course of the project, Hiroshima by John Hersey and Fallout by Todd Strasser. These books, on top of many other forms of media, were just some of the resources we analyzed to gain knowledge for our final product. The specifics of the final product were up to us, but the main idea was to create and answer a personal inquiry question on some aspect of the Cold War and fear. So now that you get a bit of an idea of the project, lets talk more in depth about what I did and what I learned.

Zettlekasten-ing

So let’s talk about my Zettlekasten and PKM. At first the Zettlekasten style of note taking was a lot to get used to, but now I really love how I’ve been able to organize and link my notes. I found I have also been more engaged in the class material because I have been taking more time outside of school to synthesize my notes and use my own words to construct more rounded ideas about certain topics or events. I also found myself linking to more literature while researching. As new connections form, I now have an easy way to jot down an idea in a place where I know I will be able to go back and make something more out of it. Overall super excited to continue to use my Zettlekasten for upcoming projects!

Agriculture in the Cold War

After watching episode 2 of Turning Point: The Bomb and The Cold War, I was incredibly intrigued by the mention of Kulaks and Soviet farming. I previously have read Anna Karenina and it is one of my favourite books so I immediately connected the book as another piece of literature that I can drawn to understand the life of farmers in Soviet countries. Originally I had planned on doing my final product about “othering” and propaganda in America about the Japanese, but after learning more about agriculture during the Cold War, I decided that it was worth my time to redo everything and switch to a topic that I was genuinely interested in! 

My personal inquiry question became; “How did agriculture and food security change and cause fear in the Cold War?”. The people who will want to read this could be anyone interested in agriculture or the Cold War, my teachers, peers, and family. I want to engage my audience by creating emotional connections by humanizing complex issues, having an interesting and engaging plot, and including my research and answer to my question. I ended up wanting to write two fictional short stories about two families. One family in America during the Green Revolution during the Cold War, and one Soviet farmer family. At first I had a creative burst and was able to get one of the stories drafted quite quickly, but as the deadline drew closer, I realized that trying to write a short book in just two weeks is not a lot of time. But after a lot of creative thinking, peer critique, and writers block, I came up with the final story that I have now. I’ll link it below and feel free to give it a read. It’s not too long.

 

Conclusion

Throughout the course of this project I noticed major growth for me in my note-making and knowledge management skills. My Zettlekasten and new ways of organizing knowledge are definitely my biggest take-aways from this project and I am now looking to beef-up my notes for all my other classes so I can have something to look back on easily for information that I have gathered. Thank you for taking the time to read my blog post and check out the book if you haven’t already!

As Always,

Brooke

The Fallout

“I am grateful to the Executive Committee for this chance to talk to you. I should like to talk tonight — if some of you have long memories perhaps you will regard it as justified — as a fellow scientist, and at least as a fellow worrier about the fix we are in. I do not have anything very radical to say, or anything that will strike most of you with a great flash of enlightenment.”

The quote above is the beginning to J. Robert Oppenheimer’s speech to the Association of Los Alamos Scientists on November 2, 1945. I chose to start the post with this speech because; 1. We did an analysis of this speech as part of this project, and 2. I think the last sentence of the quote is a really funny way to start my little blog post. 

This project was based around one of the most important projects in history, The Manhattan Project. Now I wont go into depth about what the Manhattan project is for those who don’t know, because the final product for this is an interactive book about the manhattan project!!

Field study!!

Even though it is called the “Manhattan “project, it did not take place in Manhattan. The project was based in Los Alamos, New Mexico, a town that was constructed specifically for the Manhattan Project. Through PLP we got the wonderful chance to do a field study and go to New Mexico to do hands-on learning about the project.

It was amazing to be able to visit historical sites around New Mexico and get to have tours of various museums from some very interesting tour guides. Usually our guides had some personal connection to the museums like working for the Air Force in the past or having spouses and relatives working in nuclear science labs. This made our tours more captivating because our knowledgeable guides always had some facts that you cant find on the plaques.

Capturing in The Field 

Before leaving for New Mexico, we set out plans and to-do’s with our group of where the field team, Declan and I, should film, get interviews, and collect information.

With our little microphone in hand, we filmed up a storm.

Après Field Study – Piecing the book together

When we returned home from New Mexico, our group got back together to check in on what each side had completed. Our home team had already started writing up the chapters and getting a layout of the book. I was the art director for our book and had design ideas right from the get-go of what aesthetic to have, and some page layouts. I worked with Arianne, our lead graphic designer, to crank out some sample pages that we could duplicate and use for each chapter. Our chapters were laid out, chronologically over the time of the Manhattan Project, and we decided to have the first few chapters in a lighter colour palette and then switch to darker tones after the chapter about the Trinity Test to reflect the sombre feelings of what happened after the bombs were dropped. We worked as a team to divide up all the chapters to do revisions and citations and input some amazing videos done by our audio/video people. We spent a lot of time coming up with a thesis around the historical significance of the Manhattan project. We have worked with historical significance before and past projects, so it was not a concept we were unfamiliar with. It was incredibly difficult to have to come up with our thesis towards the end of the book because then we had to go back and change/edit what we had already written to ensure it met the thesis. It would’ve been much easier to do it at the beginning before starting to write any of the chapters or collecting media in the field, but it was a good way to challenge ourselves in the end when we were already crunching to finish the book.

Finally, after a lot of hard work and time spent outside of class, we completed the book. I suggest you take the time to read it through fully and watch all the videos to get the full sense of the story we are trying to tell. I hope you enjoy.

*technical difficulties we cannot currently upload the book due to file size issues. Will get this fixed ASAP!!*

Conclusion 

This project was a lot of fun to work on, and also very serious. I am so thankful for the opportunity to be able to go to New Mexico and touch history in ways that I wouldn’t have been able to without the PLP program. We have worked with historical significance in the past, but this project put it in a new light that was really interesting to work with and I enjoyed working on it. Thank you for reading.

As Always, Brooke.

Insert Name Here – Worldview in Poetry

Salutations! I am back with a very exciting humanities blog post. This project was called “Working With Words” and its all about poetry. Now you may have remembered that i actually did a blog post on poetry in grade 8 for the student blogging challenge -> A Dive Into Literature – Poetry, and if you read that post you would already know that I am a big poetry fan. So lets find out what this project was all about!

The Driving Question

The driving question for this project was “How might I construct text that shows who I am right now?”, and the answer is… through using different types of poetry! This project taught us how to find creativity and joy in poetry, comprehend poetry to make meaning, and how to use creativity, joy, and meaning to create effective texts. I chose to try and improve myself in the competency of “Positive personal and cultural identity” because I felt that it was the perfect competency for a poetry book about my worldview. Wait did I just say worldview? Yup! This project also brought back the idea of world view and its 7 different aspects (time, geography, beliefs, economy, knowledge, society, and values). And overall I think that I did a great job at demonstrating and growing in the area of personal and cultural awareness throughout this short project, so keep an eye out while reading my eBook and see if you think I did :).

The Project

Of course a lot of people do not know much of the technical side of poetry so we started off with building our knowledge on poetry terminology. Over the course of the project we would be learning 18 new vocabulary words and creating 9 different types of poems. With each new term  came a new activity and a lot of practise analyzing and presenting poems. Here are some of the poetry terms that we learned;

And as we were starting to make all of these poems, we had to create a place to put them all… 

A super duper amazing eBook! The eBook would display all of our poems and include texts and audio messages to complement each one. We also had a bio page where we have an about me video and link to this wonderful blog that you are currently on. Ok enough of this, I think the best way to learn about what we did in this project would be to just look at my book! Here it is;

Conclusion 

The final showcase of this project will be a live-streamed “coffee house” performance that we are putting on tomorrow night at school. I am not entirely sure what it consists of yet but I’m sure it will be quite entertaining! Overall i think that this was my favourite humanities project that we have done and I am hopeful that this will motivate me to write poetry more often. I think that it was at times a little challenging to think about how to put my worldview into words but i think that I got the hang of it by the end. I am very proud of the work that I did in this project and hopefully we can use poetry in another project soon!

Thanks for reading!

As always, Brooke.