The Birth of ReligionWe used to think agriculture gave rise to cities and later to writing, art, and religion. Now the world’s oldest temple suggests the urge to worship sparked civilization.
Group items matching
in title, tags, annotations or url
18More
Göbekli Tepe - Pictures, More From National Geographic Magazine - 67 views
-
Before them are dozens of massive stone pillars arranged into a set of rings, one mashed up against the next. Known as Göbekli Tepe (pronounced Guh-behk-LEE TEH-peh), the site is vaguely reminiscent of Stonehenge, except that Göbekli Tepe was built much earlier and is made not from roughly hewn blocks but from cleanly carved limestone pillars splashed with bas-reliefs of animals—a cavalcade of gazelles, snakes, foxes, scorpions, and ferocious wild boars. The assemblage was built some 11,600 years ago, seven millennia before the Great Pyramid of Giza. It contains the oldest known temple. Indeed, Göbekli Tepe is the oldest known example of monumental architecture—the first structure human beings put together that was bigger and more complicated than a hut. When these pillars were erected, so far as we know, nothing of comparable scale existed in the world.
-
At the time of Göbekli Tepe's construction much of the human race lived in small nomadic bands that survived by foraging for plants and hunting wild animals. Construction of the site would have required more people coming together in one place than had likely occurred before. Amazingly, the temple's builders were able to cut, shape, and transport 16-ton stones hundreds of feet despite having no wheels or beasts of burden. The pilgrims who came to Göbekli Tepe lived in a world without writing, metal, or pottery; to those approaching the temple from below, its pillars must have loomed overhead like rigid giants, the animals on the stones shivering in the firelight—emissaries from a spiritual world that the human mind may have only begun to envision.
- ...15 more annotations...
-
Archaeologists are still excavating Göbekli Tepe and debating its meaning. What they do know is that the site is the most significant in a volley of unexpected findings that have overturned earlier ideas about our species' deep past. Just 20 years ago most researchers believed they knew the time, place, and rough sequence of the Neolithic Revolution—the critical transition that resulted in the birth of agriculture, taking Homo sapiens from scattered groups of hunter-gatherers to farming villages and from there to technologically sophisticated societies with great temples and towers and kings and priests who directed the labor of their subjects and recorded their feats in written form. But in recent years multiple new discoveries, Göbekli Tepe preeminent among them, have begun forcing archaeologists to reconsider. At first the Neolithic Revolution was viewed as a single event—a sudden flash of genius—that occurred in a single location, Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now southern Iraq, then spread to India, Europe, and beyond. Most archaeologists believed this sudden blossoming of civilization was driven largely by environmental changes: a gradual warming as the Ice Age ended that allowed some people to begin cultivating plants and herding animals in abundance. The new research suggests that the "revolution" was actually carried out by many hands across a huge area and over thousands of years. And it may have been driven not by the environment but by something else entirely.
-
Most of the world's great religious centers, past and present, have been destinations for pilgrimages
-
Göbekli Tepe may be the first of all of them, the beginning of a pattern. What it suggests, at least to the archaeologists working there, is that the human sense of the sacred—and the human love of a good spectacle—may have given rise to civilization itself.
-
n the 1960s archaeologists from the University of Chicago had surveyed the region and concluded that Göbekli Tepe was of little interest. Disturbance was evident at the top of the hill, but they attributed it to the activities of a Byzantine-era military outpo
-
To Schmidt, the T-shaped pillars are stylized human beings, an idea bolstered by the carved arms that angle from the "shoulders" of some pillars, hands reaching toward their loincloth-draped bellies. The stones face the center of the circle—as at "a meeting or dance," Schmidt says—a representation, perhaps, of a religious ritual. As for the prancing, leaping animals on the figures, he noted that they are mostly deadly creatures: stinging scorpions, charging boars, ferocious lions. The figures represented by the pillars may be guarded by them, or appeasing them, or incorporating them as totems.
-
nches below the surface the team struck an elaborately fashioned stone. Then another, and another—a ring of standing pillars.
-
Geomagnetic surveys in 2003 revealed at least 20 rings piled together, higgledy-piggledy, under the earth.
-
he pillars were big—the tallest are 18 feet in height and weigh 16 tons. Swarming over their surfaces was a menagerie of animal bas-reliefs, each in a different style, some roughly rendered, a few as refined and symbolic as Byzantine art.
-
The circles follow a common design. All are made from limestone pillars shaped like giant spikes or capital T's.
-
They hadn't yet mastered engineering." Knoll speculated that the pillars may have been propped up, perhaps by wooden posts.
-
Within minutes of getting there," Schmidt says, he realized that he was looking at a place where scores or even hundreds of people had worked in millennia past.
-
Puzzle piled upon puzzle as the excavation continued. For reasons yet unknown, the rings at Göbekli Tepe seem to have regularly lost their power, or at least their charm. Every few decades people buried the pillars and put up new stones—a second, smaller ring, inside the first.
-
Finally the effort seems to have petered out altogether by 8200 B.C. Göbekli Tepe was all fall and no rise.
Persuasion Map - 89 views
9More
Reading Strategies for 'Informational Text' - NYTimes.com - 172 views
learning.blogs.nytimes.com/...ategies-for-informational-text
common core standards CCSS reading teaching education resources
shared by Amy Roediger on 02 Aug 12
- No Cached
Annette Yono liked it
-
Four Corners and Anticipation Guides:Both of these techniques “activate schema” by asking students to react in some way to a series of controversial statements about a topic they are about to study. In Four Corners, students move around the room to show their degree of agreement or disagreement with various statements — about, for instance, the health risks of tanning, or the purpose of college, or dystopian teen literature. An anticipation guide does the same thing, though generally students simply react in writing to a list of statements on a handout. In this warm-up to a lesson on some of the controversies currently raging over school reform, students can use the statements we provide in either of these ways.
-
Gallery Walks:A rich way to build background on a topic at the beginning of a unit (or showcase learning at the end), Gallery Walks for this purpose are usually teacher-created collections of images, articles, maps, quotations, graphs and other written and visual texts that can immerse students in information about a broad subject. Students circulate through the gallery, reading, writing and talking about what they see.
- ...4 more annotations...
-
Making Text-to-Text/Text-to-Self/Text-to-World connectionsCharting Debatable IssuesListing Facts/Questions/ResponsesIdentifying Cause and EffectSupporting Opinions With FactsTracking The Five W’s and an HIdentifying Multiple Points of ViewIdentifying a Problem and SolutionComparing With a Venn Diagram
-
The One-Pager:Almost any student can find a “way in” with this strategy, which involves reacting to a text by creating one page that shows an illustration, question and quote that sum up some key aspect of what a student learned.
-
“Popcorn Reads”:Invite students to choose significant words, phrases or whole sentences from a text or texts to read aloud in random fashion, without explanation. Though this may sound pointless until you try it, it is an excellent way for students to “hear” some of the high points or themes of a text emerge, and has the added benefit of being an activity any reader can participate in easily.
-
Illustrations:Have students create illustrations for texts they’re reading, either in the margins as they go along, or after they’ve finished. The point of the exercise is not, of course, to create beautiful drawings, but to help them understand and retain the information they learn.
1More
Education: Competition vs Collaboration - 35 views
-
In a time where much of the debate around education is linked to performance on national and international assessments such as PISA, TIMMS, PIRLS and in Australia, NAPLAN combined with calls for market-driven reforms there is a danger that a climate of competition between schools and systems will grow.
15More
Change and why we all see it differently - The Learner's Way - 14 views
-
the rise of the ‘gig’ economy where freelance and short term contract work is common and training and retraining for new projects is the norm
-
If the young people of today are to thrive beyond the walls of the classroom they will need to be able to cope with a world characterised by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.
- ...11 more annotations...
-
there are broad typologies which emerge along a continuum from those who actively seek to change to those who actively resist it.
-
There are those who publicly embrace the change but in the privacy of the classroom continue as they have always done
-
“A person’s sense of identity is partly determined by his or her values, which can mesh or clash with organizational values”
-
Change is always complicated. A the least it involves people, personalities, cultures, beliefs, values, emotions and identity.
-
If the young people of today are to thrive beyond the walls of the classroom they will need to be able to cope with a world characterised by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. The children of todays Kindergarten will enter the workplace in the fourth-decade of the 21st Century. We debate the merits of teaching 21st Century Skills and what they might be while teaching children who have lived their entire lives in that very century. The challenge is how will schools and individual teachers respond to this drive for urgent change.
1More
Reading and Learning - 19 views
-
"Reading and learning seem to go together, but a shift in reading habits is changing the way we consume information and changing our relationship with a book. Should schools embrace this change, or celebrate a traditional model of reading and paper books? How are books being used in today's classrooms, and how could they be used better? What are the reading habits of teachers and how do educators use books to improve their teaching?"
27More
Contemplating the consequences of Constructivism - The Learner's Way - 21 views
-
learning is a process which occurs within the mind of the individual as they process stimuli arriving from their sensory buffer from their environment (broadly speaking), into working memory and onward into long-term memory.
-
self-guided learning or self-initiated learning
-
what is significant
- ...11 more annotations...
-
independent practice
-
the research on what produces effective learning supports this
-
This desire is evident when we expect our learners to be scientists, historians, geographers, researchers and problem solvers/finders.
-
We teach the skills of inquiry, problem solving and experimentation and then provide opportunities for independent practice.
-
we have previously instructed them in
-
The gradual release of responsibility model of instruction suggests that cognitive work should shift slowly and intentionally from teacher modeling, to joint responsibility between teachers and students, to independent practice and application by the learner
-
It is not always the case that learning is best served when the process begins with direct instruction.
-
Schools provide a rich environment within which such learning may occur
-
best model can be to begin with an independent exploration of new content even when this produces failure
-
schools maximise their impact on the learning that occurs
-
constructivism urges teachers to ensure that the learner is at least as involved in the process as their teachers are
-
Constructivism is one of those ideas we throw around in educational circles without stopping to think about what we mean by it. They are the terms that have multiple meanings, are at once highly technical and common usage and are likely to cause debate and disagreements. Constructivism in particular carries a quantity of baggage with it. It is a term that is appropriated by supporters of educational approaches that are in stark contrast to the opposing view; constructivism vs didactic methods or direct instruction. The question is what are the origins of constructivism and does a belief in this as an approach to understanding learning necessitate an abandonment of direct instruction or is this a false dichotomy?
3More
Debate on playtime's value grows as more states fund preschool - washingtonpost.com - 6 views
-
Play advocates welcome the dollars but worry that politicians eager for tangible returns on taxpayers' investment in early education, and school officials eager for better test scores, will push for more direct instruction, an efficient way to get short-term gains in literacy and math.
84More
Where Everybody Knows Your (Screen) Name: Online Games as "Third Places" - 52 views
-
-
"bowling alone" hypothesis (Putnam, 2000), which suggests that media are displacing crucial civic and social institutions
-
- ...80 more annotations...
-
According to Putnam, time spent with relatively passive and disengaging media has come at the expense of time spent on vital community-building activities.
-
A core problem on both sides of the debate is an underlying assumption that all Internet use is more or less equivalent
-
-
It would be more plausible and empirically rigorous, then, to consider how specific forms of Internet activity impact civic and social engagement as a result of their particular underlying social architectures
-
combining conclusions from two different lines of MMO research conducted from two different perspectives—one from a media effects approach, the other from a sociocultural perspective on cognition and learning.
-
By providing spaces for social interaction and relationships beyond the workplace and home, MMOs have the capacity to function as one form of a new "third place" for informal sociability much like the pubs, coffee shops, and other hangouts of old.
-
They are known for their peculiar combination of designed "escapist fantasy" and emergent "social realism"
-
from two research projects: one an examination of the media effects of MMOs, the other an ethnographic study of cognition and culture in such contexts.
-
the assumption that the most fruitful advances are sometimes made when congruent findings are discovered through disparate means
-
-
as a way to tease out what happens in the virtual setting of the game and how the people involved consider their own activities, the activities of others, and the contexts in which those activities takes place
-
a reasonable level of generalizability (random assignment to condition in the first study) and contextualization (ethnographic description of existing in-game social networks and practices in the second)
-
-
brick-and-mortar "third places" in America where individuals can gather to socialize informally beyond the workplace and home
-
virtual environments have the potential to function as new (albeit digitally mediated) third places similar to pubs, coffee shops, and other hangouts.
-
the default assumption is that no one person is compelled to participate legally, financially, or otherwise.
-
Unless one transforms the virtual world of the game into a workplace (e.g., by taking on gainful employment as a virtual currency "farmer" for example, Dibbell, 2006; Steinkuehler, 2006a) or enters into such agreement, no one person is obligated to log in
-
Yee's (2006) interviews also reveal that individuals who game with romantic partners or family find that such joint engagement in the "other world" of MMOs allows them to redefine the nature and boundaries of their offline relationships, often in more equitable terms than what may be possible in day-to-day offline life
-
the relationships that play-partners have with one another offline are often "leveled" within the online world
-
appeal to people in part because they represent meritocracies otherwise unavailable in a world often filled with unfairness
-
"In all such systems, linguistic interactions have been primary: users exchange messages that cement the social bonds between them, messages that reflect shared history and understandings (or misunderstandings) about the always evolving local norms for these interactions" (p. 22).
-
such that "one may go alone at almost any time of the day or evening with assurance that acquaintances will be there"
-
accessible directly from one's home, making them even more accommodating to individual schedules and preferences
-
"What attracts a regular visitor to a third place is supplied not by management but by the fellow customer,"
-
"It is the regulars who give the place its character and who assure that on any given visit some of the gang will be there"
-
As one informant satirically commented in an interview, "You go for the experience [points], you stay for the enlightening conversation.
-
Oldenburg argues that third places are characteristically homely, their d�cor defying tidiness and pretension whenever possible. MMOs do not fit this criterion in any literal sense
-
In neither of our investigations did the degree of formality exhibited by players within the game bear any relation to the degree of visual ornamentation of the players' immediate vicinity.
-
Thus, while the visual form of MMO environments does not fit Oldenburg's (1999) criterion of "low profile," the social function of those environments does.
-
Oldenburg (1999) argues that seriousness is anathema to a vibrant third place; instead, frivolity, verbal word play, and wit are essential.
-
The playful nature of MMOs is perhaps most apparent in what happens when individuals do bring gravity to the game.
-
Participation becomes a regular part of daily life for players and, among regular gamemates such as guild members, exceptional absences (i.e., prolonged or unforeseen ones) are queried within the game or outside i
-
create an atmosphere of mutual caring that, while avoiding entangling obligations per se, creates a sense of rootedness to the extent that regularities exist, irregularities are duly noted, and, when concerning the welfare of any one regular, checked into
-
Anderson (1991), who suggests that geographic proximity itself is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for the emergence and preservation of "community."
-
Social capital (Coleman, 1988) works analogously to financial capital; it can be acquired and spent, but for social and personal gains rather than financial
-
This form of social capital is marked by tentative relationships, yet what they lack in depth, they make up for in breadth.
-
On the one hand, bridging social capital provides little in the way of emotional support; on the other hand, such relationships can broaden social horizons or worldviews, providing access to information and new resources.
-
shows that bridging and bonding social capital are tied to different social contexts, given the network of relationships they enable.
-
Virtual worlds appear to function best as bridging mechanisms rather than as bonding ones, although they do not entirely preclude social ties of the latter type.
-
One could argue that, if the benchmark for bonding social capital is the ability to acquire emotional, practical, or substantive support, then MMOs are not well set up for the task:
-
While deep affective relationships among players are possible, they are less likely to generate the same range of bonding benefits as real-world relationships because of players' geographic dispersion and the nature of third places themselves.
-
Despite differences in theoretical grounding and methodologies, our conclusions were remarkably similar across complementary macro- and micro-levels.
-
It is worth noting, however, that as gamers become more involved in long-term social networks such as guilds and their activities become more "hardcore" (e.g., marked by participation in large-scale collaborative problem-solving endeavors such as "raids" into difficult territories or castle sieges), the function of MMOs as "third places" begins to wane.
-
It may be, then, that the structure and function of MMOs as third places is one part of the "life cycle" for some gamers in a given title.
-
In such cases, MMOs appear to enable a different kind of sociability, one ostensibly recognizable as a "community" nonetheless.
-
However, our research findings indicate that this conclusion is uninformed. To argue that MMO game play is isolated and passive media consumption in place of informal social engagement is to ignore the nature of what participants actually do behind the computer screen
-
Perhaps it is not that contemporary media use has led to a decline in civic and social engagement, but rather that a decline in civic and social engagement has led to retribalization through contemporary media (McLuhan, 1964).
-
Such a view, however, ignores important nuances of what "community" means by pronouncing a given social group/place as either wholly "good" or "bad" without first specifying which functions the online community ought to fulfill.
-
Moreover, despite the semantics of the term, "weak" ties have been shown to be vital in communities, relationships, and opportunities.
-
In light of Putnam's evidence of the decline of crucial civic and social institutions, it may well be that the classification "lacking bridging social capital" best characterizes the everyday American citizen. T
-
Without bridging relationships, individuals remain sheltered from alternative viewpoints and cultures and largely ignorant of opportunities and information beyond their own closely bound social network.
-
it seems ironic that, now of all times, we would ignore one possible solution to our increasingly vexed relationship with diversity.
7More
Teaching How to Teach: Coaching Tips from a Former Principal | Edutopia - 2 views
-
Done well, coaching can help you sort through your pedagogical baggage, develop or hone new skills, and ultimately find your best teaching self. Done poorly, it might turn you off to the entire notion of support. But what if it's not done at all?
-
I was reminded that good coaching is not about dynamic coaches serving as heroic educators, but rather stems from the simple habits of connecting teachers to resources and asking them reflective questions.
- ...3 more annotations...
-
I met with each teacher one-on-one to ask questions and understand their hopes, fears, and support needs in the upcoming year. By choosing to listen rather than to talk, I conveyed that I saw my primary duty as supporting good teaching.
-
As his coach, I sought to model, little by little, some strategies I had learned on the job, such as literacy-building techniques, structuring controversial debates, and charting student discussions on the board for visual impact.
-
"High-quality coaching lies somewhere near the crossroads of good teaching and educational therapy. Done well, coaching can help you sort through your pedagogical baggage, develop or hone new skills, and ultimately find your best teaching self. Done poorly, it might turn you off to the entire notion of support. But what if it's not done at all?"