Day 14: Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Post date: Jul 30, 2013 3:41:49 PM

Essential Questions:

1) What did the world look like 10,000 years ago?

2) Was agriculture a step towards progress?

3) Why did the transition from foraging to farming occur?

4) How has collective learning progressed and accelerated?

Today, we talked about the Agricultural Revolution. Here is a description of Threshold 6, the emergence of Homo sapiens and collective learning. Here is some information about the four world zones. We watched the Unit 7 Main Lecture entitled "Why was Agriculture so Important?" (Video: Part 1, Part 2). You can watch this video about the transition to agriculture to understand why the Agricultural Revolution took place. For more information about agriculture and civilizations in different parts of the world, you can see this infographic. We finished off class with more on Collective Learning and work on the Little Big History project.

Just for fun, here's Episode 3 of the Claim Testers comic we've been following.

For this week, you have already read

1. Collective Learning Part 1: Using Language to Share and Build Knowledge
2. Collective Learning Part 2: Agriculture and the Power of Networks.
3. Collective Learning Part 3: Feedback Cycles and Geography.
4. Stokes-Brown, Big History, Chapter 4 (pages. 57-71)
5. Stokes Brown, Big History, Chapter 5 (pages 75-93)
6. Christian, Maps of Time, Chapter 7 (p. 185-190)

For HW:

1. Your Little Big History annotated bibliographies are tomorrow
2. Study for a quiz tomorrow on the Agricultural Revolution
3. Read and Annotate Stokes Brown "Agrarian Civilizations" Introduction.
4. (For Thursday's seminar) Read and annotate Marshall Sahlins, "The Original Affluent Society" pages 1-5.

Lastly, here are Little Big History documents:

• The assignment document, detailing steps and due dates
• The initial topic graphic organizer
• The narrowing topic graphic organizer
• Little Big History Thresholds Graphic Organizer
• Here is an anchor for the annotated bibliography.
• Here is the graphic organizer for the annotated bibliography (due Wed, July 31)
• This is a guide to different kinds of sources and how to cite them for your bibliography.
• Here is a guide to footnotes (what they are and how to use them)
• A guide to JSTOR and how to log in and search for articles
• An initial list of possible text sources you can use for the project if you're feeling stuck
• A graphic organizer to help you write your conclusion to the LBH project.
• Here is the Little Big History rubric for 2013, off of which you will be assessed.