Today is our first day of class. I will typically write up blog posts like this before class to plan out the meeting or share materials we’ll use in discussion this day or the next today.
For our first day my plan is to introduce you to the course’s main purpose and goals, give you a knowledge pretest, do a group activity to define the term revolution, and finish with a look at our policies and assignment for Thursday.
First, I’ll show you our Canvas site and explain what’s there and what’s still under constructions, and then show you some features of this class blog.
Then we’ll take this pretest: CULF3331KnowledgePretest. I’ll give this about twenty minutes and take roll while you’re filling it out.
Next we’ll break into some small groups and create mind maps about what the term revolution means to us using MindMapFree.com. I’ll give your groups about 20 minutes to branch off and add as much knowledge and concepts as you can to your map. Run wild with it. List revolutions, categorize them, rate them as successes or failures, talk about why they happened or what influences they had, whatever you can think of! When you’re finished, take a screenshot and email it to the professor at chrisdm@stewards.edu.
At the end of class we’ll look at policies and assignments, I’ll talk about my office hours and contact info, and show you your reading for Thursday, which is an easy, popular media introduction to the Middle East. This reading will be a good primer before we start reading from our more advanced, scholarly textbook next week. While you are reading through this article (including the subsections at the bottom), I want you to note three or four surprising things you found in the reading and leave them in a comment on this blog post. You can paraphrase heavily.
After-Class Update
Excellent first meeting! I took some time to study your mind maps and they show a lot of intense effort to develop sophisticated ideas of what revolutions are. Here are the maps your groups created. What do you think? Add comments on this post to talk about anything uncannily similar or different in the maps each group made.
I found the patterns of living most interesting out of all the sections. I found it surprising that places like Cairo are suffering from severe problems with housing, employment, schooling, and services due to the rural-urban migration. It wasn’t until recently that majority of the population lived as peasants which is also surprising. The influx of oil wealth had a large impact as well as the establishment of modern nation states, which altered both culture and government.