In 1987, E. D. Hirsch's "
Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know" became a surprise best-seller, and drew charges of "cultural elitism" for attempting to list a core knowledge that informed citizens should possess.
Twenty years later, in the July 2-9 issue of Newsweek, John Meacham introduces a Special Report entitled
What You Need to Know Now in order to "start a conversation about what we are calling Global Literacy—facts and insights about the world (some objective, some subjective) that we think are worth knowing." The accompanying 130 question Global IQ quiz covers 13 subject areas ranging from Art to Faith, Politics, and Technology.
First tag in my revamped del.ici.ous bookmarks: LP-culturalliteracy (Lesson Plan - cultural literacy). This quiz should spark some interesting current events discussions! (and I wonder if I can figure out how to make one of those globes covered with pictures...maybe Jane Austen's portrait could link to the different settings of her stories; there might be a trailer from a movie adaptation of her works; an audio clip from an Austen classic...)
I spent some productive hours reviewing and relabeling my del.ici.ous items. The new tags will guide me to specific lesson plan components and professional material.
In 1987, E. D. Hirsch's "Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know" became a surprise best-seller, and drew charges of "cultural elitism" for attempting to list a core knowledge that informed citizens should possess.
Although I have a del.ici.ous account, I stopped using it for a while because I seemed to be saving an exorbitant number of sites and had to scroll through dozens of entries to find what I wanted or needed. The problem, of course, is that I was too general with my tags: links for my Current Events class were getting lost in a sea of "web2.0" and "education" items. So my goal for today is to review all the sites I've e-mailed to my school account and group them according to very explicit labels, such as "RSS-LP" and "cyber-ethicsLP" before tagging them on del.ici.ous. I'll keep narrowing my focus, and refining my tags, until I have a useful, lesson-specific tool.
