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> They considered themselves modern... Last week I was surfing google books. Was skimming The History of Modern Europe. Noticed it was from 1871. At least
by mncharity 6y ago
> They considered themselves modern...
Last week I was surfing google books. Was skimming The History of Modern Europe. Noticed it was from 1871.
At least for me, there's something about human artifacts, that can change what feels old. View a museum exhibit, a clay tablet, prescribing interval training for horses, from 3 kya. Something that was held in hands, and could be held in yours. Then, medieval objects, feel like they're from just yesterday, not old at all. I wonder if you could structure an stepped experience, where users repeatedly experience an "oh my, that's old", a baseline shift, and then get hit again with something older, and again. And then walk back through, feeling it all compressed into a stretched now.
I don't get the same effect from critters, or geology. Perhaps I'm not familiar enough with them, or thinking in genealogy. Lunch-time's inquisitive squirrel feels peer, but not "just yesterday" cousin. Enjoying the sea breeze, glad Boston is recently coastal, and that there's an ocean there to be coastal with. Despite flowering trees and chirping birds for context. On Gondwanan crust. I wonder if you could cultivate that feeling, and use it when teaching deep time? [fwiw, those are vaguely: 80 Mya, 12 kya, ~150 Mya, ~200 Mya, ~300 Mya, and ~~1 Gya]
I've lately been thinking about transformatively improved science education content. For AR, in part. Current content, classrooms, practices, apps, even education research... they've been starting to feel to me... distant? Clustered with inkwells in wooden desks, student arithmetic on Roman wax diptych and drawn on Sumerian sand. The modern of the present, become the patinaed old, the before. The "oh my, people lived like that? How curiously odd."