Every year at the annual conference, the Florida Council for the Social Studies gives out a number of awards that recognize excellence in social studies education and service to the social studies community. I just want to take a few minutes and provide you with an overview of those awards. I hope that you will consider registering for the conference and attending the awards banquet in order to help recognize your colleagues!
We are excited also to welcome Dr. Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons as the keynote speaker at dinner! Dr. Simmons has been proclaimed as an original Black Power feminist and a grassroots leader of the Mississippi Freedom Summer. Dr. Simmons will present her experience and role in Freedom Summer ’64 working to build schools, libraries and registering voters in black communities in the Mississippi Delta as part of the Civil Rights Movement. She will reflect on how these experiences were the start of a life of…“Putting communal goals before individual goals.”
The Doctor Theron Trimble Florida Teacher of the Year Award is to recognize exceptional social studies teachers for grades K-6, 5-8, and 7-12, and to encourage participation in the NCSS Teacher of the Year program at the national level. Nominees must be a former or current district-nominated FCSS Teacher of the Year, and a current member of FCSS. Nominees may apply in only one category (teaching social studies regularly and systematically in elementary settings, and at least half time in middle/junior high and
high school settings).
The Harry Tyson Moore Award is named after a teacher who championed the advancement of civil rights in Florida. Founder of the first branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Brevard County, Moore and his wife, Harriet Vyda Simms Moore, paid the ultimate price for their activism when their house was bombed on Christmas night, 1951. In sponsoring this award, Nystrom Education hopes to inspire future generations of Florida’s students to civic action with the story of Harry T. Moore, who declared, “Freedom never descends upon a people. It is always bought with a price.”
The Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History awards the Florida American History Teacher of the Year in conjunction with the Florida Department of Education annually in its effort to promote the study and love of American history.
The Doyle Casteel Outstanding Leadership Award is given to an individual for his/her continuous leadership in a supervisory or administrative capacity. Their leadership in FCSS has promoted cross cultural understanding, mentoring of classroom teachers, and advocating the importance of social studies education. This award is sponsored by McGraw Hill Education.
The Warren Tracy Beginning Teacher of the Year Award, sponsored by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, is to recognize and celebrate the accomplishments of social studies teachers new to the field of education, who engage students in meaningful lessons to increase student awareness, who are involved with school/ community activities, and who are leaders on behalf of education.
The Outstanding Citizen Award recognizes an individual in the state of Florida who has done the most to promote the growth of social studies throughout the State.
The Excellence in Teaching History Award, sponsored by Pearson Education, is to recognize and celebrate a Florida teacher of history who encourages an appreciation and respect for history, involves students in the historical process, and evidences mastery of the subject matter.
The Agnes Crabtree International Relations Award recognizes the FCSS member who has, through teaching, research or community activities furthered the cause of international, intercultural relations. It is given in honor of Agnes Crabtree, a Miami-Dade teacher. Agnes was active in NCSS and FCSS, and the United Nations Association, serving as NEA international relations consultant.
The B. J. Allen Social Science Professional Award is given to an outstanding FCSS educator who has served the professional organization in a comprehensive way. The award honors service to FCSS and to social studies during the year or years immediately past. Dr. B.J. Allen, Florida State University Professor, and President of the organization.
The J.R. Skretting Leadership Award honors an outstanding FCSS educator who has served with distinction during the year or years immediately past. J. R. Skretting was head of the Social Studies Education Department at Florida State University, the first Executive Secretary of FCSS and provided outstanding leadership for the organization.
The Wilma Simmons Golden Service Award recognizes a member who has been active for many years and has made significant and lasting contributions to the council. Wilma Simmons, former Social Studies Supervisor in Duval County, was one of the original founders of FCSS.
We hope that you will join us to recognize the winners of these and the district Outstanding Teachers of the Year that will also be brought on stage! Register now for FCSS!
To be perfectly honest, I had never thought much about graph layout algorithms. You hit a button in Gephi or call a networkx function, some magic happens, and you get a layout. If you don’t like the layout generated, you hit the button again or call a different function.
In one of my classes last year, we generated our own layouts using eigenvectors of the Laplacian. This gave me a better sense of what happens when you use a layout algorithm, but I still tended to think of it as a step which takes place at the end of an assignment; a presentation element which can make your research accessible and look splashy.
In my visualization class yesterday, we had a guest lecture by Daniel Weidele, PhD student at University of Konstanz and researcher at IBM Watson. He covered fundamentals of select network layout algorithms but also spoke more broadly about the importance of layout. A network layout is more than a visualization of a collection of data, it is the final stage of a pipeline which attempts to represent some phenomena. The whole modeling process abstracts a phenomena into a concept, and the represents that concept as a network layout.
When you’re developing a network model for a phenomenon, you ask questions like “who is your audience? What are the questions we hope to answer?” Daniel pointed out that you should ask similar questions when evaluating a graph layout; the question isn’t just “does this look good?” You should ask: “Is this helpful? What does it tell me?”
If there are specific questions you are asking your model, you can use a graph layout to get at the answers. You may, for example, ask: “Can I predict partitioning?”
This is what makes modern algorithms such as stress optimization so powerful – it’s not just that they produce pretty pictures, or even that they layouts appropriately disambiguate nodes, but they actually represent the structure of the data in a meaningful way.
In his work with IBM Watson, Weidele indicated that a fundamental piece of their algorithm design process is building algorithms based on human perception. For a test layout, try to understand what a human likes about it, try to understand what a human can infer from it – and then try to understand the properties and metrics which made that human’s interpretation possible.
NCDD was proud to host a special Confab Call this week with our partners at the McCourtney Institute for Democracy – an NCDD member organization and the host of the Nevins Democracy Leaders Program – who shared a presentation on the incredible opportunity for D&D organizations to take advantage of their Nevins Democracy Leaders Program. Nearly two dozen organizations participated in the call, which marked the launch of the 2016-17 application for organizations who want to host a bright, D&D-trained student who will work with their organization for two months of next summer at no cost. 
We are encouraging all of our member organizations to apply today for the chance to host a Nevins Fellow next summer! Having a Nevins Fellow work with you is like bringing on a new full-time staffer, so it’s a great way for your organization to finally take on a special project you haven’t had time for, get extra help with your big summer engagements, or increase your organizational capacity overall – all while helping bring more young people into our field and growing the next generation of D&D leaders!
Opportunities like this don’t come often or last long, so we encourage you to make sure to apply for a Nevins Fellow before the October 21st deadline. You can find the application at bit.ly/nevinsapp.
If you haven’t heard of the Nevins program before or just want more information, there are tons of ways to learn more. You can start with the Frequently Asked Questions document that McCourtney created for potential applicants. We also had an informative discussion on the Confab Call with the McCourtney team, who covered lots of the important details about the program, and you can listen to the recording of that call by clicking here. You can also get a better sense of what the program experience is like from the student’s perspective by checking out this blog post from a 2016 Nevins Fellow about their summer fellowship with the Close-Up Foundation.
We can’t speak highly enough about the Nevins program’s students who applicants will have the chance to work with or about the value of this program’s contributions to the D&D field. We know that these young people will add enormously to the organizations they work with and that this program is helping secure the future of our field – a wonderful testament to vision of the program founder and NCDD member David Nevins. We encourage you to apply today!
Having previously tried to use force-directed layout algorithms on large networks, I was very intrigued by
Stefan Hachul and Michael Junger’s article Large Graph-Layout Algorithms at Work: An Experimental Study. In my experience, trying to generate a layout for a large graph results in little more than a hairball and the sense that one really ought to focus on just a small subgraph.
With the recent development of increasingly sophisticated layout algorithms, Hachul and Junger compare the performance of several classical and more recent algorithms. Using a collection graphs – some relatively easy to layout and some more challenging – the authors compare the runtime and aesthetic output.
All the algorithms strive for the same aesthetic properties: uniformity of edge length, few edge crossings, non-overlapping nodes and edges, and the display of symmetries – which makes aesthetic comparison measurable.
Most of the algorithms performed well on the easier layouts. The only one which didn’t was their benchmark Grid-Variant Algorithm (GVA), a spring-layout which divides the drawing area into a grid and only calculates the repulsive forces acting between nodes that are placed relatively near to each other.
For the harder graphs, they found that the Fast Multipole Multilevel Method (FM3) often produced the best layout, though it is slower than High-Dimensional Embedding (HDE) and the Algebraic Multigrid Method (ACE), which can both produce satisfactory results. Ultimately, Hachul and Junger recommend as practical advice: “first use HDE followed by ACE, since they are the fastest methods…if the drawings are not satisfactory or one supposes that important details of the graph’s structure are hidden, use FM3.”
What’s interesting about this finding is that HDE and ACE both rely solely on linear algebra rather than the physical analogies of force-directed layouts. FM3, on the other hand – notably developed by Hachul and Junger – is force-directed.
In ACE, the algorithm minimizes the quadratic form of the Laplacian (xTLx), finding the eigenvectors of L that are associated with the two smallest eigenvalues. Using an algebraic multigrid algorithm to calculate the eigenvectors makes the algorithm among the fastest tested for smaller graphs.
By far the fastest algorithm was HDE, which takes a really interesting, two-step approach. First approximating a high-dimensional k-clustering solution and then projecting those clusters into 2D space by calculating the eigenvectors of the covariance matrix from the clusters. The original paper describing the algorithm is here.
Finally, the slower but more aesthetically reliable FM3 algorithm improves upon classic force-direct approaches by relying on an important assumption: in large graphs, you don’t necessarily have to see everything. In this algorithm, “subgraphs with a small diameter (called solar systems) are collapsed” resulting in a final visualization which captures the structure of the large network with the visual ease of a smaller network.
Myung J. Lee, the executive director of Cities of Service, and I have an article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review that is free to read or download until November 17.
We define citizen engagement as a combination of deliberation (communicating and learning about issues), collaborative action, and the working relationships that form during such interactions. We summarize a growing body of literature that finds that citizen engagement–so defined–is crucial to addressing the most stubborn social problems.
But the harder question is always: How can America get more civic engagement? Who would be motivated to expand the number and breadth of active citizens or to make their work more consequential?
In the SSIR piece, we propose one answer. Municipal governments have much to gain by enlisting more citizens in more consequential civic work. This serves their self-interest. Furthermore, many cities already have thousands of citizens involved in organized volunteering efforts. Volunteering, by itself, does not have the positive effects that we find from citizen engagement understood more broadly. But all those volunteers are expressing a willingness to take action. Municipal governments are capable of turning ordinary volunteering into opportunities for deliberation about issues, collective action, and sustained relationships (including relationships among government officials and other citizens in their communities).
One of several ways that governments can achieve this shift is by helping citizens to set measurable targets for change at the community level and providing them with the data they need to assess progress. Unpaid citizens are not responsible for achieving these outcomes on their own; they collaborate with city employees and people from other sectors and hold each other accountable.
In the article, we offer several promising examples of what we call “impact volunteering” in US cities. We highlight cases from the Cities of Service network–which I strongly endorse–but our argument is meant to apply more broadly as well.
Citation: Myung J. Lee and Peter Levine, “A New Model for Citizen Engagement,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, fall 2016, pp. 40-45.