When was this image taken?
The sort of literacy I am trying to show is historical literacy. An example of historic literacy that allows sustainable manipulation and use of historical information is Seriation. Given the principles of seriation you can relatively date this image on the basis of the technology that is pictured in the image. The fact that it is a picture of a particular technology tells you it is post 1860’s. The Railroad bridge suggests (1840’s – 1920’s during the age of railroads. The outfits if were in better resolution suggests later (1880’s to 1920’s). The greatest teller is the car which is a model before the popular Canada made Le Roy so its before (1913) and its looks a lot like the Marcus car invented in 1888. So given this technology the image can be placed fairly accurately as having taken place between 1890 and 1910 and more likely closer to the 1890 part of the range.
This graphic (serving as a graphic organizer) is used to demonstrate the archeological idea of Seriation that uses the phenomenon of popularity (frequency) of artifacts to relatively date it to a time period. So without the dates given on the left top corner from experience you could place all of these graphs in order from earliest to latest.
Comments: The presentation went well the vicarious teacher explained the principle almost perfectly. This I believe is because although fairly unknown concept the principles are fairly intuitive. Any human artifact or technology follows these principles so different eras of art, music, economies followed the standard deviation of rise in popularity and fall in popularity. The teacher did a fantastic job of using hand gestures that was missing when I attempted to do the original teaching. If I was teaching this I would also have the students draw out seriation. An activity dating a mystery box of items to earliest and latest is meant to accompany this lesson which obviously could not be completed in 5 minutes.