How do we give our students permission to be “foolish”? Another question is: how do we give our faculty permission to be foolish? Or, are we already foolish enough?
How do we give our students permission to be “foolish”? Another question is: how do we give our faculty permission to be foolish? Or, are we already foolish enough?
Over break I’ve had a little bit of time to play and think about the new release of Star Wars: The Old Republic. As a fan of trying different MMOs in general this one has stood out for me and I’d love to hear what others’ experience has been.
If you’ve spent any time on the Internet in the past 10 years or so — and who hasn’t — you’ll know that one of the most popular memes is the Top 10 list. I don’t think I’ve ever perpetuated on before, but when Edward Owens, the fictional pirate created by the students in my course Lying About the Past, made the Top 10 list of Wikipedia hoaxes published in PCWorld back in January, I just couldn’t resist posting a notice here. Because that article appeared in January and I’m only just now noticing it, that gives you a sense of how immersed I’ve been trying to finish up a book that is due to the publisher in a few days. That I’m posting this now is a sign I’m looking for distractions.
For those who care, I will be teaching Lying About the Past again in the spring 2012 semester. So, as I wrote in August 2008, you have been warned.
Last week a friend sent me the link to the YouTube channel of the History Teachers, two high school teachers in Hawaii who create music videos using well known pop songs, stripping out the vocal tracks, and adding their own lyrics. Those original lyrics are history lessons. So, for instance, one can watch/listen to “Tainted Love” by Soft Cell recast as a history of the Trojan Wars or a history of the French Revolution set to “Bad Romance” by Lady Gaga.
As cheesy as they may seem on first glance, I really like the playfulness of these teachers. As I’ve written here and elsewhere, I think historians have gotten way to stodgy in our approach to teaching about the past and these teachers have found a way to engage students without taking themselves very seriously. And they are reaching a much wider audience than just their own students (412,000 views of the French Revolution video as of May 4, 2011). Sure, it’s a simplified version of the past. Sure, their versions reinforce a tendency to compress complicated historical issues into a few minutes of text/video/power point slides. But so what? The point, it seems to me, is not to present a complex and nuanced version of the past. Rather, it is to introduce a complicated subject in a fun and engaging way that will then make it possible for teachers and their students to interrogate the evidence in much more complex ways in class.
These videos were a lot of work and so are clearly a labor of love. I’m not suggesting that we all tap our inner Culture Club or Britney Spears. But I am suggesting that the more ways we can find to lighten up a little, to stop taking ourselves so seriously, the more ways we’ll find our students engaging with our serious work.
An examination of the Rich Iott scandal, and the questions it raises about playing with the past
While sitting in our offices and wishing we were outside in the beautiful spring weather, Tom, Dan, and Mills took a virtual journey north of the border to talk to Kevin Kee and Bill Turkel about their recent conference Playing With Technology in History at Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. Kevin is the director of the Simulating History Lab at Brock University and Bill is the guru of the Lab for Humanistic Fabrication. In addition to discussing the conference and Kevin’s and Bill’s work on the cutting edge–perhaps even bleeding edge–of digital humanities, we also debated the pros and cons of the unconference model for academic meetings and whether we thought that “play” was an appropriate objective for history teachers. Kevin also gave us a sneak preview of the mobile history app he and his team are developing to coincide with the bicentennial of the War of 1812. If you don’t have any idea what “humanistic fabrication” is or if you’ve never pondered whether or not you need a MakerBot, you definitely need to listen to the podcast.
Links mentioned on the podcast:
History Education Network/Histoire et Éducation en Réseau
CraftRobo
Arduinos
Rob MacDougall on Barely Games
Running time: 50:01
Download the .mp3