The Apprentice Historian

My brain is officially full.

I can’t stuff anything else into it. Buffer overfill, as my old PC used to say. My stacks are colliding with my heaps, as my old Mac used to say. Can't stuff one more bit of knowledge in right now. Not. One. Bit.

Now, I have a site with which I’m satisfied. Even if it only looks good in Firefox. I’m dabbling in PHP land (it’s a scripting language used to build database-driven websites) and every minute there saps more of my sanity. I’ve installed a photo gallery application and a relatively simple wiki application, neither of which I completely understand. I’ve tinkered with Google Groups and Flickr in efforts to utilize their budding customization features and make their content appear to be a part of the KDCB site. As a friend of mine at work says, it’s held together by “bailing wire and duct tape,” but so far so good.

The end result, however, is that I’m reading about Internet Explorer 6 bug fixes that Professor P sent out last night, only I’m not seeing the words. My eyes travel in neat, left-to-right lines, but the meaning of those little squiggly symbols isn’t registering. In spite of repeated “readings.”

That’s too bad, too, since my site is a train wreck in IE6. Meh!

All in all, I’m feeling like I will meet the objectives of our final project, however. According to our syllabus, the final project is creating a “a modest, reasonably sophisticated history web site.” Here’s how I think I’m measuring up:

First, the content should be solid and engaging. What’s more engaging than clowns? For the intended audience (Clown Band veterans, their parents and families, amateur historians looking for source material on late-20th century small musical ensembles, and the occasional holdout groupie), this stuff writes itself! Oh, wait. See below – it is writing itself!

Second, the site should be clear in its purpose and potential audience. The purpose of the site is to collect and store the accounts and images of eight years of Clown Band experiences. The site will also serve as a community center for veteran CBers as we plan a 20-year reunion in the fall of 2007. Check!

Third, the site should demonstrate standards-based, accessible design, including a print style sheet. In other words, the site should have passed validation tests for both its XHTML and CSS. Well, the site is valid XHTML and CSS. I’m still working on the print style sheet at this point. We'll call this one “mostly done.”

Fourth, the site’s design should also reflect knowledge of typography, layout, color, and graphic design. I feel like I’ve got this one down – the theme is clear across the pages. The color scheme works to tie a many disparate pages and applications together into a clearly branded site. This is the criterion with which I have the highest comfort level.

Finally, there should be some effort make toward interactivity or online community building. Then there’s this one. I’ve added an image gallery to the site that will allow CBers to upload their own pictures of the Clown Band in action. I’ve added a wiki to the site so that the veterans themselves can tell their stories “in their own words.” It’s opened a whole can of worms, many of which have contributed to the brain buffer overload that I’m experiencing now. But darned if there isn’t interactivity and online community building going on here!

So, we’ll see what happens. The to-do list is still long, though the major items have been completed. Of course, what I’ve discovered this semester is that the “little” things on your to-do list can take just as long (if not longer!) as the “big” things! I suspect that I will continue to tinker with this site for many weeks after the class has expired, given that it is intended to have a long shelf life.

So drop by and see what you think. You can reply here or drop me an email.

Just don’t use Internet Exploder 6!!

Playing Video Games Means Better Surgery

Here's an example of how the content of the video game has little or no bearing on the benefit:
"The Impact of Video Games on Training Surgeons in the 21st Century"

Hypothesis There is a potential link between video game play and laparoscopic surgical skill and suturing.
Results Past video game play in excess of 3 h/wk correlated with 37% fewer errors (P<.02) and 27% faster completion (P<.03).
Conclusions Video game skill correlates with laparoscopic surgical skills. Training curricula that include video games may help thin the technical interface between surgeons and screen-mediated applications, such as laparoscopic surgery. Video games may be a practical teaching tool to help train surgeons.

In this case, the learning benefit of the video game is tactile -- the learners are strengthening their hand-eye coordination by exercising their ability to perform 3-dimensional actions while viewing 2-dimensional images. I can image a video game for surgeons where they are actually playing a game about laparoscopic surgery. It certainly won't be a X-box top seller, but couldn't you see it as a required element at medical schools?

Note in the article that the study author says that there's a point of diminishing returns on playing video games. As a matter of fact, he goes out of his way to remind people that too much time spent on video games is bad. This is yet another reminder that gaming is simply another tool in the learning toolkit. It can never replace all learning methodologies.

Read the Abstract of the study from the Archives of Surgery Journal.

More on Video Games

I’m fascinated by this piece a friend of mine (thanks, Ben!) emailed me this week. It’s about a game called PeaceMaker. This is another example of how games can be used for positive gain, by putting people into a virtual world that mirrors the real world and then letting them make decisions and choose alternatives faced by the real world actors. There is nothing more sobering than to realize that you really have no alternatives....

This deeper understanding of other “worlds” is difficult to convey via books and scholarly articles. It is certainly possible to achieve this deeper understanding through research and reading, but doing so requires a huge amount of time, a dedication to the work required to reach that level of understanding, and probably some guidance from an expert. All of these things are in short supply in today’s complex world.

On the other hand, immersing ourselves in a virtual world offers some short cuts. By embedding that research and knowledge in a game we remove the time constraint (since gamers are often unconcerned about the amount of time they are spending), tangibly reward users for their dedication (through the positive feedback from the game), and supply the guided learning in a very unobtrusive (possibly even unnoticeable) way. This is the power of learning through games. And the very thing that our revulsion to titles like Grand Theft Auto obscures.

But it’s worth noting that video games are just a subset of “games” in general. And happily, the learning potential of discussed by Gee extends to tabletop (aka board) and “pencil and paper” games as well. That even includes the immersive and interactive qualities of video games, as anyone who has seriously played Dungeons & Dragons can attest. All our imagination needs is a framework of rules that provide boundaries and feasibility checks.

And then I find the Niall Ferguson piece validates my experience with historical games. Having played Axis & Allies with the same group of friends for the past 15 years, I can promise you that I have tried just about every conceivable way to win as Germany during WWII, and it isn’t easy. And while I agree with Ferguson that A&A simplifies the strategic choices, my experience with the game is such that the Japanese had little choice but to attack the US fleet in the Pacific and that the Germans must capture or destroy the Russian industrial base in northern Ukraine and Russia (Karelia is the territory in the game, and any A&A player will tell you that it just gets ugly there!). These are exactly the strategic realities faced by Germany and Japan. It’s one thing to read about those, but it’s another thing entirely to try other strategies until you realize that they really did have few other choices!

Ferguson also mentions the game I heard about at the 2006 AHA meeting that I mentioned in an earlier post. The learning potential from this kind of game seems pretty obvious to me, but given the discussions in class two weeks ago, it is also obvious that this is not obvious to everyone.

As Ferguson says, “Gaming history is not a crass attempt to make the subject relevant to today’s kids.” Instead, if we can see past the moral and positive values travesty that is the success of Grand Theft Auto, we should be able to agree that games can be used to teach some pretty important lessons. Like that of PeaceMaker, or the deeper understanding of the realities facing world leaders in 1938 provided by Making History: The Calm and the Storm. To me, this is the power of games — the ability to reach a deeper understanding of the framework within which historical actors live and make decisions. After all, isn't that our ultimate goal as historians?

Lesson from the Design Assignment

So, my Design project is done (early, no less!). I elected to create a page from my final project, thus using this assignment to do some prototype work for the final project. Given the lessons I learned (see below), this is a Good Thing (apologies to Martha Stewart).

Things I’m proud of:
How the KDCB buttons work. These are on the right side of the page, and will serve as the primary navigation within the History section of the site. It’s a rollover button for CSS technique I found on the web. It’s an elegant solution and is easy to implement.

The notes in the text. While I don’t have any footnotes, I used Professor Petrick’s Sidenote 2 technique from her “Managing Endnotes & Footnotes” essay. I was able to get this to work (again), and I really like the way the additional information provided in the notes stays out of the way until it’s needed.

The header image. I really wanted to get my header image “outside the box” and I’ve very pleased at how it turned out. And even better, implementing the iepngfix.htc hack worked, too, so my hard work shows up in Internet Exploder, too. Good thing, since I’m sure 90% of the intended audience will be accessing this site in IE. If I’m lucky, it will be IE7 for most of them, but I’m sure that Microsoft will have a hand in most of the views.

Now, my lessons:
Just because you’ve done it once, don’t expect it to be easy to reproduce the effect again. Several of the techniques on my page were things that we’ve done in class throughout the semester. But I underestimated the time it takes to recreate these things when it’s (literally) been weeks since I last thought about it, much less practiced doing it in real code.

Start with a plan – the development phase is the wrong time to be doing design work. This is a lesson I’m personally embarrassed to re-learn – it’s in the day-to-day activities of what I do for a living, for crying out loud! I harp on “design then develop, design then develop” all the time. In spite of a sincere effort to think through the design of this page, much of the design is an organic outgrowth of the work I did, as I did it. I’d be creating a button and have an idea about how the buttons should be for a different navigation menu, necessitating going back and re-creating new buttons with a different theme. I would have saved several hours’ worth of work if I’d just thought it through a little more.

Line up your resources first – stopping to create new images, for instance, is a real drag on momentum. As much as I hate to admit it, I needed a project plan for this work. If my design had been more complete, I could have focused my time in Photoshop. That way I could have been banging out buttons and correcting images in quick succession, reinforcing the process with repetition and building up some momentum. As it happened, I jumped back and forth between XHTML/CSS code and Photoshop several times, and each time it took time to get back into the groove of each (very different) activity.

The devil’s in the details – keep a “punch list” of things that need to be fixed. This was actually something that I did right. I kept a running list of things I needed to fix as I went. That allowed me to stay focused on the current task without losing track of each little detail that needed attention. Several times, for instance, I started to work on trying to figure out the IE fix for showing PNG files. When I realized that I was getting off task, I was able to haul my attention back to the item I was working on and see it though to the end. I was even able to prioritize my punch list, so I focused on the “need-to” items and left the “want-to” things to the end. I eventually did tackle the PNG file issue (it works!), but only after I had completed all of the important things for getting the page to work in a standards-compliant browser.

Can Baby Boomers Adapt to a New World?

One thing that stuck out in my mind while reading James Paul Gee’s What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy is the number of times he references “baby boomer” ways of thinking about learning. “This game – and this turned out to be true of video games more generally – requires the player to learn and think in ways in which I am not adept. Suddenly all my baby-boomer ways of learning and thinking, for which I had heretofore received ample rewards, did not work.” (Gee, 5) He notes that “Today’s world is very different from the world baby boomers like me grew up in and on which we have based many of our theories.” (7)

Does one’s generational affiliation affect one’s willingness to accept the video games as a potential tool for learning? If true, it’s elegantly ironic that the baby boomers are now the “establishment” and having a hard time understanding something that is intuitively a “better” way of doing things to the younger generations. Gee, a self-described ‘late-middle-age ‘baby boomer’,” seems to understand that the way the games are designed presents (to beat an overused phrase) a new paradigm for learning and training. He observes that video games “do not reward – in fact, they punish – some of my most cherished ways of learning and thinking (e.g. being too quick to want to get to a goal without engaging in sufficient prior nonlinear exploration).” (57) “Furthermore,” he writes, “the theory of learning in good video games fits better with the modern, high-tech, global world today’s children and teenagers live in than do the theories (and practices) of learning that they see in school.” (7)

The problem arises because the younger generations have a new cultural model of learning that is at odds with “traditional” models. “Since the baby-boomer models are still quite prevalent in schools as teachers, administrators, and parents, children are most certainly exposed to them….” And while Gee does say these traditional models (for example “Learning is a matter of mastering a set of facts." And "Learning is a matter of memorizing information from teachers and books.”) are not necessarily wrong, there are many situations where these are not the best models for learning. Students (and their educators) need to understand that there are different learning models, that different learning models are most efficient in different situations, and how to recognize and adopt a different learning model when the situation calls for it. Our schools today, mired in entrenched unions, competing interest groups and a chronic shortage of resources, do not have the ability to equip our future for this kind of “active and critical learning.”(162) I suspect the culture that recognizes and achieves this first will be the next global superpower based on the strength of a generation trained to learn quickly from a world awash in information.

It’s also an issue I am struggling with at work in a broader sense – I am trying to make my company’s learning organization more effective and efficient. I struggle daily with fixed ideas about what makes “good” training, how best to deliver knowledge in the classroom and online, and how to maximize the learning transfer to adult learners who more often than not don’t understand why they are being told to attend a class. Video games (the modern Workplace Learning Professional (e.g. corporate trainer) calls them simulations or 3-D immersive environments, but never, ever “games”) offer clear advantages for connecting knowledge with younger workers. But I cannot seem to get my management chain to understand the value in the kind of immersive and collaborative learning that video games provide. Then I read Gee and the light bulb comes on – everyone above me in the corporate food chain is a baby boomer (or older). They don’t understand these new models of learning that the younger generations instinctively grasp.

Now I just need to figure out how to convey Gee’s message that “we can learn a lot from those young people who play games, if only we take them and their games seriously” (10) to my bosses!

Video Games and History

At the 2006 AHA conference, I attended an American Association for History and Computing session called Video Games and Historical Narrative. It was a discussion on using games to illustrate historical thinking. Looking over some of my notes from the session, I can add some thoughts about video games and history.

Video games are the film of the 21st century – they provide a medium for historical narrative. Games develop stories and let's face it, we're storytellers. It's a natural fit. By inserting ourselves into the story and interacting with it, we gain greater insight and understanding of the situation and context of the story. A well designed video game provides the opportunity to immerse ourselves in a historical world. Since video games are multidimensional, they lend themselves to making sense of complex environments or situations. We gain a greater understanding of the historical context of decisions when interacting within a relatively accurate portrayal of  a historical world.

In the session, one of the history professors (my notes don't provide a clue about which one) talked of using a strategy simulation game (similar to Sid Meier’s Civilization game) The professor used Making History: The Calm and the Storm historical simulation by Muzzy Lane software. This game allows players to assume the roles of various national governments. Each turn, which represents a month of game time, the players make choices about resource allocation, diplomatic, trade and economic initiatives, military planning and domestic policy. Once they are ready, the game makes decisions about the results of these choices. For example, if you choose to increase your military spending over domestic spending, it’s possible that your workers would be upset enough to disrupt production with strikes. It’s even possible that your government could be ousted from power if domestic opinion is bad enough. And this is just the domestic aspect of the game!

The class was on the interwar years in the 20th century. Teams of students assumed the roles of major powers. Students first spent classroom time learning the issues their nations faced in historical reality. Once they were familiar with the options available, they spent time making policy decisions. Then they ran turns in the game, making decisions based on their own analysis of their national goals and policy options. The turns were timed, so there was some urgency and chaos introduced into the real-world aspect of the game. Ahistorical choices by the teams during the game only served to reinforce the reasons behind the historical decisions that led to the war. The professor was very enthusiastic about the learning results from the class.

Putting yourself in the middle of the historical event can give a greater understanding of the choices made (or not made) by the primary actors. Ultimately, this is one of the greatest strengths of gaming. That and it’s a great way to kill a rainy Sunday afternoon!

So here's the catch with a blog

It's important to make regular posts. Imagine how surprised I was to realize that 25 March was my last post! My excuse is that I’ve been in Fire and Ice over the last two weekends, precluding serious postings. That’s my story, anyway, and I’m sticking to it! See, last weekend I climbed Mt. Washington (6,288’) in New Hampshire. The weekend before I was touring Key West. Seriously rough stuff, that. Sixteen miles in the wilderness and 16’ between the pool and the tiki bar. One extreme to the other, believe me!

Needless to say, neither activity lent itself to using a computer, meaning I’m behind in my online reading (both classmates’ blogs and the assigned stuff). I am, however, wonderfully caught up on the book assignments. So I have that going for me!

In my opinion, the Critical Thought from Steven Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think:

The name of the page will match the words I clicked to get there.

In other words, if click on a link or button that says “Hot mashed potatoes,” the site will take me to a page named “Hot mashed potatoes.”

It may seem trivial, but it’s actually a crucial agreement. Each time a site violates it, I’m forced to think, even if only for milliseconds, “Why are those two things different?” And if there’s a major discrepancy between the link name and the page name or a lot of minor discrepancies, my trust in the site – and the competence of the people who publish it -- will be diminished. (emphasis in original)

I think this is important for two reasons. It make overt one of the unspoken concepts of web surfing. I think we have to understand those unspoken rules if we are to create effective websites. And secondly, it's a reminder that our website must build trust with the reader. We do that through elegant but not too flashy design; with solid, well-researched content; and with ease of use (by following these “agreements” we have with our readers).

More later. I'm on a day trip to Dallas for work tomorrow, so I should have a good block of time to work up more thoughts!