The Apprentice Historian

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!

Thoughts on the Image Assignment

What started out as a quick run through Photoshop Elements turned into a long assignment.  Working in Photoshop, especially when zoomed down to the pixel level, can be grueling. And if you aren't careful, you'll spend three times as long as you meant to on a single image.

I felt like I was making good progress on my images. There was even a picture from KDCB III that need repair! Once I had finished up the images, I kicked back with a sigh of relief and got ready to coast into class last Tuesday. Then I realized I still had to present the images on a web page. D'oh! And to make things worse, I had just finished reading more about informational design (see below). It made for a harrowing 24 hours as I scrambled to design some web pages.

On the plus side, I've learned much about Photoshop Elements, and more importantly how important the care and feeding of images in an historical website is to both the overall design of the site and the historical integrity of the content. Like everything else involved in web design, proper planning is critical.

What has happened as a result of this assignment is a little clarity on just what I am doing with my final project. Since I intend to use the final web site for something more than just a class assignment (the intention is to use it to promote a King's Dominion Clown Band reunion this fall), I've been wondering how to best tie in the History aspect. It seems that the focus on clown band images is leading me toward a stand in the historical images debate going on within the class.

We have had long and sometimes passionate debates about images in history within the class. The history of the Clown Band is largely recorded in images -- both moving and still. There is very little written history, aside from the daily summaries as encapsulated in the calendars. The lack of written history could be seen as a handicap for those in our class who aren't prepared to accept history-in-images as a definitive (or at least valid) version of history.

So I will be discussing the History of the clown band in images, charting the evolution of our shows as well as the changing roster of personnel. If I get ambitious, I think I will ask CB alumni to provide their written memories of certain iconic images. Perhaps I will even do some oral history work at the reunion! With any luck, the KDCBOK  website will show the possibilities of images-as-history.

Speaking of informational design...

Here's an interesting review of two sites that propose to do to information design (a la Tufte) what YouTube has done to home video: Review: Swivel vs. Many Eyes

I find this topic dangerously distracting and irresistibly fascinating. Must be the wannabe Desktop Publisher in me. Must. Focus. On. History.

Oh, yeah, classwork.

I get all caught up in other things and I forget I need to talk about my progress in this class sometimes. For instance, there was a fascinating post on the Freakonomics Blog where Steven Levitt calls for an end to tenure. Now, granted, he’s referring specifically to Economics professors. And granted that many consider tenure to be the whole point of subjecting yourself to 10 years of PhD work. (A History PhD spent an average of 10 years in pursuit of the degree, according to the latest estimate by Robert Townsend, the assistant director for research and publications at the American Historical Association.^[1]) And I know that Mark’s already given me a gentle reminder that I shouldn’t rail against the system that is to grant me my degree at least until I have said degree. But....

This is a subject near and dear to my heart. Last Spring, I took a class in System Dynamics at American University. My final project was an attempt to build a computer model of the job market for History PhDs. Even after I drastically scaled back the scope of the model (six weeks is just not enough time to model the national job market!), I still wound up with at best a semi-functioning representation of the job market at a four-year public university. But I learned a lot of things about the business side of my academic interests. One of the things that even my duct-taped computer model showed me was that the overabundance of tenured Baby Boomer professors was clearly preventing the market from working efficiently. There is little hope for a tenure-track position for someone like me in the near-future. Not until the tenure system is changed or flushed out.

So I’m always interested in hearing what other people have to say about tenure. Levitt feels that not only does the tenure system reduce the effectiveness of the marketplace, but he rightly points out that it also depresses salaries. That’s a good angle – a 15% pay raise might help sooth the sting of actually having to produce again.

And here I go again...this post was supposed to be about classwork!

This week I learned more about Photoshop Elements. Between the “Wornamental” and the “Wicked, Worn Look” articles focused on Photoshop techniques and the “Super-Easy Blendy Backgrounds” article that shows how to do gradients with CSS, I am well-prepared to edit and enhance images for the web. The problem is that I’m not prepared from a design standpoint to begin working on these images. My class project site is up, I have a Site Goals and Requirements document posted (per Bickner’s excellent project-management suggestion), and I am beginning to gather images from several collections (thanks to my friend Ben Haley for either providing, or doing the legwork of running down the source of, many of the classic photographs).

But I’m still not to the point where I can visualize the use of these Photoshop techniques on this website. My artsy muse is still sipping her double caff half-non-caff mocha whipped single espresso-infused cappuccino in her local coffee shop, apparently. Or maybe her hybrid is stuck in traffic. Either way, I feel ready to get to work as soon as she shows up – if you see her, please pass along my regards!

^[1] Robert B. Townsend, "History PhD Numbers Lowest in Almost a Decade as Job Listings Continue to Rise," Perspectives Online, 45:1/ January 2007.

Isn't that the point?

OK, I have read again Manan Ahmed’s The Polyglot Manifesto and my mind is starting to wrap around it. At the conclusion of my first reading, I was left feeling completely overwhelmed. How is it that I will ever come to understand the vast and mercurial landscape of historical academe? So many different points of view, so many centers of gravity, so much to learn about the centers of influence and the winds of politics. Drinking from the fire hose doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of how I’m feeling right now. How am I ever to understand this topography, much less come to influence it or shape it?? Bereft of landmarks or navigation tools, how can I ever hope to figure out what direction promises glory and honor.

And then I took a deep breath, put the hyperbole away, and gave my insecurities a day off. Now, with fresh perspective, I am reminded that this is the environment within which I have been working for the past ten years. Replace “history” with “e-learning” and “academy” with “training industry” and you have a very similar situation. There is an established order within the corporate training community that has been doing things “the right way” for many decades. And the Internet and all of this digital hocus-pocus has come barging in to our idyllic utopia of ADDIE development methodology and Kirkpatrick’s course evaluation levels and thrown everything out of kilter.

The bubble might have popped on the Internet revolution, but we are left with the tools born of those heady days. The thing we are missing is the insights and knowledge of how best to use them, and that cliché of 1990s clichés – a new paradigm. In my industry, as in the Humanities, the thinkers and cerebral types are trying to puzzle out not how much of an impact this Internet thing is going to have (that’s so 2002!) but on just how it has changed on the basic structure of everything. In the interim, the herd pretends that all is just like it used to be, that e-learning means converting your classroom PowerPoint slides to an online slideshow and that interactivity equals the “Next” button. Many of my colleagues would like nothing more than to put the e-learning genie back in the bottle.

Meanwhile, the digital revolution has touched the business of corporate knowledge transfer in the same way it is touching the humanities – and in large part because knowledge transfer is the business of the humanities. Aside from occasional articles like Bruce VanSledright’s “Why Should Historians Care about History Teaching?” I am struggling the find this perspective in the great debate about digital history. This is the thing that is beginning to amaze me – the inward focus (diplomatically called “navel gazing” in some circles) of the Academy and all of that intellectual capacity somehow misses this point. So often it seems that Historians view their duty to share, explain and (to use Ahmed’s term) interpret their studies as a nuisance at best. The consequences of which are hinted at by VanSledright in this month’s Perspectives.

Getting into the swing of things

I'm suddenly realizing just how much work this class is going to be! Keeping track of 15 blogs, making my own blog entries, posting comments on my classmates’ blogs, doing the CSS and XHTML pages, learning graphic design, image editing and typography as well as trying to design my own historical website seemed like such an easy task when I first started. (HA!) Now I, like many people in my class, am coming to realize that we needed to keep track of the comments that we've made on other people's blogs in our own blog. So tonight I'm scrambling to go back and look through everyone's blogs to find out where I've commented. It turns out I've had a lot less to say than I thought I had. Go figure!

Now granted, I've started to use some more tools that should help me keep things straight. For instance, I've discovered that there is an RSS feed or link on most of my classmates blogs including my own surprisingly. I loaded all of those RSS feeds into Google Reader, and now I'm ready to use the reader to keep track of new posts from my classmates. That should help me to know who's posting when and how far behind in the readings I am. Time to start letting technology work with me instead of against me! But then, I expect that's the point of this class, isn't it Professor Petrik?

Still, I'm feeling a little overwhelmed by all of the new stuff that's being thrown at me all at once. Any one of these things (XHTML, CSS, blogs, web design, typography, Photoshop, web hosting, historical website) is enough to keep any of us busy for quite a while. But I suppose drinking from the fire hose is what I should expect from graduate school. So check out the column on the right where I've added a new list of my comments. And now on to my other comments for the day. One of these days I should get around to actually commenting on our reading instead of just what my classmates have to say about it....