My research is focused on how we can use interactive media to better communicate history. I’ve been fortunate to work with different organizations and people dedicated to improving K-12 history, but don’t spend a lot of time in schools.  So when my son’s Grade 7 history teacher asked me to speak to his class about the War of 1812, and the interactive media I’ve developed, my initial response was “of course”. This is would be a chance to get out of the ivory tower, and let the rubber hit the road.

At the same time I was ambivalent – this was outside my comfort zone.  When I step into a classroom, it’s to relate to 20-year-olds, not early adolescents. And if I felt unsure, my son Jacob was horrified. “You’re teaching Grade 7 history? My class?” He had everything to lose and nothing to gain. His Dad mixing it up his friends?  Talking about history?  His work?  It could only go badly. 

Naturally, I treated his anxiety with fatherly care…. I slouched around the house with my jeans pulled low, a baseball cap on sideways, rapping out Canadian history.  At least I thought I was funny.

When I got down to work, and started to sketch out some possibilities for the class, things went from bad to worse for Jacob.  And so I did what any wise father does in this kind of situation – I called in his mother.  My wife Anne-Marie taught high school English for many years, and now runs Canadian Accredited Independent Schools.  If anyone could help me assemble a killer lesson, it was her.  And she (we?!) did.

The next day, I gave a brief introduction, then talked about the power of interactive media to persuade in ways different from text.  I had the students play Gonzalo Frasca’s September 12, a simple but compelling online game that argues that the attacks of September 11, 2001, should not be answered with force.  We then turned our attention to the War of 1812, and after reviewing what we knew, and what we wanted to know, I challenged them: could they make an app or computer game that made an argument about the War of 1812?  

In groups of three, they dove into the activity.  Each team had to come up with a title, brief description of their game or app, and several images on a storyboard.

I left it wide open, and what they produced was astonishing.  A team of boys worked feverishly to the last possible moment to develop an intricate and effective user interface, and a concept that brought together strategy and puzzle-solving game elements.  A group of girls came up with “Mothers of the war of 1812″ – take on the role of a mother who watches her husband join the militia, and must now feed her family, run the farm, and deal with life in a battle zone.  Their game drilled down to everyday experience of early nineteenth-century women, expressed in game form. And these were 13-year-olds!

What did I learn from teaching Grade 7 history? Naturally, that young people want to play, for a while. But I also was reminded that what they ultimately want to do, and what helps them best express deep thinking about history, is making – in this case building an outline for a computer game or app.

They were immensely proud of their work. And I was delighted to be in their presence, privileged to be a part of an experience that got them excited.  It will be a long time before I stop hearing the voices of the last team to leave the classroom: “we need to take this to a game development company.  This could be huge.”

But I still held my breath when I came home that night. I didn’t want to ask Jacob directly, so went to Anne-Marie, our intermediary. How had it gone? To his considerable surprise, he’d said that “he was actually not bad”. Music to a Dad’s ears.

I blog weekly at the Ontario Augmented Reality Network. Check out my new dispatches from Augmented Reality Event 2012 in sunny Santa Clara.

In April 2010 I organized “Pastplay” (or “Playing with Technology in History”, as we called it before Bethany Nowviskie came up with a much better name), with the financial support of the The History Education Network / Histoire et éducation en réseau (THEN/HiER). It was the most rewarding two days of my career. Much of the credit goes to Bill Turkel, who I thanked at the meeting for “taking my phone calls”. He did much more, of course, helping me think through, and then plan the event. Bill also brought in several people who I didn’t know, and quickly came to admire.

Stephen Ramsay was one. He articulated a new hermeneutic for digital humanities – “community, relationship, and play” – that has since come to define that meeting. These words struck a chord with me, and I’ve seen them quoted by several others as well. They are taken from a remarkable essay that Stephen contributed to the volume that emerged from Pastplay, which is now winding its way through the editorial process.

This morning I was delighted to see Stephen quoted at length (his Pastplay paper, as well as his important essays “Towards an Algorithmic Criticism” and “Reading Machines”) in a column in the New York Times. He was referred to as “perhaps the most sophisticated theorist of the burgeoning field” of Digital Humanities by Stanley Fish, who is writing a series of columns on DH. Those who know Fish will not be surprised to hear that he is not a fan of the new movement.

Fish’s column is making the rounds on Twitter, and will get its due in the blogosphere. He laments that DH has “little place for the likes of me and for the kind of criticism I practice: a criticism that narrows meaning to the significances designed by an author, a criticism that generalizes from a text as small as half a line, a criticism that insists on the distinction between the true and the false, between what is relevant and what is noise, between what is serious and what is mere play.”

There’s a lot to unpack here, and his desire to distinguish between relevance and noise, serious and play, lies at the heart of where the Pastplay group is going. But I’ll leave that for later. For now, it strikes me that this is what we hear every time there is a changing of the guard; the establishment of new ideas within academia typically comes amidst retirements, as professors move from writing papers to newspaper columns, and a new generation sets the agenda. And Fish is correct to end with: “I have a lot to answer for”. That, after all, was one of Stephen’s points: a researcher’s research program is his/hers, and should be viewed as a contribution to an ongoing conversation within a community of inquiry.

At the same time, I appreciate Fish’s reminder that DH is making claims that new movements typically make. DHers could and should argue that there is something truly transformative about computing and the internet, but the larger point is that we need to remain hungry and humble. About a year ago the question of “who is in and who is out” was a hot topic in DH circles, and it seems to me that DH remains a big tent – with room, perhaps, for even the likes of Fish, should he want to join the party.

Thanks to Bethany Nowviskie (@nowviskie), I just read “No More Plan B – A Very Modest Proposal for Graduate Programs in History”, by Anthony Grafton, the president of the American Historical Association, and Jim Grossman, the AHA’s executive director. In a nutshell, Grafton and Grossman encourage us to get beyond the post-PhD binary of “tenure track job” or “Plan B”.

I left the university, ABD, to take a job at the National Film Board of Canada (the move, I was told by my academic friends and colleagues, spelled “the end of my academic career”). Most of the friends that I made in graduate school ended up outside the ivory tower, in areas including public history, polling, government relations, and fundraising. They have achieved considerable success (and impressive salaries).

This is the (often happy) reality, and Grafton and Grossman say our PhD programs should account for it. A chunk of my summer was dedicated to surveying digital humanities PhD courses, and then developing one for my university’s new Humanities PhD program. Along the way, I got to think long and hard about what a PhD should look like in 2011.

Here’s the paragraph from Grafton and Grosman that jumps out at me:
“…A second, and much bigger, step would be to examine the training we offer, and work out how to preserve its best traditional qualities while adding new options. If we tell new students that a history PhD opens many doors, we need to broaden the curriculum to ensure that we’re telling the truth. If the policy arena offers opportunities, and we think it does, then interested students need some space (and encouragement) to take courses in statistics, economics, or public policy. Accounting, acting, graphic design, advanced language training: students thinking at once creatively and pragmatically have all sorts of options at our research universities. And of course there’s the whole exploding realm of digital history and humanities, and the range of skills required to practice them.”

Anne-Marie was profiled in a Globe and Mail insert today (it came out on the Web on Saturday). Here’s how this goes: I drag my poor wife from her great job in Montreal to a new place and no job, and…

The Ontario Augmented Reality Network (OARN), which I’ve started with funding from the Ontario Media Development Corporation (OMDC), and in partnership with some great people, universities, organizations, and business, had its coming-out party at the OARN-organized, and OMDC-sponsored Interacting with Augmented Reality Conference on June 14 at Brock University. Thanks to all of our partners who helped organize, and thanks to those that attended.

After I introduced OARN and our goals for the next 2 years, Rob MacDougall led an AR demonstration. Working in groups, the delegates went on a ‘hunt’ for 13 different historical plaques with unique QR codes. They then used smartphones to scan the codes that loaded a URL with clues for solving a riddle. Rob gives his perspective of the event here.

Our Keynote Speaker was David Benyon, Director of the Centre for Interaction Design at Edinburgh Napier University. He spoke about the new experiences brought about by the different layers of experience that are evolving as digital and real worlds are increasingly intertwined, referring for example to a demonstration Blaise Aguera y Arcas gave at TED2010 of Microsoft’s new augmented reality mapping technology.

We will be updating our Twitter account with updates on OARN and the Augmented Reality industry and hope those of you on Twitter will add us to your ‘Following’ list: http://twitter.com/#!/ontarioarn

Thanks to those who came, and to those following us. I’m looking forward to the work that we will do together in the months and years to come.

Several nights ago, far past my bed time, I read that: “scientists say nighttime electronics are interfering with Americans’ ability to get a good night’s sleep“. “They’re right,” I thought, and duly put my iPad down. The next morning, I woke up to a headline claiming that: “the iPad 2′s wealth of new features is a boon for tech-hungry classrooms“. “Maybe it’s not so bad”, I concluded as I put it back on my night table. This Manichean response to the ubiquitous role of the iPad in my life captures my ambivalence about the device.

Returning a couple of weeks ago from Birmingham (where I gave a talk to the Renaissance Studies symposium at the University of Alabama), I tapped into the free WiFi at the airport to browse through Reeder (which piggybacks on Google Reader (a Web-based aggregator)). I scanned through posts and articles from my favourite sites, then sent several over to Instapaper so I could read them on the plane. I next opened Instapaper to ensure that all the pages had loaded (and realized that in some cases I had only selected the first page of multi-page articles.) I corrected the problem. I was feeling good.

30,000 feet up, while reading the articles, I tried to annotate them. Inspired by Bill Turkel, I’ve been trying to go all-digital, creating an archive of research articles and notes that I can analyze with software that Bill will talk about.) And this is where things went wrong. I could export articles from Instapaper in a variety of ways – like over to GoodReader (which annotates PDFs), just none that would allow me to do what I wanted – Instapaper only exports text files to GoodReader, not PDFs. Annotating text files in GoodReader means typing in text at the bottom of the document, instead of the relevant paragraph, and as Slate’s John Dickerson recently observed, you can make a cup of tea in the time it takes to cut and paste text across iPad applications, or type into them. Opening up a doc in Pages would have yielded the same frustrating (and error-filled) typing outcome. An easier option was to use Note Taker, but the iPad doesn’t yet support handwriting recognition, so I wouldn’t be much further ahead in my goal to create an all-digital, all-searchable research library. And that’s when I contemplated giving it to the passenger beside me.

Several weeks into iPad 2, and a year after the launch of the original, nearly everything that could be said has been. On the one hand, it’s WalMart, except that you have to buy the building before walking in and making your purchase. It’s a consumption device, not a creative device. On the other hand, it makes surfing the Web while you recline on your couch a joy, and provides new opportunities to share content. And against all odds, it may usher my mother into the computer age. All I can add is my personal experience: its beautiful UI raises expectations that are quickly dashed – it consistently takes me near, but not to, the productively creative spot that I am used to on my laptop.

Which is why I’ve decided to ditch it. Not completely, of course. I’m scheduled to pick up a 3G-enabled iPad 2 tomorrow. And as the mercury rises in southern Ontario you may find my students and me tripping around historic Niagara, researching how best to use it to augment reality – to support our connection to the history all around us. But I have no grand designs for it as a personal productivity device, at least not right now. I’ll let the world, and Apple, sort that out for the next couple of years.

Slate’s John Swansburg recently asked his colleagues to dissuade him of his impulse to give away his iPad. What followed was a conversation about what his journalist friends found the machine to be good – or terrible – for. Digital humanists, Steve Ramsay has recently told us, are people who “make things” (I whole-heartedly agree). Given that the iPad is so bad at creating, should we put it aside as a work device, at least for the short-term? A year after it supposedly changed the game, what do we as digital humanists think of the iPad as a device to support our work?

The Ontario Media Development Corporation has just announced the 2011 Entertainment and Creative Cluster Partnerships Fund awards. The project that I lead – the Ontario Augmented Reality Network – was awarded $220,000 (our total budget is $360,000). The complete list of awards can be found here.

OARN brings together universities, private-sector developers, cultural agencies, trade associations, local government, and business generators dedicated to building and expanding the Augmented Reality Applications sector across Ontario. We’re going to be focusing on three pillars of activities (research, training and knowledge-sharing) in three locales: St. Catharines, London and Toronto.

Our Niagara 1812 historic tour iPhone applications were profiled in the Globe and Mail today (or page A11 if you read the paper version). The apps can be found at our iHistory Tours Web site.

My company recently posted its first iPhone quest-tour to the iTunes store – Niagara 1812: Return of the Fenian Shadow. This project was conceived in my lab at Brock University, and developed in partnership with the Niagara Interactive Media Generator. Thanks to everyone who made it happen.

A new tour, built on the same engine, will be released in a couple of weeks, with more to come.