Kevin Kee

Kevin Kee, Nicki Darbyson, “Creating and Using Virtual Environments to Promote Historical Thinking”, in Penney Clark (ed.), History Teaching and Learning in Canada: A State of the Art Look (Vancouver: UBC Press, in press (expected June 2011)).

How can historians and history teachers best use Virtual Environments (VEs) to support the teaching and learning of historical thinking? This question has received little attention from researchers. To most historians and history educators, “history” is expressed in words on paper. Yet in representing history via text alone, we turn the past into a sentence, in more ways than one – just ask a disengaged student in a traditional compulsory course. But the question deserves an answer for reasons beyond student engagement: VEs provide students with opportunities to encounter historical thinking in new and innovative ways. This chapter attempts to outline some of those opportunities.

Kevin Kee, Tamara Vaughn, Shawn Graham, “’Sometimes, graphics get in the way’ – an Exploration of Interactive Fiction in the Classroom”, Young Kyun Baek, (ed.), Gaming for Classroom-Based Learning, Hershey, Penn: IGI Global, 2010.

As gaming technology for personal computers has advanced over the last two decades, the text-adventures that predominated in the 1980s ceased to be commercially viable. However, the easy availability of powerful authoring systems developed by enthusiasts and distributed free over the Internet has led to a renaissance in text-adventures, now called “Interactive Fiction”. The educational potential in playing these text-based games and simulations was recognised when they were first popular; the new authoring systems now allow educators to explore the educational potential of creating these works. We present here a case-study using the ADRIFT authoring system to create a work of interactive fiction in a split grade 4/5 class (9 and 10 year-olds) in Quebec. We find that the process of creating the game helped improve literary and social skills amongst the students.

John Bonnett and Kevin Kee (eds.), Digital Studies 1:2 (2009): “The Computer and Canadian Scholarship: Recent Trends in the Humanities and Social Sciences”.

This collection brings together some of the best recent work that Canada has to offer, touching on fields ranging from historical GIS and agent-based simulations, to discussions touching on cyberinfrastructure and the use of RDF schemas on historical text data.

John Bonnett and Kevin Kee, “Transitions: A Prologue, Program and Preview for Digital Humanities Research in Canada (Introduction to edited collection),” Digital Studies 1:2 (2009).

It is a truism in the digital humanities, a constant one, and a good one, that it is always in a state of transition. Such an observation is not surprising since the instrument upon which it relies – the computer – is itself in a state of flux. For the moment, its computational power remains firmly in the grip of Moore’s Law, exponentially increasing its computational power as the decades pass. Scholars, whether they want it or not, are constantly being presented with new paradigms of computing — be it cloud computing, ubiquitous computing, or high performance computing — and new tools and markup schemes to express, treat and analyze content. In any publication devoted to the digital humanities, then, it would seem superfluous to mention that change is our constant condition and our constant preoccupation, a trite observation best left unsaid. We sympathize with this view. But when it comes to describing digital humanities scholarship generally, and computationally supported scholarship in Canada particularly, we think it is wrong. In Canada and abroad, a number of important developments have recently emerged that will impinge on the practice and future trajectory of our inter-discipline. They are new, important, and are reflected in the contributions to this issue. They are of sufficient moment and frequency that we feel justified in rendering this issue of Digital Studies with the thematic stamp it now bears: that of transition.

Kevin Kee, John Bachynski, “Outbreak: Lessons Learned from Developing a “History Game”, Loading (The Canadian Game Studies Association) 3:4 (2009).

This paper describes the production of Outbreak, a game focused on the 1885 smallpox epidemic in Montreal. It is a preliminary report on the manner in which, by both theorizing about and building a game, we are responding to some of the questions that have animated the literature on computer games for history. The article begins with a survey of publications by researchers who have studied the capacity of games to support learning, and outlined how these can be used in concert with books and other media. We next provide the context to our project, which was conceived to market a film to be broadcast on television, and support a book on which the film was based – a bestselling history of a preventable tragedy that resulted in the deaths of over 3,000 Montrealers. We outline how we built from the book, creating a game that asked the player to save as many as possible from death, using tools that mimicked that which was available in the late nineteenth century. We conclude by reflecting on the lessons that we learned, and how we will apply these to our present and future projects.

Kevin Kee et al, “Towards a Theory of Good History Through Gaming”, Canadian Historical Review 90:2 (June 2009).

History computer games have become an economic and cultural phenomenon, and historians should seize the opportunity to participate in their development. Players of history games are interested in the past, and in the big questions that drive historical scholarship. In this way, games have the potential to draw players into the discipline if we can discover the best way to express history though simulation. But what research do we draw on as we study how to accomplish this transformation? This essay is the product of a meeting of historians, educators and gamers, who joined previously separate lines of inquiry to identify literature and models that we believe form the foundation for developing a theory of good history through gaming.

“Liberty vs. Security in the Shadow of 9/11: Facilitating the Debate in the Classroom,” in Tony Dipetta, (ed.), The Emperor’s New Computer: ICT, Teachers and Teaching (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2008).

The teaching of citizenship and history in Canadian schools has been the subject of considerable discussion in recent years; so too has been the use of new technologies. This paper attempts to contribute to those discussions by highlighting some of the lessons drawn from the production of one new media tool. In this way, the project, which came to be called “The Cyber-Terrorism Crisis”, serves as a test case of doing history and citizenship education today on the World Wide Web. I show that Web simulations can be especially effective for facilitating student understanding of the complex nature of contemporary issues, such as those concerning the balancing of liberty and security in post-9/11 Canada.

“Computerized history games: Options for narratives”. Simulation & Gaming (December 2008).

How may historians best express history through computer games? This paper suggests that the answer lies in correctly correlating historians’ goals for teaching with the capabilities of different kinds of computer games. During the development of a game prototype for high school students, we followed best practices as expressed in the literature on games for learning. The analysis that followed led us to question the applicability of these best practices, and this literature, to history games for learning. We began the second iteration by asking: “what is it that we as historians want to teach?” After deciding upon our goals for history education, we asked a second question: “how can these goals be best expressed in a game environment?” Different game genres afford different possibilities, and we connect three epistemologies for history to three computer game genres, resulting in three options for history games for learning.

Revivalists: Marketing the Gospel in English Canada, 1884-1957 (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006).

In Canada, the latter half of the nineteenth century marked a profound break with the settler past and the beginning of an age of commercialization. Kevin Kee shows how Protestant evangelists used theatre, film, and jazz to make religion personally relevant to their audiences.

The history of religious change has been largely devoted to study of the churches. Revivalists focuses on evangelists, singling out several significant entrepreneurs – Hugh Crossley and John Hunter, active from 1880 to 1910; Oswald J. Smith, who built his independent Toronto church into a popular evangelistic emporium; Frank Buchman and the Oxford Group, who appealed to the upper classes in the 1930s; and Charles Templeton, who enjoyed two careers as a revivalist. Kee shows that by adjusting their methods to the cultural forms of the day, these evangelists contributed to the vitality of Canadian Protestantism.

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Kevin Kee, Jamshid Beheshti, Andrew Large, Charles Cole, “‘A Journey to the Past: A Quebec Village in 1890’: A Test Case for Best Practices for History Simulations”. Proceedings of the 2006 Future Play Conference.

How do we develop computer simulations to best support student learning of history? This paper describes a continuing research project into the design, development, and testing of a representation of late nineteenth-century small-town Quebec for elementary school students. It provides a preliminary report on the manner in which, by both theorizing about simulations and building a simulation with a commercial-sector partner, we are responding to some of the questions that have animated the literature on computer games and simulations for history education, especially those concerning best practices for their design, production, and use. [Download Article]

Jamshid Beheshti, Andrew Large, Kevin Kee, Charles Cole, “Designing Virtual Environments in an Educational Context”. Proceedings of the 2006 Canadian Association for Information Science/L’Association canadienne des sciences de l’information Conference.

Virtual environments in which users can navigate freely through spatial representations, pick up and examine objects, and “converse” with virtual characters, can play a role in transferring information and knowledge for both training and education. This paper discusses design issues encountered when creating such an environment for grade-five primary school students.

“Bobby-sox to Bach: Charles Templeton and the Commodification of Popular Protestantism in Post-World War II Canada,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 15:1 (2004).

This article, which won the 2005 Journal of the Canadian Historical Association Prize, focuses on the transformation of evangelist Charles Templeton’s public expression of religion as a way to illuminate the intersection of religious expression and commercial culture. An innovative entrepreneur in religion, Templeton moved with the times by commodifying and re-commodifying religion to ensure that Protestant Christianity remained relevant to Canadians. In the 1940s, as an evangelist with the fundamentalist Youth for Christ organization, Templeton drew young people to his message of conversion by featuring acrobats, jive-talking preachers, and jazz. In the 1950s, as an evangelist for the mainstream United Church of Canada, he appealed to middle-class adults with classical music and the quiet techniques of contemporary salesmanship. Contrary to the traditional popular perception, this adaptation of evangelistic methods to commercial culture was not a sign of religious decline; rather, it was indicative of Protestantism’s extraordinary and continuing adaptability to changing conditions.