Devon Elliott used one of our 3D printers (a MakerBot that he built) to remake a working toy from a 1944 edition of Popular Science. Pictures and open source plans available on Thingiverse. Something like this would be too complicated to print at our workshop, but can be easily designed, made and shared in a few days.
I’m assuming that at least some of our activities in Niagara-on-the-Lake will be in the form of an unconference. This means that the schedule is up for grabs, people aren’t presenting stuff as such, attendees can vote with their feet (and no hard feelings) and awesome, competing activities will be scheduled into the same time slots (so hard choices will have to be made by all). Of course, I’m not an organizer, I just play one on TV–actually, the part of ‘me as organizer’ is played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, because he’s such a great actor he can play anybody–but, ANYWAY, I’m sure Kevin will jump in if that is not what he has in mind.
Hi All,
Rather than describing to our work and ideas to you in a session, we would like to get you playing! We (John Lutz and Ruth Sandwell) want your feedback on this proposal for a session:
We would like to host a session which would invite you to solve one of the Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History online. The facilitators will take the liberty of inviting participants to work in groups of 2-4 to ‘solve’ the mystery for the first 45 minutes or so of the session. In the last half of the session, the facilitators will ask participants to present not only their solution to the mystery, but their reflections of the interpretive acts in which they have been participating, and the media with which they have been working. The facilitators will be taping the session, and will contribute an article to the written collection that not only describes the aspirations and goals of this interactive history website, but reports on how participants of the symposium made use of the site, and how they experienced the opportunities of playful technologies that it provided, and what are the next steps in expanding this genre.
What do you think?
John and Ruth
Kevin asked us to think about and propose some games or playful activities for the first day of our (un)conference.
I have a few exercises I’d like to try with this group. They’re not complete games and they’re pretty low tech. They’re more like playful discussion exercises. I’ve talked about a few of them at my personal blog in recent weeks, but I’m saving others as surprises. Some of them I’ve used in university classes to good effect. Others are new experiments. You could think of them as “Barely Games,” a term I take from this lovely talk by Russell Davies.
“When I think about games and playfulness, [commercial video games] don’t come to mind at all. What pops into my head is … that experience of driving in the back of the family car, scrunching you eyes up at night to turn the streetlights into laser weapons and shooting other cars. Or watching the passing shadows on the road beside you, imagining shapes and rhythms.”
As I think I said in my earlier post, Tim Compeau and I have been working (along with a number of others coming to our meeting)on a pervasive history game or historical ARG, which our written paper (when we get it written!) will discuss. But I’m actually wrestling with some doubts at the moment about highly designed or structured game experiences as educational tools. I’m not certain if the ratio of effort to impact involved in designing an ARG is scalable or sustainable, or that commercial games are a practical model for time and cash-strapped educators to emulate. As a result I’m trying to deconstruct my own ideas about games and gaming, to break them down to their essential nutrients, some basic building blocks of history and play.
So if the group, or any subset of it, is interested, I’d like to take an hour or so and lead us through some Barely Games, specially designed to gently re-introduce an audience of professional historians to some whimsical, irresponsible ways of interfacing with the past. Because they are rather rudimentary, introductory kinds of things, they might make a good place for us to start on Thursday morning.
(I realize I’m being quite vague about what exactly I have in mind, but for some of these activities an element of surprise is helpful. I welcome questions, comments, or fellow co-conspirators.)
Hi, all. Really looking forward to seeing a lot of you again, and to meeting those I don’t already know. In keeping with my focus on making stuff, I am happy to bring various things for people to play / experiment with. These could include (but are not limited to) some or all of the following:
