Author: Shawn Graham

Gamification is all the rage. Operation Lapis show us what full-blown gamification can look like in the classroom; but if you’re not ready for that, there are other things you can do to introduce playful approaches to your teaching. I find myself teaching ‘The Historian’s Craft’ this term. There areContinue Reading

In my previous ‘Practical Necromancy’ post, I made the argument why we should toy with history, using the Netlogo agent based modeling environment. Let me tell you today what happened when I introduced the idea of simulating the past to my first year students. The phrase ‘digital history’ does indeedContinue Reading

My students – especially my first year students – sometimes wish for direct, first person testimony. Wouldn’t it make life easier if we could just interrogate them, read what they thought, directly? Seeing as how most of the people in question (in my classes) are Romans, this would require aContinue Reading

[a version of this article first appeared on GameSpy in 2007, but I thought y’all might appreciate it] “Vespasian has converted to Judaism!” The cheery message came as something of a shock. After all, Vespasian and his son Titus together were responsible for the destruction of Jerusalem and the TempleContinue Reading

One of the perks of working at the British School at Rome in the late nineties on the Tiber Valley Project was getting to play with the GIS, especially the digitized photos of the Tiber Valley taken during the war years. We used that GIS and those photos to re-locateContinue Reading

Instead of teaching students to ‘read’ landscapes, might ‘playing’ landscapes be better at generating meanings that go deeper? Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, in ‘Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals’ (MIT, 2004) situate meaningful play as a relationship between “player action and system outcome”, where both are “discernable and integrated into the larger context of the game” (empahsis in the original; 34). Discernability in a game relates to being able to actually perceive whether an action had some sort of outcome; integration means that the action has consequences for later stages of play (35). I’m suggesting then that the game of reading landscapes would not stop at just reading some aspect of past human activity in the landscape. Rather, it would be framed as part of some game whereby it competes with other readings of the landscape, where the story of the landscape emerges from game play, through some process of physically annotating & crafting competing visions of the palimpsest.

In short, an augmented reality game.Continue Reading