AR/VR - the future of history?

This week Dr. Gabriel Swarts meet with students in History 419: Digital History and Archival practices to talk about the changing field of history and the role that augmented reality and virtual realy will play in it. Then the students got to break out some VR headsets to play.
 

Design thinking in a history class

 You can't tell from the picture but if you could read the whiteboard you would see that in History 206 we reversed engineered a game to look at the way information is organized.  Lots of diagrams and such. We want to think about how to take content (our research) and organize it into something folks can use and understand.

Data Visualization and History Internship

Ashlee Gray, double-major in History and English, is wrapping up her internship in the University Archives with Dennis Frank.  Ashlee, an alumnus of the digital history class that experimented with app making, worked on collecting, analyzing, and displaying data from the New York 154 regiment papers in the University Archives.  She worked in Microsoft Excel and then moved on to visualizing and mapping the data.  Above is a map she produced.  Next semester she plans on continuing the project to produce a more refined final product.  (Hint:  give it a moment to load and it works best if you expand it to full screen.)

Last Day of Classes, Let's Play Games

On Friday, the last day of classes, we got together in the Friedsam Library to play some games.  Everyone seemed to need to have some fun before finals.  Fueled with pizza, we played a bunch of games, including Risk, 1775, Pandemic, Ticket to Ride, and a few others.

THATCamp Bonas 16

We're hosting a THATCamp on Oct 25.  This is an outgrowth of the digital and public history projects we've been working on with Dennis Frank and the folks at the Friedsam Memorial Library.  The web page up that we'll be adding more information as we go along.  You can register for it here.

Because Dennis and I are involved and because we've been exploring gamification and game design in the classroom, we're kicking things off with a talk by Brian Mayer who is an educational game designer.  You can see his work here.

A THATCamp is an unconference.   The rules of an unconference are (1) have fun, (2) be productive, and (3) stay collegial.  The rules explained:

Unconferences are about you, the participants, proposing sessions that you explore with fellow participants with similar interest.  All disciplines are welcome.  Technology is broadly defined.