Gaming and Playing
Posted on: October 31, 2011
I think everyone enjoyed our fieldtrip to nGen last Wednesday. (At least Melanie did, as she makes clear in her blog post!). We had an interesting discussion on modelling and simulation and I think we highlighted some important and exciting uses for modeling and simulation in the humanities. Dave’s DH project on Rome Reborn was particularly illuminating.
This week we had some interesting assigned readings on playing and gaming. At first I seemed to agree with Peters that games can’t and should not be for educational purposes. Certainly when I decide to commit some of my time to playing a game, often as a reward for completing work, I don’t expect to be bombarded with educational lessons. But having read these articles I think I am now convinced of the of the idea of incorporating “play” into education. Whil my wiki post may seem to contradict what I’m saying here I don’t see this as being the case. I’m simply interested in hearing how others define play and how they understand play in education. And as Dave eloquently stated in his blog, he approaches every game “seriously,” so I guess we can approach any serious educational topic “playfully” as well.
As for blogs and twitter: The Women’s History Network Blog continues to post interesting snippets related to black history month and unfortunately there’s nothing new to comment on from the Writing Women’s History Blog. As usual on twitter I’ve followed a number of interesting tweets to different things including an article on a Salem witch trial judge from Boston1775, a job listing for a historian of modern gender from theHistoryWoman, a list of female rulers of England and Great Britain from AboutFemHistory, and a link to a new book on women’s social history from Womens_History. If only I had more time to browse through all the interesting links these twitter feeds have to offer!
As a PC user, I won’t be able to try out Devon Think but AcademicLife Hacker proposes alternatives including Evernote (which I’m already using quite often), MyInfo, AskSam, and Nota Bene. I decided to try MyInfo. The site offers a 28 day free trial. So far I see it as being somewhat similar to Evernote. But it has “reminder” feature that I’m trying out. I particularly like the task manager. In this sense, MyInfo is better for me than Evernote because it allows me to make clear “to do” lists which I can’t seem to figure out how to do with Evernote. I’m still working on figuring out Scrivener. I haven’t downloaded it on my computer yet because I’m not sure I want the beta version on there, but I tried it out on a mac and made some headway reorganizing and revising my book review of John H. Arnold’s History on there. It helped me to reorganize my thoughts is ways that made more sense than previously. But I’m not sure if this was Scrivner’s doing or just the process of revision in general….
The Digital Humanities 
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