Jared Ferenczy – Digital History Methods

April 20, 2011

Supreme History. Site has content and final thoughts.

So if any of you were interested in my Supreme Court podcast, the site is up with five episodes right now at supremehistory.blogspot.com.

I have had a lot to think about since working on the site. The biggest and most important is the amount of work that went into it. The amount of work that went into just having 5-10 minutes worth of content to discuss was easily what it would have been for a ~5 page paper on any of the given subjects. Then recording each individual episode itself took extra time. The second episode in particular I decided to try and add some comedy to the episode by adding text to the video with sarcastic comments. It was an interesting experiment and one that I would have done more if I had had more time, but the entire digital process was just more time consuming that I would have originally thought. Part of it was my poor ability to budget my time, but part of it is that falling behind puts an extra strain on you. Maybe in the future I will tinker around with the web again and try some other form of digital delivery, but for right now it is rather work intensive and not conducive to getting other school work done.

As far as the medium goes, I’m not entirely certain that there is not a greater potential for learning through podcasts. I know that they already exist to a small degree, but there is not real market for them, but I think that with some work this could be a new method for broadening someone’s education. Part of the problem is who is speaking. To put it briefly, I am an undergraduate student. I am only slightly more qualified to talk about Supreme Court history than any other person. In order for this for of education to be more accepted, there should be actual educators and specialists making recordings. It is all fine and good for me to play around with this for a school project, but I think for something like this to actually take off, you would need someone a bit more professional than just some 21 year-old with a headset, particularly in a field like history. I can see it mattering less for topics that are studied, such as graphic novels as literature or any other popular culture topic, but there are some things you want professionals talking about.

As for what I have personally learned, I think a project like this would work better with at least a second person. Learning two programs and building a website was hard enough, but I also had to do research on every topic. And I still feel like I didn’t do enough. I barely advertised (I apparently forgot to even provide a link on the blog before now), I didn’t spend a lot of time designing my website and I feel like I cut corners on the video and audio quality to make sure I got the history part that I needed in each episode. I know other people had to do work and in no way am I complaining and saying that my project was harder than anyone else’s, but I do feel like I could have benefitted from a partner on this. If I was going to do this full time or something similar to this, I would absolutely get myself a partner who knew the digital stuff so I could focus on the history stuff.

On a side note, I don’t really feel like I got a chance to live up to my original goals. I was originally trying to make Supreme Court history brief but entertaining. I don’t think I ever really got into a groove until the very end. Part of that could have been my early topics. I know part of it was my political science background adding in information that was extraneous to the exercise and taking away from the history. Part of it was just playing around with something new and seeing what works.

I would say that the resource I was missing through all of this was time. If I was going to approach this again more professionally, I would need more time. Maybe with a couple more episodes I could finally get comfortable with the process and be more comedic and less worried about sound quality and other minor details.

April 5, 2011April 5, 2011

What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy

I feel like I have walked through the wrong door when I read this book. I am a gamer who can talk at length about the benefits of video games. When I read this book, I am inundated with complex phraseologies for what I already knew about video games. In short, this book is not for gamers. It is for linguists and specialists in education to understand video games. But let us look in more detail at this book.

James Paul Gee’s thesis is that video games can teach more than just basic hand-eye coordination. Gee believes that games can teach and that we can learn a lot from how they teach. Gee has 36 points of what games teach. 36 points that I will not explicitly state because there is providing basic information and then there is padding, and listing and explaining all 36 points is what the book is for, not the book’s summary. I think I agree with all 36 of the book’s points. I know I read the book, but I’m not sure I fully absorbed it. I’m not sure what a semiotic domain is or if video games ever taught me about them.

Despite all of this, I still feel the need to recommend this book to some people. I think the reason I am not getting the full message out of this book is that I am arriving from the perspective of someone who not only knows that games can teach and teach us about learning, but I already have my own examples. What this book teaches me is how to phrase what I already know in a different way and talk to a different group of people about the same subject. There are other people who approach this topic. I think particularly of Extra Credits, a video series about video games and video game design on TheEscapistMagazine.com (links to specific episodes will be included at the bottom), but there are other people on the internet who talk about this subject. But there has been one massive flaw in how they have talked about them in my previous experience. All of the people I know of who talk about video games and there value to society have been coming from the perspective of people who grew up playing games. They are not the 60 year-old linguists, but mid-20s adults who played video games for most of their lives. I think this book’s biggest value is just that it brings a different perspective to a dialogue that is already going on.

As far as the video series I was discussing concern, there were two episodes that come to mind. One is on gamification and incorporating game design into other aspects of life http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits/2985-Gamification. The other video I think is important to this discussion is on tangential learning http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits/2957-Tangential-Learning. They also make reference to an older episode about The Skinner Box and psychology that you can find here, but I do not necessarily think that this episode is as relevant or is entirely necessary to understand what they are talking about http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits/2487-The-Skinner-Box. I cannot guarantee that all of the content on this site is 100% safe for work, so visit at your own risk, but the videos themselves are SFW. Hopefully, these videos will help to illustrate my point about understanding the point of this book without understanding the language in it.

February 23, 2011March 28, 2011

Project Proposal: Supreme Court Podcast

For everyone who does not know me, I am a massive Supreme Court nerd. I love learning about the American legal system and how it changes over time. However, I find one of the biggest problems with learning about the high court is that the decisions are dense. Let’s face it, it is not light reading by any definition. So what I propose to do for my digital project is to do a series of podcasts about major Supreme Court decisions. The idea is to deliver old information in a new format (an audio format rather than a written one), using a new delivery system (a blog on the internet), and to do it in a more approachable manner. The idea of the podcast is that each one would be around five minutes in length, and cover the background information of the case, the decision and its impact on American history. The goal of the site would to be to provide introductory level education on any specific cases that I would be doing. For the sake of limiting my work load, I would be aiming for one podcast per week each week following Spring Break for a total of seven. For this reason, I will be picking some the most important cases and subject in Supreme Court history, but also try to include some of the less well known or less discussed cases that also had a big impact in United States history, for the sake of accomplishing my goal of education.

There are a couple of web site out there currently that are meant to present a brief form of Supreme Court history (Oyez.org in particular), but I plan on doing things differently in a couple of ways. First of all, I am planning going to present my information in a audio format to try an accommodate people who prefer learning by hearing rather than reading. Second, I am planning to provide more background and history to each case. Oyez.org is very good at providing people with the most necessary of information, but the site’s brevity can be annoying occasionally, especially because they are much more focused on the legal portion of the decision. My focus would be more on the history of the court as well as what impact individual decisions had. If I had to form a mission statement of what I am trying to teach, it would probably be that I want show people that the court does not exist in a bubble and that its decisions come from somewhere and have some effect. I want to show this in a brief, approachable manner. To provide a morsel of information to get people interested about Supreme Court history and show them other places where they can find more information.

If I had to pick an audience for my project, it would probably just be people who are interested in the court and American history, but do not really know where to go to find out more information.

My personal measure for this to be a success, beyond just keeping to a regular update schedule, would be getting at least 5 people to download my podcasts and hopefully to get them to discuss with me whether or not I helped them.

January 29, 2011January 31, 2011

The Wonderful World of Wordle

Wordle.net is a very curious little website. The website describes itself as, “a toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text [the user] provide[s].” That is pretty much the only way to describe Wordle that I can think of. Alright, not necessarily the best, because not everyone knows what a word cloud is, but it is certainly good for a short description. Wordle lets anyone input text in a box and it will churn out an image of all the words arranged in a picture, such as the one provided :

The US Constitution in Wordle. Taken from the Wordle.net home page.

Working Wordle is actually very simple. The home page provides a short description and puts a link right in front of the user telling the user to create their own Wordle image. The interface in the creation page is fairly simple. There are three boxes that use can put text into. The top one lets the user type in whatever he wants. The second lets the user provide a link to a blog (well any website URL will do but they recommend a blog URl). The third allows you to put in a del.icio.us username and it will create a Wordle image of their tags. After providing whatever text the user wants, they can click the button to create a Worlde. They are then provided an image and limited ways to alter the image. The user can change the color of the words and background, the font or the text layout. The user can also change around the language setting for their image. Unfortunately, I do not really know any other languages so I just kept the default English settings.

The opening monologue from the video game Fallout 3. Image created by me using a custom color palate.

Publishing and copying images is a mixed bag. For those with a blog or website, Wordle.net is very willing to give you the link and even generates the HTML code for you to just copy and paste into your blog. If you want to save the image to your hard drive though, or if you are like me and are just too stupid to use the HTML code, you have to go through a more roundabout process. The website’s FAQ tells you that in order to save an image, you will have to use a screen capture and save it that way. It is kind of a hassle, but fortunately the FAQ is rather helpful with the process.

Speaking of which, the FAQ for the site is very useful. I do not know just how helpful the troubleshooting section is, because I did not have many problems that needed to be troubleshot, but there are some useful tidbits to be found there. One example is that the more times one word appears in a text block, the larger it is going to be in the image. So if you put, “gold gold gold silver silver copper” in the text box when you create your image, the copper is going to the smallest word, the silver is going to be twice as big as the copper and the gold is going to be three times as big as the copper. Another useful tip is that you can use a tilde(~) between words keep them together when the image is generated, and Wordle will replace the tilde with a space.

The FAQ also answers some questions on what you can and cannot do with a Wordle. The creator allows for you to copy and paste your Wordles and use and sell your creations freely. The site is fairly open. The only problem is with the code. Apparently the creator, Jonathan Feinberg, created the code for Wordle.net while working at IBM, and his contract stipulates everything created on company time belongs to the company. So Wordle belongs to IBM.

The are a couple of issues with Wordle that stands out in my mind. The biggest that stands out for me is that Wordle has a very short memory of the images it generates. What I mean is that every time I change tabs with a new image open that I forgot to save, for some reason Wordle loses the image. I do not know if this is a problem with my browser (Safari) or a problem with the website itself. I find it hard to complain to much though because that is a negligible problem that can probably be avoided rather easily and images are often easy to recreate. Also, the site does not appear to have that problem is you change windows, so you can just create your images in a separate window and do not open a new tab in that window.

Wordle is a very simple, very easy to use toy. It is very approachable for anyone who wants to try it. The only real problem that I could see is that I cannot figure out a point to it. I sit in front of my computer screen for a couple of minutes, put something into the text box, edit it a little. I now have a nice little picture and all I can say is, “Now what?” My roommate suggested that it might be useful for advertising. I could see that, but I am personally a little put off by it from a design perspective, so I am probably going to approach that suggestion with caution. It is, for me, a toy. Something you play around with for a couple of minutes, maybe return to once or twice, share it with your friends, and forget about it. There is a rather large gallery of images created by users, so you can see what other people did with it. It is interesting and easy to use, but at the end of the day lacking any real function.