Why History Matters to the Present

History Matters

You might say that as a former historian, I’m always looking backward. I would disagree.

One of my favourite historians, Marc Bloch, told a story of how his colleague once took him on a tour of a new urban district in Sweden. When Bloch asked why his friend wouldn’t give him a tour of the historical quarters, the latter replied: “As a historian, I am most concerned with the present.”

For the most part, that’s always how I felt as a historian: The past is interesting, but only insofar as it reveals something important about the where we are right here, right now. Whether that ‘something important’ is a lesson, a grain of truth about the human condition, or a trivial fact that reminds us that despite our short lifespans, we have access to the cumulative experiences of thousands of years of human existence.

***

We live in a world that is changing at an incredible rate. The last ten years have seen advances in communications technology to a degree that the globe we inhabit can often seem overwhelmingly interconnected – a staggering pace of change.

It’s easy to forget that many eras have seen this degree of change before. Ian K Steele’s landmark study, The English Atlantic World, made the convincing argument that the decades that surrounded the turn of the 18th century saw vast improvements in communications technology (i.e. – faster, more reliable shipping). It was taking less and less time to get from England to the Caribbean, and back to England.

Why does this matter right here, right now?

Because for the millions of people who lived along the Atlantic Seaboard, their world was getting visibly smaller, and they made a number of social and economic decisions based on that shrinking world that have had long lasting effects. Increasingly reliable shipping affected trade policy, it affected the political culture of the British Empire, changed both the scope and scale of previously provincial European wars and was one of the factors that led to the American Revolution.

The lesson can be expressed simply: the way we react to our changing world has an effect on this generation, the next, and so on.

***

Confession: Just 12 years ago, I didn’t even own a computer. I did most of my communicating in person, by landline and by snail mail. Now I have a PC, an iPad, and an iPhone and I use a range of social platforms to communicate with my friends and colleagues. These changes have resulted in increased access to information and economic opportunity, much in the same way that increasingly regular shipping traffic some 300 years ago opened up a whole new world of possibilities to my predecessors.

***

About a year and a half ago, I saw Senator Romeo Dallaire speak in St. John’s, Newfoundland. At that talk, he expressed his concerns about the lack of a federal strategy to deal with the broad changes brought about by the Internet. I understand his concerns. Just as in our personal lives, the long term is shaped by how we handle change right now.

This is what historians refer to as “historical time.” Whether by action or inaction, what you decide today will shape your story for years to come.

No pressure.

***

History, for me,  is not about looking backwards. It’s about a love of the present, the human condition, and a deep appreciation for the fact that actions have consequences. It is an academic discipline rooted in humility, compassion and personal accountability.

***

The Arab Spring  was just one of the flashpoints facilitated by social media. In the year since that wave of revolution, social media is taken a lot more seriously by leaders around the world.

Our world is changing, as it always has. What will we do next?

A Useful Exercise for Career Changers

Steps

I took the terrifying step of making a career change last year. I was well on my way to becoming a researcher and educator, and made the switch to writing, communications and event planning. It wasn’t a dramatic change because I had dabbled in my new career path before. But the switch was difficult and the transition period full of stress. As I later discovered, with a little more structure in my job search, it didn’t have to be.

Changing careers means putting yourself under a microscope. It involves a lot of reflection on who you are and where you want to go with your life. The questions you ask during this period aren’t limited to what you want as a “job,” they delve deeper into who you are as a person, what your interests and talents are, and what you find valuable. Here is an exercise that really helped me develop the focus that I needed to target my applications. As any career coach will tell you, knowing what you want to do will make your search for a new profession far easier.

1.Grab a few pieces of paper and something to write with.

2. Draw a line down the middle, from top to bottom.

3. In the margin on the left, write 10.

4. On the left hand side, write anything you did for money at that age. In mine I had “paper route” and “collect bottles in the woods.”

5. On the right hand side, write anything you did for pleasure. Mine included “playing GI Joe with my friend Curtis,” “camping,” and “putting on plays/haunted houses in my basement for my parents.”

6. Continue this all the way until your current age. Make sure to include as many details as possible, including those that seem like a waste of time. (i.e. video games, watching internet videos of kittens, etc) Did I forget to mention that this isn’t necessarily a five minute exercise? Yeah, it takes time, but it is really worth it when you get to the end.

7. When you reach your final lines, start looking for items that come up often, especially ones that cross the boundary between the things you did for fun and money. On my list, I often saw activities related to writing, entertainment, research and gaming.

8. Take those common threads and turn them into a one sentence summary of who you are. Mine was “Lifelong gamer with a passion for learning and media.” I started looking for jobs as a writer, for careers in  the gaming industry, as a journalist, and communications positions with museums and universities. (and other related searches) I had focus and a credible story to sell based on my life’s experience.

A career change doesn’t have to mean a disconnect with your past and your experience. As we get older and increasingly specialized in one field or another, we often build rigid barriers between our professional and personal lives. The years move on and the threads that connect who we are now with who we were at a very early age become frayed.

A career change can mean reconnecting with who you have been for a long, long time. And this exercise can help with that. It provides you with a basic outline of your personal narrative and can help you develop the focus you need to make a successful transition into a new, rewarding career.

The Secret to Learning Anything, Anywhere, in Any Field

The Secret to Learning Anything, Anywhere, in Any Field

If you’re currently overwhelmed by trying to learn a new task, a new job, or a new subject in school, then read on. I was in a similar situation when someone taught me the secret to picking up a new skill set that I have since applied to everything I do, whether it’s writing an article for a website, or fixing my toilet.

The Secret

During the misguided period that followed withdrawing from my PhD, I wound up in Grande Prairie, Alberta working as a technician on oil rigs. My girlfriend’s brother offered me a position with his company and I accepted. It was simultaneously one of the worst jobs and one of the most memorable learning experiences I’ve ever had.

I was 3,000 kilometers (1,700ish miles) away from home, “enjoyed” 30-hour work days in -40 Celsius, 6 to 7-hours of driving on a daily basis, 14-days of continuous work and had zero skill for what was really a highly technical job. That last part was the worst.

I was exhausted on most days and frustrated in the knowledge that my lack of skill was making me work longer than most.

But there were also some really amazing parts to the position and I wanted to appreciate them more fully: the landscape was beautiful, it was my first time seeing the mountains, I had a lot of time to think and reflect every day on the drive to different sites, there was a great deal of self-direction in the position, and I could see the money becoming alright. But I couldn’t tell a hopper from an impeller to save my life.

Seriously, if I needed to know that to save my life, I was a deadman. I quit.

But in my last week out in the Great Canadian North I worked on a drilling site at the top of a crater with a technician named Justin who taught me a killer learning technique that helped me really start to understand the job and how the machines work. I have since applied it to everything from writing, to cooking, to repairing things around the house.

The secret is this:

Stop trying to understand the whole before understanding the parts.

I suddenly knew what I was doing wrong: I was overwhelming myself trying to understand something difficult, even though that complicated process was just a grouping of very simple ones. If I broke the system down to the simplest parts, then it made a lot more sense.

How You Can Apply it to Anything, Anywhere, in Any Field

Lets use writing as an example.

When I’m asked to write an article, I don’t write an article. I decide on tone and format. I write a headline, the body text, occasionally sub-headers and pictures, and then write the lead paragraph. On more formal articles I might include footnotes and a reference section.

Each part of the article has a specific function in your writing:

  • The headline captures the reader’s attention and gives an indication of the direction of the article.
  • The lead paragraph summarizes the argument you’re making, or piques the reader’s curiosity and convinces them to read on.
  • Sub-headers help the reader situate themselves in more complex articles and allow them to skim over the piece.
  • Paragraphs express ideas.
  • Footnotes prove to the reader that you’ve done your research and direct them towards sources for further reading, should they want to verify your claims.

They all fit together in a piece of writing, but if you try to write without an understanding of these different bits and pieces you will likely become frustrated at not achieving your objectives.

Instead of writing an article, focus on mastering each section. Learn how to write a strong headline, (80% of online readers only read this part) and then move on. Don’t overwhelm yourself trying to write a Pulitzer prize winning novel – focus on fitting the different parts of the article together by understanding what each of them are intended to accomplish.

You can apply this tip to anything you’re learning, whether that’s picking up an instrument, or trying to figure out how a piece of software works. A lot of the tools we use are complex, but if you take a step back and think about them in terms of their individual pieces and how they fit into the bigger picture, you’ll find greater success, less frustration, and pleasure in knowing that you’re starting to master something that you previously thought was out of your reach.

Achievement Unlocked: The Place of Video Games in the Classroom

In the past decade, a new term has emerged on the learning landscape: the MMOLG, or Massive Multi-Player Online Learning Game. MMOLGs seek to engage students on a deeper level, and across a broader audience than conventional education methods, and they are doing it using a model with tremendous commercial success.

As tens of millions of people found out over the last decade, video games are an effective way of motivating people to commit to something. And no other category of game has drawn as much attention from scientists, philosophers and educators as the MMORPG – the Massive Online Role Playing Game.

These types of games were a genuine business coup, with some – World of Warcraft in particular – reaching over ten million monthly subscribers. The players of online video games spend an average 25 hours a week playing a video game online.  That’s four times more than the average offline video game player and enough to gross an extra $1000+ a month at minimum-wage in Ontario (Canada).

I’m not judging – when I had my own online gaming account, I often spent more time in front of the computer screen.

While I won’t go into the different types of MMOLGs today, I do want to explore what makes video games such effective motivators, and why this media isn’t used more in the classroom.

Games Offer A Sense of Progression

A progressive rewards system makes video-games powerful and highly successful motivators. It’s not just the sense that you are moving forward, but the feeling that you are getting better at something as well. In most online games, progress is tracked both numerically – you earn more points in “strength” – and experientially, as you encounter more complex challenges, while opponents that overwhelmed you before are overwhelmed by you instead.

In many games now, there’s a system of achievements in place where tasks as mundane as acquiring a pet chicken from a certain farmer “unlock” rewards for players in the form of titles, virtual equipment or humorous pets.

As this article on MSNBC  points out, games also speak to the spirit of competition – the quest to excel at something beyond everybody else in the virtual room.

The ancient Greeks held the virtue of “arete,” or “the pursuit of excellence.” Video games speak to this basic human desire for mastery.

Games Provide A Safe Environment in Which to Make Mistakes

Video games also provide a safe environment where you can make mistakes with few consequences. Players become frustrated at having to repeat a task, but generally speaking, you’re free to blunder with impunity. Avoiding the tedium of repetition is often enough to motivate gamers to do better next time.

I used to play with a “raid team” in World of Warcraft – a group of ten people that banded together to accomplish difficult objectives. We could spend entire evenings trying the same task over and over, in the hopes that we would eventually master it and move on. Most of the time we would. That’s ten people, most of whom only ever met online, who would strategically coordinate their actions for hours, despite multiple character “deaths.” Frustrating? Yes. But the only cost was time. (and $17 a month)

This brings up my next point…

Online Video Games are Inherently Social

MMORPGs are inherently social. As my “raiding” example above illustrates, people come together to play. This is something I think some non-video gamers have trouble understanding: Gamers make commitments to real people through the medium of the game.

If you’re not a MMORPG player, consider the game as highly sophisticated telephone software. What you see on the screen might be graphics, but those graphics are controlled by individuals at the other end. Your partner or child is making time commitments to them, not the graphics. It’s as real, as fun, and even more safe a social activity, as going out for drinks with your friends.

And you can end up with epic loot instead of a hangover.

But Can We Leverage Video Games For Learning?

It’s no surprise to see innovative teachers and thinkers trying to tap into the enormous motivating potential of the online video game, and some are even exploring game mechanisms to do everything from lose weight to improve memory.

Take this video by Jane McGonigal at TED Talks, who explains not only how she’s leveraged gaming to add 10 years to peoples’ lives, but how gaming actually saved her life!

Jane stresses the use of games to develop collaborative approaches to problem solving, and she encourages using this approach in everyday settings. Here’s the link to her book: Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. (not an Amazon affiliate link)

Many teachers have adopted games in the classroom, but there is still significant resistance to full scale adoption of video games as a teaching tool.

What’s the Problem?

As this paper from the Software and Information Industry Association’s (SIIA) Education Division points out, while we have evidence that games are effective learning media, we lack an education system that can effectively deploy them in the classroom.

Lack of familiarity, inherited curricular methods and dwindling resources are just three of the obstacles identified in the report. How does the SIIA recommend selling the idea?

  • Link it to a metaphor that screams familiarity – like a laboratory;
  • Offer guidelines for classroom management to prevent loss of control, or perceived loss of control;
  • Develop game-based solutions that complement “pen and paper” based assignments;
  • Clarify the expert-role of teachers in educational gaming;
  • Show proof that the games are effective teaching aides;
  • Use games that adhere to certain standards;
  • Focus on selling the idea to “early adopters” – they are more likely to buy in, and then will provide a far more powerful endorsement to their peers than an external agent ever could;
  • Communicate the key benefits education-based games clearly, without the puffery of marketing slang.

So…

While video games aren’t the most effective solution for every pedagogical challenge, they can often offer significant advantages over traditional media. They appeal to a broader set of learners, are powerful motivators, and grab student attention in ways few other technologies do. For learning technology, I suspect there is no rival. I’ve personally learned more about computers as a gamer than I ever have in formal classrooms. My desire to succeed at various games encouraged me to download and install mods, optimize my UI, use console commands and then research how to undo the catastrophic problems I had created on my computer.

I made less mistakes as time went on. And as a benchmark for learning, I’m OK with that.

What have your experiences been with games and learning? Share some in the comments below and I’ll try to write about them in a future post.

3 Things Humanities Programs Could Do To Become Relevant Again

There’s a crisis of confidence about modern humanities and liberal arts programs. Universities and Colleges have legitimized an overwhelming number of learning programs that non-academic employers consider irrelevant. And this is hurting students both in Canada and the United States.

Critics are right to be concerned.

Many humanities programs continue to follow an informal structure of course offerings that emphasizes writing and research. This offers little by means of marketable training. None of the history programs I’ve taken, for example, mandated a statistics course – curious for a program built on identifying trends over time. And that’s just one example.

How many English programs feature courses on publishing? (By that I mean, the business side of writing.) How many Classics programs offer museum studies components?

I conducted a quick survey of History and English programs (my two areas of study) at major North American universities (Harvard, University of Toronto, Simon Fraser University, and Yale) and found that none required their students to take any sort of training that could be marketed outside of academies, museums, or book clubs.

This really has to stop, and the people who design courses need to innovate for the sake of their students.

Here are just three ways Humanities programs could change for the better:

1. Incorporate Manadatory IT Components Into Your Discipline

Historians use databases to organize their data all the time – including Access, Excel, and EndNote. They analyze statistics, make tables and charts and plot large sets of information occasionally using complex applications. Similarly, English majors use a variety of word processing software for their writing and some go on to work in publishing houses where specialized software is used. It completely baffles me that there isn’t a mandatory course incorporated into the curriculum where these tools are taught!

I understand the importance of self-learning, but I also understand that 1 in 5 university graduates in Canada alone live below the average income line. The people who design humanities curricula need to consider the signalling power (to potential employers) of offering formal IT training directly in their programs. If I’m an employer, and I know that this English major has learned publishing and editing software in her program to complement her advanced critical thinking, reading and writing skills, then she’s just become a far more attractive candidate.

2. Mandatory Public Speaking Courses

So much of what liberal arts majors do involves communicating, so why is it that so many programs don’t require a public speaking and presentation course? I don’t think that every student needs to be a world-class orator, but they do need to understand the principles of communicating ideas for a crowd, rather than a dissertation committee.

Most programs have professors who are just rock star speakers already. Share the responsibility of offering the class, make it dynamic, have students run the show, but offer feedback. Don’t just sit at the front and pontificate. If your university makes it impossible, organize a Toastmasters meeting in your department and make sure both students and professors are involved. This one innovation alone could be the greatest favour you do for your students.

But it needs to be 100% mandatory. People outside the program need to know that a graduate from X university/college is also a competent communicator.

3. Encourage Students to Submit Assignments Through Social Media

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my increasing involvement in social media, it’s that there is no better way to stay on top of current trends, to validate your ideas, and to share with a wide audience than through blogs, Facebook pages, and Twitter feeds. The career and learning potential for students to use social media is enormous!

The practice of submitting assignments – almost covertly, with as little direct contact between professor and student as possible – fails. The additional pressure of making assignments public could encourage better quality work, allow students to compare good submissions to better ones, and provide a medium whereby they would learn from each other, as well as the professor. They could then polish and edit assignments and develop a portfolio of published work well before graduation. What a way to break out onto the job market!

Too many academic programs in the humanities are designed to feed  additional studies – law school, grad school, education, etc. It’s a gigantic racket and it has to stop.

With tuition fees at the level they are, it is morally reprehensible to funnel students through a series of low-value diplomas that they don’t actually need in order to have meaningful careers. Instead, program administrators should focus on making bachelor degrees relevant again, and that requires a different way of thinking about the sacred temple of the arts.

Decision Making is a Process, Don’t Rush It

One of the wonderful things about the internet is the amount of people you can connect with when you’re making a decision; people who have left some trace of their experience making the same one as you at any given time.

Last year, almost to the day, I made a very hard life choice: I looked my Ph.D. career in the face, sucked in my gut, and said “I quit!”

I had been working at the program for a little over two years and was done with it. My topic was poorly defined, I was living in different city than the one my university was in, and I couldn’t see a professional future in academia.

It took me about a year to make the decision to leave the program.

During that year, I must have read a hundred articles and forum posts about whether or not to quit. Many of them very good, such as an article in The Economist titled “The disposable academic: why doing a phd is often a waste of time.”

Like many other articles I came across, I must have read that one a half-dozen times. Re-reading it to squeeze out every bit of advice I could.

During this near frantic reading frenzy, I noticed that there were a lot of really decisive people on the Internet. This realization did absolutely nothing for my self-esteem, until it occurred to me that they were giving advice from the other side of the decision.

Decisions take time. Difficult ones take longer. Don’t try and force the issue if you’re not ready. It’s OK to read a little longer, to think about things a little more, and to get another look at both sides of the issue before committing one way or the other. A decision is a process, not a moment.

But please realize this:

Until you make that Earth Shattering Decision, you’re stuck in a holding pattern, 30,000 feet up. You’re not going anywhere. You’re not committing to anything.

Once you decide something, anything, you’re free again.

You might find yourself in freefall, but at least you’ll be moving towards some experience. And that – taking the plunge with your life in your hands –  is the only way you can ever really learn.