“’Digital Zombies’ — A Learner-centered Game: Social Knowledge Creation at the Intersection of Digital Humanities and Digital Pedagogy,” by Juliette Levy

1. Introduction

1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 Most knowledge creation in an undergraduate academic context is social – knowledge is created in the classroom, what is to be learned is explained or modeled by an instructor, shared with a librarian, tested among student. Even the solitary moments of learning happen in the social and cognitive environment of the college in which it exists. I do not need to extend this summary of Albert Bandura’s work further to state that in the context of the modern university, the creation of knowledge, and the creation of social knowledge specifically, is a cognitive exercise with social consequences and incentives.[1] Never has this been more evident than when I developed an online class aimed at more than 150 students per term. The course, which is part of the University of California, Riverside’s History curriculum is a writing intensive gateway course called “The Historian’s Workshop.” The class has one explicit goal: to teach historical research and writing skills to lower-division students who want to major in History. There are many ways of accomplishing this goal, and each faculty member who teaches it does so in a different way. To date, I am the only faculty member who has taught the course online. When I developed the course for online instruction I had a second explicit goal: to teach more than 100 students at a time to effectively read and write like historians despite rarely being able to connect with them synchronously. This is the context in which the game of Digital Zombies was born.

2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 1 Digital Zombies is both the name of the learner-centered game created to teach students how to think about historical research, historical sources and repositories of historical material in both digital and physical forms; and it is a reference that resonates through materials from the course (in which the game is played) that encourages students not to be “digital zombies,” i.e., not to use the internet blindly to do research, to know their sources (the digital and the material ones), to be a responsible digital citizen, and to become digitally literate. In this paper I want to discuss how (with the support of the many colleagues named in the acknowledgements) I combined digital humanities, traditional humanities instruction, innovative pedagogy and digital pedagogy to teach an online class that engaged students in historical research, digital tools and collaborative practice.

3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 I assigned Max Brooks “World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War” and other primary source readings and texts, made available through the course management system.[2] The course uses World War Z and other readings to guide students on the use of maps, photographs, letters and diaries, newspapers and other popular press items to create history—maps to explore versions of Columbus’ voyages, early photographs to understand the Mexican Revolution and late nineteenth century slavery on Brazilian plantations, diary entries to compare a the life and the intentions of an eighteenth century colonial American midwife to a mid-twentieth century rebel (Martha Ballard and Che Guevara respectively), and letters to read into Charles Darwin’s and Abigail Adams’ lives. This is a class on research methods—so the content needed to be relatively well known so that the focus could remain on the exploration of the sources that gave rise to our knowledge about them.

4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 It may seem contradictory to develop this curricular plan around a fictional history of a zombie war, but World War Z is a fake oral history that uses a significant amount of historical primary sources and ties its zombie war story to verifiable events. The zombie theme also fit in with a behavior observed among many students, namely their overreliance on unreliable digital sources and websites for research. The subtext of the class ultimately is that being in the digital world but not of it dooms us to becoming “digital zombies”—so let’s not.

Digital Zombies : game and/or educational tool?

5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 Digital Zombies was first conceived in 2014, during a workshop at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI). I had joined DHSI that year to learn about games in the digital humanities and use them in the online class I was developing. DHSI is where the first ideas about a learning game involving zombies, the library, and digital and analog primary source materials took shape. These ideas were developed collaboratively by Steve Anderson (a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Riverside), Andrew Keenan, Matt Bouchard (doctoral candidates in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto), any myself.

6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0 Together we articulated the logic of the game’s design, the roots of meaningful play, and the identity and branding of itself. Digital Zombies (here: http://zombies.digital) is an interactive learning tool designed to address significant needs in student preparedness as humanities scholars and twenty-first century students. Digital Zombies takes the principles of game design and user experience and breaks down their logic and processes, by which independent research activities are then broken into a series of smaller tasks that follow sequentially in a historical narrative around a fictional “digital zombie outbreak.”

7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 0 Doing/making/praxis is a significant part of the Digital Humanities, and one that arguably distinguishes Digital Humanities from many other disciplines in the humanities. Applying this to a History class was challenging since learning history by doing history isn’t really obvious. How do you actually “do” history? Historians write history, which is our version of “doing,” and we spend hours in archives to “do” this. I spent many hours trying to think of how I could inject an active learning component into a craft for which I literally spent years sitting in an archive. Ultimately, the key was to make a game, and to collaborate across fields to do so.

8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 0 We realized that in order for students to do a multi-week research project we would need to give them guided step-by-step instructions on how to proceed—instructions that were clear enough for students to follow, but vague enough for students to have to sort some of the experiences out for themselves. This meant we had to deconstruct the steps of a research project and transform them into individual steps/tasks that students needed to complete while leaving enough room for exploration and personal initiative.

9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 0 In Digital Zombies, the game supports the curriculum of the course. The class (outline available in the appendix) goes well beyond the game, but the game (played in the first five weeks of the quarter) teaches students the steps of library research and exploration. These skills, which roughly overlap with the 5 missions of the game, are:

  • 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 0
  • Go to the library. This is surprisingly important—our assumption that students go to the library to do research is generally wrong. Most students use a search engine from their computer, so our first task was to get them to walk into the library and explore it.
  • Find something to be curious about and talk to it with someone who knows where to search it up. We gave students a series of options that we hoped would align with at least one of the things they are interested in, and then gave them the explicit task to speak to a librarian about it. This was for many students the first time they spoke with a librarian, and the first time they needed to explain what they were doing.
  • Learn to research online. Online collections from libraries and archives have revolutionized how we do research—unfortunately, most students do not know how to do targeted online research, and rely on search engines and general search terms to find material. This mission teaches students how to access library holdings via VPN, and also introduces them to the Library of Congress and a series of online archives and how to use them.
  • Understand crowdsourcing and Wikipedia: Most students have been told Wikipedia is a bad research tool, but hey don’t know why. In this mission we ask students to compare what they have learned about their topic in libraries and archives to what Wikipedia articles say about it. We also go behind the scenes and explore the history of Wikipedia updates, how Wikipedia gets edited, and how to use Wikipedia for research.
  • Write a report. This is when students learn to write more than 5 paragraphs—the report reviews skills learnt over the past 4 weeks, and asks the student to demonstrate expertise in their chosen field.

11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 0 The skills learnt over five weeks in Digital Zombies are all put to use in the final project for the course, in which student have to go to the library, choose a research topic, find primary sources, analyze them and then write an essay addressing the topic. Students are asked to perform increasingly complex tasks—first identifying the exits of their library, then locating and citing a specific book, and using their library’s VPN access to find books through WorldCat and JSTOR. They are asked to find specific material on specific topics, and they have to be able to explain the logic of their choices. At each of these stages, students get feedback and credit for completing tasks, and at each stage they learn the skills that carry them to the next task.

12 Leave a comment on paragraph 12 1 I model how to do historical analysis of primary sources in the weekly topic lectures and students practice this in discussion section with the Teaching Assistants. By the sixth week of the quarter, when the student starts on his/her independent project, the student is familiar with all these steps, not because they have been lectured about it, but because they have learnt about it by doing it.

13 Leave a comment on paragraph 13 0 The course content additionally introduces the students to different source material every week. For example, students are exposed to the inherent bias of historical maps in week one, and they can explore maps with a librarian in week two, and revisit this skill and their librarian in week seven for the final essay.

14 Leave a comment on paragraph 14 0 Students are initially very apprehensive about having to engage as scholars with library staff, but this uncertainty, which is largely inherent in games, has also proven to be key in creating ‘emotional incentives’ to learning.[3] The Digital Zombies game, with its implied trial and error dynamic, gets students to grapple with the curriculum. And the curriculum, which explores the ambiguity of historical research and the process by which historians work to confirm and test reliability in analysis of their sources, feeds back into the loop of learning that students are doing in the game.

15 Leave a comment on paragraph 15 0 This feedback loop and the course that serves as the context for Digital Zombies, makes Digital Zombies a meaningful play project, in which students learn a series of skills that we consider to be essential to success as History majors, but that also teach students how to function and think in a digital environment. This digital environment was a given since the class was online, and Digital Zombies explicitly addresses the context and pitfalls of the medium, and teaches students how to communicate with and rely on libraries and librarians to counter these pitfalls.

3. Digital Zombies and [digital] literacy

16 Leave a comment on paragraph 16 0 Taking a class online, and using a game to teach the material online does not guarantee digital literacy. In that same vein, despite what the term “digital natives” invokes, it does not mean that those who are digital natives (born after 1980) understand digital technology.[4] In fact, digital natives may not remember life before the internet, but that does not mean they understand the complex systems that supports it or the nuances of communication and knowledge creation in the digital age.

17 Leave a comment on paragraph 17 0 Similarly, even if students know where the library is located, or that it is a good place to find research material, students will not know how to search its collections unless they are taught how to do it.

18 Leave a comment on paragraph 18 0 Last but not least, despite great efforts to teach students why and how to cite, it is increasingly difficult to convey that citations reflect provenance and that provenance matters, to a generation that has always relied on Napster, iTunes, and other legal or less legal downloading platforms with a fragile concern for origin or authorship. So beyond teaching history in this online class, it became critical to address these three issues with Digital Zombies: the architecture of the digital, the architecture of knowledge in a library, and the origin and authorship of any knowledge available online and offline.

19 Leave a comment on paragraph 19 0 The first issue—the architecture of the digital—hovers over the entire course. Students upload their assignments to the CMS, which makes them relatively proficient in addressing issues of file formats, browser problems and file naming strategies. Most interactions with Teaching Assistants and myself happen on web conferencing software, where students are expected to behave in a professional and respectful way. The web conferencing software allows for back-channel conversations among students that are visible to the conference host, which becomes another way that student experience transparency, and the fact that digital communications are not anonymous at all. In those interactions, students also experience in real time what download speeds mean, and learn to do speed tests, close applications, update software, reboot their laptops. This may all seem obvious, but it is not—and in the act of taking this online class, students make significant strides towards digital competency.

20 Leave a comment on paragraph 20 0 As for the architecture of knowledge, this is achieved by bringing the students into the library. As they talk to librarians who explain why some libraries use the Dewey Decimal system and other use the Library of Congress system—and then see that system embodied in the stacks they are searching—students experience the epistemology of knowledge as it is embodied in the library. As students become aware of this, it becomes easier to explain to them why commercial Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that organizes search results according to their previous individual searches may not be the ideal way to locate material relevant to their historical research topic.

21 Leave a comment on paragraph 21 0 Finally, the issue of authorship and provenance: the basic foundations of citations are made explicit in the conversations with the librarians, who have so far been extremely generous with our students and have explained in detail how material is organized in the library. This practical experience of the organization of knowledge in the physical and virtual library has made it tangible to the students that without an agreed upon system, it would be very difficult to find anything in the library. This really helps students understand why citation formats are formal (even if they have a hard time understanding why the conventions change across disciplines). It also helps them understand why the results of their searches will be better if they work in curated and formal environments rather than if they fumble blindly through Google.

22 Leave a comment on paragraph 22 0 These three achievements happen in concert, and in the context of an already intense digital component to the course. From the digital submissions and rubrics, multi-modal feedback (on mobile platforms, online office hours and discussion boards), the contact with librarians—in the library and via the on-call librarians that are accessible at all hours, as well social media and Wikipedia—students become digitally literate and competent.

23 Leave a comment on paragraph 23 0 Digital Zombies accomplished the triple goal of generating excitement about doing research, teaching core research skills in the library, and increasing digital literacy skills. Digital Zombies proved itself as a successful teaching and learning tool, as well as a successful game-like environment that enhanced the student’s experience of a humanistic research project. The game successfully transformed the library from a musty napping place with computer banks to the epicenter of learning during the extent of the course. It also put librarians at the center of students’ research projects, demonstrating in practice to the students that collaborating with an expert on archives, materials and search terms was key to the success of their own research. For many students, the assignment stopped being an assignment and became a part of their own discovery of an important place on campus, the people who work there, and their own ability to explore and create.

24 Leave a comment on paragraph 24 0 The library for its part saw a significant increase in visits and usage. Not only did students consult material more often in the library, they were also active across all sections of the library. Special collections items were requested more often, books were being checked at higher rates, virtual collections were being accessed constantly, and, once the barrier between librarians and students had been breached, librarians were involved in multiple stages of the research projects. Digital Zombies has some overlap with library games, but as many librarians told to us, library games organized by the library have a significant drawback: participation is entirely voluntary, so there is little potential for iteration or assessment. In order to be successful at scale, educational games must include an incentive structure that leads to large-scale participation. Digital Zombies integrated the strengths of the library with the robust pedagogy and assessment structures of the classroom.

25 Leave a comment on paragraph 25 0 The successful outcome of Digital Zombies relied as much on the scaffolding of the game as it did on the patience and participation of librarians, who were aware of the game and what it would ask of them. Now that the course and the game has been taught three times already, many librarians tell me they look forward to the “digital zombie” crowds. The fact that this crowd is actively engaging in research in the library and warding off digital zombies is not lost on any of us.

26 Leave a comment on paragraph 26 0 Finally, the students are continually overwhelming positive about the experience. To date, 350 students have completed the Digital Zombies game, with another 150 scheduled each Fall quarter and 50 each summer session. Course evaluations have been very high, and many students expressed having “enjoyed the research project,” and reported how “useful it was in completing research assignments in other classes”; and they shared how gratifying it was to discover librarians “are actually really nice”—thereby proving we were meeting both the goal of meaningful play and learning.[5]

4. Learning while playing: gamification, badging & role playing

27 Leave a comment on paragraph 27 0 Games are, in Eric Zimmerman’s words, a dominant cultural form of the twenty first century, and they also they allow us to observe learning in a non-academic context.[6] The incursion of games in non-game environments has given rise to the concept of gamification, a term that currently has as many definitions as applications, but which I will define here as a process by which game thinking and game mechanics are used in non-game contexts to engage users in solving problems.

28 Leave a comment on paragraph 28 0 The theory of gamification is not new—its theoretical forefather, Johan Huizinga wrote “Homo Ludens” in 1949, and this book was central to Caillois’ 1958 “Les Jeux et les Hommes,[7] both foundational texts that explore the various forms of play and their connection to social and cultural structures. In the twenty-first century context, the notion of games in education includes, and largely focuses on online games.

29 Leave a comment on paragraph 29 0 Gamification has received enormous attention because it promises an easy path to generating data and information about players and users. The expansive literature on gamification presents a dizzying amount of strategies and methods that use a player’s natural instincts to compete, discover, explore and win/lose to draw them into accomplishing tasks that they would otherwise not do, to gather and share information about it.[8]

30 Leave a comment on paragraph 30 0 The success of gamification has also generated a critique of it. This critique generally discredits gamification because of its commercial application or because it isn’t really a game. Ian Bogost is the game scholar who has been most outspoken in his critique of gamification. To him, gamification is “used to conceal, to impress, or to coerce” players into participating in something they would otherwise wouldn’t.[9] In Bogost’s perspective, commercial gamification is “exploitationware.”

31 Leave a comment on paragraph 31 0 Gamification is in fact is a broad set of mechanisms, among which “digital badging” may be the most used in games for learning. Users/players/students receive badges for the completion of tasks thereby tracking their progress visually. Math learning games, library games, and any course that uses badges to replace certificates of completion are part of the badging trend. Digital badges were originally conceived to break down assignments and learning activities into smaller parts, to pace learning and allow repeated trial and error without major consequences on the final grade.

32 Leave a comment on paragraph 32 0 It is hard to argue against this pedagogical logic, and it has become a key element of Digital Zombies. Digital badges add an element of play in the learning and reemphasize that the purpose of the exercise is to learn, and no matter how many attempts it takes—the reward will be claimed when it is earned.[10] The power of this proposition has led a significant part of the Digital Media Hub at the University of California, Irvine to be dedicated to the development and exploration of badging in education. I did not include badges in Digital Zombies simply because the course management system we work with does not have that functionality, but the logic inherent in digital badging permeates the course and the game.

33 Leave a comment on paragraph 33 0 One of the purposes of badging is the immediate response it provides to users, and as such, the functionality is achievable without badging. What matters is that users never doubt where in the game they are, or how well (or poorly) they are doing. In an educational game, the benefit of real time response mechanisms also helps faculty and advisors—who a) have immediate responses on student skills and learning and b) have responses and assessments that go far beyond those produced by the traditional midterm and final exam. In short, digital badges are tools that help visualize the learning goals, and that allow transparency in both the process and the progress of learning.

34 Leave a comment on paragraph 34 0 Role-playing predates digital tools but has become an important game mechanic in digital games for learning. There is an element of role-playing in Digital Zombies, but its narrative does not replicate the conditions of other educational role-playing games, such as for example Mission US or Pox and the City. The play in Digital Zombies is closer to the games Jane McGonigal has developed, such as her Find Your Future [11] game in the New York Public Library. Digital Zombies, like Find Your Future, relies on players and students to develop their own narrative of history within flexible research parameters. In Digital Zombies students learn skills that are learned through meaningful social interaction and challenging game dynamics. The student’s task with Digital Zombies is not to reenact history, but to discover how history is written.

35 Leave a comment on paragraph 35 0 Ultimately, there are two reasons why gamification has become such a buzzword: 1) in its commercial applications, behavioral incentives of play have been knitted into commercial and data generating projects; and 2) as an educational tool, it has permeated in competency based training, both in K-12 and in corporate training context. Jane McGonigal and many other digital media and games scholars as well as myself are emphatic advocates for the beneficial power of games, but we won’t necessarily refer to this as gamification because of these connections to for-profit data generation and/or competency-based training.

36 Leave a comment on paragraph 36 0 I prefer to think of games for learning in a digital context as contributing to what I call “transparent pedagogy.” Transparent pedagogy is built on absolute transparency in the goals of the class, and in the metrics by which students will be assessed, allowing students the means by which they’ll be able to assess whether they are meeting the explicit goals of the class. I approached the syllabus as if it were the rulebook of a game, involving students in the course contents in the same way that players are involved in a game. The emphasis in this transparent process is not on punitive grading but on iterative exercises, short and frequent feedback loops, and collaborative assignments.

37 Leave a comment on paragraph 37 1 Transparency in pedagogy overturns much of the hierarchy that traditional classrooms adopt, and speaks to the student rather than to the syllabus. The transparency that badges confer, and the iterative process by which students earn points in a game for learning, and the creative process that role playing games unleash, all speak to a philosophy of teaching in which students are stakeholders of the learning process rather than subjects of it. This is very much how many digital humanities courses are being taught and modeled, and how much of the praxis of digital humanities unfolds.

Conclusion: A future for games in (digital) humanities and pedagogy?

38 Leave a comment on paragraph 38 0 Digital Zombies demonstrates the logic that underlies the intersection of games and humanities. In Digital Zombies, students interact with physical and digital built-environments, provoking interactions with people, physical and digital or digitized library materials, search engines, and social media. The game ties libraries into a course curriculum, making libraries and librarians an integral part of the exploration of digital narratives, collaborative and individual writing, and also hybrid research methods, all of which successfully engages students beyond the traditional classroom experience. The game is an innovative narrative exercise that erases the boundaries between the physical and the digital.

39 Leave a comment on paragraph 39 0 The hybrid nature of Digital Zombies also solves a crucial problem and need in the current higher education curriculum, where “academic digital literacy” is a highly valued learning goal, but it is difficult to teach, especially if it is not integrated into a course or part of an explicit academic curriculum. Digital Zombies also addresses another problem of the twenty-first century, namely: how to understand and utilize the physical library in a digital age? Digital Zombies puts students in an active learning environment, helping them see the logic and value of information organized within the physical library as well as digital space. Digital Zombies teaches students how to use library resources, how to search for and evaluate online sources, and how best to utilize digital and non-digital materials. Ultimately, Digital Zombies is a case study for the kind of game that has specific pedagogical outcomes, that uses digital and non-digital realms interchangeably.

40 Leave a comment on paragraph 40 0 The learning outcomes of Digital Zombies are both specific and broad. Specifically, they lead the student to the library to perform tasks that teach them how to find and evaluate scholarly sources and become an expert in a historical field of their choosing. The questions and tasks students do help them develop critical thinking skills and research skills, and exposes them to the library and its many digital collections.

41 Leave a comment on paragraph 41 0 Broadly, through playing Digital Zombies, students are able to navigate in and between the digital and the physical world, they respond to the affordances of each.

42 Leave a comment on paragraph 42 0 Digital Zombies could not function at the scale that it does in a fully physical environment, and it would not work in a pedagogical context of punitive grading or a few high stakes assignments. It has been a powerful example transparent pedagogy and student agency in a large classroom all while achieving the traditional learning goals: students learned how to do effective research and how to write a convincing research paper, and they did it at scale, in a context that allowed for personalized and targeted interventions by teaching assistants and faculty, as well as interactions between students, and obviously the many librarians who supported the game.

43 Leave a comment on paragraph 43 0 The debate over what Digital Humanities and Digital Pedagogy is vast, it is ongoing, and occasionally controversial.[12] I tend to think that in the twenty-first century, all pedagogy needs to engage with the digital, and most teaching relies, if only a little, on digital tools. As for Digital Zombies’ role in this, I intend to focus on how to push the boundaries of what can be done in a classroom with technology—whether that classroom is in a building with ivy running up its outer walls or if it exists in a computer program and is built of code.

Appendix 1: summary syllabus and course outline for course

44 Leave a comment on paragraph 44 0 History19WV

45 Leave a comment on paragraph 45 0 the historian’s workshop: how to tell fact from fiction using the clues of history

46 Leave a comment on paragraph 46 0 Prof. Juliette Levy: juliette@ucr.edu or google hangout, skype, twitter (@profjuliette), or facebook

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48 Leave a comment on paragraph 48 0 CLASS OBJECTIVES: LEARN, THINK & WRITE 

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50 Leave a comment on paragraph 50 0 Our objective this quarter is to debunk historical myths and fallacies using primary sources, which are to the historian like DNA is to a CSI crew. These historical myths are like undead zombies—they refuse to die. Think about the Mayan Apocalypse—there was ample evidence that the Mayans never predicted the end of the world on December 21st, 2012, yet many people continued to believe that the Mayans were onto something and that terrible things were going to happen. The story of the Mayan apocalypse prophecy was a zombie!

51 Leave a comment on paragraph 51 0 LEARN

52 Leave a comment on paragraph 52 0 Over the course of 10 weeks and 10 modules you will learn what primary sources are and how historians use them. You will be introduced to different historical events and people—but more than anything you will learn how historians use and analyze the clues history leaves behind.

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54 Leave a comment on paragraph 54 0 THINK & WRITE

55 Leave a comment on paragraph 55 0 The goal of this class is to introduce you to the craft of History, and to teach you how to write like a historian. The benefit of knowing how to write like a historian is that it generally also means you will learn how to write—and by ‘write’ we don’t mean that you are able to write a sentence. We know you can do that! But here, the point of writing is to articulate your thoughts and reasoning in such a way the 1) it is intelligible and persuasive and 2) it is relevant to the course material. You will measure your progress towards the objectives of the class by going through a series of exercises and assignments.  Each exercise will quickly reflect how you are doing in class. If you are not hitting the high marks, you should be able to figure out why by looking at your score in the rubrics that accompany the assignments, or by speaking with your TA and or myself. Come talk to us if anything is causing you concern or trouble—that is why we are here!

56 Leave a comment on paragraph 56 0 Every lecture will be accompanied by a series of writing and analysis exercises. The lessons from the exercises will be reinforced in the lectures and in discussion. Think of the discussion sections as writing boot-camps.

57 Leave a comment on paragraph 57 0 WHAT’S THE DEAL WITH THE ZOMBIES?

58 Leave a comment on paragraph 58 0 The only book you need to buy for this class is Max Brooks “World War Z: an oral history of the zombie war.” It is published widely, you can download it as an e-book, you can buy a used copy. It does not matter to me how you acquire the book, but you will need it. Is it a history book? No. Is it a great way to see how historical methods can produce great stories? Yes.

59 Leave a comment on paragraph 59 0 This class will also introduce you to the concept of “digital zombies,” and will teach you how to avoid becoming one.

60 Leave a comment on paragraph 60 0 REQUIRED READING:

61 Leave a comment on paragraph 61 0 Below are the only books you need to buy (e-texts are ok).

62 Leave a comment on paragraph 62 0 Max Brooks, “World War Z: an Oral History of the Zombie War”, Broadway Press, 2007 (WWZ)

63 Leave a comment on paragraph 63 0 You also need to read EVERYTHING posted on the course site

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65 Leave a comment on paragraph 65 0 GRADE BREAKDOWN, ATTENDANCE, EXAMS AND ASSIGNMENTS

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67 Leave a comment on paragraph 67 0 Grading:

  • 68 Leave a comment on paragraph 68 0
  •  Lectures (with built-in quizzes): 15%
  •  Readings (WWZ & assigned in modules): 15%
  •  Writing assignments: 15%
  •  Digital Zombies (midterm): 20%
  •  Independent research project (final): 20%
  • Discussion sections: 15%

69 Leave a comment on paragraph 69 0 Your final grade is a composite of your performances in many different venues. The research projects are very important, but you need to succeed in all other assignments to get an A. All the assignments build towards your skillset, so don’t skip any steps. You’ll lose points and you’ll miss out on learning important skills.

70 Leave a comment on paragraph 70 0 Checklist: In order to complete this class you will need to:

  • 71 Leave a comment on paragraph 71 0
  • take 10 quizzes
  • write 8 short (250-500 word) responses/essays
  • do 1 peer-assessed writing exercise
  • fulfill all the missions in Digital Zombies
  • write an independent research project
  • participate and attend online discussion, contribute to Piazza Q&A
Week 1 Topic: How to succeed in this online class

72 Leave a comment on paragraph 72 0 Lecture: Why primary sources? Why zombies? Why online?

73 Leave a comment on paragraph 73 0Quiz on readings due Thursday: NYT article (link), “Introduction” in World War Z, Max Brooks; “Introduction to the Undead”, in Theories of International politics and Zombies, Daniel Drezner.

74 Leave a comment on paragraph 74 0Writing assignment due Friday: write a letter about your first day on campus. Minimum 150 words.

Week 2 Topic: Myths and Maps

75 Leave a comment on paragraph 75 0 Lectures: 1) The history of Zombies; 2) how maps lie

76 Leave a comment on paragraph 76 0 Quiz on readings: WWZ “Warnings & Blame”; excerpt from “Mapping Latin America”

77 Leave a comment on paragraph 77 0 Digital Zombies: upload mission 1

Week 3 Topic: Letters- Points of View and their intent

78 Leave a comment on paragraph 78 0 Lectures: Letters and power : Columbus, Abigail Adams and Charles Darwin,

79 Leave a comment on paragraph 79 0 Quiz on readings: WWZ, “The Great Panic”; Bernal Diaz del Castillo “The True History of the Conquest of New Spain”; choose one / many letters from Abigail Adams letters to John Adams here: http://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/browse/letters_AA.php, Charles Darwin – any letter(s) on http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/

80 Leave a comment on paragraph 80 0 Digital Zombies: upload mission 2

Week 4 Topic: Paintings as primary sources

81 Leave a comment on paragraph 81 0 Lectures: In the absence of Instagram, paintings. How painters and paintings reveal the society for which they were created.

82 Leave a comment on paragraph 82 0 Quiz on readings: WWZ “Turning the Tide”

83 Leave a comment on paragraph 83 0 Digital Zombies: upload mission 3

Week 5

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Topic: Photos

85 Leave a comment on paragraph 85 0 Lectures: how technology changes the evidence – photography, mass production of images and propaganda in the Mexican Revolution and into the 20th century.

86 Leave a comment on paragraph 86 0 Quiz on readings: WWZ “Home Front USA”;

87 Leave a comment on paragraph 87 0 Digital Zombies: upload mission 4

Week 6 Topic: Moving images: films and TV

88 Leave a comment on paragraph 88 0 Quiz on readings: WWZ “Around the world and above”;

89 Leave a comment on paragraph 89 0 Readings: Huntington exhibit of WW1 propaganda (attached);

90 Leave a comment on paragraph 90 0 Digital Zombies: upload mission 5 [this is your midterm]

Week 7 Topics: Newspapers

91 Leave a comment on paragraph 91 0 Lectures: WW2 and the Cold War, The US and the USSR and two versions of history

92 Leave a comment on paragraph 92 0 Quiz on readings: WWZ “Total War”;

93 Leave a comment on paragraph 93 0 newspaper articles posted in module

94 Leave a comment on paragraph 94 0 Individual research project: submit topic for approval

Week 8 Topic: Diaries – the not so secret secrets of historical diaries

95 Leave a comment on paragraph 95 0 Lecture: How do you read between the lies of a personal text?

96 Leave a comment on paragraph 96 0 Quiz on readings: WWZ “Good Byes”,

97 Leave a comment on paragraph 97 0 read   “Martha Ballard: diary of a midwife”; “Diary of Anne Frank” and “The Motorcycle Diaries” by Che Guevara.

98 Leave a comment on paragraph 98 0 Individual research project: submit fictional diary entries of at least one historical character youa re researching for your final project

Week 9 Topic: public history

99 Leave a comment on paragraph 99 0 Lecture: how museums create history

100 Leave a comment on paragraph 100 0 Quiz on readings: TBA

101 Leave a comment on paragraph 101 0 Individual research project: submit primary sources and analysis that you are using for your final essay.

Week 10 Topic: systems, networks, wikipedia and history

102 Leave a comment on paragraph 102 0 Lecture: Algorythms and digital zombies

103 Leave a comment on paragraph 103 0 Quiz on readings: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization and TBA

104 Leave a comment on paragraph 104 0 Individual research project: submit draft, explore existing knowledge of topic. You can add video footage, twitter exchanges about the discovery, reddit discussions, movie clips – be creative – everything is a source.

Week 11

105 Leave a comment on paragraph 105 0 FINALS WEEK

Individual research project: upload final version

105 Leave a comment on paragraph 105 0  

Works Cited

106 Leave a comment on paragraph 106 0 Online games and descriptions:

108 Leave a comment on paragraph 108 0 Printed and digital material:

  • 109 Leave a comment on paragraph 109 0
  • Bandura, A. 1986. Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall
  • Bartscherer, Thomas; Coover, Roderick. (2011) Switching Codes: Thinking through Digital Technology in the Humanities and Arts. University of Chicago Press.
  • Bogost Ian, “Gamification is Bullshit,” Atlantic, August 9, 2011, www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/gamification-is-bullshit/243338/
  • Brooks Max. 2006. World War Z: an oral history of the zombie war, Crown Publishers.
  • Caillois, Roger. 1958. Man, Play and Games, University of Illinois Press; Reprint edition (August 31, 2001)
  • Friend, Chris. 2015. ‘Part 1’. Podcast. Digital Pedagogy. http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/005-Digital-Pedagogy-Part-1.mp3; Friend, Chris. 2015. ‘Part 2’. Podcast. Digital Pedagogy. http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/006-Digital-Pedagogy-Part-2.mp3.
  • Gee, J. P. 2003. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy?. New York: Palgrave Macmillan
  • Gee. J. P. 2005. “Learning by Design: good video games as learning machines”  E-Learning, Volume 2 (Number 1), p. 5-16
  • Gold, Matthew K., ed. 2014. Debates in the Digital Humanities, University of Minnesota Press, 2012
  • Huizinga, Johan. 1949. Homo Ludens: a study of the play Element in Culture, Martino Fine Books .
  • Kapp, Karl. 2012. The Gamification of Learning and Instruction: Game-based methods for Training and Education. Pfeiffer Press.
  • Losh, Liz. 2014. The War on Learning, Gaining Ground in the Digital University, MIT Press.
  • McGonigal, Jane. 2011. Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and how They can Change the World; The Penguin Group.
  • Morris, Sean Michael. 2015. Digital Pedagogy: A Case of Open or Shut. at http://learning.instructure.com, last accessed July 4th, 2016, originally accessed via http://www.seanmichaelmorris.com/digital-pedagogy-a-case-of-open-or-shut/ Retrieved October 12, 2015.
  • Nowiskie, Bethany, ed. 2011. #alt-academy. New York: Media Commons. 2011 http://mediacommons.futureofthebook/org/alt-ac
  • Prensky, Marc. 2001. ‘Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants Part 1’, On the Horizon, Vol. 9 Iss: 5, pp.1 – 6
  • Sheldon, Lee. 2011. The Multi-Player Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game. Cengage Press
  • Sutton-Smith, Brian. 1997. The Ambiguity of Play, Harvard University Press.
  • Svensson, Patrik. 2009. “Humanites Computing as Digital Humanites.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 3, no. 3 http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3//3/00065/000065.html
  • Unsworth, John. 2002. “What is Humanities Computing and What Is Not?” Graduate School of Library and Information Sciences, Illinois Informatics Institute, University of Illinois, Urbana, November 8.2002. http://computerphilologie.uni-muenchen.de/jg02/unsworth.html
  • Zimmerman, Eric. 2016. Manifesto for a Ludic Century, in “The Gameful World: approaches, issues , applications”, MIT. And http://ericzimmerman.com/files/texts/Manifesto_for_a_Ludic_Century.pdf last accessed July 4th, 2016.

110 Leave a comment on paragraph 110 0 [1] Albert Bandura, (1986). Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall

111 Leave a comment on paragraph 111 0 [2] Max Brooks (2006) “World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War”, Crown Publishers.

112 Leave a comment on paragraph 112 0 [3] Brian Sutton-Smith. (1997). “The Ambiguity of Play”, Harvard University Press.

113 Leave a comment on paragraph 113 0 [4] Marc Prensky. (2001) “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants Part 1”, On the Horizon, Vol. 9 Iss: 5, pp.1 – 6

114 Leave a comment on paragraph 114 0 [5] The three quotes in this paragraph come from end of the course evaluations from the course in the Spring and Summer quarter of 2015.

115 Leave a comment on paragraph 115 0 [6] Eric Zimmerman. (2016) Manifesto for a Ludic Century, in “The Gameful World: approaches, issues, applications,” MIT.

116 Leave a comment on paragraph 116 0 [7] Johan Huizinga (1949). Homo Ludens: a study of the play Element in Culture, Martino Fine Books and Roger Caillois. (1958) Man, Play and Games, University of Illinois Press; Reprint edition (August 31, 2001)

117 Leave a comment on paragraph 117 0 [8] To name but a few seminal texts: Karl Kapp (2012). The Gamification of Learning and Instruction: Game-based methods for Training and Education. Pfeiffer Press. Lee Sheldon (2011). The Multi-Player Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game. Cengage Press; JP Gee. (2003).What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy? New York: Palgrave Macmillan; JP Gee. (2005). Learning by Design: good video games as learning machines. E-Learning, Volume 2 (Number 1), p. 5-16

118 Leave a comment on paragraph 118 0 [9] Ian Bogost (2011), “Gamification is Bullshit,” Atlantic, July/August 2011 issue.

119 Leave a comment on paragraph 119 0 [10] see MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Badges efforts: https://www.macfound.org/programs/digital-badges/

120 Leave a comment on paragraph 120 0 [11] http://www.nypl.org/blog/2011/04/01/jane-mcgonigal-and-nypl-present-find-future-game

121 Leave a comment on paragraph 121 0 [12] For example: Gold, Matthew K., ed. Debates in the Digital Humanities, University of Minnesota Press, 2012; Unsworth, John. “What is Humanities Computing and What Is Not?” Graduate School of Library and Information Sciences, Illinois Informatics Institute, University of Illinois, Urbana, November 8, 2002. http://computerphilologie.uni-muenchen.de/jg02/unsworth.html ; Svensson, Patrik. “Humanities Computing as Digital Humanities.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 3, no. 3 (2009). http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3//3/00065/000065.html; Liz Losh, The War on Learning, Gaining Ground in the Digital University, MIT Press, 2014; Friend, Chris. 2015. ‘Part 1’. Podcast. Digital Pedagogy. http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/005-Digital-Pedagogy-Part-1.mp3; Friend, Chris. 2015. ‘Part 2’. Podcast. Digital Pedagogy. http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/006-Digital-Pedagogy-Part-2.mp3;

122 Leave a comment on paragraph 122 0 Thomas Bartscherer, Roderick Coover. Switching Codes: Thinking through Digital Technology in the Humanities and Arts. University of Chicago Press, 2011; Bethany Nowiskie, ed. #alt-academy. New York: Media Commons. 2011. http://mediacommons.futureofthebook/org/alt-ac

123 Leave a comment on paragraph 123 0 Sean Michael Morris (2014), Digital Pedagogy: A Case of Open or Shut. Keep Learning at http://learning.instructure.com, last accessed July 4th, 2016.

3 replies on ““’Digital Zombies’ — A Learner-centered Game: Social Knowledge Creation at the Intersection of Digital Humanities and Digital Pedagogy,” by Juliette Levy”

I appreciate the intentional objective to teach digital literacy. It is true that the vast majority of new students are familiar with digital technologies; however, that does not equate to digital literacy. Not overestimating familiarity with (or the basic understanding of) digital technologies and proper practices — and taking the time to explicitly teach these skills — is key to effectively integrating “the digital” into the classroom.

The iterative nature of this course is really appealing. The fact that students are guided through research practices via the game and then repeat the same set of steps on their own later in the course allows for a type of growth and exploration that may not be otherwise facilitated. 

Addressing and dismantling classroom hierarchies is something that has occupied much of my recent ruminating on pedagogy. Making the goals and evaluation standards of the class transparent helps to create a learning environment where students are more willing to take risks, be creative, and invest in the assignments. Last year, I experimented with creating a final essay grading rubric as an in-class activity with my students. It was a fruitful exercise that I believe compelled the students to think more deeply about the assignment, its goals, and their personal growth as learners. It also gave me a window into what the students saw as the most important aspects of the assignment and allowed us to have a meaningful discussion regarding the evaluation process/standards.