At the end of April two dozen historians gathered at Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario for a conference called Playing With Technology in History. The organizing idea of the two-day meeting was that if we take a more playful approach to the teaching, learning, and the production of historical knowledge, new ways of thinking about the past may emerge. The three most prominent themes evident during the conference were historical gaming (so-called „serious games„), mobile history, and physical computing in the humanities (see an earlier post in this blog on that topic). As a participant in the conference, I spent a fair amount of time wondering how all the “play” we talked about can be connected to the serious purposes of teaching and learning about the past. I’m a believer that there are direct connections, but I also am hard-headed enough to insist that those connections be made explicit through data (qualitative or quantitative) that demonstrate how certain kinds of learning takes place during or as a result of play. It also remains to be seen whether a more playful approach to the construction of historical knowledge will have tangible results. At a minimum, however, it seems to me that if historians are willing to be a little more playful, we are more likely to engage a wider audience for our work.
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