The Leisurely Historian…

I’m trying to do an autobiographical final project, so I attempted to do a reconstruction of the house I grew up in.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have any pictures of it, so I did most of the "construction" from memory. This led to a few problems when I flew in to Ohio last night and got a picture of the place:

I’d remembered the roof on the front of the house, over the front entryway, as being peaked, for example.

So last night I did a lot of erasing and fixing and correcting, and I’m reasonably happy with the results:

(I gotta say, I’m also quite impressed with Sketchup’s ability to cast shadows fairly reasonably, too.)

Obviously, there’s some problems. The dormer’s kinda funky. The buttresses that hold up the roof– which are a pretty defining part of the house’s character, I left off, because I was having so much trouble with the roof’s overhang… has anyone else gotten the "follow me" approach to roofs to work? ‘Cause it worked in the video, but it ain’t workin’ for me. And that leads to another problem– there’s funky unnecessary lines everywhere, especially on the roof. And as my mother pointed out, the chimney’s too short, and a bit too far to the front, which would be a fire hazard.  So I guess it’s good that I’m just doing this virtually…

Let’s walk around to the back of the house, now…

I actually enjoyed this view– it may not look like much, but if you wanted to have this view of the house when I was growing up, you’d have had to have stood in my neighbor’s garage, and had the ability to see through walls. And he was an old man, a compulsive hoarder with about a million cats… So even if I could have seen through walls, I wouldn’t have gone into his garage to get that view, ’cause he scared me.

Notice how the roof line gets strange in the back? When I was a small child, my parents built  an addition on the back of the house. My mom had a serious illness in the middle of that, so there was about a year when I was small where the kitchen sink was a garden hose and a bucket. The wooden stairs out the back were there when I was small, but were later replaced when my father built a small porch.

There’s some problems from this side, too. The addition is actually not clapboard like the rest of the house, but board-and-batten. I got lazy on that one, and decided to use the clapboard, because I didn’t want to make a board-and-batten pattern.

Another problem is with the stovepipe for the wood stove that heats the addition– it’s crooked. I just noticed that a few minutes ago. I lined it up with the roof instead of making it parallel to the ground.

Again, the thing’s awash with unnecessary lines.

Overall, I learned a lot about Sketchup, and it was kind of fascinating to first attempt to replicate the building by memory, and then try to make it look like a photograph. I mean, I know that building pretty intimately– I scrubbed it every summer, and painted it more than once. But it’s kind of amazing how hard it is to remember the fine details. This morning, my family and I have sat around critiquing my Sketchup work, each of us remembering different little details about the way the house was built.

Oh– and finally, because technically the Sanborne Map thing, while it was by far the easiest part of the assignment, was integral to the assignment– here’s how my house, circa 1982, looks superimposed onto the map of the neighborhood from 1928.

Shockingly, there’s only one other building on my block that’s changed significantly other than the one I grew up in.

Incidentally, did anyone else find a way to get the Google Earth data to not come through to Sketchup in black and white? (Not the Sanborn stuff, the actually satellite images from GE…)

The new History Carnival went up last week, and it features a really interesting article on a map of the US– in terms of Major League Baseball Teams.

Just thought some of you might be interested…

I attended the annual conference of the Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association last week. It was fortuitous, maybe, to have this week’s James Paul Gee reading on the potential of video games as pedagogical tools, as I had the opportunity to attend several Internet and Video Games panels. One panel in particular made me reflect back to this course, and instead of just doing a gloss of the readings and the websites I’ve visited, I want to use my post to discuss the ideas I encountered in this panel.

J. James Bono, from the University of Pittsburgh, presented a paper called "Playing with Disaster:  Serious Games, Alternate Realities,and Atlantic Storm." This paper brought up the pedagogical possibilities of something I’d never heard of– Alternative Reality Games. These are a new development, a web-based type of game that is without a single platform– the game is outside, it’s in the minds of the participants, it’s essentially research-as-gaming. Players find clues and put together remarkably difficult puzzles cooperatively, in a "game" the elements of which could be anywhere– on any website, in the form of an SMS text message, even in that dreaded IRL world. For those of you unfamiliar, as I was, with the idea of Alternative Reality Games, or ARGs,as I was, I encourage you to check out the Wikipedia article linked above– it gives a good sense of what ARGs are, and how they work, and it’s pretty well-written for a Wikipedia article.

Another presenter, Angela Colvert, of the University of London, discussed a project she undertook with two primary school classes she taught: she assigned her fifth grade students to create an ARG, specifically targeted at the fourth grade students she also taught.  While the project was, due to the students’ ages, a rather simplistic project about an alligator who lives in the London Sewers, the project immediately suggested a whole set of ideas in my mind– what if an assignment for grad students in CLIO was to design an ARG for students in an undergrad course, one based on an actual historical event or mystery? One class would acquire an invaluable set of skills based in information design, and the other could finding new approaches to research– in an environment of a "game," which whether we’re gamers or not, is often more fun and engrossing than reading a textbook and memorizing dates.

The final paper in the panel that related to this class– I’m excluding a wonderful piece about the Japanese aesthetic principle of mono no aware in the Nintendo video game Pikmin 2, because it simply doesn’t apply– was by Terence Brunk of Columbia College.  While his paper was actually an analysis of the narratological principles that can be seen in two "serious" online games– the type of game that is created specifically with the social consciousness of its player in mind.

This paper really brought home the potential of ARGs as opposed to more traditional video games– no matter how many options you present a player, video games are essentially goal-oriented and thus fairly linear. Eventually in the process of game design, you have to decide that the player must complete Level 1 before entering Level 2. While they’re interactive, video games still have much the same linearity of text. And this is reinforced by their very nature: they’re pre-produced, complete worlds. Add-ons like they have for the Sims or when they add new areas to an MMORPG are limited fixes, and must follow the rules previously established.

The role of the "puppet master," the person who essentially creates and maintains the ARG, often modifying the next step, puzzle, clue, or plant based on previous outcomes, is in many ways essentially very similar to the role of an excellent educator– they challenge their subjects, altering results to outcomes, constantly pushing the problem further. I think it could be a really useful tool for this reason.

So as I was downloading the Sockwave player onto my Internet Explorer, which I haven’t used since I bought this computer except to check how my web pages look on a non-standards-compliant browser, something I asked a couple members of this class last week came back to me:

Could someone tell me why we should even worry about how our web pages look in IE? Why bother with the little hacks and fixes?

Seriously. If the entire web starts ignoring IE, and users’ experience on all websites just starts slipping, won’t that just encourage a) users to jump over to Firefox or something that’s similarly compliant and open-source, and/or b) Microsoft’s developers to realize that there’s a real problem with being non-compliant, and getting with the program?

What really drove this home was reading about (and in the case of WebAim, simulating) the experiences and difficulties of those with disabilities using the web. The fixes are all doable, and not too hard to implement on an example-by-example, but overall, it’s a lot of extra coding, a lot to keep in mind, a lot of extra work.

Don’t get me wrong– the work is worthwhile, and even admirable. People with disabilities use the web. If anything, my experience as a big ol’ geek who spends too much time in internet communities, BBS’s, and networking sites seems to indicate to me that it’s actually a disproportionately high number– or at least that the handicapped have a disproportionately high presence on the web. My personal experience having a roommate with Parkinson’s has only backed up this concept– he spends more time online than almost anyone his age I know. It’s his livelihood and a major connection to the outside world for a guy who has to take a van to go even a block from home.

So I’m all for implementing accessibility measures on my web pages. It makes sense. It’s the humane thing to do. And it’s catering to a good potential audience of highly-engaged users.

But at some point, the camel’s back will break. I’m all for geeking out on doing your design, etc, but at some point you really just want to put the stuff up on the web and get it out where people can see and use it. If you’re looking for somewhere to cut corners for speed or convenience, it just makes a lot more sense to try to make your page accessible to the greatest number of people. Cut corners by not designing to the people whose only "handicap" is having a rotten web browser. And then, if you feel like trying to get those people to come over to the non-IE, compliant side, don’t coddle them, but prosthelytize!  Try to tell– or even show– people just how easy it is to install a nice, simple compliant browser.

My comments in other blogs can be found here, here, and here.