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On January 9th, 2016, I found myself sitting in a class titled the exact same name as this series: Professionalizing History. The professor started the very first class with a shocking statement: “What’s wrong with all of you?” followed up with “Why on earth would you all decide to waste your lives on a subject
The Postmodernization of Sex and Gender by William Simon is an interesting example on how modern idealism has changed over time. Postmodernism is essentially the modern-day brain-child of Western philosophy which focuses on the “construction of truth” throughout world views, religion, and identity. When understanding the “truth”, one must be willing to accept newly furnished
Video games have come a long from being a niche hobby. Everyone’s a gamer from your older relative who’s platform of choice is Facebook, to perhaps sons, daughters and younger siblings that play Minecraft on the family computer. They have become a mainstream part of society as can be seen by the Pokemon Go phenomenon.
We oftentimes hear of historians archiving old documents onto a digital server, bloggers recording their thoughts on white screens, and news articles being published via social media. We use digital ‘encyclopedias’ like Wikipedia rather than opening actual books. Credible newspaper after newspaper have ditched the old fashioned art of publishing to save costs and increase viewers. In
If you’re in the public education system, then you’ve heard about (or have been forced to use) Kagan activities like Bloom’s Taxonomy Questions and the Fan-n-Pick Strategy – two methods to incite engagement through knowledge-based questions that we’ll be talking about today. I personally have a bias against Kaganist (clever pun, please love it) activities, but
For a company that is relatively famed in the handheld gaming industry, Nintendo has been so utterly turned off by mobile game platforms for the longest time. Pokemon GO is the first actual step Nintendo, the company of “innovation ahead of its time” has ever made. Yet this first step has been a very successful one, with Nintendo making $35 million within its first two weeks of launch.
Lasting from the late 1970s and pursuing into the 1980s, the videotape format war influenced the modern world through intense capitalistic competition between the models of consumer-level analog videocassettes and cassette recorders. The two sides? The Betamax and the Video Home System, commonly referred to as the VHS. It’s kind of amazing to think of this in a “historical” sense. But, it’s also how modern technology works. The VHS won this war, becoming the dominant home video format for a period of time, but ultimately it would become obsolete on its own terms.
Sid Meier’s Civilization series is a highly rated turn-based historical strategy game which allows one or more human players to compete against computer-controlled artificial intelligence in a race to expand from a small kingdom of just a few tiles to an enormous empire which spans the entire map. The goal is rather simple: each player will attempt to make their specially designed nation or ethnic group superior when comparative to the others and to win the game through different elements: from science and culture to domination and diplomatic skills.
I know this is a little late in terms of technology and updates, but if you’re on Facebook you’ve noticed that the traditional “like” system has replaced itself with an optional range of emoticons. From “like” to “love” to “haha”, “wow”, “sad”, and “angry”; this new system allows interaction between social media aficionados to be more complex than ever before. It’s more than obvious why Facebook turned to this new system: a major flaw that’s plagued simple conversation since the beginning of instant messaging. Users have been forced to “like” messages coming from grieving widows and cancer patients. A bit of an, erm, awkward experience from both sides if you really think about it.
I’m not happy with this. It’s not cool, it’s not hip, it’s not worth anything. It’s some fad that’s going to take the internet by storm and stay there to remain a sociological “slang” in our culture. I guarantee we’ll start seeing emoji quotes everywhere, because of the importance of finding loopholes in character limits mixing with pure and sheer laziness.
