By: Cassandra Hendry
Can you imagine a course where students become archaeologists, all from the safety of their computers, by participating in a virtual archeological dig?
How about one where students create an augmented reality catalog for the Canadian Museum of Civilization, where 3D models of flat images can be accessed by scanning a smartphone over the page?
If this sounds like fiction, then you haven’t taken a class with Shawn Graham.
An assistant professor of history at Carleton, Graham has received acclaim for his unique teaching style: incorporating digital media and game-based learning into the curriculum.
“All of my teaching has been trying to explore the ways digital media allows us to ask new and impossible questions in history,” he says. “The skills of the historian are the skills needed for the modern digital world.”
In April, he was one of five recipients of the Desire2Learn Innovation Award in Teaching and Learning for his creativity and ingenuity in the classroom.
What makes Graham’s teaching style so unique is how he wields new media as a tool to explain and experience the rich historical world.
He doesn’t see it as a gimmick to get tech-savvy millennials to pay attention, either. Graham says it can be used to develop a student’s critical approach to what they’re studying, whether it’s new software, print resources or historical archives.
And anyway, for this professor, it’s just second nature.
“I’ve never taught any other way but this,” he says.
This approach can be seen in his virtual archeological dig, which takes students on an engaging adventure into what real archeologists do at a site, all from the comfort of a computer screen.
“In a regular excavation, if you make a mistake, the best case is maybe a bit of info is lost and the worst case is that someone gets hurt,” says Graham. “The virtual excavation is a way of making it safe to fail.”
Graham’s fusion of digital media and history doesn’t end there. Currently, he’s co-authoring a handbook called The Historian’s Macroscope that discusses analyzing digital data patterns for historical benefit.
The kicker? It’s live online so anybody can follow along as he writes it. This seems only fitting for a professor whose creativity in the classroom rivals his imagination in the digital world.