we're going to use mikes because it is being recorded by channel seventeen thank you very much so even for the q and a will pass a mike around so please make sure you use it so thanks for coming to this evening part of our critical conversations series that's part of the emergent landscape class for the masters of fine arts in emergent media at champlain college so thanks for being here tonight tonight we have going to look at my notes our t is called engagement community in the digital space reflections from the arts and humanities and to tell you a little bit before i introduce our speakers i'll tell you a little bit about the class that the speaker series is part of and about the program so the master's program an emergent media are interdisciplinary programs designed to give graduate students the opportunity to gain a deep understanding of how humans interact with and are impacted by technology allowing them to become thought leaders and designers of media solutions for tomorrow so our students are learning about how to evaluate the social impacts of technological innovations and communications processes and they're using media in new ways to address creative business social and education challenges and to make a difference in the world so this classes and introductory class two it's called the emergent landscape and it's designed to speaker series course that's designed to introduce students to kind of a wide range of different ways of thinking about technology in contemporary society really we've worked we've had people from the health care space doing human centered design we've had generat artists and technicians we've had people from the digital humanities we've had musicians i don't know who else lot of others i'm missing a few i'm sure so today i'm happy mouth so the idea for this particular presentation began actually this summer when i had the privilege of being on the hiring committee for the new executive director for the arts council and we had the pleasure of interviewing i had the pleasure of interviewing karen middlemen who in the middle of the interview started talking about her vision for the arts in vermont and how important digital media and and the game space was to her vision for the arts and humanities in the twenty first century and she and i started getting into this conversation this side conversation in the middle of the interview and i had to stop ourselves so i ha so i we chose her for the position and we brought her here and now i get to have a good to have this evening so i'm very excited to introduce karen middleton she has a ph d in u s history and published her first novel in two thousand and sixteen she was prior to being the newly minted executive director at the vermont arts council where on month two she was the director of the division of public programs at the national endowment for the humanities in addition to that she  senior position at the national museum of american jewish history and was a curator at the smithsonian institute in washington karen and i started talking about this particular talk early on in her tenure at the arts council but a month ago actually before she officially started six weeks ago and she immediately said let's invite peter gilbert who is our other guest and he is the executive director of vermont humanities council so we emailed peter and set up a phone conversation and the first thing he said to us on the phone was i have no idea why you want me to participate in this conversation i don't know anything about the digital space or you know how it impacts the future of humanities an art and karen and i both said that's exactly why we want you to participate in this in this conversation so i told him at the beginning just before that was the light of the luddite of the group and so he can help us kind of probe and ask questions from kind of a different perspective in addition to being the executive director of the vermont humanities council peter is a former litter litigator and teacher of english in history at phillips academy he also was senior assistant to the president and associate provost at dartmouth college and this was i thought the most interesting since one thousand nine hundred two gilbert  peter sorry my notes peter has also served as robert frost's literary executor so yeah so there you go so i'm going to start with karen she's going to talk a little bit about her time at the national endowment of the humanities and some of the work she did in bringing digital media projects to to that any age and then we'll have a conversation and we hope that you guys will curator and i really started thinking about the digital space in the possibilities of digital humanities as a funder when i was at any age so we had well i've been up and had been at the n e h for twenty years about and we had a very vibrant digital humanities program that was founded i want to say ten years ago but in my division the division of public programs we we really weren't doing much in the digital space and most of what was going on in digital humanities was very academic not to knock academics but it was not aimed at the public and my mission was public education the division of public programs funded a wide range of of public program formats that delivered humanity and humanities ideas to the public so documentary film radio museum exhibits historic site interpretation reading groups and local libraries you name it any any format that brought humanities ideas to a wide public that's that's what we did except for digital we had kind of side away from that and about five years ago six years ago i said this is crazy you know we have to explore this digital space and figure out a way to to play a leadership role there was tremendous apprehension at the time in my field in the museum field about the potential of the digital space it may be hard for the students here to appreciate this but the first reaction of a lot of folks in the museum field was to you know kind of be terrified by digital they were convinced that if museum collections were put online for example no one would come in their doors anymore that no one would want the real stuff we know that's but that's not what happened in fact that digital engagement drives people to want to engage more deeply with the real stuff but there is tremendous fear and apprehension and resistance so ok so fast forward to twenty fourteen we finally pushed through all that resistance and we said we're going to do this anyway we're going to offer a new grant category called digital projects for the public and i'm happy to say it's still alive and well and we started to fund some really innovative stuff we originally had very modest expectations we thought we would fund websites museum websites we would help museums get their collections online we would  help use digital tools as a way to for people to access humanities ideas and resources but it quickly became clear that the digital space was much more than that which is no news to you but it was sort of news to me at the time so we could clearly realise that we need what we had got our hands on as a funder was a whole new kind of learning space that had its own pedagogically and its own approaches and needed leadership from funders like any age to nurture a lot a sense of common practice and pedagogic if it was going to be effective in reaching the public and remember again i'm thinking public i'm not talking about what happens on the college campus or university classrooms i'm talking about people lay people so we started finding digital field trips and experimenting with mobile apps but i have to say that among all the things we funded the most provocative and the most appealing to all of us on stuff we're games and that's what i'm going to focus on tonight this is the game space struck us all immediately as a really provocative alternative learning environment and i want to talk about that in a couple of levels and then i'll show you a clip from one of my favorites so i think there are several things that make a game a really intriguing learning space first and some of these will seem obvious but i hope during the conversation we can push deeper so first the most obvious one access people who don't know who no longer read books play games younger generation can be engaged through a game that would not sit down and read a book that's the most obvious but also there's access so that's access and kind of the physical level intellectual level but there's also access for people in china to visit virtually the metropolitan museum of art collection who are never going to set foot in the doors of that museum so access on that level as well in terms of the game environment as a learning space it allows for situated learning it allows for learning that is rooted deeply in a place or in a moment in time and this is something that if you're a teacher you long for you long to be able to create an immersion for a student in another moment in time i've taught history and one of the most impossible things to teach really not just in the classroom but the most difficult thing for any of us to grasp is a sense of contingency and choice so we know for example how the french revolution came about we know how it turned out we know why and how the smallpox vaccine was invented we know when and why slavery was ended in north america we know all of these things because we learned them through history books or through lectures or or from our parents and there's a sense of inevitability that we absorb about history and it's almost impossible to unpeel that from your mind from your understanding of history and not think that everything was just marching along the way it had to march along what a game can do is it can take that away from you that sense of inevitability and pose an alternative ending and play around with contingency so that you really are confronted with the fact that things really can work out differently if you make this choice or that choice at this turn in the road and there's some there's some fascinating brilliant people working in the game development field who are playing around with them with the potential of the game narrative to affect our thinking about choice and contingency so i hope we can talk more about that during the discussion but i just want to put that out there is for me one of the things that's really deeply fascinating about the game space and how it can alter teaching but really possibly alter our thinking about our place in this moment in time and how we got here so i think is i my background is history that's probably the one that compels me the most  there's also a lot of potential for gaming as what's sometimes called and pathic narrative a an experience that can place you genuinely in the shoes of someone else in the heart and mind of someone else in different moment different place different different point in time i have to admit to a little bit of skepticism on this point we can talk more about that in the in the in the break but i've seen i've seen it work in fact a group of us were just talking about  a game that a student said moved him or her to tears at some point i've seen games move people in ways that really surprised me because perhaps because i don't play them that much i didn't until five years ago and i'm much more likely to be moved by a film or a novel or a conversation with a person that i trust but there is this forum that is incredibly powerful as an empathic tool and expressive an empathic tool and i think we've only begun to understand that that particular power this is something that's completely fundamental to both the arts and humanities to world to the worlds that both peter and i inhabit the idea that a great novel or a beautiful dance performance or a great game can can give you access to someone else's mind and heart that's why we're in this business right and that's why i'm in this business and so that's i think for me why games are so so exciting because we know that that that depth of understanding can be genuinely profound you don't have to have lived in one thousand century russia to read anna karenina and be profoundly moved right we know that the brilliant art form can push right through those particularities of experience that so often divide us and i've really come to believe that a game if it's well crafted and thoughtfully designed has perhaps even more power than a novel like karenina to achieve that so i put that out there for us to argue about later anyway i think i mean basically what this led me to is that if your mission is public education or teaching you have to take the game environment seriously as a learning space we just have to wrestle with what those possibilities are so i'd like to pause for a minute and show you a clip of the game that i think will help raise some of these interesting questions it's called  walden it was developed by tracy fullerton a really innovative kind of groundbreaking great game designer at u s c she runs the game lab there just released in june twenty seventeen for both mac and windows in this game instead of fighting zombies or surviving combat you are put in a first person simulation of the life of henry david thoreau the american philosopher the game begins in the summer of eight hundred forty five when thoreau has just embark on his experiment in self reliant living and as the player you following him you follow in his footsteps as he is walking through the woods building a cabin gathering firewood finding food sewing clothing and more and i will i will pick up this conversation after we watch this is about a two minute trailer that gives you an intro to the game pla thorough scholars were advisors on this game and they love it and they in fact one of them said to me because any h fund of this game in part one of them said to me that he believed if the room were alive today he would be playing video games i mean he in fact was luddite that that we believe him to be so the game play in the in this game is on one level very very simple there's about six hours if you play it straight through and you're just wandering in the woods  you find food you make clothing you read here right in your journal you meet with ralph waldo emerson you go into town the resonance of the technology that toro abhorred wrote about changing the pace of human life is there you saw the railroad going by there other hints of that technology that were encroaching on the world of walden pond and you can write about that and reflect about that there are quests built in for example as you explore the natural environment environment you come across arrowheads and you can pick them up and in the process learn about the history of the native americans who inhabited walden pond before thoreau arrived on the scene the seasons change you saw that in the trailer each one presents its own challenges and its own its own opportunities for reflection and inspiration if you don't take the time to reflect if all you do is hurry about the business of survival the game changes the music and the colors start to dim the music gets thinner the colors dim and as a player you lose energy you start to feel faint so in other words you have to figure out that you need nature to replenish yourself and that you need reflective time if you're going to go about the business return to the business of survival it's that balance between survival and reflection between the reflective life and the and our basic human needs for survival that really was went through with grappling with for those two years it will then climb that's what you were forced to grapple with as a player nothing in the game tells you that you have to figure it out as you're playing  what else i'll read you what the game developer tracy says she says players cultivate through the game their own thoughts and responses to what they discover when have you ever heard a game that is about a player cultivating the thoughts in response it's not about action it's about reflection the piece this is tracy fuller and again the piece has a subtle narrative arc in homage to the original text which is not an inventor of the body pitted against nature but instead an adventure of the mind and soul living in nature over the course of one doing and here ultimately what tracy was hoping to do and we can argue about whether she did or not was to prompt reflective play instead of fast paced first person shooter kind of engagement with games but ultimately they also raise questions about the personal experience of the natural environment and the personal costs of human progress the project includes a very ambitious outreach campaign if she's trying to get into schools across the nation and we don't know yet how kids are engaging with it was just released but i'm really looking forward to the research on how it works in the classroom i know for a fact because of the focus group research that i have seen that in the early days of developing it kids were responding to this game who were never going to pick up all of them and read it so it's in terms of access it's clearly opening up the world of henry david thoreau to a whole new audience that is not going to encounter him in a book so i don't know that walden embodies all of the qualities that i think you know kind of the ideal game might embody but i think it captures the way the digital space enormous potential to invite discovery and to spark the imagination in ways that are substantively and i think profoundly different from a novel or a dance performance or any other art form that we're used to in our world used to funding and thinking about so this work that i've done over the last five years i will say has really challenged me as a historian as a writer and as a funder to think about my work differently and so i'd like to throw  a couple questions for and then i'll finish i'm interested in opening up a conversation about in what ways do these new digital forms challenge us to change our practice and when i say us i mean artists teachers humanists thinking people what ways are recharged to change our practice of engaging with each other and thinking about our purpose and i think that challenge for me he is clear in three areas first on the level of creativity the most obvious one right the new possibilities for artistic expression that are presented by digital space we could talk about that for hours the potential for collaboration you know a digital app that lets a composer in peru collaborate with a composer in china the possibilities for artistic collaboration expression that weren't there before but also and i think this is the most provocative changing our ideas of narrative so this we're used to narrative as something that's linear whether it's a text or a performance that has a beginning and an end or a museum exhibit where you enter there and you exit there and you know that in the digital space nothing is linear so what does that do to our pedagogic as teachers what does that do to our encounter as students with new ideas when we're not encountering ideas in in a fixed sequence i think that's really fun to think about so that's that's a whole bucket of questions about creativity second inclusion not just access to new audiences like the kid i mentioned who's never going to pick up walden but will might get engaged by the game but in what ways do we does with digital space are we able to include people in the conversation who otherwise might not sit down with us to talk and to interact and then related a whole set of issues about community so there are games that pose ethical choices  that are profoundly about our relationship to our self and others there's a game that puts you in the in the role of a border guard deciding who gets to enter a refugee camp there is a game actually that takes place in the syrian refugee camp and tries to get you to think about what would your experience be fleeing your country and settling in a new land there's a whole set a whole movement of games that are motivated by the goals of getting people to think about social change and social justice so one of the possibilities for the game space for having us think about ourselves in our relationship to each other in our communities differently when i went to a couple  weekends ago to have a terrific conference that peter shop put on at the here at the university of vermont on the double edged sword of technology one of the speakers quoted benedict anderson's book imagine communities and the quote was about the idea of community in and then that he and it would benedict anderson was talking about was a group of people i think in a in a public space on a subway train all reading the same newspaper in isolation not talking to each other because they were all experiencing the same narrative now ended by that printed page they were in some sense having engaging in a belief that they they were connected in some way talk about a metaphor for addiction digital space so i think the digital space you know everybody's talking about the digital space and its potential to forge a community but what are the dimensions and the depth and the texture of that community how do we enact it how do we nurture it so that it's really meaningful to ourselves and to the wider human community  miracle of the written word of history literature is you can actually know the thoughts of a person who's been dead for two thousand years when you think about it that is really bizarre is really extraordinary  unfortunately i think we've lost many of us have lost that lesson we've lost the lesson that literature can be enormously powerful i'm glad that we have emerging media that are picking up and capturing people through different means but i'd also like to grab those people and show them the power of short the power of a how far along they said the table how far they go along this journey we don't know but my hope would be that some of those people would say this is kind of a share going to find out about this guy thora i'm going to pick up that book and then they'll sit down and maybe read a little bit in it and about it and follow those threads other places why because it started here and started somewhere for them so anytime we can have experiences that put us in the shoes of other people were doing a wonderful thing too often i think the stereotype would be that we objectify in the violence of video games anti social behavior and do things that are really prodigious to individuals and society there are ways as karen has pointed out that we can do just the that's what when we make a passing reference to something and everybody smiles because you know that song by madonna or you know that poem by for austerity whatever there's a connection there that matters a lot not only in in the subtlety and the efficiency of communication but also the bias that the bonds that they create so i really do want this to be a conversation so i'm i'm hoping to pass the mike to somebody and and start a conversation with a question or comment that was raised really interested in the idea that we all experience the information that's being provided whatever the medium is simultaneously and therefore experience some sort of connection when we're talking about digital media that allow us to mimic pilate the experience how we had any kind of connection what do you think yeah i think that's a great question i think so let me start with a story in the one nine when the internet was a new thing i know some of you won't remember that but i remember i was at a new year's eve party with my best friends and we stayed up late drinking too much wine and we were arguing about don't laugh is the internet a good thing or a bad  but the substance of our conversation you know is that i mean it sounds like a ridiculous question but it was such a ridiculous question in the early one nine hundred ninety s but the substance of our question was is it going to isolate us or is it going to bring us together and we had we were passionately on opposite ends of the spectrum and i think you know the question that you've raised is is really for me the crux of the matter if you how do you how do you forge something shared from a digital experience and is it what that's what i meant by saying how do we nurture it in an act and build it so that it's meaningful because just saying that we're both on the same you know looking at the same digital information is not the unity any more than those people sitting on the subway both reading the same newspaper they might have had the perception of community but one was taking away this message of us taking away that message with or not exchanging ideas or affecting each other in any way to me that's a community so that's i'd love to know what other people think one quick response or addition to that it may actually make it more shared and more authentic and more connected because in life we have the two of us see the same thing or read the same book and we do have radically different sometimes reactions to it you found that character sympathetic the person we just met you actually thought he was a decent guy about he's a scoundrel then there's a little exchange about that and i learned a little bit from you and you learn a little bit from me the fact that we don't we aren't in lockstep is closer to reality it's closer to the way we live our lives whether it's in art or literature or game well and i'm glad you said that because this is i recently had sort of rebuilt this argument with a new friend and i was saying you know if you're if if your it existing in this digital world over here and talking to people like you and looking at photos art you know you're the architecture of this environment so you're choosing what images you see and who you interact with and i'm creating my own digital environment over here how can we find a shared map of the world and she basically looked at me and said karen we've never had a share not of oh this is not about exactly as you're saying you know you're you're naive if you thought that human beings have ever walked around with a shared map of the world that's not the nature of human experience it's just that we're reacting to these new tools as if they're altering our experience not sure i buy that one hundred percent but but it's when you have much more sun in there with you eighty percent you really have much more to say about a movie that you just watch with somebody who disagrees with you than somebody who says yes exactly yes exactly yes exactly hi i have a question about learning through play and i wanted to ask it about the walls and game because i think it's it's exciting and a really great case study and so i've sort of bridged two worlds in my life one the sort of digital media making world and one the free play unstructured play experience at outdoor play world and those two worlds hate each other and so i i think the walton game is really exciting but i can think of my mentor at play corps in providence saying if they play that game they're looking at screens and they're not going outside into the world and having their own experience where are like which isn't circumscribed by a narrative designed by somebody else and so my question is how can these two forms of play be in productive conversation with each other and is that possible that's a big question so my background is i did history for my undergrad and i'm game writer for a master's so what i thought of immediately when you were talking about that is unstructured play to me and i actually got to play walden and it's a great game it's a really cool game and i didn't actually realise  even was a narrative to me it was simply unstructured play and unstructured play to me is another term it means the same thing to me as the emergent narrative which is also something that karen was bringing up an emergent narrative is it's not the story that anybody hands you it's it's rather that somebody creates a world for you to explore and it's a story that you as a player or the viewer create for yourself by virtue of your actions and your choices that you make in the world so for me emergent narrative is is really the same thing as unstructured play and i think as game design or some like something i'm working on  is moving away precisely moving away from linear storytelling and into creating spaces that are really just opportunities for players to make their own stories so i think that there's a lot of overlap  about so this makes you think two different things first the people who are at walden pond in concord have installed the kiosks of the people who actually come to physical space play the game which if you think about  it makes no sense because they're there in this beautiful natural environment why don't they just take a walk and explore walden pond but in fact what they are finding and it's still you know this game was just released so i think we have some time to figure out how this really works but what they're finding is that people move back and forth seamlessly between those experiences so and this gets to your point of how can those two worlds be united productively i think in fact if you just let children alone in particular they do move very readily back and forth between those two modes of experiencing the world and they don't think it's jarring the way that we do there's some really good research in the children's museum field about that in fact and i have a hunch that's what they're to find a walden pond and that's what the curators interested in seeing people don't do one in place of the other they feel like they're mutually reinforcing and that when deepens their experience of the other and it's something that i have to say i don't quite get on a personal level because i would much rather be out there walking around the pond than sitting at a kiosk but i know that that's not true for other people and i see the research and i see it happening in sort of the light in people's faces when they're discovering this environment through the game and those two modes do there is a way that they don't think we have to do anything to facilitate that experience it happens so i mean you're asking a bigger question i think a pedagogical question that have that kind of self directed narrative and this is a question for anyone in the room has played them that to me feels like one of the most profoundly isolating experiences you are in you are actually constructing your own reality as who play d the game like that and i played a couple of them and they're completely mesmerizing and you know five hours can go by and you don't even know that the times gone by when you were utterly utterly utterly creating your own reality in those five hours that's to me a little scary how that do you ever create a bridge between that experience and the experience of another person that's fair to ask you that question but i mean it was what in what way is it scary because it's so profoundly isolating and isolating in the way it like you felt like you were alone or i mean i'm curious what yes so i don't think it links me in any meaningful way to someone else in another room or classroom or country who's playing the same game in the way that if two people are reading a great novel they might they might there might be places that they can come together at their local library to talk about those ideas their you share a great novel with your friends in a book club or with your mother or with your sister you don't share the experience of playing one of those games with somebody else because it is a very deeply personal experience so i think it's there's something fundamental so so i find that really jarring when i think about its impact on us as a human community i think there's a lot of h of going up from some of us who've played some of these kinds of games that you find the other people that have online through forums even in libraries looking up the same kinds of materials i had assumed when you said it was isolating that you would have of that kind of play experience you build your own narrative and you would be unable to share that narrative of somebody else because it was it was self driven but i think of games where people have to face a similar challenge and even if it's a real open world experience you run into this particular challenge and you don't know how to get around it and so you start finding videos of other people who played it and how they got around you start talking to other players about what techniques they were using you start showcasing your own ability because you think that you've come up with a better solution and they did there's there's a lot of community that can be built even those very personal play experiences and i experience is all about your sense of choice and agency and the narrative that emerges from that so it has a lot of that that built into it and there was one of the point i wanted to make about that oh  not to go off in this direction but i've played some of those games and they do feel maybe a little bit isolating because you are sort of having that experience alone and one of the things is different about that from say reading a novel which can a very intimate experience even though you don't know who in the world is reading that novel at the same time is that there is not really as strongly felt presence of an author authorial hand you know every time you pick up a novel especially the ones that i pick up which are always written by people who you know who have died years ago and know about them but you know you had that sense that the human being created this and that you're being come spoken to or communicated with in some way and you know we know that these games are are the product of large development teams and the good ones cover their tracks and they leave you alone and so you really do feel and i get i get what you're saying about that well there was a loser in this deliberately for you that you were the author of the your experience right so i mean that's a really interesting point because you don't have imaginary connection to the author or the choreographer or the painter or that you're right it's because the  developer doesn't want you to have that relationship they want you to believe that you are the author of your own experience and that's a profoundly different relationship to just experience than most art forms that i'm used to also i think it ends like you said you can get fully immersed into that experience for hours and hours on end and you are alone and isolated in that space while you're doing it and you know you can you hear you know i've seen and experience myself that i might sit down to play a fun little game and two or three hours have passed and i don't even realize it where when you're consuming traditional media there is an end that's pre determined and you might read a book a second time or watch a movie over and over again but there's a finite time associated with it it's not this bottomless pit which also i think feels isolating to me anyways because you're alone with the screen even if you're even with games i think in which you're having digital communications with through avatars or even with you know through conversations i mean my watch my kids play video games and they all have their headphones on and they're playing virtually with their friends from the other side of town and having conversations or doing it but it's still you're alone with the screen for an undetermined amount of time that also i me so i want to take things back for a minute to communities and specifically digital communities and it seems to me that when we're talking about sort of traditional communities communities that existed prior to things like the digital age the one of the main bases one of the main bases that community was founded on was dependence reliance and consequence with other people so if you have to live with people you have to see them every day you have to take responsibility for your actions you depend on them socially emotionally economically all those sorts of things and i think anyone who's spent any great amount of time on the internet can see that there's a lot of toxicity that can frequently come up in communities when anonymity is assumed so that people do not feel like they have to respond to the consequences of their actions and therefore can just kind of make a mess of things other people would rather they did and so do you think that there is any sense in which digital communities should have more accountability towards individuals or more ways to make it so the consequences are more real to people as opposed to something that can be just sort of shoved off and you get more of an illusion of community where it's more just like feelings or ideas being exchanged rather than concrete you know currency of emotion or economics or those sorts of things guess what i'm asking is would it be worthwhile to try to pursue what making digital spaces have more accountability to individuals is anonymity destructive of community use when we're talking about digital spaces and would it be worth trying to have some way in some multiplayer games that i've had there is a great respect for the social community that goes on in these games in large part because there is a huge amount of time put into your character in the game and into the world itself and therefore when other players mess with that and when they do things with it there is a strongly felt emotional reaction against it which other players can you know act as sheriffs and act as real forces to try to get things back into a real kind of community control and in other areas when anonymity is much more widespread that kind of social pressure doesn't exist in the same way and therefore it's a lot harder to create a real community one where people's actions mean things and where people are actually trying to pay attention to one another and you know have their actions have some reciprocity basically so is there or you know might might it be something that digital communities need to do to try to really reach out towards the people who are actually there and connect them more firmly than just having a name that comes up whenever you're espousing something on the internet is that kind of wide social contact that you're talking about is that something that has a organically or is it built into the architecture of the game that you're playing this this is largely organic this is basic this is yet no this is basically like the more the more time you put into something the more you care about it i mean i would say there's your answer i think those kinds of forms of police control should emerge organically and shouldn't be really reluctant to say that it's anyone's job to create that kind of structure but that's just my that's a philosophical question our society from i can judge your credibility i can find a connection with you that's the way society live societies built at least in this in the west absolutely and i think this is also related to you know everyone likes talking about fake news nowadays and i think that there is a i think that that lack of accountability towards individuals and the idea that you can just go on the internet and it we can p t o or you can just go on and post anything on some particular journalism website i think there is something about the kinds of communities that spring up online that has this high potential at least for deception and for kind of creating areas in which policing becomes very difficult and i don't i mean i'm most i don't really know exactly where my question is going but i do want to bring up the link between anonymity consequence and what those things have to say about what kinds of communities are real and which ones are more lose novels and the like and and video games they're both potential engines for cultivating empathy agree with that and they both kind of operate by immersion they achieve those effects in different ways you  know in a short story or novel we have to decode the language and that kind of unlocks it and we and we fall into it and it works in different ways in video games but we've been defending literature some of us for a long time on many grounds one of which is that it's it provides a useful literacy what is the link between literature and literacy let's say and so i'm asking the question now about about these digital spaces have you thought much about the literac from that how did those stand up and i think it relates a little bit to what you were saying because we're asking so what what what do i become when i play these games and what does that matter in how i actually interact with real people there's a huge literature on this that i'm not i can't speak to except to say that it's there i mean cathy davidson's or it's written some really interesting work on how the game environment and digital space affects kids cognitively and builds different skill sets than traditional you know reading a book or a home and there's psychologist nurse scientists are studying this so the answer to question is yes there is a there is a profound difference and there is a third different skill sets that are being developed but that's not my background i guess i would also argue that you know if you are a dyslexic growing you know growing up one hundred years ago you you know you are at your left behind right so the our traditional form of  literacy you know affords success to certain kinds of brains and i think what we're going to find in the next you know however many years is that this new form of digital literacy is going to afford success to a different kind of intelligence and you know we we will change right how will change remains to be seen and it also hopefully will change pedagogy in the classroom i mean there's a lot of evidence that you know we're very focused on individual learners and the proficiency these are skills that they develop that we can measure and grant them credit to graduate and we know the little that i have read i know that the digital space encourages a kind of collaborative learning that isn't just easily defined but you know you have the skill set and i have the skill set kids in a classroom that's digitally that whether the pedagogic is shaped by digital tools from the get go they learn differently they interact differently and it's a much more fluting collaborative kind of learning that doesn't lend itself to that kind of individual measurement so talk about a vast sea change being required in our classrooms  word education i think the emerging media are excellent at experience all education coming to understand something through experience i'm not convinced that there is equal to books when it comes to information or knowledge it's important to know of writing things good citizenship tolerance and right of other important th fundamental understandings you get real problems i think that's pretty clear and it's important for people to have a shared knowledge and you know you know the best way to  convey information is the written word that it hasn't gotten any better you can have it said to you but i can read faster than that even if i'm not a fast reader but the information that kind of wanted to revisit something that came up earlier about it seems like in this conversation we've had a lot of worrying about digital technology taking the place of reading or that kind of being at odds with one another  and i had a professor ken howell who's a teacher here who said once that culture is a luxury item and i think that as our technology gets better as we are able to have more free time we're actually spending more and separate from the whole netflix and hulu and everything else kind of replacing traditional cable television one thing that i found that was interesting was all of these broadcast networks are kind of freaking out worrying that people are going to be watching less television because they're on the internet more and it's true that people were spending more time on the internet in twenty fourteen than they were in two thousand and five but they were still suspending the same amount of time watching television and so to extrapolate that a little bit further back i think that we're  seeing people just in general spending more time with all forms of media and so maybe it isn't as much of a battle for real estate in people's minds as we're portraying it to be i think you're absolutely right  beauty and power to a narrative that's beautifully constructed to move you from here to here it moves you emotionally intellectually and you don't you don't get to hear without knowing what you learned over here it matters that you go in a sequence that matters the way the story unfolds if you're in a space where you just get the bounce around and pick up content the way you choose something is lost i i can't give up on that idea and i'd love someone to push back against that who's younger than i am because i fear i'm betraying my age here so i'm going to have a question that's probably probably different than everything else about sustainability and one of the things i've been talking about and some my classes now is that it's really we want to get into a more sustainable age where we're using sustainable materials and how do we teach the humanities using sustainable technology for example you know why would we use the books when it's more sustainable to use digital technology because it can last longer and it doesn't have to you know destroy the environment as we do it so i'm wondering i know it's a different experience using a book to learn about the humanities compared to using another device but how would we get into this future age where we can actually be sustainable what's to learn about the humanities can i let me push back on that i mean you know i've had the same book for you know in my family for a hundred years and i can read the same one and i can have it did lend it to you you change your computer at least once in the last five years and that has a lot of toxic materials in it it has things that are of limited resources it's really hard to recycle and paper and it uses power and a book doesn't do any of those things it's incredibly cheap once it's purchase right and it can go on anywhere i'm just thinking about the future of where we're going like you know you we not we're not going to have bookshelves in our outer space or something like that it's going to you know has to be in the digital format so i'm just wondering how are we going to deal with that when that time comes when we're like we can't use books anymore well i would just suggest that you look into the carbon footprint of like amazon web services for example like you know we  plane use canvas as our learning management system that's hosted by amazon there's these giant cavernous warehouse buildings out in nevada or something that are just chewing up electricity to keep those servers running and you know there are multiple redundant in all of that so i mean there's actually studies done of like what the actual carbon footprint of a tweet is and you know just multiply that by the billions that occur every day like those there's power required there storage space required the cloud i mean we have a colleague brian murphy who who talks about this and he's like the cloud is is not the cloud it's a physical reality there's this massive infrastructure supporting it so sustainability is a tricky thing in the digital age that is not as you know we can grow more if we want to go that way but so yeah i think the funny pushback would be that when it all goes to hell i don't think we'll be worrying about like how we're going to be able to plug our laptops and because the only thing that will be left are books communication first son of the scene in that sort of a foothold the ones that were there before are freaking out the new one always things it's going to take over the world and it's going to be the only thing in the end result is always the same the end result is always that the new thing just becomes another thing and then a new thing comes along and then the same sort of dance takes place my question is and i have no idea and i don't know if anyone else has an idea is do you think that the human brain will ever reach a threshold where there will be so many things that will be spread so thin that we become sort of the you know jack of all trades and master of none intellectually like is that something that's maybe a legitimate concern that we have so many different methods of communication that we are not good at any of them yeah no more new things right but i think you're right i'm not going to answer your question but i will kind of piggy back a little bit on what you said is that i think as these new media come into play i think the old media gets to figure out what it's best for right and i think that is you pointed out there are certain things in which the written word is better at communicating but i think there are certain things that the branching narrative possibility of a video game are also better at and now we get to stop making books do all of the heavy lifting for everything and everybody and we get to start diversifying that experience i want to hear what you have to say but i also want to call attention to the time it so i think it's a little bit after eight o'clock already so i think we should maybe have a couple of last comments and then we can wrap it up and if anybody wants to stay and talk afterwards but go ahead i think you're absolutely right there could also have text you could have audio you can have video and you together those create a good balance and a good combination they are also collaborative i've got one thing and you've got the other thing you've got the letters from that great person and we can put them on and you have a fabulous interview so i want to use that and you have film of the place and together we can have a terrific product but it's a product of four things or five things  things in twenty people and not just one so one of the interesting dynamics when you think about collaboration and community this is an interdisciplinary class right so there are people who are like w feel like one of the sticking point is about funding always who is getting money and i was just curious about your perspective on funding because i read a lot about like the crisis in the humanities and that crisis is necessitated by it like defunding that has been happening over the course of the past twenty to thirty years which is happening in the us at the federal and state and institutional levels i see it playing out even in our own local s defunding of the humanities with the funding of like technologists who are creating humanities ish type educational things to create empathy in so but without the context or the experience of the humanities and then like the humanities people are expected to a let's come play with you and will collaborate but we're not going to actually give you money and so i'm curious as to how that dynamic like plays into this conversation about so i think the question for me as a wonder is the one circling back to what robin said which is what if i'm going to make decisions as a funder what what is the best form to accomplish the kind of public community engagement that the arts council or formerly at the national government for the humanities we want to foster and sometimes that might be a traditional humanities form and sometimes it might be a new digital form i don't i don't think i think funders need to think strategically about what is the best medium to achieve their ends and it should be a blend of traditional and digital i mean that's easy to even you know despite all the threats of defunding the arts and down in the humanities and i don't think that's going to happen i don't think there's appetite for that and i also believe that most of the funders of stem are recognizing that arts and humanities can amplify and and deepen the work that's happening in stem because the research is is there now and the research was in there ten years ago so you know i mean and that matters that turns a funders had if you can demonstrate learning change in the classroom change in student achievement through engagement with the arts or humanities alongside stem or instead of stuff it matters and so i feel like there is a change in the last i don't know i would want to say the exact number of years but it feels like in the last maybe five to ten years because of research and that funders are taking notice that some of the larger foundations and government funders including department of education are taking notice and there's a more integrated approach but again i tend to be an incurable optimist so you have the same perspective i know that the department of education in vermont first was i was actually going to suggest that your you worry less about the linear narrative and you take some take a deep breath because the fact of the matter is although the playground type approach sandboxes are who'll the fact of the matter is the vast majority of games today are still fundamentally linear narratives with stuff we throw on top which is smoke and mirrors to make the player think they have some agency the other