Author: TheConversation

By Bob De Schutter, C. Michael Armstrong Professor of Applied Game Design, Miami University It is one thing to learn about history in a classroom. But as any visitor to a living museum or historic site can tell you, a fantastic way to learn is to make a personal connection. In early 2019, media entrepreneur Mati Kochavi and his daughter Maya brought the stories of Eva Heyman, a Hungarian Jew who was murdered in Auschwitz, to social media with the simple question, “What if a girl in the Holocaust had Instagram?” “Eva Stories” was a one-day project told through...

By Lindsay Grace, Knight Chair of Interactive Media; Associate Professor of Communication, University of Miami Video games are often blamed for unemployment, violence in society and addiction – including by partisan politicians raising moral concerns. Blaming video games for social or moral decline might feel like something new. But fears about the effects of recreational games on society as a whole are centuries old. History shows a cycle of apprehension and acceptance about games that is very like events of modern times. From ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, historians know that the oldest examples of board games trace back to the...

By John S. Carlson, Professor of School Psychology, Licensed Psychologist, Health Service Psychologist, Nationally Certified School Psychologist, Michigan State University I have never seen so much federal, state, and local money spent to “harden” school buildings and campuses in my 25 years as a school psychologist and professor of school psychology, The term encompasses a wide array of steps being taken to keep students safe amid increasingly frequent mass shootings. Examples include arming teachers, conducting active-shooter drills and installing surveillance systems. It is a booming business that by 2017 had become an estimated US$2.7 billion industry with about $1.5...

By Malinda Maynor Lowery, Professor of History and Director, Center for the Study of the American South, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Increasingly, Columbus Day is giving people pause. More and more towns and cities across the country are electing to celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day as an alternative to, or in addition to, the day intended to honor Columbus’ voyages. Critics of the change see it as just another example of political correctness run amok – another flash point of the culture wars. As a scholar of Native American history – and a member of the Lumbee...

By Ezra Markowitz and Adam Corner Associate Professor of Environmental Decision-Making, University of Massachusetts Amherst; and Research Director at Climate Outreach & Honorary Research Fellow in Psychology, Cardiff University The story of climate change is one that people have struggled to tell convincingly for more than two decades. But it’s not for lack of trying. The problem is emphatically not a lack of facts and figures. The world’s best scientific minds have produced blockbuster report after blockbuster report, setting out in ever more terrifying detail just how much of an impact we humans have had on the Earth since...

By Jayur Mehta and Tara Skipton; Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Florida State University; and Graduate Student in Archaeology, Florida State University Native North Americans first arrived in Florida approximately 14,550 years ago. Evidence for these stone-tool-wielding, megafauna-hunting peoples can be found at the bottom of numerous limestone freshwater sinkholes in Florida’s Panhandle and along the ancient shoreline of the Gulf of Mexico. Specialized archaeologists using scuba gear, remote sensing equipment or submersibles can study underwater sites if they are not deeply buried or destroyed by erosion. This is important because Florida’s archaeological resources face significant threats due to sea...