Carlos Hernandez (Borough of Manhattan Community College) giving opening remarks at the CUNY Games Festival, held at the CUNY Graduate Center, January 17, 2014.
The first annual CUNY Games Festival, January 17-18, 2014, was a terrific success. One of the first academic conferences to explore game-based learning (GBL) in higher education, the two-day event attracted almost 200 registrants. Participants included faculty and students from 10 CUNY schools and dozens of universities and colleges across the country, along with game developers and other representatives from non-profit and for-profit technology sectors.
The first day of the conference, held at...Read more
As part of our CUNY History initiative, the website Student Voices from WWII and the McCarthy Era has been completely redesigned. ASHP/CML worked with historian Adina Back to launch the website in 2006 as a resource to teach college level oral history interpretation and practice and to explore the history of activism on the Brooklyn College campus. The new design focused on making the site’s navigation simpler and more accessible for tablets and mobile devices. Other new features include a persistent menu for easy navigation and new audio formats, including downloadable mp3 files.Read more
The history of the City University of New York and the championing of public higher education are the focus of a new initiative involving present and past CUNY faculty, staff, and students along with libraries, archives, and collections in and outside of the university. Coordinated by ASHP/CML, the CUNY Digital History Archive will collect the stories in text, sound, and image of the many events, people, and communities that have been critical to the university’s democratic mission. These materials will be made available to the public as an open access repository and also will direct users to valuable records and...Read more
Mark your calendars—ASHP/CML is helping to organize and sponsor the first annual CUNY Games Festival, which will take place on January 17, 2014 at the City University of New York Graduate Center. This one-day conference to promote and discuss game-based learning in higher education will bring together faculty, students, game designers, and other domain experts from various disciplines. Open to the public, the conference features an Arcade where attendees can play learning games and games-in-progress, as well as sessions addressing questions such as:
Apart from engaging college students, what real learning can happen
We’ve been hard at work on our latest website, Who Built America Badges for History Education. It’s free, online professional development designed to help middle and high school social studies teachers integrate the Common Core Standards into their teaching—and it’s launching in October at badges.ashp.cuny.edu. Our new professional development program, Bridging Historias through Latino History: An NEH Bridging Cultures at Community Colleges Project, is underway. Thirty-eight faculty and administrators from colleges in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania have been active in online reading discussions and will meet at the Graduate Center in October for...Read more
Launching soon! Mission US: A Cheyenne Odyssey will introduce middle school students across the country to Little Fox and his Northern Cheyenne band. The third installment of the Mission US series of adventure games begins in 1867 in what is now Montana. As the fictional Little Fox, players will decide how best to survive changing life on the Plains and respond to encroachment from white soldiers and settlers. Visit Mission US on October 16, 2013 to start playing—and learning.
ASHP/CML is the content developer of Mission US, which is produced by public television...Read more
With the support of a supplementary grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, ASHP/CML just launched Visual Culture of the American Civil War. The new website provides broad public and educational access to the resources of our 2012 NEH summer institute for college and university teachers. The website features videocast presentations by historians, art historians, and archivists focusing on the war’s different visual media as well as major themes of the conflict. In addition, each presentation is accompanied by a selection of archival images, primary documents, and a bibliography. Additional...Read more
The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded a grant to ASHP/CML to host a two-week institute in July 2014 on the visual media of the American Civil War. Following on the heels of our successful summer 2012 institute, this second institute on “The Visual Culture of the American Civil War” will study the ways the war was recorded, reported, represented, and remembered via an unprecedented array of visual media that included the fine arts, photography, cartoons, and a range of “ephemeral”pictorial items and publications. Institute participants will work...Read more
As part of our continuing effort to support digital research and experimentation in a collaborative interdisciplinary environment, 2013 ushered in 10 new doctoral students into the ranks of the New Media Lab. Bringing our total to 24, NML’s coterie of students comes from 14 programs/subprograms at the Graduate Center, with each student incorporating a range of approaches and tools as they explore the use of new technology in his or her doctoral work. For the first time, we have representation from Educational Psychology (Second Life environments to teach autistic children), French (Digitization of 17th century manuscripts), and Criminal Justice...Read more
Since launching last year, Mission US: Flight to Freedom continues to win accolades from the education, media, and gaming worlds. Flight to Freedom, the second of the Mission US series of adventure games on which ASHP/CML has collaborated with public television station WNET/Thirteen and other partners, features the journey of Lucy King, a (fictional) 14-year-old girl enslaved on a Kentucky Plantation. The game and curriculum immerse players in the history of slave communities and resistance, and the wider anti-slavery struggles that led up to the Civil War. Flight to Freedom has been praised for it’s “intelligent” and “thought-provoking” approach...Read more
Launching soon! Mission US: A Cheyenne Odyssey will introduce middle school students across the country to Little Fox and his Northern Cheyenne band. The third installment of the Mission US series of adventure games begins in 1867 in what is now Montana. As the fictional Little Fox, players will decide how best to survive changing life on the Plains and respond to encroachment from white soldiers and settlers. Visit 
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