Permanent Beta

Gamestorming

2011-05-23T01:31:00.000-07:00

More

http://www.gogamestorm.com/

Amber Case - Introduction to Cyborg Anthropology

2010-09-08T01:44:00.001-07:00

Greenpeace release ship simulator game

2010-08-24T11:33:00.000-07:00

Onlignment: Enjoyable Elearning – Is it an oxymoron?

2010-07-22T12:08:00.000-07:00

Clive Sheperd was into the job last week, giving a very useful webinar.

This is a Pechu Kucha (20 slides, each 20 seconds in duration) on the oxymoron of "enjoyable e-learning" from his company Onlignment.

Learning styles don't exist. So stop asking me about them!

2010-07-13T04:03:00.000-07:00

The video which anyone who works in learning/development should be made to watch. Again and again. If I get another mail from someone asking me about how my e-learning design work 'accommodates learning styles', I am likely to cry.

Clay Shirky on 'Cognitive Surplus'

2010-07-05T04:06:00.000-07:00

Clay Shirky, talking about his new book cognitive surplus.

From the Guardian:

"Techies were making the syllogism, if you put new technology into an existing situation, and new behaviour happens, then that technology caused the behaviour. But I’m saying if the new technology creates a new behaviour, it’s because it was allowing motivations that were previously locked out. These tools we now have allow for new behaviours – but they don’t cause them."

Informal Learning

2010-07-05T03:51:00.000-07:00

A video summary of the 2008 Learning Technologies conference, London with some notable points on 'Informal Learning'

Michael Shermer on 'Patternicity'

2010-06-19T12:36:00.000-07:00

Microsoft Pivot

2010-03-04T12:38:00.000-08:00

Whole Earth Discipline by Stewart Brand

2010-02-15T03:51:00.000-08:00

I picked up a copy of Whole Earth Discipline by Stewart Brand this weekend and have found it, so far, a fascinating and brilliant read.

Jeff Jarvis on Google Buzz

2010-02-11T11:00:00.001-08:00

Google Buzz

2010-02-10T13:48:00.000-08:00

(image by Thomas Hawk)

Not quite sure what to make of Google Buzz. I like it, as I spend a fair bit of time in Gmail talking and sharing stuff, but I just don't know if I need another feed to follow.

Moving into Facebook's territory naturally invites comparisons: the interface seems a little sloppy compared to Facebook, with Google sticking to their convention of using the full width of the screen.

Columns people! Columns! When will Google realise that reading text across the width of a screen is crap on the eyes?

http://www.google.com/buzz

Clay Shirky: 'It's not information overload, it's filter failure'

2010-02-02T06:52:00.000-08:00

[8] A Hitchiker's Guide to Cyberspace

2010-01-03T15:52:00.000-08:00

This post is part of a 'digital essay' for the course Digital Cultures, a semester in the University of Edinburgh's MsC. in eLearning. To go back to the start of the essay, click here.

Some questions to ask as you encounter digitally-mediated narratives on the web:

1. If a narrative cites an historical source, can it be authenticated?

2. Does the narrative display tendencies toward syllogistic thinking?

3. Does the narrative display poor probalistic reasoning?

4. Does the narrative insist on assertions being accepted as facts?

5. To what extent does the narrative depend on visual literacies to commuinicate its' message? And does this alter the transmission and meaning of the narrative?

6. Does the narrative display signs of a dominating dystopian or utopian slant?

[6] The Pyramid of Learning

2010-01-03T15:03:00.000-08:00

This post is part of a 'digital essay' for the course Digital Cultures, a semester in the University of Edinburgh's MsC. in eLearning. To go back to the start of the essay, click here.

The Pyramid of Learning is a 'learning model' which has been repeated for decades, despite recent work making a convincing case for the model and the assertions made on its' strength being bunkum.

Will Thalaimer has written on the Pyramid and it's sustained existence. The Pyramid of Learning is a fusion of two ideas - a series of numbers from D. G. Treichler, an employee of Mobil Oil Company in 1967, writing in the magazine Film and Audio-Visual Communications. Fused to that was Dale's "Cone of Experience," developed in 1946 by Edgar Dale.

'You can see that Dale used no numbers with his cone. Somewhere along the way, someone unnaturally fused Dale's Cone and Treichler's dubious percentages.'

And yet, year after year, Instructional Designers and Learning Technologists use the model in their presentations.

Whatever the reason, the worlds of conspiracy theory and online learning share more than a few similarities - disaggregated, fragmented, uncanny in their dis-construction and shifting authenticity, with spare parts of other people's ideas mashed into a new narrative.

Go to Part 7.

[3] The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

2009-12-22T08:16:00.000-08:00

This post is part of a 'digital essay' for the course 'Digital Cultures', part of the MsC. in eLearning from the University of Edinburgh. To go back to the start of the essay, click here.

This map tracks some key moments, locations and people involved in the evolution of what is often called 'the first modern conspiracy theory' - that is the anti-semitic literary forgery commonly known as 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion'. In addition to giving us a window into the mechanics by which a conspiracy theory is created, we might also pause to note that these are the same mechanics by which a digitally-mediated, post-foundational learning experience or 'narrative' are constructed - from fragmented, multi-located sources.

Click the option to view the larger map so that you can properly see the embedded content.

View Tracking the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in a larger map

What I want for Social Media Christmas

2009-12-17T13:31:00.000-08:00

I want to be able to leave audio comments on a blog as easily as I can on something like Audioboo.

Anyone know how to do that?

Hello? Is this thing on?

Is the VLE Dead?

2009-12-14T07:50:00.000-08:00

Found at Bill's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog � Reverse engineering

Digital Cultures Course Lifestream Summary

2009-12-13T13:48:00.000-08:00

This entry is cross-posted from the University of Edinburgh's 'Digital Cultures' course, a part of the MsC in e-learning.

Technologies

Where to start? I've just spent the last 40 minutes or so editing the lifestream and have been amazed at the amount of stuff that got lumped in there. There was stuff in there that I'd forgotten I'd added, which brings up perhaps my first point; that although the lifestream may be a viable way of evaluating a learner's engagement with course content, it may have some way to go to improving as an aide to a learner - a semantic, tag-based arrangement of all lifestream entries might sort that. But that doesn't solve the problem of how you'd tag them at the source.

Truth be told though, my main aid in gathering up resources was not the lifestream itself, but the Tumblr feed which I set up to post into it. Tumblr is a fantastic tool for a course like this - especially when utitlised on an iPhone. Half of the stuff in my lifestream was added via my iPhone Tumblr app - a fantastic on-the-go learning tool for someone like me who has to do a fair bit of study 'on the run' from one place to another.

Experience

But what of the experience of using the lifestream? For me, this lifestreaming was both reassuringly familiar yet novel enough to surprise me. Familiar in that I am an avid Delicious user and have been accustomed a while now to 'storing' large parts of myself online - this through my own blog. Through here I have a twitter feed, a Delicious tag cloud, university and work posts, Last.fm playlists and at one point my Flickr feed. In a sense I've kind of been wanting a 'lifestream' for a while and used Blogger as the conduit.

As to being novel, I enjoyed seeing the connections crop up as I posted, 'liked' and favourited my way around Google Reader (the other crucially useful tool for me), Youtube, Twitter and the university blogs. I enjoyed the sense of 'the pieces falling together' when you viewed the lifestream page: conversations, blogs, feeds, pictures and videos all sloshing around in a great big soup of links. In a very simple and powerful way, my Tumblr feed became more than my 'online scrapbook'; instead it was the central artery of my lifestream and course learning.

Content

As to content - well, it's a weird bag. This is a reflection of the stranger junctures of the web which I've been choosing to hang about in these last 12 weeks. There's 9/11 conspiracy theories material, analyses of UFO abductee accounts, summaries of anthropological process and theory, studies of semingly feral discussion forum teenagers, videos of rock-star cyborgs and web-star ethnographers, quotes from university professors and random twitterers, pictures of books I've tried to dip in to, clips from sci-fi movies which the readings made me think of, examples of game-based learning that sprang to mind when the literature turned to 'cyborg pedagogies' and probably a few ill-tempered remarks about my struggles to play the PC version of Modern Warfare 2.

Cyborgs and Ghosts

Looking back at it all now, I find myself giggling a bit - amused at the twists and turns of web-mediated learning, how a quote from one writer can lead to a video from another, to a podcast about conspiracy theories, to an angry conversation about online movies resulting in giving a talk at the Dublin Paranormal Conference and the excruciating experience of seeing yourself on Youtube. I can honestly say that when I started this semseter I didn't see that coming.

How wonderfully odd that a course which makes such explicit references to 'hauntology' and 'ghost-like' online presences should see me wind up speaking in a Dublin hotel full of UFO-hunting, ghost-busting, poltergeist-whispering, Yeti-chasing, paranormal activity fans, in a scene akin to something from a recession-busted Hunter S.Thompson novel.

As to 'cyborg pedagogies', looking back over the lifestream now it seems a suitable example of the re-aggregation, re-assembling and re-modelling of information and meaning-making suggested by the cyborg pedagogy literature. What initially looks like a car-crash of data, upon slightlly closer examination shows patterns of thoughts and concern, avenues of investigations, fruitless rummages down dead-ends of online madness and overall the seemingly random, manic linking between one subject area and another - the connections between disparate writers, disciplines and mediums all merging back in to one big story.

It's a great big mess, but I love it and will be continuing to use my Tumblr as I work my way to the final assignment. Put simply I can't work without it now.

I've immensely, immensely enjoyed this 12 weeks and find myself sad to start winding it all up. And wondering how I can ever go back to a 'mainstream' learning model again.

'What has been seen cannot be unseen'.

I've been Chromed

2009-12-09T11:09:00.000-08:00

There's probably no need to tell you what Google Chrome is - the search giant's browser, which they launched about a year ago. What you may not know is that Chrome is now quite useful. They've added a gallery of extensions, much like the thousands of free plug-ins that you can get for the Firefox browser.

As of today I'm a fully-fledged Chrome convert. For a guy who spends way too much of his life hunched over an internet browser, this is a big thing. Why have I changed? Well, in addition to the myriad extensions which bring delicious, gmail, twitter, gcal (which can sync to your Outlook), Wave and Google Reader into the browser with teeny-tiny little icons informing you if you have a new mail, wave, tweet or tag, Chrome also allows you to sync your bookmarks, toolbars and assorted tools across multiple machines.

So, import all your bookmarks into Chrome from wherever you have them stored (whatever browser you are currently using) save them, and then simply synchronise on another machine when you're elsewhere. No more laboriously adding favicons and importing bookmarks one machine at a time.

Fabulous stuff.

Oh and it seems to be about 30-40% faster than any other browser I've used.

Download here.

Fembots, Latex, Haraway and Hayles

2009-12-03T07:09:00.000-08:00

This entry is cross-posted from the University of Edinburgh's 'Digital Cultures' course, a part of the MsC in e-learning.

References:

Haraway, D. (2000). A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20th Century. in D Bell and A Kennedy, The Cybercultures Reader. Routledge.

Hayles, N.K. (1999). Toward embodied virtuality, chapter 1 of How we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature and informatics. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. pp1-25

I've been rather quiet of late - this last two weeks - partially because Modern Warfare 2 arrived (disrupting nearly everything in my life) but largely because (and I have to be honest here) I found the Harway and Hayles readings quite alienating. As I've said before on this course, I struggle badly with certain types of language used by academics in this field and have wondered if that language and those accompanying narrative structures wouldn't be worthy of a mini-ethnography itself.

Going back to Hine's assertion that the job of the virtual ethnographer is to discover how our informants create 'truth', I can't help but (somewhat snidely) observe that for many in this field 'truth' seems to be created by use of an elitist, hyper-real vocabulary. Whilst such pointedly playful language is perhaps part of the point which Harway and Hayles are trying to make, there were moments when (with Haraway in particular) some of the writing seemed like an exercise in linguistic masturabtion. Although, I'm aware that that probably says as much about me as it does Professor Haraway.

All of that said, I appreciate that such things shouldn't discourage me from course participation, but rather spur me on to try to form a greater understanding. To that end, I'll try to work my way through the five discussion questions which Sian and Jen posed to help us work through these readings.

1. What is the difference between being a cyborg and being posthuman?

The short answer: I really don't know. But some ideas did slosh around in my head whilst reading these pieces: perhaps Haraway's cyborg is a celebration of the fusion of man and machine, a position which revels in the ambiguity caused by the union of organic and artificial. By contrast, Hayles' identification of the narrative of 'the posthuman' seems to be something else - where the materiality of the human condition seems to be considered a design flaw of evolution; something which we may soon be in a position to rectify with unspecified, unknown technologies which allow human consciousness (now reduced to a mere mathematical equation for the storage of information) to be 'downloaded' and 'uploaded' into another physical host.

My first thoughts ran to Warren Ellis' Spider Jerusalem stories (the Transmetropolitan series), in which one of the stories showcases a future technology where humans download themselves into a cloud of particles - unshackling themselves from the limits of their bodies. Naturally, I also found myself thinking of James Cameron's forthcoming 'Avatar' - in which a wheelchair-bound war veteran is offered the chance to download into the engineered body of an alien (an eight-foot smurf by the looks of it) in order to... oh, who cares why? The whole thing seems an excuse to showcase some nifty new 3D technology, but the same notion of humans as 'downloadable content' seems to pervade here - as though corporeal existence is simply an irrelevance and we are destined to be reduced to nothing more than a DNA driven RSS feed.

2. Is our thinking about – and beyond – cyberculture still too structured by the kinds of binaries Haraway critiques (promise/threat, for example, or utopia/dystopia)? How does Haraway’s cyborg myth disrupt these?

Again, I just don't know. I do certainly see some of the binaries which the questions suggests in operation every day: debates around 'real' friends and 'online friends', virtual and real, actual and imaginary, corporeal and data-based information and the endless online firestorm over authentication of information as 'real' or 'false' (see Wikipedias' ever-present problems).

But, speaking with friends, family and colleagues I think that the 'utopian/dystopian' binary of the web is rather reductive. People who have serious grievances with social networks like Facebook (over issues of authenticity of interaction, stalking, bullying and privacy) are still using it - no matter how much they may profess they dislike it. If their view of such technologies and the resulting interactions were that dystopian, I don't believe they would engage as they do.

I'm not all that sure that Haraways' Cyborg does actually disrupt these binaries all that much. I know that it's hardly scientific, but I find myself looking (again) at the narratives, stereotypes and presentations of cyborgs within contemporary science-fiction and feel that not all that much has changed. Star Trek: Voyager's latex-clad, baloon-breasted 'Seven of Nine' character seemed like nothing more than a fairly routine geek-boy fantasy - all curves, doe-eyed, kittenish misunderstandings about sexuality, arched eyebrows and the ever-present threat of repressed sexual desire exploding out of its spandex jumpsuit to consume the nearest unsuspecting male crew member. Although not a cyborg per-se, the next Star Trek show (Enterprise) replicated the formula with the charecter T'Pol - a similarly Lara Croft-shaped Vulcan crew-member, whose detached, unemotional behaviour made her seem like nothing more than 'Seven of Nine 2.0'.

A more recent example might be Summer Glau's portrayal of a female Terminator in 'The Sarah Connor Chronicles' (pictured above) - a behaviourally submissive, lethally dangerous killerbot sent through time to protect the male hero, whose duties seem to involve brutally murdering people whilst looking sexually suggestive and wanton. It's not the first time Glau has done this either - her portrayal of River Tam in the fan-favourite 'Firefly' was remarkably similar in places: a precociously talented young woman, fiddled with by nefarious government scientists whose intention was to use technology to turn her into a lethal killing machine - placing a murdering automata in the body of a hot teenage girl. And let's not stop there - Joss Whedon's latest offering, The Dollhouse, sees an array of interchangeable models posing as empty-headed government assasins - their minds a series of blank slates awaiting downloading of new orders to murder assorted bods whilst looking like they're posing for the cover of Vanity Fair.

If Haraways' cyborg was an attempt to break-down standard male-authored sexual fantasies, gender narratives and older, more rigid binary constructions of sexuality, it has been, in the field of mainstream sci-fi anyway, a manifest failure.

3. Is Cartesian mind/body dualism, as Hayles argues of posthuman embodiment (p5), the ultimate opposition that structures all of our debates about subjectivity and online identity?

I'm not that convinced that the Cartesian duality referred to in the question is the ultimate opposition, but it is one which I see debated and enacted almost every day. The seeming paranoia which sat at the heart of James Harkins' 'Cyburbia' seemed to stem from the linking of human beings to a 'feedback loop' - in which virtual comunication becomes an exercise as addictive as the most powerful drug, leading to the illusion of 'friendship', authenticity and meaningful interaction. Social networking's detractors, it seems, suggest that there is an inherent artificiality about such interactions - that the lack of embodied discourse renders the interactions trivial, meaningless and devoid of substance. 'Friends' in Facebook, this narrative suggests, are not real friends at all. But why? Because data sent down a optic cable cannot carry the same meaning, the same nuance and same 'authenticity' as an exchage of data between two people in the same room.

4. What other connections might there be between cyborg theory and the pragmatics of online pedagogy and course design?

Placeholder answer: I don't know. Sorry! I appreciate that this is probably the most crucial of the five questions, and a short answer declaring my ignorance is less than ideal, but I'm being as honest as I can. I've just failed to see the obvious connection between these readings and the design of e-learning materials. And I'd very much like to know what they are.

5. Do cyborgs really resist the structure of sex/gender, as Haraway claims?

In short, no. I don't think that they do. I shan't repeat my earlier assertions about female cyborgs in current sci-fi shows except to say that it seems as though many are merely play-things for male writers - blank slates upon which rating-gathering, hyper-sexualised, yet emotionally dead female archtypes are projected. Rather than resisting, usurping or inverting structures of gender, it would seem that cyborgs perpetuate certain archetypal fantasies, and may, in fact, lead to even more stereotyped depictions of gender and sexuality - a body without a brain, a set of curves to be observed without guilt or conscience because, after all, she's 'only a machine'.

Is Google Knol making a comeback?

2009-11-26T02:35:00.000-08:00

When initially launched, Google's Knol (the seeming competitor to Wikipedia) was widely dismissed as a flawed concept - placing the experts back at the top of the knowledge-creation food chain, in contrast to the more open and all together 'democratic' Wikipedia. That was then. Now, well, things seem to be a little different. From the Guardian Technology section:

Wikipedia editors seem to be dropping like flies, according to research by Felipe Ortega, from the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid. He analysed Wikipedia's data on the editing histories of its more than three million active contributors in 10 languages and found that "in the first three months of 2009, the English-language Wikipedia suffered a net loss of more than 49,000 editors, compared to a net loss of 4,900 during the same period a year earlier," reports The Wall Street Journal.

But why? Hard to say, but a constant theme in the comments below (and that I've read elsewhere this last 6-12 months) is that many Wikipedians are leaving citing abusive, power-mad editors.

And many of them have jumped ship and gone over to Knol. From the comments section below the main article:

For two years, I maintained an important contemporary dental and oral surgery topic after heavy research, writing and editing to establish the all-important standard of care. I am a tech journalist with ample experience and training.

Suddenly the topic was dumbed down, removing long-standing authoritative referenced content critical for patient safety. It seemed to me as if some malpractice insurance carrier was suddenly editing the material, doing serious damage to the safety aspects as if worried that someone might wave the Wikipedia article from the witness box in front of a jury. Oh, Wikipedia says xyz is the standard of care. Since the surgeon did not use xyz, let's give a $M to the plaintiff.

I made repeated attempts to restore the content but it was always returned to the dumbed-down state. Somebody with a paycheck was watching. Disgusted, I jumped ship, rewriting and posting the content at Google Knol and at Scribd.com where no one but me can touch it.

Knol is very cool from a content management standpoint. My work has earned very high marks and I have now been invited to post at MedPedia (and I am working on it). Thousands have read the articles and many have downloaded. I am delighted because the safety issues are critical.

Is Knol for you? Give it a tumble, ask the top rated writers (many Wikipedia refugees, like me) for help. And have some fun with the low end stuff. Knol is a very liberal experience. www.knol.google.com.

Blather, Rinse, Repeat: An Ethnography of Conspiracy Theory

2009-11-12T01:35:00.000-08:00

'Blather, Rinse, Repeat: An Ethnograpy of Conspiracy Theory' [A Prezi Scrapbook]

2009-10-26T10:17:00.001-07:00

I don't know how I get myself into these things, but I'm doing a talk on Saturday 7th November at the Dublin Paracon 2009, at the Radisson Blu Royal Hotel, Golden Lane, Dublin 8. I've wanted to try out Prezi for a while and thought this might be a good chance to muck about with it. This is a 'Prezi scrapbook' which will eventually become the basis of the talk. It also overlaps with some of my university work at the moment.

Wonderful when two previously completely un-related fields you move about it wander together. Suggest you go full screen to see it properly. Press play first.

Field Sites, UFOs and Virtual Pith Helmets

2009-10-23T08:48:00.000-07:00

This entry is cross-posted from the University of Edinburgh's 'Digital Cultures' course, a part of the MsC in e-learning.

I've been having a ball this last few days, as our focus moves into Block 2: Communities and our working towards a 'virtual ethnography'. I haven't quite decided what community to look at just yet (I'm leaning towards a study of the community of people around the 9/11 Conspiracy Theories) but getting up to speed on the various ideas surrounding notions of 'virtual ethnography' or 'netnography' as some prefer, has allowed me to indulge in a long-held notion I've had about myself 'being an ethnographer'.

I studied Anthropology for a year at university - finally opting to focus on English and Classics for degree level - but I've always harboured fantasies about myself returning to the subject in some unspecified, undefined capacity in the future. I'm not claiming I'm there yet, but the reading lists for this block and some rummaging on the web have brought back some familar ideas and names: Bronisław Malinowski, Margaret Mead, E. E. Evans-Pritchard et al.

But then, I thought to myself, have I actually been doing this along? Have I actually been conducting virtual ethnography the whole time? Since 2001, I've been contributing to an Irish site, www.blather.net, where 'fortean phenomena' are catalogued, ranted about and studied with a jaundiced, satirical eye. We've been doing so since 1997 and have embedded ourselves into a rather strange interweb culture of conspiracy theorists, UFOlogists, Cryptozooologists and general random lunacy.

I hasten to add by the way that there our stated position is that we don't believe in UFOs and aliens. And we're not so sure that they believe in us either.

Or to put it another way, I'm not as interested in finding UFOs so much as I am in finding stories about UFOs.

An example is this 'Map of the Weird' which we put together a while back, location marking many of the stories which we've blogged about over the years.

This is a video version of the tour.

So, it's with some giddy excitement that I now find myself in the hilarious position of being able to academically justify my years and years of trawling the bowels of the internet for the detritus and wreckage of conspiracy theory, alien abductions and frog falls. Who knew?

All joking aside, there's some serious questions to be answered before I can really go any further:

What (if anything) is my 'field site'?

Am I a 'lurker' ethnographer or one that directly partcipates in the community?

How do I reference, present and quote sources?

What 'netiquette' considerations do we have be aware of?

I may not need a pith helmet so much as a tin-foil hat, but here we go...

Second Life Ethnography

2009-10-23T08:23:00.000-07:00

Policing 2.0 NPIA Conference

2009-10-22T05:44:00.000-07:00

What's that ghoul doing?

2009-10-17T15:18:00.000-07:00

The Map Is Not The Territory

2009-10-16T07:34:00.000-07:00

This post is a project for the University of Edinburgh's 'Digital Cultures' course, a part of the MsC in e-learning

Best viewed by clicking on the 'View in a larger map' option.

View Visual Artefact in a larger map

Of Genres, Boundaries and Plain English

2009-10-12T11:32:00.000-07:00

This is a cross-posted blog from my course 'E-learning and Digital Cultures', part of my masters at the University of Edinburgh

Reference: Carpenter, R (2009) Boundary negotiations: electronic environments as interface. Computers and Composition. 26, 138-148.

Much of cyberculture academia seems to concern itself with the observation of what Carpenter identifies as 'genres' - means or modes of expression with their own cultural sets of rules and behaviours. Wednesday night's Skype tutorial clarified a lot of this for me - most especially the example that 'blogging is a genre of popular culture, whereas broadsheets are a genre of academic culture'. A very useful example I thought, illustrating the possible boundaries between these genres: one which made me think how the lines between the two have become so wonderfully blurred in the last two years or so.

What stuck me this morning though, is that in reading these studies of cyberculture and the genres and activity systems within them, we are being exposed to another genre: that of academic writing on these subjects. If genres are largely defined by the unspoken, undocumented sets of behaviours and 'ways of being' that form them, we could go as far as to make a study of those doing the studying.

And it makes for an interesting set of behaviours in and of itself. Carpenter's article starts warmly enough, with a humourous account from his undergrad days of trying a transliteral presentation and the anxieties it caused both him, his fellow students and his tutors. It made a refreshing change from the somewhat obtuse and impenetrable language of some of the readings within week 1 and 2. But then, on pg. 140, we get this:

'This reconceptualization of genre calls for a reinterpretation of interface that extends beyond user-system interaction to include interactions between the user and multiple, sometimes competing, systems as well as between systems themselves. Such a view allows us to examine systems relations not simply in terms of juxtaposed boundaries but rather as dynamic boundary negotiations mediated by genres that are themselves mediated by the boundary interface.'

Come again?

I'm sorry, but I have never met, heard, seen or been told of a single human being on planet earth that actually talks like this. Stephen Fry doesn't talk like this.

I find it peculiar and fascinating that a discipline of study which examines cyberculture and its endlessly fluid, constantly playful, hilariously subversive 'genres' is so frequently reported on in a form of language which is not just a thousand miles from the culture which it is studying, but seems a world away from the general speech patterns and communication forms of the average human being.

Where does this come from? Why do so many academics in this field insist on using this tortured, alienating form of language to communicate their ideas? It's baffling in the extreme. For a group of academics driven by the motivation to reveal the hidden cultures of cyberspace and the popular culture which is its beating heart, they seem singularly determined to make sure that vast majority of human beings can't understand them.

Boundaries indeed.

I realise, reading back over this text, that this may come across as another ill-tempered gripe about academia, but it does occur to me that a study of this 'genre' itself could be highly revealing; not just for a window into cyberculture studies itself, but into those who engage in it. Why this use of language? Why this highly selective and exclusive choice of vocabulary? Who does it serve? Who are they trying to impress? How does it 'function'?

Or am I just becoming a hideously out-of-touch, grumpy old man who can't keep up with the kids?

I.D. / self :: the new "real"

2009-10-07T11:03:00.001-07:00

Digital Culture

2009-09-27T14:31:00.001-07:00

http://digitalculture-ed.net/damiend/

NCALT Senior User Group Conference

2009-09-24T01:26:00.000-07:00

James Paul Gee on Serious Games (Video)

2009-09-22T02:49:00.000-07:00

Tales from Cyberia: Tape-decks, Pathe News and Damien Hirst's Skull

2009-09-21T04:14:00.000-07:00

This is a cross-posted blog from my course 'E-learning and Digital Cultures', part of my masters at the University of Edinburgh

Who is going to control the internet? Can it be controlled? Do we want it to be controlled?

Hand's analysis [1] of the differing 'narratives' on cyberculture seems to reveal two central themes - two lenses through which to view cyberspace. Lenses which, at first glance anyway, would seem to sit in stark opposition to each other. First, the belief that cyberspace will be a liberating space for society, removing barriers to communication, reducing the cost of creating value to almost zero and moving us away from the rigid, top-down control of governments. The other, a narrative that seems to be in almost bipolar opposition, is that the web is providing government and big corporations opportunities to mount assaults on our privacy and space which would have been previously unthinkable. And I can see both sides.

A piece by Charlie Brooker in last week's Guardian would seem to illustrate this quite well. Drawing together strands from a story about how "artist" Damien Hirst has gone all legal-handbags with another artist (Cartrain, a 19-year old would-be Banksy) who had the temerity to use an image of Hirst's much-discussed diamond skull piece in a montage he did, and how this relates to broader issues of copyright and ownership, Brooker then turns to comment on the increasingly hysterical legislation being mooted by the British government in response to file-sharing technologies. In short, the 'three strikes and you're out' rule is back on the table after, we can assume, a ferocious round of lobbying by the music industry. Brooker then says:

''In its heyday, the Radio 1 Sunday evening Top 40 countdown constituted the biggest file-sharing portal in British history, with millions of users hooked up simultaneously, mercilessly downloading content to their tape decks.'

And it was. I know this because I was one of those kids.

Old school

Did I know that I was breaking the law? No. I was completely unaware of issues of copyright and ownership. I was six for God's sakes. All I knew was that there was a machine in my living room which enabled me to record songs off the radio so that I could listen to them again when I chose to. Not when or where the record company said I should, but where and when I chose.

In terms of simple affordances , the only difference between BBC's Radio 1 Sunday Chart show combined with my Dad's tape-deck and modern peer-to-peer file-sharing softwares, is the fact that the latter is happening in corporation's faces. In public. Recording a track off of Radio 1 in 1985, a music executive had no way of knowing that such illegal activity was hapenning. Or even if he had known, he had no earthly way of doing anything about it.

It would seem that at the same time as new technologies have enabled people to share media and enabled data to be 'set free', the same technologies have enabled corporations to gain a window into a social habit which has gone on for decades. And to try to do something about it. You might be forgiven for thinking that perhaps the solution would be for them to go where the kids are and, you know, start working on online services that deliver quality, value-for-money products in a manner in keeping with the times, but no, you'd be mistaken. Law-suits, apparently, are the way to go.

Time for a little bit of history.

Older school

My father (80 years young this year) recently told me stories of how during the early 1950's he and his friends would gather at each other's houses to play vinyl records and share music. Was this 'filesharing'? Did it constitute illegal activity? Were they breaking the law?

Similarly, my father also told me a tale (just this weekend gone) which caught my attention: during the Second World War, Ireland (my home) was officially 'neutral', meaning it had no strategic allegiance with either Allied or Axis powers. This led to some fairly weird behaviour from the Irish state. One of their more peculiar notions was to place a ban on the broadcast and showing of all war footage - so those wonderful old Pathe New reels which British audiences crowded into cinemas to watch, were not shown in the Republic of Ireland.

But, my father told me conspiratorially, the word on the street was that should you know the right person in Dublin, access could be got to small, select private screenings of war footage which were held on the quiet in backstreet Dublin cinemas. Due to the bootleg nature of the footage, it was not the sanitised, 'good war' morale-boosting footage which London audiences saw. Instead it was raw, hideously violent rushes shot on European battlefields which showed the true carnage of battle.

So, did the censorship rules implemented by the Irish government (to stop 'filesharing' of contraband materials) actually facilitate a small number of Irish citizens actually being better informed about the realities of what combat troops were facing than the folks over in London? Perhaps.

I couldn't help but think that, occasionally, the invasion of corporatism into technologies often results in unforseen consequences - cultural and social changes that can't be predicted. And can't be controlled. That the battle for control of new technologies and the frequently absurd squabble over increasingly complicated copyright issues can lead to cracks in the spaces betewen the desires of end users and the corporations trying to protect their wares. I'm thinking this could be an interesting theme to track.

Note: it's interesting perhaps that the British Pathe News reels site which I linked to above plays a vast archive of fantastic footage, but doesn't allow for embedding. They're not still worried about reproduction rights are they?

References

[1] Hand, M (2008) 'Hardware to everywhere: narratives of promise and threat', chapter 1 of Making digital cultures: access, interactivity and authenticity. Aldershot: Ashgate. pp 15-42.

Back to Uni

2009-09-16T05:04:00.000-07:00

I'll be starting a new semester of my Masters in e-learning next week, so there should be more activity on here than of late. Blogging will be a hefty feature of the course, so I'll be cross-posting here.

Large sections of this course will be done 'in the open' and can be followed and viewed by folks who are curious. You can view more about the course here, at the Wordpress portal, - which by the way, I'm thrilled about. I've been meaning to spend some time learning about Wordpress (most of my blogging is done using Movable Type or Blogger) and am looking forward to it. I'm already quite impressed by how far Wordpress has come since I last looked at it about two years ago.

So. Brace yourselves. Digital culture, here I come.

Michael Wesch's 'The Machine is (Changing) Us: YouTube and the Politics of Authenticity'

2009-07-23T07:07:00.000-07:00

More fried gold from Prof. Michael Wesch:

I don't even drive

2009-07-03T10:44:00.000-07:00

Taken at Thames Valley Police training centre

Mapumental

2009-06-09T04:41:00.000-07:00

Meet Mapumental, a fascinating little gizmo from the kids over at MySociety.org

More at Mapumental.

Google Earth as a Serious Games Engine?

2009-06-09T03:52:00.000-07:00

Well, not quite a game is it? More of a simulation really. But the potential may be there.

Hat-tip to Wonderland

London (harder, better, faster, stronger)

2009-06-08T02:06:00.000-07:00

Enjoyable little picture collage by David Hubert

London (harder, better, faster, stronger) from David Hubert on Vimeo.

Google's Wave

2009-06-04T01:35:00.000-07:00

If you can sit through the self-congratulatory Google back-slapping, this actually looks like a powerful tool.

If you can't quiote stomach the whooping and hollering, there's a good sumary by the boys at Mashable here:

Google Wave has a lot of innovative features, but here are just a few:

- Real-time: In most instances, you can see what someone else is typing, character-by-character.

- Embeddability: Waves can be embedded on any blog or website.

- Applications and Extensions: Just like a Facebook (Facebook reviews) application or an iGoogle gadget, developers can build their own apps within waves. They can be anything from bots to complex real-time games.

- Wiki functionality: Anything written within a Google Wave can be edited by anyone else, because all conversations within the platform are shared. Thus, you can correct information, append information, or add your own commentary within a developing conversation.

- Open source: The Google Wave code will be open source, to foster innovation and adoption amongst developers.

- Playback: You can playback any part of the wave to see what was said.

- Natural language: Google Wave can autocorrect your spelling, even going as far as knowing the difference between similar words, like “been” and “bean.” It can also auto-translate on-the-fly.

- Drag-and-drop file sharing: No attachments; just drag your file and drop it inside Google Wave and everyone will have access.

Freda Viola's Animated Vocal Improvisation

2009-05-29T06:20:00.000-07:00

Improvisation 2 from Fredo Viola on Vimeo.

Transparency: Drinking Water

2009-05-07T08:18:00.001-07:00

Beautiful animated infovid on the state of the world's drinking water:

The Machine is Us/ing Us - Dance Mix

2009-05-07T03:38:00.000-07:00

Am I the only one that immediately thought of the 'dance cycle' scene from the Big Lewbowski?

American Military Immersive Combat Simulation

2009-05-07T03:04:00.000-07:00

Read Doug Rushkoff's blog at Boing Boing

Myst on the iPhone

2009-05-05T01:43:00.001-07:00

Yes! Original 1993 'mystery-novel' Myst arrives for the tap-tap. If you haven't played it, for God's sakes go get this.

Guardian report on Myst for the iPhone

Now, can we have a Grim Fandango for the iPhone please?

What to do with those plastic bags

2009-05-01T03:46:00.001-07:00

Did Social Media Kill The Economy?

2009-04-30T06:56:00.000-07:00

Stop what you're doing. Sit back. Take twenty minutes. Watch this.

Essential viewing on why our econmonic models are now out of date, why the banking system is no longer relevant and why this is a good thing. No, seriously.

Are you listening Gordon Brown?

'How the Web Ate the Economy and Why it’s Great for Everyone' from web 2.0/social media guru, the ever-challenging (and usually right) Doug Rushkoff:

In case you think I'm raving (which, let's face it, is not beyond the realms of possibility), note that we're already seeing how social media and mobile technologies are helping people circumnavigate the stranglehold that financial institutions have over us.

Can The Mobile Phone Kill The Bank?

2009-04-30T01:29:00.001-07:00

Let's hope so, eh? A fascinating piece from the Guardian tech section on how Kenyans are by-passing banks by using an online service called M-Pesa to pay for goods and services using their mobile phones. Yes, I know, the possibiities for fraud must be legendary here, but there is one very simple advantage: using a service like M-Pesa means that money transfers take 14 seconds. Not the three days which the average bank takes, in which time your cash has been invested in something dodgy, accrued interest and made the bank more money. Which is probably the same bank which your taxes recently bailed out and awarded a £750,000 a year pension to the fat, obnoxious, incompotent, Rotarian gas-bag that sold it down the toilet in the first place and who...

Sorry.

Read more here.

Don't Leave Climate Change To Oil Companies

2009-04-29T03:41:00.000-07:00

London Timelapse

2009-04-28T06:26:00.000-07:00

Andy Hudson-Smith's Digital Urban blog is always fascinating and well worth the subscription click. This is an intriguing timelapse video of London. Watch out for the fire that breaks out half way through...

London Timelapse: Aircraft and Smoke from digitalurban on Vimeo.

More at Digital Urban

How texting and GoogleMaps helped Kenyans survive crisis

2009-04-28T04:34:00.000-07:00

Ted 2009 details here

Social Media for Non-Profits

2009-04-28T01:56:00.000-07:00

Want to use social media goodies to help get your non-profit/development group seen and heard? Do yourself a favour and drop by Beth's blog.

About Beth:

Beth Kanter is a trainer, blogger, and consultant to nonprofits and individuals in effective use of social media. Her expertise is how to use new web tools (blogging, tagging, wikis, photo sharing, video blogging, screencasting, social networking sites, and virtual worlds, etc) to support nonprofit. She has worked on projects that include: training, curriculum development, research, and evaluation. She is an experienced coach to "digital immigrants" in the personal mastery of these tools.

Read more at Beth's Blog.

Anyone got any more suggestions for sources of info on using social media for non-profits, development and social change?

Facebook Manners

2009-04-27T02:56:00.000-07:00

Not quite got a handle on the whole 'netiquette' thing? Watch this;

Serious Games and Flu Pandemics

2009-04-27T01:27:00.000-07:00

Going through my feedreader last night, I came across this post from Future Making Serious Games:

As the Netherlands’ most multifaceted university medical center, the Erasmus Medical Center creates special opportunities for patient care, training and research - every day, over 12,000 employees are working hard towards this objective.

The Erasmus Medical Center is an innovative UMC in which high-quality knowledge is being developed, passed on to future professionals and applied in patient care. It covers covers a broad field of interests that stretches from illness to health, and from individual to community healthcare.

Let's hope they're not too late, eh?

More at the www.thegreatflu.com/

A Multimedia Design Masterclass

2009-04-24T05:09:00.000-07:00

Slagsmålsklubben - Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.

Hat tip to Michelle Gallen (whose new blog is superb and well worth looking at).

I haven't been able to confirm it yet but I'm pretty sure this is by H5, the same chaps that did the 'Remind Me' video for Royksopp.

UPDATE: Not the same company, but definitely an open homage to the work of H5. Still bloody brilliant.

The Twouble with Twitterers

2009-04-23T07:51:00.001-07:00

Must admit, this made me snigger.

The YouTube Symphony Orchestra

2009-04-15T02:36:00.000-07:00

Microsoft Surface Game

2009-03-27T00:59:00.000-07:00

Us Now

2008-11-27T11:41:00.000-08:00

Us Now will be shown at the RSA London on December 3rd.

I'll be there.

Find out more at http://www.usnowfilm.com/

A Requiem for Google Lively

2008-11-25T09:44:00.000-08:00

(image by whitedavepaint)

I was mildly distraught to hear of the imminent demise of Google's nascent 'Lively' - a mini-Second Life like room you could paste into a blog page (much like pasting in a Youtube video) which Google have now announced they'll be taking out the back and humanely putting down just in time for Christmas.

If the future of e-learning is going to be largely based in virtual environments, Lively seemed like the perfect solution. Not for immersive simulations, but possibly for socialisation spaces. Given that the Second Life bubble has finaly burst (and mega-corps like Reuters have finally figured out that SL is all fur coat and no knickers) I would have thought that Google may have given this longer. Alas no.

Lively, we knew ye well.

Generation We

2008-11-03T07:51:00.000-08:00

Generation WE: The Movement Begins... from Generation We on Vimeo.

Buy the book

Reverbiage - Best Widget Ever?

2008-10-27T11:19:00.000-07:00

When Social Media Goes Bad

2008-10-24T02:01:00.000-07:00

I've spent much of the last fifteen minutes crying laughing at this. The Republicans, in a spectacularly stupid attempt to 'get down with the kids' have launched a series of 'make your own' yard-sign sites. The result? Well, see for yourself:

Joe the Plumber Yard Signs

More at Fark

Barack Obama: Instructional Designer

2008-10-23T11:23:00.000-07:00

(image by BohPhoto)

This is why I love the guy. When asked by Joe Klein about trusting his instincts he said this:

He said the first really big one was how to react when incendiary videos of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's black-nationalist sermons surfaced last spring. "The decision to make it big as opposed to make it small," Obama said of the landmark speech on race relations he delivered in Philadelphia. "My gut was telling me that this was a teachable moment and that if I tried to do the usual political damage control instead of talking to the American people like ... they were adults and could understand the complexities of race, I would be not only doing damage to the campaign but missing an important opportunity for leadership."

Whoa.

I've never, ever heard a politican talk like that - seeing the negative stuff as a chance to talk about the bigger picture.

And the fact that he uses the language of an instructional designer to describe it pushes all my nerd buttons at once.

Watch the speech

Michael Wesch's 'Information R/evolution'

2008-10-09T04:27:00.000-07:00

Just watch it:

Emergency Procedures Training in Virtual Worlds

2008-10-09T04:15:00.000-07:00

The Serious Games Institute 'Second Wednesday' event was chaired by Dr. Sara DeFreitas (a virtual version of whom you can see above) of the SGI. I was lucky enough to be there to see some amazing demos.

If you're not familiar with the SGI, watch this:

The following is a quick summary of two of the talks.

Ron Edwards from Ambient Performance

Ron gave a demo of a multi-player medical and first responder training programme.

Built on Forterra's OLIVE Virtual world platform, it uses a SDK (Software Development Kit) to allow clients to customise the environment to their particular needs - such as localised uniforms, vehicles and architecture. In contrast to many virtual space engines, the OLIVE platform allows for all avatars to be controlled by real users, and not simple not AI (Artifical Intelligence) which allows for a greater degree of fidelity in interactions and 'gameplay'.

The project had a strong focus on cultivating and encouraging team co-ordination, forcing learners to make decisions in groups - these decisions are based on multiple inputs from the facilitators and environment, forcing users to 'think on their feet'.

Another interesting feature of the OLIVE platfrom, is that it the virtual environment allows for embedding of elearning courseware - which is quite powerful in providing 'just-in-time' learning hits for anyone who wants to quickly refer to official procedures or protocols within the virtual environment.

All 'in-world' activities can be recorded and analysed for discussion in later plenary sessions or evaluation by facilitators.

OLIVE also allows for AI to run mass crowds in emergency situations. Customers can use third-party plug-ins such Aptima and Charles River.

Watch a video of OLIVE in action:

Mary Matthews - Trusim (Blitz Games)

Mary from Trusim gave a fascinating demo of the new Triage Training 'Game' which plunges learners into the midst of an explosion in a London street. Learners are required to quickly triage victims, classifying the walking wounded, seriously wounded and critical patients for treatment against a tim-measured metric: delay and people will die. In addition to providing practice at making critical decisions under time pressures, the simulation also enforces procedures and protocal and gives the learner detailed feedback on their choices, correcting where they have gone wrong and pointing to the exact flaws in their procedural choices.

Rather than providing an 'open-ended' environment, Triage Trainer focuses on specific training needs within virtual worlds and keeps the action within a specified space for a distinct process and set of circumstances.

The environment designed so that non-gamers can use it. Navigation is easy, with a simple 'point and click' action, not dependent on keyboard usage at all. Essentially this is a protocol-led learning experience, testing if learners can respond to the scenarios given within protocol and under time pressure.

Pilot runs of the simulated environment showed students having a high level of engagement - identified as the 'added value' by Trusim. Later, the simulated training was compared to a comparable, 'traditional' table-top training event and both groups of learners were assessed at the end. The students who took the simulated event scored higher.

Trusim will be shortly be releasing a paper on the findings of the project, including detailed exploration of how the simulation was mapped to learning outcomes, ROI figures and comparison to 'traditional' training events. I'm looking forward to reading it.

Watch the TruSim Triage Trainer:

Cambridge and Oxford do iTunesU

2008-10-07T06:18:00.001-07:00

(Photo by Extra Medium)

This should be fun. I'm a huge fan of iTunesU and seriously hope that it grows and grows. That said, it could do with some competition, but that's another day's blogging. From the Guardian Tech:

'For 800 years Oxford and Cambridge universities have competed in everything from Nobel prizes to boat races. The academic rivalry runs deep: Oxford has tutored 25 British prime ministers, while Cambridge claims Darwin and Newton as its own. But today the venerable institutions launch into battle on iTunes, taking their ancient competition into the 21st century.

The universities are simultaneously publishing about 450 hours of free audio and video podcasts of lectures, films and admissions guides for people to download to a computer or MP3 player.'

Full article

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Intellectual Augmentation

2008-09-29T04:13:00.000-07:00

(image by twenty questions)

I've started back at University this week and now find myself doing a semester of my MsC. in e-learning entitled 'How people learn in an online environment'. This is some 'thinking out loud' about a position paper written by my tutor which touches on a number of issues to do with cognition and learning...

I'm fascinated by the issue of "Intellectual Augmentation". As some of you will have heard me mention, I work for the Police Forces of the UK. It's arguable that 21st century policing will be about information management - which is more than just learning about the job. It's about learning how to manage information about the job.

Recently I was half-way through reading a blog on something related to work and stopped to just tag it in Delicious. I don't know why, but for once I asked myself what the actual likelihood of me going back to read this was? Minimal, I decided. And if that were so, then why am I doing this? Why not keep reading? Why stop?

Is delicious making me dumber? Is it making me lazier? Or do I actually have to hold every exact reference, citation and date in my head?

Why can't delicious just hold that information for me, freeing up valuable 'RAM' in my head to concentrate on the bigger picture? Whatever that is.

It's an interesting set of questions and one which relates back to the Task-Artefact question - observing how social bookmarking facilities change our relationship with the information that we manage and acquire, perhaps driving us towards a relationship with learning which is now mediated by machine (the semantic tagging behind delicious and diigo etc.) and which assumes that we have a different, more surface-like relationship with a field of learning and it's constituent parts which we no longer hold in our own memories but only have a loose connection with via an external database of content and semantically linked objects.

Doesn't this raise some very fundamental questions about how we define learning? Does this change how we need to examine and assess people? Does it change what we mean by mastery of a subject? Is mastery no longer the ability to recite wholesale facts and figures but rather the abiliity to categorise that subject's constituent parts - and to assimilate new objects into that field?

Is 'learning' becoming a question of ability to manage information and categorise it for later access from an external aid? And if so, where do we draw the line in what we hold inside and outside of ourselves?

Morocco

2008-09-25T04:17:00.001-07:00

More Cyber-Nookie

2008-09-03T13:14:00.000-07:00

(photo by Dr. Joanne)

Following on from the intriguing BBC documentary we featured in June comes a Guardian piece on how virtual world software is evolving to allow for increased realism in online whoopie. From Paul McNamara:

'People have been getting it together online for years now, whether it's via dating and contact websites or virtually via their avatars in online worlds such as World of Warcraft and Second Life. But it took a Florida plumber to develop a system that further blurs the line between the virtual and real worlds.'

Ooooo. Sticky.

Read the full article here.

And if that isn't enough to get you all flustered, the Guardian's Alexs Krotoski has penned an interesting piece on Cyber-sex in Second Life:

'It turns out that people who use Second Life are a randy bunch. Most online sex estimates place active online sexual activity around the 2% mark (versus passive, like looking at pictures and videos), whereas the vast majority of the people I surveyed between April and December 2006 have had at least one sexual encounter in the virtual world. Brits are a particularly active bunch which, depending on your views on online pleasure, is either a great thing for international relations or a sad state of affairs in the bedrooms of Blighty.'

Read more about Alexs' research here.

Elgg give it another go

2008-09-02T02:36:00.001-07:00

(photo by twenty questions)

And here's hoping they can get it right this time. I love ning.com but some competition would do no harm.

'Elgg is an open, flexible social networking engine, designed to run at the heart of any socially-aware application. Building on Elgg is easy, and because the engine handles common web application and social functionality for you, you can concentrate on developing your idea.'

Oh and it's free.

Anyone used the new Elgg social network-builder yet? If so, let us know.

Try Elgg here.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Ubiquity - me likey

2008-09-01T07:19:00.001-07:00

(photo by twenty questions)

Mozilla Ubiquity - it's damned clever kids. First, install the thingy from the nice folks at Mozilla. Now, open a random page of the internet (let's say with, oh I don't know, a picture of a giant turd), press Ctrl + Spacebar, type in 'email to the ex' and, whaddyaknow, it just does it. Assuming you have your former lovethang saved in your GMail account as 'the ex'.

More you say? Okay then.

Want a map of that? No worries. Make with the Ctrl + Spacebar thing and then type in 'map of cheating tart's house'. And voila, you have a map. Okay, well not really. But you get the idea. Anyway - watch the video...

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

The Dangers of Google Docs?

2008-08-28T02:36:00.001-07:00

(image by Dunechaser)

Garrrr! I'm a big fan of the 'owl Goggle Docs thing (the book I recently authored with two friends could not have been done without it) but it now appears that there are some serious flaws in the design of Google docs which could accidentally allow randoms with similar names to yourself to get access to the mucky contents of your docs and spreadsheets. Ouch.

From the Bits blog at the NYT:

'There was a time when it would have taken a fair amount of criminal activity to get access to this much information about a company’s internal workings and Web site performance. Now an employee can accidentally drop it into the lap of a random outsider without even knowing that anything is amiss. That’s the power of cloud computing at work.

Most of the discussion about the security of online applications revolves around whether or not you can trust Google and its competitors to protect your data. ... Google could help with this by, for example, flashing a warning before you share a document with a person you have not exchanged e-mail with in Gmail. But in the end, security requires careful typing — and perhaps some careful decisions about whether some documents would be better left behind the corporate firewall.'

Amen to that brother. Google need to sort this out, before what's currently a superb service becomes another spam and identity theft boondoggle.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

'This means nothing to me'

2008-08-21T02:16:00.000-07:00

Vienna, Austria

A Collosal Redneck

2008-08-15T14:38:00.000-07:00

And now, sunburnt from Rome...

The Death of the Remote Control

2008-08-11T07:41:00.001-07:00

(image by sanofi2498)

The ever-entertaining Jay Cross threw up an amusing blog the other day, riffing on some observations by David Brooks in the NYT that reciting obscure factoids from our cultural past no longer gives you any street-cred. The new 'cool' [*makes embarrasing white-boy pseudo-gang gesture*] is to be connected to 'the now', via your iPhone or other mobile web device.

Jay sez:

'Last night at a party, instead of one-upping each other with modernist cultural artifacts, people talked of Tweets and Twirl and other blips on the radar of the greater social network. Esoterica still rules, but the successful social climber has to stay ahead of the curve: very early to the game but also among the first to announce that the new stuff has become old hat.'

And too right he is - I've noticed lately that when friends come around to my place we no longer argue over obscure facts and arcane movie trivia. Because there's no point - any of us can just search for the relevant piece of data online in seconds, leaving a previously insufferable smug git (usually me) with a sheepish expression on his face as he's proven wrong.

Another shift has been the death of the remote control - as we now no longer argue over the TV or even the iPod, but instead fight over Youtube with ever more hysterical cries of 'No, I'm just playing one more and then you can have it' as we body-block our mates from getting at the keyboard.

Brave new world etc.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Is this Web 3.0?

2008-08-07T06:44:00.000-07:00

Has someone, finally, given us a glimpse of what the much-fabled Web 3.0 will look like?

Aurora (Part 1) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

Has Google Knol already failed?

2008-08-07T05:30:00.001-07:00

I said in a previous post that I had my reservations about Google's answer to Wikipedia, Knol. Specifically I have a serious problem with the model of placing the 'expert' at the top of the knowledge creation chain. This is in stark contrast to the Wikipedia model where (with some exceptions) anyone can create content. That content may be changed by the greater community, but that's the whole point.

Knol on the other hand places content creation in the hands of one individual - who can then choose to invite collaborators to help author or edit that 'Knol'. Ostensibly, this has a certain attraction, making content accountable as it's controlled and owned by one person. There's only one problem; this has been tried before and it failed spectacularly. That failure was known as Nupedia.

'Unlike Wikipedia, Nupedia was not a wiki; it was instead characterized by an extensive peer-review process, designed to make its articles of a quality comparable to that of professional encyclopedias. Nupedia wanted scholars to volunteer content for free. Before it ceased operating, Nupedia produced 24 articles that completed its review process (three articles also existed in two versions of different lengths), and 74 more articles were in progress.In June 2008, CNET hailed Nupedia as one of the greatest defunct websites in history.'

What amazes me most about Knol is that Google seem to have entirely failed to learn the lessons that Wikipedia taught us - the bigger the pool of authors, the greater the potential for content creation.

And I'm not alone in thinking that the entire concept of Knol is flawed. Dana Boyd comments:

'Frankly, from my POV, Knol looks like an abysmal failure. There's no life to the content. Already articles are being forgotten and left to rot, along with a lot of other web content. There's no common format or standards and there's a lot more crap than gems. The incentives are all wrong and what content is emerging is limited. The expert-centric elitism is intimidating to knowledgeable folks without letters after their names and there is little reason for those of us with letters to contribute. While I don't believe in the wisdom of a crowd of idiots, I do believe that collective creations tend to result in much better content than that which is created by an individual hermit.'

Worse still is this Guardian report which suggest that Knol is a perfect breeding ground for spammers:

'Google's new Knol system has come under fire for making itself open to spammers seeking to push their products up the search engine's rankings - in effect with the blessing of the company, which has previously sought to exclude them from its listings.

Knol, which was announced in December but only opened for wider use last month, is already being targeted by people who have realised that its characteristics are a godsend to spammers.'

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Michael Wesch's 'Anthropological Introduction to Youtube'

2008-08-07T04:05:00.001-07:00

Uber-guru Michael Wesch (he of the The Machine is Us/Ing Us fame) is back with another Youtube goodie - this time weighing in at a whopping 55 minutes. Hilarious, brilliant and occasionally deeply touching - this is essential viewing for anyone interested in social media.

I think Michael Wesch is becoming my new hero.

(Via Stephen Downes)

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What's wrong with Cuil?

2008-08-07T03:39:00.001-07:00

Clay Shirky threw up a tweet yesterday asking why there was so much Cuil-bashing going on. It's an interesting question. Surely a new search engine should be welcomed by those of us obsessed with social media and its close cousin search, yet cuil has been met with some fairly stiff criticism. Why?

It's hard to say exactly , but for me cuil has two fundamental problems: a seemingly overstated ability to do what it does and a marketing drive that put people's noses out of joint. Of course, cuil may not be entirely at fault here - at least in the media pronouncements about the new engine being a 'google killer'. This is most likely because Cuil have a few former Google employees on the books and sub-editors just love mentioning this.

More pointedly cuil just doesn't cut the mustard. A good number of people have reported running a search for their own name (we all did it) and being presented with a list of results showing a picture of someone from the opposite gender. Had cuil made it clear that the service is in beta (a marking which is pointedly missing from their pages) people may have been more forgiving.

This isn't to say that cuil can't evolve into something useful over time (I hope that it does) but right now, it doesn't seem quite right.

Finally, a small personal observation: the word 'cuil' itself is (according to the site's blurb) an ancient Irish term for 'knowledge'. Now, I'm Irish. I don't pretend to speak for all Paddies, but there is a certain cultural resistance amongst many of us to Irish words being appropriated for their phonetic similarity to English words in an attempt to be down with the kids. It smacks of just the sort of neo-Celtic smugness which really winds Irish people up. Frankly, it makes me think that whoever chose that name is a smug marketing prick. Sorry - knee-jerk I know, but there it is.

Anyway, here's hoping they get it right over time. And show some humility.

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To BT

2008-07-26T03:29:00.000-07:00

You see this? Yeah, you can kiss it.

I've quite literally never come across a more incompetent company than BT.

Knol goes live

2008-07-25T03:26:00.001-07:00

(image 'Sound Advice' by twenty questions)

So. It's finally here - Google's answer to Wikipedia, Knol.

It remains to be seen if the alternative model of knowledge creation - that of one centralised author vs. Wikipedia's collective wisdom model - will work.

Am I the only one that slightly hopes it won't? I dunno, maybe I'm being grumpy, but I can't help but feel that at attempt at placing academics back at the top of the information food-chain is a step in the wrong direction.

We'll see.

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A Google Earth Game?

2008-07-24T03:44:00.001-07:00

In 2007 I was asked, as part of an assignment for my MsC. in e-Learning to create a 'game' using Google Earth. This is what I wrote afterwards...

How would a Google Earth game work?. The strength of a Google Earth (GE) game lays in GE's superb ability to give dramatic, location-based hyperlinking. Exportable .kmz files (also know as 'Placemarkers') can be saved, extracted and embedded into blog posts, e-mailed to gamers and used as a device to send learners to specific locations. The problem, however, rests with what they do when they get there.

Assuming that you have successfully landed at a GE location, the question remains as to what to do. Are you there to identify a place? That isn't that challenging - GE layers for roads, historical monuments and other locations of note will allow a gamer to gather his location pretty quickly. Not to mention the fact that you fly there.

Beyond using each location as a means to help identify this person, GE seems almost redundant. Which is a shame. Such a powerful linking function could have done much more. For example, why not send gamers to obscure locations across the earth, embed clues nearby (using tags) which lead the gamer to search other forms of media for clues - not just the blog and GE?

For example, Flickr.com, (despite the best efforts of Yahoo to screw it up) remains one of the quintessential social media services. In addition to the great networking and RSS capabilities, Flickr also presents users with a fiendishly clever (and simple) means of interaction: notes.

Notes are, as the name suggests, small packets of information placed on top of an image with text files. Click on the image above for an example (from my account) of some notes that I left on some photos of the Geffrye Museum, London. As you can see from the notes I left on the image, in addition to text you can also leave hyperlinks to other locations: images, blogs, wikis, Google Earth placemarkers, Youtube videos.

You can export a Flickr image to a blog as I've done here, but, dissapointingly, you can't export the notes with it. Which is a damned shame.

What makes them powerful for a gaming application, is that the notes can be placed over specific places in photos - this means that a visual clue (something in the image) can be associated with a piece of text for a far more meaningful prompt to participate in a game than a simple question asked on a blog page.

Using Blogs as a 'launch pad' is good, but constantly directing the gamer back to the blog could be slightly repetitive. Rather than that, why not send them to a Flickr page? Which has a note? That note can require you to search a wikipedia entry for an answer with the connected area of the original Flickr image as a clue? That Wikipedia entry could lead to a Youtube video, which leads to a Twitter page, which leads to another blog, which leads to another Flickr page, which leads to...

Well, you get the idea. Rather than focusing on just two media streams (Blogs and GE) a proper linking game ('cos that's what it should be!) should drag you around the web, connectingseemingly disparate ideas, images and locations - allowing users to explore a range of media and enabling different learning styles and information acquisition styles to flourish. Furthermore, the simple sense of adventure (of being slightly lost) would be far more tangible. Running 'home' to a blog at each turn feels somewhat tedious and un-inventive for me.

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Ian Bogost's 'Persuasive Games'

2008-07-22T10:59:00.001-07:00

Found via a Guardian Tech blog I came across this book which I'm gonna be sure to get my paws on.

'In Persuasive Games, I advance a theory of how videogames make arguments and influence players. Games represent how real and imagined systems work, and they invite players to interact with those systems and form judgments about them. Drawing on the history of rhetoric, the study of persuasive expression, I analyze rhetoric's unique function in software in general and videogames in particular. The field of media studies already studies visual rhetoric, the art of using imagery and visual representation persuasively. Here I argue that videogames, thanks to their basic representational mode of procedurality (rule-based representations and interactions), open a new domain for persuasion; they realize a new form of rhetoric.'

More about the book here.

Read the Water Cooler Games blog

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Google release 'Lively' chat rooms

2008-07-09T02:17:00.000-07:00

Google seem mighty proud of their latest creation, 'Lively' a 3-D chat room facility which can be plugged into any other webpage. That means that I could (if one were inclined) add a 'Lively chat room on this network. It all seems a bit 'Second Life', but this is one to keep an eye on - if only to see where Google's social media strategy is going. From the Ars Technica review:

'Unveiled on Google's blog with the disclaimer that it was a "20 percent" project, Lively is designed to be a portable 3D space where users can build rooms and interact with visitors via avatars. "Second Life in a web browser" is an applicable analogy, though Google appears to have made sure that rooms and user activities remain in the G to PG range. Each room can be linked with a unique URL—I Hate Ewoks and Lively: Google Room are two good examples—or even embedded in a website through an iframe.

"If you enter a Lively room embedded on your favorite blog or website," Google's Niniane Wang said in the announcement post, "you can immediately get a sense of the room creator's interests, just by looking at the furniture and environment they chose." Apparently, a WordPress theme, Flickr photosteam widget, and a Twitter Flash badge aren't enough to show off one's personality anymore; we need to know people's architectural preferences as well. '

More here

Good Day, Bad Day

2008-07-07T14:35:00.001-07:00

(image by twenty questions)

The Bad: 'Public' online spaces don't carry speech, rights - Yahoo! News

The Good: Zeitgeist: Belfast Blogger wins right to free speech

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Virtual Adultery and Cyberspace Love: BBC's Wonderland Documentary on Second Life

2008-06-30T03:04:00.000-07:00

Hmm. Edgy and important documentary making or scare-mongering nonsense? I'm not sure. I can't help but suspect that the makers of this show didn't do that much research into virtual spaces and their impact on relationships. To give just one example, the documentary states that SL has 4 million users - it doesn't. It has 4 million registered members - that's not the same as users. Anyway...

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Map of the Weird

2008-06-24T06:27:00.000-07:00

A few months back I was lucky enough to get to spend some time with Andrew Hudson-Smith from CASA who gave a fascinating talk on the application of web 2.0 tools to mapping and cartography. His blog 'Digital Urban' is well worth checking out.

Anyway, a few hours in Andrew's company was inspiring and set me off playing with Google Maps. Which led to the creation of a'Map of the Weird' for blather.net, the Irish site I write for in my spare time. Then I figured out how to export that into Google Earth. And then how to play it as a tour. And then, I thought to myself, why don't I just... well, you can watch the rest. Press play

Like I explained above, this is a first attempt at seeing what you can do using just Google Earth, an iPod and a screen capture software kit. Now to find an educational application...

Games, Learning Objectives and 'Telescoping'

2008-06-18T02:14:00.001-07:00

If you should find yourself doing a course on game design, it's likely that you'll be asked to read James Paul Gee's book What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (2003). It's a brilliant book, but, perhaps not that easy a way into the subject.

But, for a good introduction to some of the themes involved in applying computer games to learning you could do no worse than to take a look at the Steven Johnson book 'Everything Bad Is Good For You' . It's possible that Johnson does an even better job of explaining Gee's theories than perhaps Gee does himself. However, in addition to nicely summarising Gee, he also draws your attention to an aspect of modern video games which has immediately obvious educational applications - what Johnson calls 'Telescoping'.

This is when a gamer is forced to hold multiple objectives in his or her head in order to achieve a final objective. I immediately thought of 'Terminal' and 'Enabling' learning objectives, which are a staple of the Instructional Design Framework which NCALT e-learning staff work to. What's crucial here is the manner in which these objectives are 'nested' inside one and other, encouraging gamers and learners to cultivate the mental skills required to keep short-term goals in sight whilst never losing sight of 'the bigger picture'.

From 'Everything Bad Is Good For You':

"I call the mental labour of managing all these simoultaneous objectives 'telescoping' because of the way that the objectives nest inside each other like a collapsed telescope. I like the term aswell because part of this skill lies in focusing on immediate problems whilsy maintaining a long-distance view. You can't progress far in a game if you simply deal with the puzzles you stumble across: you have to co-ordinate them with the ultimte objectives on the horizon. Talented gamers have mastered the ability to kep all these varied objectives alive in their head."

Grim Fandango

As part of the game design course I recently took, I asked to do a study of the classic Lucas Arts game 'Grim Fandango' (pictured above) recently which gave me some classic examples.

Designed in 1998 by Lucasarts and widely held as the best 'adventure game' of all time, Fandango was a critical success but commercial flop. It still carries a large, cult following and has be held up as an exemplar of the genre of games.

Set in a universe inspired by Mexican day of the Dead mythology, the game is a tricky adventure game with a plot every bit as intricate as a Philip Marlowe novel. The clever story is complimented by an Art Deco look and feel, bonkers Bandito/Bee-Bop/Jazz score and excellent voice talent. Oh and it's very funny.

The game was the brainchild of Tim Schafer, previously responsible for the celebrated Monkey Island and Full Throttle. From Wikipedia:

'The story unfolds in four episodes, each set a year apart on the Day of the Dead. It is from this festival that much of the game's imagery is drawn — most of the game's characters look like skeletal calaca figures (based on the work of Mexican printmaker José Guadalupe Posada). Various flowers are also used as tools of murder, in the form of a substance known as "Sproutella", which reacts with bone, destroying it by causing flowers to grow in it extremely rapidly. Characters refer to this manner of death as "sprouting". There is also unique fauna scattered throughout the game, such as bone-eating fire beavers and gigantic race cats.

The game combines this mythical underworld with 1930s Art Deco design motifs and a dark plot reminiscent of the film noir genre.[1] The design and early plot are reminiscent of films such as Chinatown and Glengarry Glen Ross.[2] Manny, whose job combines the roles of Grim Reaper and travel agent, turns detective when he discovers that deserving souls are being denied their rightful post-mortem reward of direct travel to Mictlan on the Number Nine train, bypassing the four-year trip that other souls must take. Manny's investigations draw him into a tangled web of corruption, deceit, and murder.'

Telescoping

The first sequence of 'Grim' involves Manny (the hero) attempts to get to the scene of a mass poisoning in the 'Land of the Living', so that he can reap a premium soul.

In order to get to the Land of the Living, you have to complete the following objectives:

To get to the Land of the Living, you need a car and a driver ('Terminal' objective)
To get a car and driver you have to go to the garage.
To get to the garage you have to find the lift down.
To get a driver you have to convince Glotiss to drive for you.
To convince Glotis to drive you have to have a signed form.
To get a signed form you have to go up to the boss's office.
To get into the Boss's office you have to climb the drainpipe and switch his PC's auto-prompt to tell his secretary to 'sign it' herself.
To get her to sign it you have to...

And so on. This dizzyingly complex set of objectives represents only half of the first level of the game - which overall comprises about 20 'Terminal' objectives.

The next step is to find an example from police work of obvious telescoping and see how the nested objectives could be broken down into a logical learning and activity path.

What next?

So, how could we use 'telescoping' in e-learning? Are there any obvious applications that spring to mind?

Can Obama win the election online?

2008-06-06T13:17:00.000-07:00

Excellent piece by Doug Rushkof on 'Brand Obama' and the shortcomings of his web strategy - chiefly in it's failure to truly take advantage of what social web tools can really do. Or might do, if they were given a chance:

'Where Dean's people inserted their stock candidate into an online fund-raising campaign, Obama's message and media are more organically related to one another. His message is about invigorating bottom-up, grass-roots, community organizing - and the Internet is that, if anything.

Still, a closer look at Obama's online effort reveals many opportunities for work, and few opportunities for what I consider to be intelligent participation. We can sign up to make phone calls, send emails, volunteer in the streets, or become precinct captains. But where's the participatory democracy wiki? Where do we get involved in the conversations that help shape his policy positions? How is he incorporating the massive intelligence of his support network into his philosophy of governance? BarackObama.com is a great example of crowd-sourcing, but it's a far cry from even a fledgling effort at open source democracy. '

+O'Blatherama+

So what else could a politician's social network doohickey offer? How about:

Moderated Wiki for Public Policy

A moderated wiki space for community consultation on public and foeign policy. From the arts to zen motorcycle maintainance. Pay professional moderators and establish parameters for discussion (translation: rules for banning the loonies) and then let 'em at it.

Video-discussion forums

Go look at Seesmic, adopt the paradigm (or better still work with them) and allow threaded video forum back-and-forths between the candidate, party members, campaign staff and the electorate. No, seriously. Hell Spielberg just did it.

Anyone else got some more?

Lies About Learning?

2008-06-04T06:42:00.000-07:00

The world of e-learning/blended learning is a (relatively) new one. Often this means that a lot of folks peddle certain 'truths' about learning which are anything but. One common example is how the idea of different 'learning styles' (visual, audiotory, kinaesthetic) has been completely misunderstood by some educators and has, in some cases, led to wildly inappropriate design of learning programmes. Baroness Greenfield is on the record as saying that she considers the entire 'VAK' thing nothing more than a fad with no scientific basis. Whilst her remarks might seem harsh, anyone who saw the recent hair-raising Newsnight report on how the U.S. invented 'Brain Gym' system is colonising British schools will not be that surprised. See this blog by Donald Clark to see what I mean.

Anyway, another commonly cited myth (particularly amongst 'learning consultants') is the oft-cited 'Cone of Learning' model. The following diagram shows an example:

(taken from here)

Essentially, the 'cone of learning' myth runs as follows:

"We remember…
10% of what we read
20% of what we hear
30% of what we see
50% of what we see and hear
70% of what we say
90% of what we say and do"

I've seen this break-down trotted out a number of times by 'consultants' and e-learning salesmen. Thing is, it appears to be complete bunkum. A fascinating whitepaper by Cisco entitled 'Multimodal Learning Through Media: What the Research Says' pans this 'cone of learning' theory as pseudo-scientific nonsense. I heartily recommend the white paper for an entertaining and educational read; but on a more serious note, it also draws our attention to how certain myths take hold in our trade and then get repeated over and over, without any academic research or data to back it up.

So, can anyone else think of any other examples of 'truths' about learning which get trotted out again and again?

Citylapse: 'Just Breathe'

2008-06-02T07:42:00.000-07:00

Found at Digital Urban (one of the best digital cartography blogs going):

In case you're curious, the music is Telepopmusik, 'Just Breathe'.

[Virtual Worlds] IBM, Virtual Battles and Roy Keane's Mountain Bike Madness

2008-06-02T04:40:00.000-07:00

Note: This a blog entry from my MsC in e-learning 'Introduction to Game Design' module.

Reading over the IBM Global Innovation Outlook 2.0 Report, 'Virtual World, Virtual Leaders' I was struck - not by the gee-whizz factoids and structural study of what good leadership entails (the Sloan model of Leadership, apparently) but rather how virtual worlds (and their games) provide opportunities for gamers not normally associated with roles of leadership to have a crack at leading in a safe guided environment:

'Using massively multiplayer online games as a template, it can be argued that leadership is as much a by-product of environment as it is intrinsic. Leadership happens quickly and easily in online games, often undertaken by otherwise reserved players, who surprise even themselves with their capabilities'.

Now, normally speaking, I would launch into my usual banter about obvious applications in the world of Policing and enabling officers to make critical command decisions in a safe, guided environment, but instead I instantly found myself thinking about one Roy Maurice Keane.

Keane's meteoric rise as a football manager (taking Sunderland from the bottom of the Championship to the Premiership in just 8 months) has seen him become the darling of the British red-tops. With Jose Mourinho now off pouting on a beach somewhere, the press have turned to Keane as their rent-a-quote supplier. His down-to-earth manner, self-deprecating wit and willingness to fashion an articulate statement when all around him are awash in a sea of egomania and mobile phone advert contracts, ensures that Keane's every word gets parroted by the media. He has, as one friend of mine observed, a certain undeniable mystique.

But what has all this got to do with virtual worlds? Well, without knowing it, Roy Keane has become an unwitting spokesman for the efficacy of 'Virtual Worlds' and their opportunities for providing just the kind of leadership opportunities which the IBM report cited above describes.

Last season, several newspapers ran the story that Keane had taken to sending his players up the side of mountains, white-water rafting and cross-country biking in what most reported as a simple example of Roy the 'hard man' sorting the men from the boys in increasingly macho team events. What most journos failed to notice was that Keane, through the creation of 'games' ("split into four groups of ten and race up the top of that mountain and back down again") was providing the circumstances for otherwise quiet players to exercise their nascent leadership skills in a (relatively) safe, guided environment.

From a Guardian article of April 19th 2007:

'I gave the lads a challenge yesterday and it was a very difficult challenge - four hours on a mountain bike is not easy," the Irishman said. "We were in four teams of 10 and every team wanted to win."

Rather more importantly, Keane was able to assess how individuals adjusted to being removed from cosily familiar habitats. "I find out who the leaders are, who likes to be in control, who the real winners are," he said. "We've done a lot of this stuff over the last seven months and you find out a lot about your players through different challenges. The lads are comfortable with a football at their feet but throw them on a mountain bike or into a white-water raft and you see another side of them, some good, some maybe not so good. We like to keep them guessing and give them surprises. Yesterday, for instance, they only knew we were going to Swaledale two minutes before we left.

"You'd be surprised who comes to the fore, there were one or two I thought wouldn't enjoy it but did. And it means they look forward to getting
back training here and getting a feel for the ball again."'

So, if a Premiership manager can do it...

[Games] U.S. Spies Use Custom Videogames to Learn How to Think

2008-05-31T03:24:00.000-07:00

Interesting piece from Wired magazine on how the U.S. government is using serious gaming in training it's intelligence staff in critical decision making:

'In the wake of the intelligence bungles that propelled the United States into the Iraq war, it's no secret that the nation's spies have been working to improve the quality of their analysis. Now the top U.S. military intelligence agency has come up with a new tool for teaching recruits critical thinking skills: videogames.

The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency has just taken delivery of three PC-based games, developed by simulation studio Visual Purple under a $2.6 million contract between the DIA and defense contractor Concurrent Technologies. The goal is to quickly train the next generation of spies to analyze complex issues like Islamic fundamentalism. '

More here

Battlefield 2: A Policing Game?

2008-05-31T03:19:00.000-07:00

Note: this entry was originally submitted to the MsC in E-learning 'Game Design' Module in November 2007 to Hamish MacCleod (tutor) as a mid-term paper.

This review will examine the game 'Battlefield 2' with a view towards an educational adaptation for Police training - an adaptation which seeks to create what J. P. Gee calls 'distributed authentic professionalism'.

BF2's strengths lie in its collaborative real-time gaming. Players enter one of twelve maps, choose a 32-member team to play on (usually USA or Middle Eastern Coalition- MEC), join a six-member squad and pick one of six standard 'classes'. These classes are: Special Forces, Assault, Sniper, Engineer, Medic and Anti-tank. Players can also create custom squads, invite other players to that squad, and act as a conduit for communications between squad members and the commander.

Depending on the rank you have achieved, with promotions and weapon-unlocks given based on your performance, you can apply to be commander of the whole team. It's these last two functionalities of command and communication, in addition to the novel usage of vehicles for collaborative transport and combat, that lend themselves most readily to an educational adaptation of BF2.

A brief look at the functional options for squad members, squad leaders and commanders respectively, allows us to discuss potential adaptation to a Policing scenario.Taking a quick look at some standard BF2 gameplay might help visualise some of these ideas. You can do so by watching this video. (Please note that the banging techno was not my choice).

Player classes have a range of weapons and kit - easily accessed either by using the keyboard's 1-5 buttons or the scroll-wheel on the mouse. The basic 'Assault class' soldier, for example, has a knife (1), side-arm (2), machine-gun (3), and grenade launcher (4). The medic or engineer has further options with a medical kit (5) and shock paddles (6) or, in the case of the engineer, a wrench to fix damaged vehicles and artillery guns or radar stations. These could be replaced with the four or five pieces of standard kit which a Police Officer carries - notebook, handcuffs, torch, Airwaves radio set etc. Each one could be activated in the same way as a weapon or piece of kit in BF2.

Such selection could enable simulations of arrest scenarios, interview and statement taking procedures, surveillance operations and radio communications -using VoIP which the BF2 engine exploits wonderfully. Since Police Officers are required to report their movements and to be accountable for their actions (constantly carrying out dynamic risk assessments), VoIP communication provides a rich means to practice communication protocols.

Additionally, as noted by Manninen and Kujappaa, the Battlefield game allows for additional 'perceivable and holistic manifestations of interaction that enable players to fully collaborate and cooperate in networked game settings'.

So, what would a policing-based adaptation of the BF2 engine look and feel like? The game would begin with a clear statement about the value systems of the game, encouraging gamers to behave, think and communicate like a Police Officer. It would offer a fish-tank and sand-box; emphasise the impact of decisions; allow for customisation of kit; elaborate on your role; provide well-ordered problems; be pleasantly frustrating; give cycles of expertise which challenge gamers' evolving skills, within the regime of the gamers' competence; give just-in-time information; and ties sets of skills together into larger contexts of activity. All done within legislative and procedural guidance.

The 'downtown Baghdad' location (perhaps based on the 'Strike at Karkand' map) is replaced with a 'downtown Newcastle' setting and the simulation replicates a busy Saturday night. The map could have three or four pubs, nightspots, take-away food locations (known flash-points for public disorder) and transport systems, such as bus depots and taxi-ranks, which need to be vigilantly policed.

A commander can receive real-time intelligence from his IBO centre (Integrated Borough Operations) on incidents that are breaking out. A challenging, but realistic, game might involve a commander receiving intelligence on two or three incidents of public disorder, a traffic collision, a domestic violence incident, a stolen vehicle, perhaps involved in joy-riding, or a missing persons report.

The commander then dispatches vehicles containing squads of six to each location, with specific orders. At the scene, the squad leaders are required to communicate with the commander - reporting on the scene, requesting resources and back-up - with individual officers expected to interact with avatars at the scene. The avatars themselves (which could be programmed bots, or better still real players acting as inebriates, violent spouses or whatever) allow for real-time, on the scene policing simulations with officers making dynamic decisions - reported via VoIP.

In BF2, squad members access a series of communication short-cuts by pressing the Q key and using the mouse to choose from a menu. Standard requests include 'Need ammo', 'Need medic' and 'Need backup'. In addition, a central menu interface gives an 'Enemy spotted' option which, with a right-click, allows you to specify the threat e.g. 'Enemy tank spotted'. These could be adapted to code-specific Police communications and the 'enemy spotted' option changed to communicate specific incidents such as 'traffic collision', 'domestic violence incident' etc.

Squad leaders gain access to a higher level of functionality in the game's standard map (accessed by pressing the M key) where they are able to request a range of services from the commander. Specifically they can request artillery strikes, vehicle drops, supply drops, reinforcements and unmanned aerial vehicles to act as radar for spotting mobile enemy. The adaptations for a policing scenario are obvious enough: the UAV request easily translates to a request for helicopter assistance, the back-up request to a ambulance or medical services support, and the requests for artillery and supplies to intelligence requests such as a standard Police National Computer (PNC) check.

Commanders receive access to a third level of functionality (from the Caps Lock key) which enables them to meet the requests of squad leaders e.g. 'artillery strike on this location'. Crucially, commanders have the ability to issue specific orders at specific locations on the map. There is the standard 'attack/defend this position' order, but you can also order demolition or repairs at a location. This ability allows a commander to tackle multiple tasks at the same time. This readily maps to the range of choices which a BCU (Basic Command Unit) Commander faces when dealing with a busy Saturday night in a town or village.

BF2 has an array of vehicle options including quad bikes, hummers, tanks, APVs, fighter jets, helicopters and boats. Their value lies in the gamers' ability to enter vehicles with team mates. Each vehicle allows up to eight players to driven to a location. Given that the commander can issue location and situation specific orders, e.g. 'place demolitions at this co-ordinate', a Policing simulation could enable commanders to order mobile response units to proceed to a location and deal with an incident there. In-vehicle time could be used to send field-briefings to officers as well as for officers to speak to and learn from each other.

Given the continued threat of terrorism, and the need for robust police training in dealing with that threat, a similar design solution could simulate management of assets and resources during a terrorist incident, enabling differing ranks of players to learn counter-terrorist, critical incident and emergency procedures collaboratively.

References

Manninen T. and Kujanpää T. The Hunt for Collaborative War Gaming - CASE: Battlefield 1942 [accessed November 11, 2007]

Gee, J. P. What would a state of the art instructional video game look like?. Innovate 1 (6). [accessed November 11, 2007]

Gee, J. P. (2004). Learning by design: Games as learning machines. Interactive Educational Multimedia, 8, 15 - 23. [pdf - accessed November 11, 2007]

Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants

2008-05-30T08:02:00.000-07:00

This is an updated version of a blog post which I originally submitted as part of my MsC. in E-learning at the University of Edinburgh, in Spring 2007.

Unavoidable

Anyone who attends e-learning conferences (or keeps up with the chatter on the blogs) will have found it difficult to avoid references to 'digital natives'. There are other terms which are popular (like 'Gamers', or 'Gen Y') but the term 'digital native' is perhaps the most commonly used term to describe the people currently entering the workforce.

But what are they and where does the term come from?

The term was coined by the author Marc Prensky (pictured above) who used it to distinguish between people who have grown up using interactive multimedia and those who are having to 'learn' how to interact with and use services like Youtube, Google Reader and the dizzying array of social web services like Facebook, Orkut and Myspace.

From Prensky:

'Today's students – K through college – represent the first generations to grow up with this new technology. They have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, videogames, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age. Today's average college grads have spent less than 5,000 hours of their lives reading, but over 10,000 hours playing video games (not to mention 20,000 hours watching TV). Computer games, email, the Internet, cell phones and instant messaging are integral parts of their lives.

It is now clear that as a result of this ubiquitous environment and the sheer volume of their interaction with it, today's students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors. These differences go far further and deeper than most educators suspect or realize. “Different kinds of experiences lead to different brain structures, “ says Dr. Bruce D. Perry of Baylor College of Medicine. As we shall see in the next installment, it is very likely that our students’ brains have physically changed – and are different from ours – as a result of how they grew up. But whether or not this is literally true, we can say with certainty that their thinking patterns have changed. I will get to how they have changed in a minute.'

Suspicions

My reading of Prensky's article on digital 'immigrants' and 'natives' was thought-provoking in two ways: firstly in that it seemed to confirm some long-held suspicions about current educational models and secondly because it proposed a new division of learners which I'm not entirely sure I'm comfortable with.

Prensky's arguments that 'digital natives' are not being well served by traditional pedagogies is one part of a larger argument which has been bubbling up within the zeitgeist for some time now. Any of us working in educational fields will be long-familiar with constant claims that school-children are more disengaged than ever before, with teachers complaining that learners are switched-off, suffering from attention-deficit disorder and that they lack the basic ability to concentrate in class. This isn't new - Plato uttered similar complaints in the 6th century BCE.

What's notable now is that such complaints have become so vociferous in recent years that increasingly there are more and more people suggesting that rather than there being issues with the learners, there is in fact a fundamental problem with the system which is trying to educate them.

Underground History

Some time back I stumbled across the work of John Taylor Gatto, who in his groundbreaking book 'The Underground History Of American Education' suggested that the American educational system is designed as nothing more than a complex factory line for producing hordes of compliant individuals, whose sole purpose in life is to willingly submit themselves to processing by multi-national corporations in menial physical labour.

The exact details of how this project came to be are complex, but if we accept Gatto's arguments for a moment, a large problem makes itself very clear. The Anglo-Prussian model upon which the US system was based was designed during a time of Industrial manufacturing. That age is now gone - with today's school-leavers thrust into a global 'knowledge economy' which they are ill-prepared to compete in.

This notion has been surfacing in several places - from blogs, to academic journals - to mainstream media where we saw in an episode from the seventh season of the TV show 'The West Wing', Democratic candidate Matt Santos (played by Jimmy Smits) railing against the US educational system because it was based on the agrarian calendar.

As dead as Gagne

I have no difficulty in accepting that some older pedagogical models may have had their day in the sun, but I'm concerned that such a rush to embrace the future may marginalise those of us who do not necessarily fit comfortably into one of Prensky's two categories. For example, Donald Clark (former CEO of the Epic e-learning company - where I worked for a year) posted a blog in February of 2007, where he stated that the increase in usage of the web in education is 'killing Gagne dead'. The Gagne that he refers to is Robert Gagne and his 'Nine events of learning'. This is probably the most often used ID model for producing 'chapters' of digital e-learning content.

Clark argues that the increased accessibility of content via the web (notably video content) is knocking such 'guided' models out of the water entirely. To an extent I agree with him - I believe that many digital learning solutions are designed not with the learner in mind but rather the tutor - accommodating perhaps the tutor's preferred learning styles rather than the learners.

However, a white paper from Epic (which Donald, as you can see from the comments below the blog post in question, is at pains to point out he did not write) makes a good case for different usage of ID models for different audiences. Specifically, it suggests that 'entry-level' audiences would benefit from the more guided models (of which Gagne is an excellent example) and that more free-form models of self-guided learning (such as are facilitated by the web) work better for more senior and experienced learners - who crucially have the time and the technical skills to enable such learning to occur.

Pedagogy or not?

My own experiences would seem to back this up: I work in creating digital learning solutions for a range of audiences - all of them in the Police services of the UK. Unbelievably, entry level learners to the police force have no protected learning time - rendering any offer for learners to learn in their 'own way' redundant. This, coupled with the fact that the learners we design for are acquiring sensitive, challenging and highly legislation-sensitive materials, behoves us to provide a clearer line of guidance in any learning materials provided. I would prefer it that we lived in a world that allowed trainee Police officers the opportunity to have exploratory, free-form learning experiences but the time constraints, legislation compliance and complexity of information negates this from happening - at least for entry level learners. Digital natives or not, pedagogy (of some form) is required for audiences such as this.

I can't help but feel that Prensky's narrow division of learners into 'natives' and 'immigrants' is reductive, binary and perhaps unhelpful. For certain a 12 year-old will have different wiring (as a result of the neuro-plasticity which Steven Johnson alludes to in his book 'Everything Bad Is Good For You') than a 32 year-old as myself, but I'm not entirely ignorant of new technologies and in some rare instances still have the ability to wow my teenage nephews with what seems to them like arcane knowledge of the web and it's myriad services. On the flip side, put them up against me in a PS2 shoot-em-up and they'll annihilate me. I'd like to think that myself and my nephew fit somewhere in-between 'native' and 'immigrant' and that neither of us would be pigeon-holed into one educational model based on our age and hours put in on an Xbox.

Read

Prensky's article on 'Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants' (pdf)

Watch

'Did you know?' - explaining the 'digital native'.

What is 'Permanent Beta'?

2008-05-30T07:52:00.000-07:00

Shamelessly reworking Tim O'Reilly's concept of 'Perpetual Beta', this blog is a random space for personal musings on e-learning, technology, digital cartography and making a better education system for the 21st century. Failing that, I'll just post amusing Youtube clips.

Watch this space for more.