Archive for April, 2007

It looks like Gartner is jumping into virtual punditry if this press release on BusinessWire is any indication. It states emphatically “By the end of 2011, 80 percent of active Internet users (and Fortune 500 enterprises) will have a “second life,” but not necessarily in Second Life.” Really, 80%? That’s quite a turn around in a month.

Though it feels like a lot of hype fanned by the Second Life and World of Warcraft juggernaut, maybe it’s not out of the question. For instance Business Week’s special online report on Virtual Life has 16 articles on the topic. Though skewing heavily to Second Life, they’ve managed to inlcude a sidebar, Life After (or before) Second Life that shows how the metaverse is growing beyond Linden Lab’s vision.

This just in from the department of astute observations: Andrew Eglinton, a student at the University of London, posted this on his blog last year:

“Generations born after the early 90’s in industrialized countries will not know the world without Internet. This is generation G and they sit on a cultural and evolutionary hinge, between old perceptions of a national and local intransient world and new perceptions of a global and mobile one. That sense of awe you had as a child thinking about far away lands, you can now see on Google Earth, that penpal exchange with a lone French boy in Lyon can now be had instantly in chat rooms. A large part of this new generation’s opinion is being formed through the Internet, new language, experiments with persona, the consequences will be enormous. The future is now.”

The way that the NCEE report “Effectiveness of Reading and Mathamatics Software” was misinterpreted as a damnation of educational technology was deconstructed this week by Gregg Downey, Editor of eSchool News. Besides setting the record straight, he also takes the press to task for their knee-jerk reporting only the summary of a preliminary report. Very well put and worth reading if you missed it.

“Repeaters, not reporters,” by Gregg Downey, Editor, eSchool News, April 16, 2007. “The efficacy of math and reading software has been maligned around the world as the result of careless, inappropriate, and misguided news reports about a study paid for by U.S. taxpayers. The Bush Administration was the proximate cause of this disservice, but so-called reporters supplied the megaphone. All in all, the spectacle was enough to make me want to burn my press pass.

One would have hoped editors and reporters might have learned by now that swallowing whole what comes out of Washington can lead to journalistic indigestion. But it doesn’t look like they’ve absorbed this basic lesson.

Indeed, if any conclusions at all could be drawn from the research released so far, the study boils down to some pretty unspectacular findings, as were cogently enumerated by Computerworld’s senior news columnist Frank Hayes:

•Educational software doesn’t automatically improve test scores;
•Educational software works better when class sizes are smaller; and
•Educational software works better when kids use it more.
At one point, the study itself reveals this astonishing fact: “For a typical 180-day school year, average daily usage is about 10 minutes for all products combined.”

Hmm … Using math or reading software for 10 minutes a day doesn’t boost test scores. Or, as Hayes put it: This software doesn’t work … unless you use it.

A valuable insight, to be sure. But we might be excused for asking if that revelation really is worth every penny of the $10 million U.S. taxpayers had to pay for it.

Now, look: ED was irresponsible to release such a half-baked study. The department should have known how its findings would be misused. But at least the study itself contained caveats aplenty.

In fact, speaking of the report, Phoebe Cottingham, the head of ED’s research agency, confided this to eSchool News: “I think it’s premature to draw any kind of conclusions … we don’t feel we’re done yet, and the rest of the world shouldn’t consider that we’re done.”

One might tremble at the prospect that there’s more of this sort of thing to come. But Cottingham’s admonition did nothing to dissuade the Fourth Estate from plastering erroneous conclusions all over newspapers, television stations, and web sites.” Editorial continues here…

Dr. Richard Hackathorn of Boulder Technologies writes on the Business Intelligence Network about Serious Games in Virtual Worlds: The Future of Enterprise Business Intelligence. Using game and simulation technologies for intelligence analysis is hardly new but their use for this purpose beyond of the defense and intelligence industry is.

Hackathorn brings his expertise in data warehousing to the field, arguing that there are four levels serious games that encourage the player to observe, experiment, collaborate, or manage. I would argue there are other variations — including virtual worlds that encourage players to do all of these things — but still appreciate this contribution to the dialog. Dr. Hackathorn’s article continues here…

In the same meme, UK based Apply Group recently published a report on the use of serious games in business training in Europe, based on a data collected by their researchers between April and December 2006. Their study “focuses on the dynamics of the emerging market in Europe, the shape of the ideal offering and applicability to training applications, along with insight into the emerging supply chain. All analysis was conducted on data gathered directly from the market leaders.” The complete report is a little pricey but a substantial abstract of Apply Group study is available here…

Serious Games is a new web community and blog built by Adrian of Coventry, UK. He’s assembled the best collection of web videos covering serious games and educational technology I’ve seen and it a good demo of the Ning.com platform.

The slides ask repeatedly, “Did you know…” and then fill in an answer or analogy. “Did you know… If you’re one in a million in China there are 1,300 people just like you?

That in 2002 Nintendo invested more than $140 million in research but U.S. Government spent less than half as much on Education?

That there are over 2.7 billion searches performed on Google each month. To whom were these questions addressed B.G. (Before Google)?”

I noticed these and similar points in several conference presentations last year. At first I wrote it off as coincidence, then I became curious and recently discovered the source is Karl Fisch, a teacher in Arapaho Basin, CO who prepared a deck PowerPoint slides for a school faculty meeting in early 2006, intending to “start a conversation.” Did he ever. The result shows how deeply his ideas resonate and is an untended lesson in viral marketing.

This background story describes how Dr. Fisch’s slides came to be, have gone viral (”more than 2,000,000 served”) and been posted on YouTube and elsewhere hundreds of times. Click here to view the Flash version (to music from Last of the Mohicans) that juxtaposes a string of disturbing yet ultimately motivating facts about our world, how and what we teach, and the not to distant future.