Archive for May, 2007

Ian Bogost’s Persuasive Games has partnered with the New York Times to create a series of gamevertorials (sic) for the Time’s OpEd page. In Food Import Folly, which appeared last week, you “Take the role of the FDA inspectors in a world of increasingly numerous food imports and increasingly unmanageable risk. Your charge: try to protect the country from contaminants in foreign food imports using extremely limited resources.” Though not the first-ever editorial game, the fact that the NY Times has adopted the form is further proof that games are becoming an integral part of today’s media environment and shows a strong vote of confidence in the power of games to inform and influence public opinion.

As noted by 360KID’s Scott Traylor in his blog Ben Sawyer presented a taxonomy of serious games at the recent Annenberg Workshop on Learning Games. Scott writes, “Ben began the presentation with a very fitting poem by John Godfrey Saxe about six blind men who went to see an elephant. Each blind man found a part of the elephant; it’s sturdy side by one, a tusk by another, an ear by yet another, and so on. Each blind man thought they had come to understand the true meaning of what an elephant is. Each person was partially right about what they thought was an elephant, yet all of them were wrong in their understanding” (Scott’s post continues here…).

>>> Update 12/21/07: Ben Sawyer will be presenting his taxonomy at the 2008 Serious Games Summit:

In this presentation, Sawyer and Smith will present a complete overview of their Serious Games Taxonomy 1.0, providing not only a stronger definition of the serious games field, but also presenting a platform upon which to drive further activity and understanding of serious games, including market opportunities, research requirements, advocacy, criticism, and more. Feedback from the audience will be used to drive refinements to the work prior to publishing it formally.

If you combine the open source Moodle.org learning management system with lesson plans that use Linden Lab’s Second Life you get something like Sloodle.com, a vision of how to use virtual worlds in the classroom.

“Sloodle is a project to integrate the VLE platform Moodle with 3D immersive settings such as Second Life. Imagine a Moodle course that, if you wanted, could turn into a proper 3D interactive classroom with all your Moodle resources available to your students in the virtual world. A growing community is using Sloodle.com to work toward making this happen. As is the ethos of Moodle, the code will be open source and so we encourage all users, no matter how IT-savvy to get involved and make this a reality. Its benefits to the global education community could be huge.”

Sloodle is the work of Jeremy W. Kemp, an instructional designer at San José State University and started teaching online in 1999. He keeps the official wiki for educators using the Second Life immersive environment — www.simteach.com. His instructional technology project connecting Moodle and Second Life has attracted hundreds of participants from around the world — www.sloodle.com. He is a doctoral student at Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara, CA working on educational and social issues in immersive environments.

If you’d rather watch the movie, Jeremy has posted several machinima videos of Sloodle on YouTube.

I’ve championed user centered design for years and in part that’s behind the argument for using educational games and simulations for teaching: meeting and engaging students on their own terms. Now I’m seeing a gamer-centered design aesthetic begin to emerge in some surprising places, like business software, where you might least expect games to have an influence.

Consider the NY Times report, Work is Not Play But Maybe it Should Be, which describes how Seattle-based Entellium has reworked the user interface of their Rave CRM software to be more game-like. “Reasoning that sales people are wildly competitive” CEO Paul Johnson “thought that they would respond to a program that showed where they stood against their goals — or their peers’. Hence, Rave, which Entellium introduced in April.

“Rave adapts a variety of gaming techniques. For instance, you can build a dossier of your clients and sales prospects that includes photographs and lists of their likes, dislikes and buying interests, much like the character descriptions in many video games. Prospects are given ratings, not by how new they are — common in C.R.M. programs — but by how likely they are to buy something. All prospects are also tracked on a time-line, another game-like feature.”

Two posts on Paul Johnson’s blog — The Birth of Gamer Influenced Design and The X Factor for the Software Industry: Gen Y Gamers — expand on this thinking. In one post Johnson observes, “One of the biggest stories missed by the business software industry: the impact of the video gaming generation. This is a huge demographic (upwards of 90 million people in the US alone) that will fundamentally change the work environment – and how business software applications should be designed and built.”

Johnson’s observation that this sea-change will impact the work environment is spot on and the fact that he’s acted on it in designing CRM software is also a point well taken. Developers and publishers who heed this change and are agile enough to deliver a highly engaging, gamer-friendly experience will be the best positioned to catch the next demographic wave.

Bringing new meaning to the phrase global warming, Rafat Ali broke the story yesterday that Sony is in talks to acquire Club Penguin, the virtual world for kids from British Columbia. Sale price is rumored to be in the range of $450m, a 7.5 multiple of Club Penguin’s reported $60m sales. Though not the stuff of dot-boom days, it’s still a healthy increment and further evidence of the rapidly growing interest in mmogs and virtual worlds appealing to young kids, a market that includes the educational and social Whyville, purely social worlds like Habbo Hotel and Nicktropolis among others. From the PaidContent story:

“Sony is in advanced talks to buy the two-year-old kids focused social gaming (Club Penguin, paidContent.org has learned. We have confirmed the talks from senior insiders, but have not been able to confirm the potential price. The talks are exclusive, but still ongoing and could break down, and I’m sure they could have other competitive bid from others.

“Club Penguin is a massive multiplayer online game for children developed by New Horizon Interactive, a software firm based in Kelowna, BC in Canada. It was launched in Oct 2005, and has grown to about 4.5 million visitors in March. Using cartoon penguin avatars, players can converse, play minigames, and participate in other activities with one another in a snow-covered virtual world. The service is subscription-based (about $6 a month), and also has additional e-commerce/shop revenues. A detailed description of the company is here on Wikipedia.

“From what we know, the site/service does not have any investment money in it yet. As to what fit it has with Sony, could be a good distribution vehicle for some of Sony Pictures’ kids-focused shows. Or, it might be that it becomes a part of Sony Computer Entertainment America, the gaming unit, which runs the Playstation franchise, or more likely, the Sony Online Entertainment division, which runs Everquest and others. Both Disney and Viacom (though Nickelodeon) have plays n this kids gaming/avatar space: Disney recently relaunched an existing virtual-reality site under a new name: Disney Xtreme Digital (DXD), and Nickelodeon launched its entry, Nicktropolis.com, at the end of January. Nick also bought Neopets in 2005 for about $160 million.” Story continues here…

Scratch is a new programming language developed at the MIT Media Lab that’s aimed at kids from 8-up. According to the BBC story and video out earlier this week Scratch “does not require prior knowledge of complex computer languages. Instead, it uses a simple graphical interface that allows programs to be assembled like building blocks.”

An MIT news release provides more details, “A new programming language developed at the MIT Media Lab turns kids from media consumers into media producers, enabling them to create their own interactive stories, games, music, and animation for the Web. With this new software called Scratch kids can program interactive creations by simply snapping together graphical blocks, much like LEGO® bricks, without any of the obscure punctuation and syntax of traditional programming languages. “As kids work on Scratch projects, they learn to think creatively and solve problems systematically — skills that are critical to success in the 21st century,” said Resnick.

“Designed for ages 8 and up, Scratch is available by free download from the Scratch website (http://scratch.mit.edu). The software runs on both PCs and Macs. The MIT Media Lab is now collaborating with other organizations — including Intel, Microsoft, Samsung, BT, the LEGO Group, Motorola, and One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) - to create other versions and applications of Scratch, including versions for mobile phones.” MIT News Release continues here…

It’s no secret that IBM has been experimenting with Second Life and other virtual world platforms for some time. More recently the “desire to have a more secure intranet environment where we can meet and explore the potential technology and social implications” has prompted the addition of Garage Games’ low-cost Torque engine to their arsenal, according to the eightbar blog this week. “Now before any purists jump in this and say, ‘but that’s a game engine not an MMO engine you can only host _n people at a time’ let me explain. Torque lets us run controlled game style servers, even run locally and host our own ‘meeting rooms’ but we are customizing elements to hook into or existing communication systems. e.g. we have a large corporate index of employees called bluepages, we have single sign on to the intranet (and hence know who we are) and we have a set of services being built to access any of the data we need. We also already have a corporate wide Sametime messaging service and products on the way such as Lotus connections for deeper connectivity across existing channels. What we need is the ability to gather some people together and use the human aspects of the avatar interaction to be more effective in our communications. Part of the investigation is to treat this as another client for web based services. So the services we build can then be consumed by any metaverse.” The complete post on IBM and Torque is here…

Joost, the web video service created by Skype founders Jnus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom that I’ve blogged in these pages earlier in the year, has taken down a jumbo $45 million round of investment according to Rafat Ali’s PaidContent.org blog this morning. Although less than the $59.4 million raised by Brightcove, it’s still a huge payday that gives Joost the juice to compete aggressively in the web video space. What does Joost have to do with educational technology? Directly perhaps not a lot, but indirectly it’s an example of successful serial entrepreneurship and disruptive technology challenging the status quo. It’s only a matter of time before the same forces have an impact in educational publishing and technology.

The growth of the One Laptop Per Child movement and the recent release of the “$100 laptop” has been a bright spot in educational technology. Or so it seemed. Then the New York Times front-page article Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops made me take pause.

On the surface, the Times reports that there have been mixed to poor learning outcomes because “…laptops had been abused by students, did not fit into lesson plans, and showed little, if any, measurable effect on grades and test scores at a time of increased pressure to meet state standards. Districts have dropped laptop programs after resistance from teachers, logistical and technical problems, and escalating maintenance costs.”

Educators interviewed for the story reported “either the equipment broke down, kids used the laptops for surfing porn or for IM-ing test answers” but you have to wonder, what kind of professional development was provided to support the teachers using this technology? Did the districts surveyed roll out laptop programs without technical support, as it appears? And speaking of cheating and inappropriate messages, have they noticed what kids are writing and drawing with pencil and paper when the teacher isn’t looking?

Then there was the recently released study from the US Department of Education which according to most journalists said there was effectively no difference in academic achievement between students who used educational reading and math software, and those who didn’t. But read the fine print and the study notes that students’ average time-on-task was 10 minutes per day, and no weighting given to the quality of the software they used, facts which seem to have gone over the heads of everyone except for the editors at eSchool News, who responded with a scathing editorial on misleading reporting.

Just as that brouhaha has begun to fade, The National Poll on Children’s Health reports “US parents rate Internet Safety as being a more serious health threat to children than school violence, sexually transmitted diseases, abuse and neglect” according to this post on TechCrunch.

If we’re to believe these reports educational technology is ineffective, laptops — if they’re working at all — are used mainly to cheat and look at porn, and the Internet is too dangerous period. So what’s left, cuneiform tablets? It’s almost enough to make you snarky but I’ll choose to buckle down and build better products, support them with research and professional development, and make sure the media gets the message right.

Several months ago I began using MindJet’s MindManager to give form to some essentially stream-of-conciousness research and I was hooked immediately. Though I’ve hand-drawn or seen computer-generated mind maps for years, most recently in Ed Yourdon’s mind map of Web 2.0, adding another piece of software to my quiver was the last thing I wanted to do.

I soon discovered this product is different, however, a breeze to use and invaluable if you trade in concepts and ideas, are a visual thinker and would benefit from a tool to organize your thoughts. Can you relate? Do you collaborate with colleagues in different locations? Then wait, it gets better. At the end of another post on Web 2.0 recently, Yourdon mentions a new online mind mapping and collaboration tool called MindMeister from Codemart in Germany. This just-out-of-beta tool allows you to publish your mind maps on the web, collaboratively edit them in real time, ties in with Skype so you can IM or VoIP with your colleagues, imports and exports to MindJet’s .mmap format, and it tracks and keeps revisions. In true Web 2.0 fashion it’s also free at a basic level and modestly priced at about $49/year for the fully featured version.

So take your pick: MindManager on your desktop or MindMeister on your web top, two great tools that I’m now using in an attempt to map the metaverse. But now I’m getting ahead of myself. Tune in again soon for the next installment of this saga and until then, happy mind mapping.