Archive for August, 2008

Playing video games “teaches skills that transfer to classroom, surgical procedures, scientific thinking…” according to the American Psychological Association, meeting in Boston this week. In a press release aggregating the results of several recent studies, the APA reports “Certain types of video games can have beneficial effects, improving gamers’ dexterity as well as their ability to problem-solve – attributes that have proven useful not only to students but to surgeons.”

The studies cited include “Four dimensions of Video Game Effects,” William Stone, BS, and Douglas A. Gentile, PhD, Iowa State University; “Games, Stealth Assessment and Learning,” Valerie Shute, PhD, Florida State University; “Informal Scientific Reasoning in Online Game Forums,” Constance Steinkuehler, PhD, and Sean C. Duncan, MA, University of Wisconsin at Madison; “Children’s Problem Solving During Video Game Play,” Fran C. Blumberg, PhD and Sabrina S. Ismailer, BA, Fordham University. For more visit the APA website.

Evidently rumors of the venture economy’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. At the beginning of the month New York-based serious game entrepreneur Nt Etuk announced he had raised a Series B round of $6M for Tabula Digita, the educational game company he founded four years ago. Here’s the lead of the press release:

New York, Aug. 1, 2008 - Tabula Digita,Inc., an educational gaming company delivering pre-algebra and algebra software programs to K-12 schools and consumers, announced that it recently closed its Series B funding led by Ascend Venture Group, LLC.

“Tabula Digita’s educational video games have been embraced by some of the most respected thought-leaders in K-12 education,” said Ntiedo Etuk, chief executive officer of Tabula Digita. “This tremendous acceptance, coupled with positive reviews from all corners of the market, has been both flattering and suggests that we will be successful in transforming the way children learn and their level of engagement.”

Nt and his founding partner Rob Clegg were early entrants, making serious games for K-12 against skepticism and long odds to pioneer the market. With that back story in mind, this new round of funding is even sweeter and comes with our wishes for continued success.

Earlier this year Automattic founder and WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg suggested on his blog that the future of Wordpress MU (multi user) is social media. TechCrunch covered the story too. As a user of Wordpress and advocate of the new convergence I think it’s great news. From the BuddyPress site:

The idea of BuddyPress is to take a standard vanilla installation of WordPress MU and turn it into something that represents more of a community building tool, or niche social network.

BuddyPress is essentially a set of WordPress MU specific plugins. Each plugin adds a distinct feature (or component) to BuddyPress and only handles functionality for that specific component (for example, private messaging). BuddyPress also has a core plugin that all other plugins require, it contains shared functions and performs the basic modifications to the WordPress MU interface.

When using the default theme, BuddyPress will move the main focus of WordPress MU away from blogs, and onto the actual member profile. However, members can still blog and use all the blogging features they would normally expect from WordPress. When someone uses BuddyPress, they will be going there to build or enhance their profile first, and write something on their blog second. The blog is turned into another component of BuddyPress.

Everyone is asking me about Twitter lately: “What is it?” Microblogging. “Does it serve any purpose?” Lets you follow and communicate — 140 characters at a time — with friends, colleagues or (from the Twitter home page once you’re logged in) everyone who tweets. But invariably it comes down to the last question, “Why would I want to?”

The first two questions are easy but I admit to being pretty dodgy about answering the last one. I know of a professional librarian who uses it to query her colleagues around the world, and of at least one remarkably large company with a staff tweeter who monitors the bit-stream for customer insights and respond to any complaints that bubble up from the chatter. But what about smaller companies, professional practices, consultants, creatives, writers… you?

In my short life as a tweeter I’ve found a few business uses — it’s gotten me back in touch with a colleague for a possible collaboration, for one — but really I’ve gotten hooked on Twitter to follow the “story” that some tweet-streama reveal. For example take Ingen Bio Group, “the leading private human pharmaceutical development company in the world” and Dr. Leonard J. Kendall who tweets as IngenBio and has said:

05:38 PM July 30, 2008 from web
Thorne log> I wasn’t able to stop him. Kendall was killed in the explosion. 03:46 PM

July 30, 2008 from web
Thorne, Sgt. Garrett - INTRAGEN EXPOSURE >QUARANTINE HOLDING 4.30.95 >Ingen Bio - Security Command >ITC CLEARANCE LEVEL - RE … … 03:17 PM

July 30, 2008 from web
. …- . .-.. -.– -.

02:47 AM July 29, 2008 from web
http://tinyurl.com/6qom2q

09:12 PM July 28, 2008 from web
The Salt Lake Times - Warehouse Explosion Kills Cancer Scientist April 16, 1995 - 10:13 a.m. CT

08:48 PM July 28, 2008 from web
KENDALL LOG//DELETE - FILE RECOVERY INCOMPLETE / UNABLE TO RESTORE

12:38 AM July 28, 2008 from web
1:08:00:00 FIGHT.SURVIVE.INFECT.

Wait… back up… “Fight. Survive. Infect?!

Then I played the video Dr. K linked to this morning… and have to conclude this is either one of the best viral marketing campaigns or social media art works I’ve seen. Very cool. Though the excitement of discovery has passed the intrigues of Dr. Leonard J. Kendall and the Imogen Bio Group continue amaze and entertain. And I still don’t know if they’re a corporate security breach, a marketing promo for a movie or video game, or an emerging literary form.

What do you think?

Update – I just ran across a January post called 9 Benefits of Twitter for Bloggers by Darren Rowse on ProBlogger that expands considerably on my post. What caught my eye was this chart of Darren’s traffic since he started “taking Twitter seriously.”

Suffice to say that if you found my post of interest and you’re a blogger you want to check this out.