Archive for September, 2008

Unless you’re a red-meat conservative fundamentalist, the recent news from Alaska has been disturbing. Snow Job. Square Glasses. Need I say more? Finally, there’s some progressive news from the 50th state that showcases a simple, inexpensive and effective approach to teaching middle school writing.

I’m talking about a multi-author blog called Tell the Raven that is one Fairbanks, AK teacher’s grass-roots effort to make writing relevant to the kids in his 6th grade class. Teacher Doug Noon writes,

One of my challenges as a writing teacher is to show my students that their writing can be a celebration of the ordinary. After watching what they choose to write about, and how they respond to each others’ writing, I’ve come to believe that global citizenship begins with local knowledge. Without a solid grasp of what’s happening in their own backyards, students have difficulty understanding the wider world. It is my hope that learning to care about, and take responsibility for what happens in our own communities, will encourage an ethic of care that extends out to the whole world, which is what our totem pole story teaches. [...] We write every day. Each student has a spiral notebook in which they do their “rough draft” thinking. From there, they can take their work directly to the Web. I moderate all posts and comments, so if a piece needs revision, it doesn’t go out until I’ve seen it. They can read each others’ work at every phase of the process. They share their rough drafts informally, and they love to read and leave comments for one another on the Web site. These interactions are critically important for building our writing community, as students come to realize they are writing for each other and for people from around the world, and not just the teacher.

Seems to me this practice could be syndicated to every middle-school classroom in the country at little cost but to great effect. Among other benefits, it makes writing relevant and not something done “…just for the teacher,” as Noon observes. It helps blur local, regional and national boundaries, impressing on kids that they are writing for — and are part of — a global community. And it channels kids into using the web as a creative tool for personal expression, a core 21st Century Skill they need to succeed.

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CBS’ Simon & Shuster dipped its toe into the world of online video over the summer with the launch of its own digital production studio to produce digital HD video interview series and other features around its authors.

Nothing remarkable on the surface. However their first video series features not only Stephen King discussing his new graphic novel, but it’s followed by 25 episodes (drawn by Marvel’s award-wining comic book artist Alex Maleev, and colored by José Villarrubia) that you can watch online for free or purchase from iTunes at 99 cents per three 2-minute episodes.

Now the line starts to blur: is this just a clever promotional tool deployed first to promote a a hugely popular and profitable novelist, or are we watching a new kind of mashup where a venerable publisher morphs into a web video producer in the hopes of replacing revenue lost to the decline in literacy and reading? It’s a big question with a short answer: we’ll have to wait and see. Meantime, if you’re a Steven King fan you can now enjoy his work in a new way.

I trust you all tuned in last Friday night to see if McCain was going to show up?

After such a tough week for the old maverick — suspending his campaign, parachuting into Washington, speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative,  and keeping everyone guessing if we’d be watching Barack debate himself — it made for quite the drama and a weird preview of a McCain presidency. As Gail Collins wrote in her Times op-ed piece yesterday:

Imagine what would happen if a new beetle infested the Iowa corn crop during the first year of a McCain administration. On Monday, we spray. On Tuesday, we firebomb. On Wednesday, the president marches barefoot through the prairie in a show of support for Iowa farmers. On Thursday, the White House reveals that Wiley Flum, a postal worker from Willimantic, Conn., has been named the new beetle eradication czar. McCain says that Flum had shown “the instincts of a maverick reformer” in personally buying a box of roach motels and scattering them around the post office locker room. “I can’t wait to introduce Wiley to those beetles in Iowa,” the president adds. [And] on Friday, McCain announces he’s canceling the weekend until Congress makes the beetles go away.

But I digress – this began as a post about Twitter mashups. Maybe you’ve been at a conference recently where the presenter invited the audience send text feedback, projected on a screen above. What if that happened on a national level?

We saw that in the pre-convention debate sponsored by CNN (who’ve been out front on weaving Twitter into news broadcasts). Now Current TV, the independent cable television network founded by vice president Al Gore, has broken new ground by incorporating audiences’ 140-character commentaries from the microblogging service Twitter into their broadcasts.

How cool is that? For the whole story go to Wired for their post Current TV Hacks The Debates and visit Current TV’s Hack the Debate for more episodes. I can’t wait to watch this during the VP debate on October 2nd.

Better late than never - and just in time for the presedential election - the state of Florida is getting serious about math. New York serious game company Tabula Digita (New York Serious Game Developer Raises $6M) announced the sale of their supplemental pre-algebra and algebra DimensionM video game to 24 middle schools in Broward County, Florida, the nations sixth largest public school system.

Students naturally like to learn through games, and the three-dimensional, virtual world format is deeply engaging. It’s a high impact, motivating learning tool that greatly assists when teaching a complex subject like algebra,” said Jeanine Gendron, Ed.D., director for the district’s department of instructional technology. “That subject is especially challenging during the middle school years, and quite often children become turned off because they view it as difficult. But from observing students using this program, we know that Tabula Digita is going to have a profound positive effect on the attention of our middle school learners.

Fore more visit the DimensionM web site and Serious Games Source.

You hear the words “teens” and “games” in the same sentence all the time, but seldom with the word “civics” included. Continuing their series of outstanding, unbiased reports on American Culture, the PEW Internet and American Life project released Teens, Games and Civics this week. In the first national survey of it’s kind, PEW found that nearly all American teens play computer, console, or cell phone games:

Video gaming is pervasive in the lives of American teens — young teens and older teens, girls and boys, and teens from across the socioeconomic spectrum. Opportunities for gaming are everywhere, and teens play video games frequently. When asked, half of all teens reported playing a video game “yesterday.” Those who play daily typically play for an hour or more.

Fully 97% of teens ages 12-17 play computer, web, portable, or console games. Additionally:

• 50% of teens played games “yesterday.”
• 86% of teens play on a console like the Xbox, PlayStation, or Wii.
• 73% play games on a desktop or a laptop computer.
• 60% use a portable gaming device like a Sony PlayStation Portable, a Nintendo DS, or a Game Boy.
• 48% use a cell phone or handheld organizer to play games.

Game playing is ubiquitous among Americans teenagers. Fully 99% of boys and 94% of girls report playing video games. Younger teen boys are the most likely to play games, followed by younger girls and older boys. Older girls are the least “enthusiastic” players of video games, though more than half of them play. Some 65% of daily gamers are male; 35% are female.

Read the highlights here or download a PDF of the full report.

The art of data presentation is choosing a graphic method that makes your intention clear. As a followup to my recent posts on putting words into pictures, here’s a lengthy post on data visualization from Smashing ezine that’s an excellent reference to established and emerging techniques.

Data presentation can be beautiful, elegant and descriptive. There is a variety of conventional ways to visualize data - tables, histograms, pie charts and bar graphs are being used every day, in every project and on every possible occasion. However, to convey a message to your readers effectively, sometimes you need more than just a simple pie chart of your results. In fact, there are much better, profound, creative and absolutely fascinating ways to visualize data. Many of them might become ubiquitous in the next few years. Continues here >>>

I began playing World of Warcraft when I was a suit for Pearson. Though I worked my way up to a L20-something Paladin, the daily 4 hours as a commuter and on the phone, and 10 hours at the computer and on the phone killed my interest in grinding higher. Still, WoW was compelling and deep, and I acknowledge was my gateway drug to playing and working with the new - and next - generation of MMORPGs and virtual worlds.

From the beginning I saw beyond games’ entertainment value to their high potential to be used as teaching and learning simulations. That led me to the first several Serious Game Summits that were held in Crystal City, MD just across from the Pentagon. From the spook-to-wonk ratio of attendees there, it was clear the military-industrial complex was on to the potential of games to train, too. In a Presidential season with both sides all puffed up about their ability to defend the country, the constitution and the borders, Wired reports today that:

American military and intelligence communities are increasingly worried that would-be bin Ladens might gather in a virtual world, to plan a real-life attack. But the spies haven’t given many details, about how it might be done. Now, a Pentagon researcher has laid out how such a terror plot might unfold. The planning ground is World of Warcraft. The main target of this possibly nuclear strike: the White House.

There’s been no public proof to date of terrorists hatching plots in virtual worlds. But online spaces like World of Warcraft are making some spooks, generals and Congressmen extremely nervous. They imagine terrorists rehearsing attacks in these worlds, just like the U.S. military trains with commercial shoot-em-up games. They worry that the massively multiplayer games make it incredibly easy to gather plotters from around the world. But, mostly, virtual worlds are nerve-wracking to spies because they’re so hard to monitor. The accounts are pseudonymous. The access is global. The jargon is thick. And most of the spy agencies’ employees aren’t exactly level-70 shamans. Continues here >>>

At first I rolled my eyes thinking here’s more fodder for the haters to bash all video games. But all that palaver about terrorists training in WoW got me to wondering: which Presidential or VP candidate can see WoW’s nefarious underworld better from their home state: Obama-Biden or McBush-Impalin?

More importantly does saying you can see something — Russia, polar bears thriving in the melt, or World of Warcraft — mean you understand its subtleties and nuance, or is that only maya, the dangerous illusion?

Click image to stop on one picture, mouse up or down to pan, click again to continue.

Here’s a whole new take on the global market and media mashups. This kaleidoscopic stream displays 35 images I shot at public markets in London, Seattle, New York City, in Ariquipa and Urubamba, Peru, and in Seine Bight, Belize. 

It’s made with a cool new service from Viewvox.com that allows you to mix, create and blend personal media - video, photos and music - and share them as live streams on your own channel, in email or embedded as it is here. Look for more here soon and comment with links to ones you make - let’s discover everything Viewvox can do.

You pay local and (mostly) Federal taxes but where does it all go? Maybe you blow a tire on an interstate highway that’s full of potholes and needs fixing, lament the condition of your kid’s school, and shake your head as Dubya’ and his legions continue to divvy up the take to pay for their war agenda. But how much money is that taking off the table that could have been put to less destructive use? Perhaps not the best examples, but putting abstract numbers in perspective is difficult and that’s where Many Eyes and GapMinder come in.

For instance, this illustration showing the relative US Government spending since 2004 starts putting Fed spending in sharp focus. (Hint: the big blue circle is the 1,102 billion spend on the Department of Defense; the smaller circles are everything else.)

This chart (and illustrations from many other data sets) was generated by Many Eyes, a just-out-of-alpha experimental project at IBM. You can enter and chart your own data as well using more than 15 different visual models, like these Wordle charts that Wired used to parse the speeches at the Democratic National Convention.

Not that I’m trying to make a statement about the distorted, nay criminal, priorities of our country’s political leadership (sic). I do, however, gravitate to visualizing data so I can understand what’s going on.

Another source  outstanding data visualization toolset comes from GapMinder, a company that Google acquired last year. Though you can’t make your own charts — yet —  they’ve provided some pretty good examples. Like this interactive chart of real estate prices, sub-prime loans, unemployment and population from 2000 through 2006. If nothing else it paints a pretty picture of some grim numbers and in the process argues even more persuasively for regime change.

Several weeks ago in Hooked on Twitter I pondered whether microblogging had spawned a new literary form. Evidently it has, as Matt Richtel writes in the New York Times last weekend:

You might remember the novel in its earlier form; it had a cover, and many pages, forethought of plot, editors and agents weighing in, and, oh yes, it generally had sentences and punctuation. And, finally, some poor suckers had to take the time out of their busy days to actually read it.

Who has time for all those niceties? They’re so first half of 2008.

Introducing the Twiller. Recently, a handful of creators (present company included) have scrapped pen and paper for mobile phone and keypad, and started texting their novels — in real time, just a few characters at a time. Our medium is Twitter, a service that lets you broadcast bursts of 140 characters at a time to be read by people who subscribe to get your updates.

Really, so first half of 2008. For more, visit Matt’s site and go pick up a copy of Hooked from Amazon. See you in the tweet-stream.