User Experience

While waiting for the coffee to brew this morning I glanced at Twitter and the first post on my screen read “Wordpress 2.7 “Coltrane” released…” (props to ijafri for being first on my radar with the news). As the song playing in an endless loop in nearly every store in New York says, “It’s starting to look a lot like Christmas.”

Seriously, references to obnoxious holiday music aside, I’ve been waiting for v2.7 ever since I met the founding developer of WordPress Matthew Mullenweg who tipped his hand to what was in store and I’m excited it’s finally here.

The most obvious change is the redesigned Dashboard, which is almost endlessly customizable to your way of seeing and doing things. In the process, this reduces the number of clicks needed to do anything: post, edit, illustrate, prioritize, upgrade, moderate comments or assassinate comment spam… one click and it’s done right from the Dashboard. Nearly every other screen can also be customized to your liking, too. How cool is that? Here’s a video that shows what I’m talking about:

You can find out more about version 2.7 from Matt’s post on the WordPress.org blog.

If you’re running WordPress give me a shout about upgrading. And if you choose to do it yourself please make a backup of the database and all the files before you go for it. Though WP code has been thoroughly vetted by our global user community some elements of your site, particularly if its older or you haven’t upgraded in a while, may not be fully compatible. We can address these issues pretty easily but it will be a lot less stressful if we’re not working under the influence of a broken site.

We were working on a new product idea for kids 3 to 7 years old the other day and began envisioning one version built specifically for the iPhone. But is the iPhone a platform that’s viable for children at the younger end of this age range, we wondered?

As this video and others of the same ilk demonstrate, kids *love* the iPhone and even some 2 year olds have no problem finding their way around:

For more videos of kids using the iPhone click here.

In this video from the 2008 Dust or Magic Institute, Warren Buckleitner talks about how children’s portable computing devices are changing childhood and comes to some insightful conclusions.

Born the same year as BF Skinner’s teaching machine (1958), Warren Buckleitner has been reviewing children’s technology products now for over half of his life. After five years in the classroom and ten years at the High/Scope Educational Research Foundation, he established Children’s Technology Review earning him SIIA’s First Journalism Codie Award for “Best Software Reviewer.”

Warren is an advisor to Consumer Reports WebWatch and teaches both at NYU and the Rutgers Graduate School of Education. He is also a regular contributor to the New York Times Circuits page, and writes for Parents, PARADE, Disney Family, Scholastic Parent & Child and others. Warren founded the Dust or Magic Institute (www.dustormagic.com) and the Mediatech Foundation (www.mediatech.org). He likes to try to IM with his two teenage daughters, who are his best teachers.

For more information about Warren and booking speaking engagements and workshops, visit his media links page.

Mark William Hansen, who leads product development at Lego, talks about their transition from a toy company to developers and publishers of an immersive 3D virtual world set to launch in early 2009.

For more on Lego Universe read the Reuters story Virtual World is Lego’s Latest Brick Trick and visit the Lego corporate site. For an historical perspective, view Mark William Hansen’s 2006 presentation on Lego Universe. For more videos from the 2008 and 2007 Dust or Magic Institutes visit http://dustormagic.blip.tv.

In a few weeks this blog will be coming to you live from Dust or Magic, the exclusive conference of interactive toy designers, developers, manufacturers and critics held each Fall in Lambertsville, NJ, under the auspices of Children’s Technology Review.

I’ll be videotaping all of the presentations for the Dust or Magic Wiki and will also try to steal a few minutes during the conference (November 2-3) to post live. It won’t be in real-time, but will be the next best thing if you follow children’s interactive media and aren’t able to attend. This year’s speakers include:

Christopher Byrne, President Byrne Communications, Inc. aka The Toy Guy. Chris is one of the leading experts on toys and play. Over the past 27 years (and he’s not even old), he has served in a variety of positions with toy companies covering marketing, media, operations and product development. In 1988, he formed New York-based Byrne Communications, where he has served as a researcher, analyst and consultant to a variety of Fortune 100 companies. He is widely quoted in the media and appears regularly on national television commenting on toys. Besides his own web sites (The Toy Guy and new online Time to Play Magazine (www.timetoplaymag.com) he writes for trade publications including Toys & Family Entertainment and Royalties. Currently thetoyguy.com attracts millions of visitors annually. Chris will help us critique the crop of 2008 technology toys on hand at this year’s Institute.

Jim Gray, Ed.D. is head of the LeapFrog Lab where he oversees all user experience and product development research. He is responsible for ensuring that LeapFrog products maximize children’s engagement, fun, and learning. Jim has a doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a bachelor’s degree in Early Childhood Education from Michigan State University. He was a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Center for Innovative Learning Technologies, and Instructor of Interactive Media Design at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He has contributed to dozens of publications and published studies and has been a driving force behind LeapFrog’s new learning path.

Claire Green is the President of Parents’ Choice Foundation, the oldest not-for-profit organization dedicated to the evaluation of children’s books, videos, toys, computers software, videos, television and magazines. Parents’ Choice was founded in 1978 by Claire’s mother, Diana Huss Green. Fewer than 15% of the products submitted to Parents’ Choice Awards Program receive a commendation in one of six award categories. Claire is a long-time participant of Dust or Magic, and has a deep conviction for empowering children, with all forms of media. She’ll be in the Reviewer’s panel on Monday morning, to lend her view on this year’s toys and software throughtout the event.

Benjamin Grimley is the Senior Director of PBS Interactive Businesses. He founded and leads PBS’ new Interactive Businesses group, including licensing, product development, and online distribution. In March 2008, his team launched PBS KIDS PLAY! for ages 3-6 in collaboration with PBS content providers including HIT Entertainment, National Geographic, The Jim Henson Company and Universal Studios. Previously, as Vice President of Business Development for Exent Technologies, Ben built Internet distribution channels for interactive publishers such as Atari, Microsoft Game
Studios, Riverdeep, Scholastic, Take-Two and Ubisoft. Ben holds an MBA from Johns Hopkins University.

Mark William Hansen is the Director of Business Development for the LEGO Group, and is the project lead for LEGO Universe, a new social construction site coming early 2009. He was the original architect of LEGO Factory, an experience that that bridges virtual design with real world construction allowing anyone to design custom LEGO models online which can then be ordered as a set for assembly “offline.” Hansen spent 3 years researching Mass Customization and Agile Systems at Aalborg University and served twelve years in the United States Navy. He holds a Bachelor of Science from Embry Riddle Aeronautical University and a Masters of Engineering from Aalborg University.

Kathleen Kremer, Ph.D. is the Manager of Child Research at Fisher-Price. She oversees product research and testing for the Learning, Preschool, and Creative Activities Divisions. She advises these teams on child development, education, interface design, and game play and provides creative input. Products she has worked on include the Smart Cycle, the KidTough Digital Camera and FP3 Player, Digital Arts and Crafts Studio, Easy Link Internet Launch Pad, Pixter and Computer Cool School. Prior to joining Fisher-Price, Kathleen was a Development Scientist at Educational Testing Service. She also has worked on various product evaluations for media organizations such as Nickelodeon, WGBH, and Sesame Workshop and has published book chapters and journal articles on education and child development. She holds an M.A. in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. from the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota.

Debra Lieberman, Ph.D., is a communication researcher and lecturer at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she also directs the Health Games Research national program funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to advance the design and effectiveness of digital interactive games used to improve health. Debra’s research focuses on processes of learning and behavior change with interactive media, with special interests in interactive games, health media, and children’s media. Debra has published widely and she consults for health organizations, education agencies, and media and technology companies to help design and evaluate interactive media for entertainment, learning, and health. Debra’s talk this year will be called Using Interactive Games to Improve Health Knowledge, Skills, and Behaviors.

Robin Raskin is a highly respected speaker, author, conference planner and blogger at YahooTech. Robin has been writing about raising kids in a digital world for nearly 30 years. The former editor of PC Magazine, and Editor-in-Chief of FamilyPC, she is the author of seven books on kids, including The Parents’ Guide to College Life (Random House, 2006) and consults on new media strategies for The Princeton Review. Robin is a long-time speaker at Dust or Magic. You can learn more about Robin at www.robinraskin.com

Scott Traylor, Chief KID and Founder, 360KID a kid-focused content and technology company dedicated to creating a love for learning through products that educate as well as entertain. 360KID provides turnkey development services to the broadcast, cable, textbook, and toy industries. Scott started his business over 16 years ago. His company has emerged as a recognized leader in the development of fun and engaging learning products. His clients include Sesame Workshop, LeapFrog, Discovery Channel, Hasbro, Highlights for Children, PBSkids, and many others. 360KID is a multi-award winning and three-time Emmy nominated company. Scott is continually reading, analyzing, and synthesizing research covering all aspects of kids and learning including new technologies, gaming, and different consumer-based delivery systems. He’s fascinated by electronic learning aids and technology instruction that is non-PC based. Scott believes nothing is impossible and so he pushes to make big dreams a reality, especially when it benefits children. See Scott’s 2006 Dust or Magic presentation here (on YouTube). You can see other presentations at http://dustormagic.wikispaces.com

Tanya Van Court is the General Manager Noggin and Sr. Vice President of Parents and Preschool Digital, Nickelodeon and MTVN Kids and Family Group. She oversees strategy and operations, as well as creative and editorial content for Nickelodeon and MTVN Kids and Family Group preschool and parents online businesses. Van Court assumed this position in the fall of 2006 and is responsible for the day-to-day management of Nick Jr.com (Playtime and Nick Jr. Parents), broadband offerings Nick Jr. Video and Nick Jr. Parents TV, NOGGIN.com, GoCityKids.com and the community site ParentsConnect.com. She is a graduate of Stanford University, where she received both her bachelors and masters degrees in Industrial Engineering.

Roger Wagner is the creator of HyperStudio — the number one selling educational software product in the world during the early ’90s. Roger was a witness to the beginning of personal computing, writing the first book on assembly language programming for the Apple II which included the the first published description of how to make a computer do bi-directional scrolling text. He was a magazine columnist prior to starting Roger Wagner Publishing, and he’s experienced the garage-startup, building a company with market leadership, the thrills and trauma of selling a company, and the aftermath of brand mismanagement. Join us for an after-dinner conversation with one of the first software developers in the age of personal computers, as he talks about the past, present and future of interactive publishing for schools.

Jennifer Wells is the Associate Director for PBS Interactive Businesses. A former student of Sandra Calvert, Jennifer leads interactive content development for PBS KIDS PLAY! Past projects include creating content for Bear in the Big Blue House, Curious George, Fisher-Price, Highlights Magazine, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Reading Rainbow, Schoolhouse Rock and many others. She holds an MA from Georgetown
University.

Institute Facilitators: Warren Buckleitner of Children’s Technology Review and Daren Carstens of Carstens Studios.

For more information about Dust or Magic visit their website and wiki.

David Byrne sang about burning down the house and now it’s time for burning down the TV thanks to Miro, the open source video player.

Think TIVO for web, but without buying any hardware or software (sorry AppleTV). Think millions of programs packaged as pre-programmed channels, or search the web and make a channel with the video you like — Grateful Dead TV? TED Presentations? Knitting for Dachshunds? You got it. Finally, think open source and open format — Miro plays MPEG, Quicktime, AVI, H.264, Divx, Windows Media, Flash Video, and almost every other major video format. And those are only some of Miro’s features and specs.

But don’t take my word, go and download it (free, fast, stable for PC, Mac, Linux) and you’ll see why Miro vision for the future of web video is so compelling. Want to hack it? Download the source code too. Want to program and brand your own channel? Miro converts any media RSS feed into a channel you can put your name on. Once you search the web for the content you want, Miro displays an iTunes like listing with program details and links to download, save, organize, or share the video.

Where did Miro come from? It’s the core project of the Participatory Culture Foundation, a 501c3 non-profit based in Worcester, MA and founded in 2005 with a mission to build tools and services that give people more ways to engage in their culture.

Television is the most popular medium in our culture. But broadcast and cable TV has always been controlled by a small number of big corporations. We believe that the internet provides an opportunity to open television in ways that have never been possible before. Miro is designed to eliminate gatekeepers. Viewers can connect to any video provider that they want. This frees creators to use the video hosting setup that works best for them– whether they choose to self-publish or use a service. It’s the kind of openness that the internet allows and that we should all demand.

Lastly, special shout outs to Jen Simmons of Milkweed Media Design who talked up Miro in her presentation on web video at last weekend’s Wordcamp in New York, to Bill Sobel of NY:MIEG and to Bob Sokol at Sun who promoted and hosted the event.

Narrative story telling has been part of the the human experience since we told tales of the days hunt around the fire, about what it was like to “be there” when this or that event happened. From that oral tradition, we learned to write them in pictures, then glyphs, and a succession of written languages and media from stone to paper, to the celuloid that captured Peter Sellers’ performance as Chance in Hal Ashby’s Being There, to the electrons (all recycled, I assure you) that are making this blog post possible.

As PJ Haarsma’s Orbis, Scholastic’s Rick Riordan (39 Clues) and so many game designers before them have learned, video games are a narrative form too. But how are they different, what makes them unique, how can we leverage those unique strategies for entertainment, learning, propaganda… or to motivate students? The NY Times reports today that authors and libraries are starting to use video games to lure new readers:

When PJ Haarsma wrote his first book, a science fiction novel for pre-teenagers, he didn’t think just about how to describe Orbis, the planetary system where the story takes place. He also thought about how it should look and feel in a video game. [...] The online game that Mr. Haarsma designed not only extends the fictional world of the novel, it also allows readers to play in it. At the same time, Mr. Haarsma very calculatedly gave gamers who might not otherwise pick up a book a clear incentive to read: one way that players advance is by answering questions with information from the novel. Story continues here…

And in July, game designer Steve Gaynor pondered similar questions in a thoughtful essay on his blog Fullbright:

In my estimation every medium has its primary strength. Literature excels at exploring the internal (psychological, subjective) aspects of a character’s personal experiences and memories. Film excels at conveying narrative via a precisely authored sequence of meaningful moments in time. And video games excel at fostering the experience of being in a particular place via direct inhabitation of an autonomous agent.

Video games are able to render a place and put the player into it. The meaning of the experience arises from what’s contained within the bounds of the gameworld, and the range of possible interactions the player may perform there– the nouns and the verbs. Just like in real life, where we are and what we can do dictates our present, and our possible futures. Video games provide an alternative to both the where and the what of existence, resulting in simulated alternate life experiences.

It’s a powerful thing, to be able to visit another place, to drive the drama onscreen yourself– not to receive a personal account of someone else’s experiences, or observe events as a detached spectator. A modern video game level is a navigable construction of three-dimensional geometry, populated with art and interactivity to convincingly lend it an identity as a believable, inhabitable, living place. At their best, video games transmit to the player the experience of actually being there. Post continues here…

I think that’s the crux of what sets games apart: “Video games are able to render a place and put the player into it [and] transmit to the player the experience of actually being there.”

True, a written story does that too, but in a well designed video game the player seemingly controls the world, progressing through the game’s levels (chapters) according to the strategies, tactics and myriad descret decisions made along the way. In that way the story becomes the players own, and particularly for today’s digital natives, more personal and meaningful and impactful than listening or reading alone.

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.

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?