Kickers

Regrettably, kicking feeds and ideas seems to have distracted many blogs I used to read. I wonder how many bloggers now kick content to micro-feeds – and we are becoming less engaged with the thoughts and minds of those people? The feed runs too fast. I have no idea what Kevin Jarrett is thinking anymore … unless he blogs about it.

I was reading some blog post with a list – telling people what to do and not what to do. I’m never sure what to do. I’m still a kicker, but much less so than a few years ago. Today, I kick most feeds and ideas to Posterous – and usually make no effort to substantiate them in my blog. Blame iPhone for that.

I leave the biggest kicks to Mashable et al, who have professional-kickers.

Most of the people I engage with though blogs and communities would not build a school system anything like the one they are working in — they are talking about a mass-movement away from that — where teaching and learning is important — but in-between is up for grabs. They see a more than possible future of learning that does not require critical mass adoption by current teacher-volunteers at all.

Perhaps I’m just tuned into dystopia, but I am sure today’s education system and exams will not create any utopia for my kids — who are in public school along with 75% of the rest of Australia’s future — the ones that ultimately matter to me most … mmm, spiky thoughts. Yet we seems to orbit the same issues and drag in overseas kickers who can’t realistically tackle any local issues — which is where we need to be in 2010.

I’m not going to get all list-making about it — as there is a place for that stuff– as everyone needs an upstream , however I’m seeing a decline in Australian blogging … and an increase in kicking … not good.

Web2.0 moved on; kicking to new channels; demanding new playgrounds — and some are eating off the same meal – using their blog to push what people into private spaces – where they kick content to a user-pays audience. What do you read that makes you think again or try something new — pushes you out your comfy chair … or have you opted to kick to Twitter and Facebook and quit blogging? I’d love to find out … what Australian bloggers are sending out new smoke?

Augmented Reality Toys

This post kind of follows the last few and looks at why TOYS will create digital-emigrants from 2D learning, before you can say podcast. The trends in creating online virtual worlds around product and game is stepping up, and will see kids stepping out of using laptops and desktops …

The traveling STAR WARS exhibition had an interactive table, where with a few crude black and white shaped cards, you could build a moisture farm using augmented reality.

These are toys you will be buying. Free software online and a web-cam. Given that all consoles can deal with this and so can most laptops – even phones – you will be using this technology sooner than later.

This short demo from James Cameron’s movie Avatar – shows this at a new level. Although the movie is going to be just that – a passive movie, it is interesting to see how toys and peripheral materials are increasingly focused on mashing physical objects with virtual ones. There are a number of examples of people messing with cameras and applications (check this Transformers home made one) or an academic project to see what people are doing. but this is the first one I’ve seen which has obviously been developed around what will be a big-commercial-movie. This interaction, blending real with virtual is already happening with things like PS2 Eye-Toy. But objects are now beginning to appear in the middle. Not just camera sees person and visa versa, but camera recognises object and persons interaction with it. – That makes it an assessment tool as well as a learning tool.

With digital camera’s already fitted with projectors — 3M mini-projectors on Amazon — and POV cameras — it’s significant that a major movie/game enterprise starts to fund the mashing of these together in commercial ways. Think it’s hard teaching with an iPod – imagine what the science lab will look like in a decades time – when this kind of thing is old-hat and been in the lounge room since they were pre-schoolers.

The point is that much of the driving forces that power the web itself are more interested in escaping the small screen. While we live in a time where hyper-connected-social-twittering is the new cheese … it is likely that the generation now playing GT5 on PS3 will see much of Web2.0 as ‘historical’ much like dial-up.

While adults might discuss the decline of traditional media trending down and to the right – it is facile to think that one is simply replacing the other. Statistically, youth-online is not flocking to 2D spaces – and FB has discovered games are it’s killer app, not comment walls.

Yet, virtual worlds and games – are still regarded as less important than the new-standards – and god knows, they are hard enough to access in public schools.

If you have 10 minutes – watch this amazing video story  ‘world builder‘. Especially if you are not yet seeing what ‘virtual worlds are for’.

Designed for game, build for real

I spent some time looking around concept sites today — looking for an idea. I need some object that two characters I’m messing about with might use to leave messages. . Just about everyone who is or will be an industrial designer is blogging and developing highly rendered concepts online, so it’s not hard to fly though hundreds of ideas.

From mobile phones to cars, household items – you name it – there are highly talented people doing it. During my travels, I noticed this video – where a car — designed for a game – has been put into real life. There was a time Industrial Design students sketched out ideas with Pantone Markers — today they are building cars in games, racing them and creating movies from their virtual toys. This is a great video to make the point about how easily influential 3D has become in the development of — well everything.

Amazing tech or Amazing environments?

I read Betch’s post about being AMAZING – or rather what is AMAZING technology. He observed …

The teacher was all effusive, gushed about the Ning’s “amazing” features and wanting to show the students all the “amazing” things it could do… “Look! You can use it to leave messages for each other!”, she said excitedly.

So what is AMAZING? I have to say STORYTELLING and writing. But it means getting out the comfy chair again.

Increasingly virtual worlds and games offer tools that are more engaging than those Chris mentions — and even pre-schoolers are using them. Transmedia is now the norm in publishing. You can’t seriously leave the reader – just a reader. They want to participate. Check out http://fairygodmotheracademy.com/ for a nice example of this in action.

STORYTELLING and more specifically — digital narrative — plays out in the lives of young people though their use of consoles and games. The development of the story, the realisation through images, sounds and immersion in ‘open’ worlds will be more familiar to kids than anything else.

Call of Duty – $3billion dollar game — a significant reason for games/entertainment to find increasing synergies between telling stories and being immersed in stories. They are skipping past he blogs and portals — and putting their audience in world, not on the web. Developers have learned that we don’t just want to play — we want to connect, share and customise ourselves and the environment.

Sony PS3 Little Big Planet is about to offer online creation and other games such as Spore have already discovered that creating a character is more engaging that just choosing one and even separated the character tools from the game itself. Pre-schoolers love to create Mii’s as much as play the Wii – and no MMO would dare show itself unless you could dress up your avatar.

What has this got to do with school? — Literacy. We like to create and visualise outside of the reading. We want to combine characterisation with avatars and we want to experience the worlds and situations that we create. This is what made Peggy Sheehy’s ‘To Kill a Mockingbird” sim on the Teen Grid so brilliant – way ahead of its time – kids could be part of the book, not just observers.

Schools right now have multiple options to use virtual worlds. The AU RRP of PS3 is under $500 — and of course will play DVDs — so why not replace the DVD player with a console? OSGrid, HyperGrid, ReactionGrid all offer affordable, reliable and safe places for students to create content.

Second Life has well established places to gain teacher inspiration — and the fundamentals of writing are no secret online. So why not use them? Here are two photos from Second Life – what story could you build around these? – Of course! – BUT you have to be in world to take the shot — and that seems outside of what even the most Webby teachers like to do.

I had the good fortune to spend an evening with Dr Larry Johnson, CEO of NMC this week following his trip to VITTA. We talked about the Teen Grid and a lot about Open Grids. At VITTA he was keynoting about the Horizon report. He made several points about Second Life — not least that the ideas founded in virtual worlds are more important that the world itself, saying that if Second Life closed tomorrow, they it would not matter to NMC — Second Life is the now technology which is why they use it to create ideas and generate new directions for learning.

It seems a fundamental issue that Australian attitude among administrators and IT managers is to block the use of virtual worlds, even on a small scale. From a story creation, literacy viewpoint they offer far more than adding Google’d images on a powerpoint blah. But teachers don’t spend time in them, don’t explore them and don’t understand sufficiently that the decline of passive media online is being amplified by games and virtual worlds – it is not blogs and wikis that drive out portals exclusively — it is the multi-billion dollars in games and the millions of people immersed in their story.

Yet, Second Life and Game remain something missing from the PLN – get connected slide-decks that we see presented at conferences. Twitter, FB, Ning et al – but not Blue Mars or MetaPlace, not even Second Life.

Kids don’t need Twitter — they have MSN and Mobile Phones. They need immersive, motivating environments. We need to recognise that teaching story telling and literacy need to happen ‘in world’ – and not just on Ning — that consoles are every bit as valid in class as a DVD. Chris has hit on a big issue. We should be AMAZING when it comes to using technology with students for engagement, assessment, inclusion and most of all – learning to be creative, critical thinkers.

I’ll be running some classes in-world next year via Jokaydia on using Second Life in English … via Second Classroom. If you are interested let me know.

Edublog Nominations

It’s that time of year – Edublog nominations … which I think is pretty important stuff. I’m also feeling a bit challenged this year, as some of the edu-stuff I read isn’t technically Edu (yet) and represents a tiny part of what sits in my reader, or on my friends list in virtual worlds these days, but never the less … the list must be written.

Best individual blog
Teach Paperless – http://teachpaperless.blogspot.com/ the guy just has Horde attitude, kids and burts bubbles with his lateral thinking

Best individual tweeter
@middleclassgirl - never a dull moment and free writing

Best group blog
http://center4edupunx.ning.com/ – But I guess Classroom2.0 will win as it’s just MASSIVE, never the less, massive ideas exist beyond the newbie garden – dangerous ideas live here.

Best new blog
http://kellimcgraw.wordpress.com – New to me at least – love the conversation that Kelli generates for Australian Educators

Best class blog
http://ecsshoutouts.shoutem.com/ – You might not see inside, but trust me – Mr A connects kids to the real world with his amazing micro-blog.

Best student blog
http://tkak.wordpress.com/ – Old student of mine I guess Year 10, but a collaborator still – check his first and last posts – that is what communication does in a classroom

Best resource sharing blog
No idea is that called Twitter?

Most influential blog post
http://www.massively.com/2008/02/11/why-mainstream-media-hates-the-internet-games-mmos-and-you – Tateru Nino writes some great stuff – I know this is 2008 – but it takes a while for people to catch up to gamer-blogs.

Most influential tweet / series of tweets / tweet based discussion
What? – Mark Pesce’s endless verbage around himself on New Inventors probably.

Best teacher blog
http://darcymoore.net/ – Because Darcy is dragging admins and execs into the light.

Best librarian / library blog
http://heyjude.wordpress.com – THE library blog and centre of much rebellion

Best educational tech support blog
http://techticker.net/ – Mike Bogle – crazy mixed up Canadian, American, Australian who is resiting the Borg. He puts a lot of the tech-issues in professional dev into focus for me, but it’s not nuts and bolts stuff – it’s interpreting edtech – which is more important to me.

Best elearning / corporate education blog
http://www.edutopia.com – Betty and Suzie ROCK.

Best educational use of audio / Best educational use of video / visual
Kerry Johnson – as without Kerry bugger all audio or video would leave most decent Education Events in Australia. I know that’s not spirit of the category, but I don’t care, anyone can make a podcast – Kerry can teach you how and run a live event to the planet at the same time. Without Kerry – Ed Au would be just another wordpress blog. Someone should make her the CEO if they were smart. I would.

Best educational wiki
http://jokaydia.wikispaces.com – so much so Linden drones felt it out did them on too many levels.

Best educational use of a social networking service
http://secondclassroom.ning.com – okay, It’s part me – but hell we cracked 250 members this year around game and virtual worlds! So well done everyone! – Of course Ning is the portal, the worlds live beneath … on Reaction Grid, Quest Altantis, Second Life and World of Warcraft … do they could as social networking too?

Best educational use of a virtual world
Virtual Macbeth – Angela Thomas – No question. The design is amazing; the concept original and the execution floorless – this is exactly what Unis should be doing.

Lifetime achievement
Peggy Sheehy – though she might kill me. Peggy is without doubt an elite punk — amazingly generous, supportive and insightful – I am so pleased my 8 year old plays Warcraft with her.

There a stack of blogs and things that DON’T fit into these … all the people in Reaction Grid, Hyper Grid, Unity, Indie Games, story writing, programming … blah … and to all of those people I say THANK YOU. I’m really noticing this year how many people I can’t nominate – but have given me so much help and support.

Best Association — something that we MUST work on in Australia — HTAV. Events this year have been world class.
Most underachieving use of all of the above – The Department of Education and Training NSW. Who still can’t see the tree for the Wood so to speak.

Hoping to nominate a NSW DET project next year! – Roger?

Keep looking for the edge.

For Sale: TV

Prior to Web2.0, we were talking about being ’student centric’ by abandoning the idea of pouring content into cognitive apprentices. That didn’t happen en-mass and today it is almost impossible not to challenge people’s teaching philosophy as soon as technology becomes a two-way interaction. It is a spikey topic — communication. The C used to be the study of; now it is the use of Communication.

Is your school allowing facebook and IM in class or giving detentions for it. Is the mobile on or off.?

There is no ICT unless there is communication. More importantly community is not built without communication between members – the first tenant needed online. Asking that question will usually lead to folded arms and grim faces in many professional development situations. If you do use IM, Twitter etc then the old classroom environment seems ugly. Both situations cause friction with people and policy.

The barriers to change: fear; uncertainty; denial are fed by old media tales nightly on TV. Few go home to learn, play and explore – almost all watch TV.  We can’t treat educational reform the way modernists tried to reform society though brutal architecture. It has to be pretty – and that is what attracts kids to online. TV is pretty boring – but IM, Social Games and Virtual Worlds bring edgeless opportunity. TV cannot ever provide the most important reason we use social media – to strengthen friendships and model social behavior. School as to stop acting like TV.

 

Churn, Sink and Drift – 21C Outcomes

Online communities – are now a  culture or counter-culture depending on your ideology. Community, culture, churn, sift and drift are the reagents of motivation and at the center of learning anything online.

Communities need culture to operate. Anyone talking about communities in an online world, cannot dismiss its cultural influences. This is however a ver spikey idea – especially to people who prefer the world the way as it was.  Big communities are more robust. In times of stress, they spin off into smaller ones rather than shattering. They are easy for newcomers to join, so you spend less time recruiting as there’s always room for one more. They are very attractive to socializers who seem to prefer their inclusive feel. Small communities are fast to develop, the community levels faster (I think there are 4 stages to community: communication, interest, practice and collective action). Small communities are more personal-friendly to newcomers. They tend to be more diverse in their interests and are far more exclusive. Explorers, risk takers and innovators prefer them.

They all suffer from churn, sink and drift.

Churn is the rate people leave. The stronger the community, the less churn. (schools auto-churn students every year). Most of the churn happens in the newcomer days: It’s too hard, I don’t have time, it’s not me etc., A good way to manage churn rates is to offer a trial (as in 10 days game play for nothing). This acts as safety value to ensure the community is not determined by the churn. The community does not want people who can’t strengthen it and are willing for give up revenue and size for this. Much of education is fixated on cost and size, so actually promotes churn. Education is built to churn by offering pilots and taster communities, most of which fail when the community is forced to scale to reach enterprise level. We go from a few classrooms to a few schools to a policy as enforcement. The churn point.

Sink is all about why people engage. Why people sink time and intellectual investment into learning or playing online. It is why people want to use a virtual world – or why they want to learn from YouTube. Drift is why they stop using it, or stop being interested. Community is the hook that pulls people into Educational Technology and what keeps them there. Immersion is what teachers and leaders need to be concerned with. It is rare for a politician to talk about immersing teachers in a culture of … as they have no real access to communities that do – they are not buraucrats.

The strategy of adding more hardware, more tools, more resources, more policy does not promote community of immersion. It promotes churn (I tried, and didn’t like), sink (I wanted to do it, but it was blocked) and drift (I have been using some technology, but that now I’m told its old hat).  I think that when you get beyond around 250 members of a community – you will see sub-groups forming with their own sub interests – leading and coordinating those is a whole new level. In EdTech communities; the laws of churn, sink and drift determine everything.

This is why we see teachers churning out the classrooms, sinking thousands of hours into online communities nand drifing away from the ideology and philosphies that were installed in them as pre-teachers. We love our small communities – as we reach that level of participation and action quicky (classrooms, small groups etc) and use the big communities (Twitter, Facebook, Blogs) to locate them.

These communities operate at an almost intutitive level, they defend, promote, create and help constantly, the best ones do it for free and never attempt to rule the members but enable them. Second Classroom reached 250 members this week. A virtual community that now has to level up if it is going to become a big strong one.

 

 

 

 

 

Communities don’t just happen

There is much written about communities, especially around students. Seth Godin uses the ‘tribe’ metaphor and says ‘we need you to lead us‘. I wonder if leadership plays out differently where leader is to a greater or lesser degree, a designer or the game maker, not your hierarchical superior.  If we are seeking Godin’s view of leadership, is education trying to turn gas into a solid.

There are some tenants needed for effective community. MMOs, Virtual Worlds and Open Source more often demonstrate understanding that to work members/players must have a shared pool of knowledge. They must follow and abide by common practices. They must have a history (either self-evolved, or presented though a back-story). Members must share a vision or mission goal for the whole communities future. Members must work together on projects so that the community to creates strong bonds between groups and individuals. They must also be able to negotiate outcomes.

A strong community is desirable over a collection of people using a portal, because members are less likely to want to break the bonds made between them. Portals have users, who have no bonds. To the portal makers, when the level of community-friendlyness extends to attempt to undermine the goal – it’s a warning sign, that there is trouble. Messenger or Twitter  in schools for example undermines a weak community – but strengthens a strong one.  See Shelly’s post about Latin Tests on Twitter and Laurel Papworth on banning social media in schools. Please don’t yell ‘duty of care’ … as clearly public education policy is medieval  in comparison to private and Catholic on this – BOTH have the same legal obligations.

There are levels in which a ‘community’ must pass in order to succeed. Leadership requires a specific design, revealed to members as they pass through these levels – but is always adaptive to it’s members needs. Leaders do get lucky from time to time – but also unlucky when things fall over or fail to work as planned. In a weak community, it shatters all momentum but in a strong one members will accept a bad day on the grid, lose a game or not get that code to run … a strong community rallies where as a weak one stumbles.

Strong community cannot be built though artificial means. Unless you have a leader you want to follow and who’s design you believe in – you don’t join. No one wants to join a crap community. Consider how easily many newcomers to technology give up (the reluctance problem) when leadership is less than compelling. We don’t believe, therefore look for the exit.

In Halo, we get killed, in Second Life, we all get logged out and in Open Source, things crash – but we try again, we learn from it, and make it better next time.

These levels probably have shades of gray, but I see them like this – and I’m sure you can swap out the examples).

1. community of communication (twitter, messenger, facebook, myspace, bebo, workmail)
   
2. community of interest (nings, wikis, games, forums, second life)
   
3. community of practice (collabatoriums – sourceforge, indie games)
   
4. community of commitment (advocacy, guilds, networks)
   

Any group which gets to the last level here is a force to be reckoned with. There is an almost spiritual bond between it’s members – who both advocate, maintain and defend it. The Church is a great example. They have the community thing down to a fine art, but the Minister for Edumaction – I don’t think so. So we are left with using policy to force group creation. Policy is supposed to protect the organisation and members but does not create community. When members cannot succeed or operate without being in the group, they never become a strong community as the policy is the bubble that defines the operational limits, regardless of the groups increasing abilities and interests.

We can’t replicate what we see happening in conference lounges between networked friends or in Warcraft inside systems defined by policies designed to prevent it. Open Source for example didn’t start with a policy but and idea and people who rallied around it to form community. We can’t realistically expect a ‘revolution’ because Rudd wrote a policy. We can expect compliance and performance pressures.

A great community is one which is communicating and working intuitively on their need to strengthen and defend members and values, as well as achieve operational and strategic goals. There are thousands of these online today. People who are  not just saying they believe – but truly believing. From Car Audio to Steam Punk Photography, there’s a community for everyone and an opportunity for everyone to make a new one. It stands to reason that there is increasing opportunity to learn in places that didn’t exist a decade ago.

Seth Godin calls these people ‘true fans’. How many of them are there in your work place? … or do you have people determined to prevent it – fearing some perceived loss? Culture, ideology, philosophy and many more behavioral intelligences play a much greater role in adoption that skills in how to use a computer. Participation in groups at the higher levels is entirely voluntary, so of course will join communities of their choosing, not their employers. We simply don’t hang out in the employers portals in the same way students won’t hang out in our creepy treehouse. Level 1 and 2 you can make me do, level 3 and 4 is up to me.

Communities, like game players, need to learn to level up. Players in MMOs or communities in Second Life such as Caledon operate at the higher levels. Members have the skills, bonds and committments to continually strengthen the group performance for as long as they choose to voluneer.  Leaders in these spaces are able to design for strong community from the outset. This is the missing ingredient in many districts, administrations and patriarchies – they don’t know how to do it. Its not in the MBA, wasn’t in the Masters and probably not the subject of their PhD. Anyone who is talking about building communities can’t be in it for the money, the power or the glory in my view. They are in it because they want to be, and that they want to participate in ways that the leaders have designed. Open Source is perhaps the best example of this leadership and community. Not using it in schools, locks students out of a culture that has tremendous value for them and society.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The learning dilemma

Wikitree

As if there was any doubt that information is increasingly heading into the Z dimension, Wikitree has gone open source – in response to a need to grow (pun) the solution. Wikitree is a 3D-Wiki plug-in on the virtual world platform, Second Life. Its a wiki, but creates the canopy of leaves represent the information, and versions of it.

Now imagine information is not in fact limited to letters, video, sound or images – but has three dimensions. Let me expand.

This is a Wikipedia page on a Spanish Galleon. I am sure with a little Google skill you can find a video or even a 3D render of one too. In wikitree, there would be a Spanish Galleon. You can rez it, move it, walk around it. With a little more imagination, the galleon is a fleet and the fleet becomes an Armada. Wikitree changes the dynamics of information because the things we want to describe and know about are multi-dimensional and spacial. But it’s not just a rezzer. You can vote, add, comment and do all the connected stuff that we love about wikis in the browser.

Look past the Second Life platform itself and picture this ability in high end game engines that already exist in MMOs and consoles. Imagine what happens when Porsche start releasing 3D information and you can take their prototypes around the track. Imagine when the school wiki – allows you to experience the syllabus in three dimensions.

Wikis are very powerful ways to create, share and store information – Wikitree is a further signal that what is currently in the browser will continue to be augmented by that pesky Z dimension. Perhaps most interesting to me is that it is considered architecture – not ‘media’.