Augmented Reality

MIT Folks

I dig the terms light AR and heavy AR defining how much R is really added. WE are definatly trying to reuse as much of the physical world as possible in these games

The OAR platform is much for science process oriented than ARIS

Kurt Squire - Madison

Existing: clickers, ar, etc.
Not computers: small screen, input sux, poor storage
Do Well: portable, social, context
Approaching Ubiquity : They are becoming more common

Emerging Mobile Practices: Cocooning, GeoCaching, Flash Mobs, Citizen Journalism, Unsanctioned Info, Co presence like Daily Cos

Remediating of Place: Augmented, Leveraging Space, Students as Artifics

Like it or not, Kids are goingto be online. (What are we going to do?)

Principles:

• Collective Intelligence
• Designing a new solution FOR REAL. example: saving lake wingra. The students go a play a game about the green bush neighborhood, have a class time to redevelop a new city development plan, then had a resolution passed to have “green bush” day to tell the story of what happened there.

Reflection: Heck yeah. lets be designing our games to enable folks to change their world. Where do we start?

Zoo Games

Tensions: looking down at computer screen vs the roaring lion, not much time (in school), filed trips=day off mentality, need chaperones, better if free standing without prep/followup.

Prototype 1: Too much text (ESL students) , Too Many decision (cognitive load), Only one player has info

Prototype 2: Tutorial needed to be smoother

Comment: Mobile Documentation - Group in Amazon documented , NPR maps- like activity to understand space.

Madison AR Games

As high tech as things get, you are still sitting in front of a computer. Outside is a great place to create stories. You know, the place where our bodies actually are.

OAR Platform and ARIS

(Ohh snap: John just shared this parcore lookin game with me while I was taking notes)

Game Design Ideas

Big Games and Our Games

Patrick Lipo - Hidden Path Development

• Fear of player expectations
• Resources have no meaning
• ‘Stuff’ adds value
• Open world insanity (GTA is like $100M) Breadth in every direction.

So you need to know your “verbs”, “secondary verbs”, and “pillar values”

For example, primary verb is solving puzzles, secondary is managing money. Value placed on lightweight narrative structure to unlock puzzles.

I know he is saying that educational games are tempted to shove content into existing structures, but the example that you can never have the player solve a diff eq to continue is shortsighted. Its all about integration. If the player is doing engineering, the pencil/paper activity is completely in genre!

Interesting scope problem: Vegas. Players are thinking ‘per-room,’ clearing room after room, but then all of a sudden, one random character was not just part of the crowd. It caused the player to start thinking ‘per individual’ and didn’t work.

The big question is: What are the players going to take away after playing?

I’m curious how we can move our cryo design from the regular math gate into the building of an analysis tool based on experimentation - Modding the game (like Jim G talked about)

From Pure entertainment to Playful Learning

UBISOFT - Games for Everyone - Emile LIANG, Peter YANG

Three types of behaviors for our games:

• Have to learn
• Want to learn
• Enjoy Learning

Casual Gaming

Good: expanding the media horizon, challenges industry to think about what people really want, not dumbing everything down

Bad: no consensus, new goldrush so everyone is building and the quality is dropping (that doesn’t make sense to me, more developers is better in my mind. this is how we learn what quality is!)

Misconceptions: casual gaming is for girls, isn’t fun

Creating tension: “You don’t need the sound of chainsaws in the background” but instead give challenge while providing feedback on success for progression and achievement.

Tips:

• NAVER assume you know your audience
• People are not always looking for a ferarri
• Being assessable doesn’t mean treating your audience like a dummy.
• PLAYTEST PLAYTEST PLAYTEST

Games for Science

Tiger Sharks and 3d minigames

You have to love Dan, Dan and Alex of Filament Games In their demo of Uncharted Depths they are showing a bit of the scientific reasoning process that goes into understanding population densities of different animals. 

Field experiments are performed and sharks are collected, then you check out the contents of their stomaches and find out of if they are really eating all the baby seals. This data is stored like an inventory item and these are used to make a scientific argument (like Phoenix Wright). 

he complexity of these questions builds up to the final question: How to solve the problem of shark overpopulation. The model is tight, experiments and arguments, repeat. Though I would hate to see zero punctuation take a crack at it, this is one of the best examples of educational gaming I’ve seen to date.

I’m personally challenged on how my designs can integrate this notion of building a theory.

The space of education is changing

C. Ondrejka

Things are getting smaller faster better in every way. There are some trends that are a bit intersting:

• People are wearing tech
• The web is getting better (despite identit, offline access)
• Everything is connecting to PLACE

 What else can we collect to make data more interesting? Emotion…

For virtual worlds, its all about browsers and portable devices.

What do we use them for?

• Presence - Where are you, are you moving, etc
• Life Logging - Its comming! Should the default be to stream everything?
• How do we wanange multiple identities (second life, second life work, personal, etc)

But interfaces are the same! Mouse plus keyboard

There are a lot of things converging, should it be a feild? 

• Establish common vocab
• Preserve knowledge
• etc.

This whole thing is really encouraging. I’m seeing someone tell me that our work to utilize the portable devices is indeed interesting. Will ARIS be the gateway into this new field for our team? 

The Halversons

Redefinition of GLS society into participatory media experiences. 

Fan practice tries to retrace the primary activities (for example a baseball player trade), but fantasy games feed this back. This model of previous knowledge and reinterpreted primary actions combining into fantasy play can be reused for any data rich environment.

Mr Jim Gee

Linguistics, Education, Video Games.

We need to make a choice about paradigms. Many complex systems are interacting and biting us in the butt. We are on the cusp of this stuff being unsolvable (see book: plan b). Food, water, oil, etc, they are all interconnected.

21st century skills are all about thinking about complex systems.

Passion communities:

• recruit
• manage
• find solutions

The passion communities with (amateur knowledge) often come up with better solutions! So why are we leaving the hard stuff to politicians? There are passion communities around everything (sims, modding wow, etc) and have/create experts in that field who are very unlikely. Ex: the failure girl who learns photoshop at an expert level to design clothes for the sims and has 400 people downloading her designs.)

These people are PROSUMERS

Producing, but not for money. They get social status, control, fun

 Same girl, still no good at school, now moved into second life. When interviewed, she doesn’t want to be a fashion designer. She wants to work with computers because they give you power.

The future of education is not to design games, but game like systems. 

Let’s talk about Portal. The whole game has you running around in a bunch of labs using the portal gun, but the last phase puts you in a real world, with sno suggestions. You have to transfer to succeeded. The game wants to give you a tool that let’s you see the world in a new way. It let’s you see the (my word) AFFORDANCES OF THE KNOWLEDGE SYSTEM.

Empathy for a complex system.

Example: Modding - Experts theorizing their play and building a tool to support that theory. Better than the designers!

Portable Augmented Reality

I am not alone in the dream to see portable internet connected devices change the way we interact with our world. This is a fantastic example of some folks who have brought strong AR to a smaller screen.

3rd Spaces, Games and Online Learning Community

This afternoon I attended the third (or possibly forth) ENGAGE lunch this semester. At these lunches we gather the faculty that have received grants to build games with our group as well as all the ENGAGE support staff. Demos are done, design challenges are discussed and sometimes small talks are done by one of our staff or an outside voice. Today the main speaker was Constance Steinkuehler.

There were a couple of interesting topics that came up in her presentation about social learning spaces that are manifested in video games. The thing that most inspired me was the discussion about 3rd Spaces.

3rd Spaces are informal social gathering grounds that are not work or home (1st and 2nd spaces). A number of years back, the catacombs coffee shop on Library mall was a place like this to me. I would drop in between classes and chat with people I knew as well as have chit chat with people I didn’t know at all. These days, I’m not quite sure if I frequent a place that falls in this category.

Constance’s stance was that MMOGs are a third space in our contemporary culture. In games like WoW, players gather together and meet one another. They play, chat, learn and teach in a space outside of home, school or work. Meaningful dialog and relationships occur here, identity is formed here, people find community here, all despite the fact that it is taking place on a computer monitor.

One of the things I have been picking up on throughout my academic work is that a growing amount of people believe that the university as we know it is a pretty lousy place to learn. For many, a class is simply a means to an end, a way to fulfill some requirement for a degree. Is it even possible to learn something you don’t care about? In addition, students are often put in relational silos in each of their classes, working alone except for rarely utilized office hours. Collaboration is often minimal, while individual reading, listening and homework dominate the time spent for a class. Content is decontextualized from meaningful practice or a community. Courses are the ruling organizational unit above all else and then they dissolve every 16 weeks. One thing I’m sure of: Things learned outside of practice, interest or community fade away at a blistering pace.

I for one have been fascinated by the concept of an online learning community. A community of this sort, say a group of users from all over the world that participate in fandom or political discourse, organizes itself around an interesting common trait, exchanging dialog and relationship in a technology mediated format. What I see today is that whether it be video gaming, digg, or your friend list on facebook, these 3rd spaces play a large part in our education. We may even learn more about what we really think the universe is like in these informal environments than anywhere else.

I do.

In these separate spaces, the rules change. The awkward become leaders and the powerful become noobs. It doesn’t matter that you have a PhD or make a lot of money. The effects of this equalizing are likely impossible to measure and I’m sure the effects are not always positive. However, the interactions that take place give us things to consider as we think about the teaching and learning processes that we do facilitate in our traditional courses.

That all said, I feel like I have one more reason to explore the development of games in context of the class. While the university structure is too mammoth to change from the top down, I can at least allow the benefits of informal learning, 3rd spaces, fun and community to make their way into the individual courses I work with. We might even succeed in changing our own view of education along the way and have a good time doing it together.

What is “real” conversation anyway?

For the last few months I have been meeting exclusively in IM sessions for my class on online learning theory. Every wednesday, we all make sure to log in to a javascript based chat window in a moodle system to discuss the readings and continue the conversation that has been taking place inside of a few discussion forums.

This last two weeks, I was the designated facilitator for the class and we were concentrating on articles that related to the use of WIKIs for collaborative knowledge construction. In addition, we were trying to establish the purpose and scope of an actual wiki site were will build with the rest of the semester that could possibly be published.

The first time I “led” a synchronous discussion with 9 or so folks, it didn’t go all that well. The second time was even more stressful. As I would throw out questions to the chat, they always seemed a bit off topic. When we would ask questions like: what should the topic be? A swarm of ideas would come in with very little real conversation taking place (IMHO). For the last 15 minutes of the chat I found myself wanting to get a smaller group face to face, where I would be much more comfortable.

Now the funny thing is that we did meet face to face and a wonderful discussion arose. I had a conversation with one of the students that was also struggling with hte format. We were wondering if it was even possible to study online tools while only living “inside” of them. We both felt that the quality of the discourse that happens when people are in the same room was somehow more natural and productive. We also expressed frustration with the lack of non verbal conversation that is provided by gesture and tone during a conversation when you can both see and hear someone while they are talking.

These concerns were raised in our face to face time and I was surprised that few of the other students couldn’t disagree more. On student in particular spends quite a bit of time online. I believe she even made the statement that she actually prefers text chat over f2f because it moves along faster (more conversations at once), it cant be reviewed (scrolling up in the chat window) and so forth.

My sister in law also seems to agree. She has friends all over the world that she chats with using IM on a dialy basis. For a time, I would even say that she spent more time online chatting than in “real” conversation.

IM style chat does have a number of advantages:

It is non-geographical

It records the conversation

It works wonderfully when you want to include text/links/images

My question is therefore, can a person’s communication skills improve over this medium so they can communicate non-verbally? The evidence of communication device history seems to see so. Have you ever seen someone who is stil getting used to the idea of a telephone? I know that is rare these days, but I know that for people that saw this technology come into use after they had already learned how to communicate, it was a real adjustment. Closer to home, I still encounter people that don’t understand the social norms of email. It is as though they are writing letters with a fountain pen that will be carried by horse!

In a conversation I had with a group over at Wisconsin Public TV, one participant kept saying that despite the new technology, we all need to learn how to work in “real” conversation. So I asked, what is real conversation anyway? Why is face to face any more real than any other format?

I am beginning to understand that each mode of communication requires the development of skills in the use of that mode.

The scary part is that you might be an expert on the podium talking to thousands, but unable to hold a decent diner conversation.

As McLuhan said, new media not only changes how we communicate, but it changes us as well.

Social Agendas in Education

This week my online learning class read a number of papers that addressed the idea of decentralized organizations, social agendas and the group theory that emerges.

I once had a conversation with an educator, Katherine Dang, about the consequences that result from schools becoming political. In summery, her view is that this is a dangerous endevour. For starters, most of us have realized by now that politics has the ability to politicize everything around itself. When a school becomes the platform for political views, the students can become indoctrinated without knowing. They may begin voicing the positions of the local school board as their own, simply because it is the only opinion they have every heard. The fact of the matter is that many of the current political topics such as health care, abortion and Iraq do not have simple answers. That is exactly why they are debated. However when the teacher or school takes a stance these options are perceived as fact. When the same person who teaches 2+2=4 begins embedding their views about religion, economics, etc. the students will naturally be swayed.

I’m not sure why this frightens me so. I guess I’m scared that government makes a lousy moral compass. I fear that the pursuit of political correctness might not lead our children in the best way, science may not contain all the answers, and that the loudest voices in politics may not be the wisest.

Case in point: I was with some 7th grade girls this summer who were doing an after-school program with my wife, Sarah. We had about 20 wonderful young ladies over for a BBQ at our house to celebrate the closing of the program where they learned about some of the “old arts” of handmade goods. During the night, some of the girls were talking about how they had recently had a day of silence to honor the closet homosexuals among them that were forced to remain silent about their sexual orientation in school. The girls explained this topic to me with convincing emotion, using well crafted sentences and examples that obviously did not come from their own reasoning. I listened and asked them questions, concluding that for most of these girls, sex was about the last thing on their minds. So why is it that they had already formed views on paticular sexual issues?

I know this is a complicated subject. That is why the last person I would like to have involved is a teacher that will only know one of these girls as a single student in a single class period of a single year. The real investment of the teacher to deal personally with any of them is just too shallow to discuss topics as important as these. I love that the school has taken it upon themselves to promote equality and the value of all people, but when does it simply become political?

In the worse case, the government will celebrate the knowledge of humankind to the point of being not only the end but the means to all things. The current state of science will become the absolute truth in all things and individuals will exist solely to serve the state. My time visiting auschwitz in Germany and the killing fields of Cambodia have taught me that politics do not always hold the answer.

So how do we give to our student the best of what we have without creating a feedback loop of knowledge that may backfire?

Who is able to aid in teaching how to reason about moral dilemmas when we all have different opinions?

Whose epistemology will win when the state is the source of moral reasoning?

I’m starting to think that it would have been better just to talk about decentralized organization theory.

Progress in Online Learning

This week I had three readings about Activity Theory from Wolf-Michael Roth, Bonnie A. Nardi and Sasha Barab. The theory has its original roots in Karl Marx and as you can see from the Wikipedia article, many of it’s roots seem to be in Moscow.

The theory as applied by the mentioned authors allows for a framework of analyzing the nature of actions within a community of focus, such as an online learning community. Everyone seems to agree that there are three AT components: subjects, objects and tools. Sasha was able to use these interactions to tune an online collaboration website for teachers and Nardi adds the element of passion to ask the question of why.

I also have a few observations from the student side about online learning that I would like to mention:

Online learning takes more time that you think. To really participate in the asynchronous discussion, you have to read the incoming messages as they are happening and respond right then. For the last two weeks, I have waitied for a scheduled time, read all the posts and made a few replies. I can tell that I am missing something by using this approach.

Synchronous Chats benefit greatly from ground rules. This week’s chat was much easier to follow simply because we had a bit of structure (we knew what the main topic of the chat was going to be) and some conventions such as a trailing “…” meant that more text is coming from someone so wait before typing something new.

Emerging Media Seminar

This week I spent six hours with the producers and designers at WPT facilitating for a discussion about some of the trends in media. We walked through subjects such as:

Audio/Video Formats and DRM

Blogs

WIKIs

Social Networks

Tagging and Social Bookmarking

Video Games as New Media

Next time around I hope to spend more time on games and the upcoming trends like mashups, portable media devices, crowdsourcing, etc.

Here is the PDF of the presentation if you are interested.