According to Seth Priebatsch the Princeton drop-out who calls himself the Chief Ninja at SCVNGR, the last decade was the social decade. It was all about connections. "We took all the digital connections to our friends, to our families to our colleagues, we digitized them and we put them online. The framework for that social layer is facebook and it is built."
The next decade he says will be about the Game Layer. It will be about influence and there will be no set foundations. It will influence where we go and what we do. It's only just begun but we all will be involved so we should think about how it will be built.
He talked about 5 big problems that the game layer could help solve. The first problem and the one most interesting to me is of course school.
"School is a game," says Priebatsch but it's a poorly designed one that is broken. But school is a near perfect ecosystem because it has motivated players, challenges, rewards, rules, allies, enemies, levels, appointment dynamics, countdowns and incentives and disincentives. The two problems with the game of school are engagement and cheating. Students show up late, don't do their work. Lack of engagement is caused by a broken grading system. As for cheating, Priebatsch says it's a standard game mechanic.
What school has created, he says, is the "Moral Hazard of Gameplay." It has replaced the real reward which is learning for learning sake with arbitrary letters causing people to view the real reward -learning for learning sake- as a chore. Grades fail as rewards because they are just levels, and status; the problem is they are a game mechanic where you can loose. You can go from an A to an F on a bad day. He suggests focusing on the positive and progressing only up. As you do progressive challenges you level up and focus on the end result.
For the second problem cheating, he showed a student filling out a scantron form with cell phone open. The problem with the picture isn't the phone it was just that it wasn't an Android phone and the screen wasn't big enough. The cheating results in a disincentive- if you get caught you fail; but if you don't get caught, you win. He talks about how cheating at Princeton was stopped by changing the game. Princeton holds tests with no teacher, no admin no oversight but gives two rules: students write the honor code and agree that complicity is a crime. The shift changes the game says Priebatch, it puts the students in the role of the enforcers.
If one took in every session about games at SXSW, one might conclude that the Gamification of everything is nothing less than the second coming. I have to say, I enjoyed many of the sessions on games and their potential but I certainly wasn't ready to go as far a one gentleman and the herd of others in the sessionLearning 2025: School is out Forever, who declared after working in groups that the number one way to fix school was through games. Really? Nothing to do with crazy numbers of standardized tests in US schools, underfunding, or teacher's values linked to standardized test results? It seemed to me that group had drunk the Kool-aid, just saying.
To me it goes to show that if you expose a bunch of people to a bunch of sessions on one thing, they all start to see that thing as the solution even if they are a bunch of seasoned educators. So I was really happy to attend the session Cheaper, Better, Faster: Can Casual Games Save Education? and especially happy to hear Scot Osterweil, Creative Director Education Arcade at MIT say that not all games are good, even some that portray themselves as educational, and that it was time to separate the hype from what is real.
Osterweil talked about how play and games are natural to children as they construct their own vision of the world. What games and play provide is the 5 Freedoms:
The Freedom to Experiment
The Freedom to Fail
The Freedom to Fashion Identities- You can understand your own identity and"try on" other people
The Freedom of Effort- You can go full tilt playing and then rest at will
The Freedom of Interpretation-Each person has his/her own unique interpretation
A game player has her/his own personal motivation. The key to creating educational games is channeling play into meaningful activities. Osterweil says that instead of just being "candy" a game can be a "gourmet" meal.
And if you look at the type of games coming out of the Education Arcade at MIT, you can see the gourmet! Vanished is a joint effort of MIT Education Arcade and the Smithsonian Institute. They invite kids to log on and discover clues to unravel mysteries. It's an online/offline interactive event over 8 weeks where kids collaborate and race against time to save the world from environmental disaster.
And then there are the Augmented Reality Games from MIT
According to Jane McGonigal, author of Reality is Broken-Why Games Make us Better, humans invest 3 billion hours a week playing online games. In her SXSW talk McGonigal spoke about the common belief that time playing games is wasted and unproductive. For McGonigal playing games is productive and we need to increase the amount of time we play games to solve the world's problems. Using Seligman's definition of productivity-PERMA: Positive Emotion, Engagement, creating stronger Relationships, producing more Meaning to be of service to a larger goal and a sense of Accomplishment- she made a case that games are not a waste of time --they work well creating self motivation and a sense of accomplishment.
The problem is not with games but rather reality-it's broken. Reality does not provide the kind of motivation that games do. What real world problems need is to offer the same addictiveness, sense of success, happiness and productivity that games provide. Instead of complaining about wasted time she says we should "repackage real problems."
As a example, she talked about Evoke the 2010 game she created along with the World Bank Institute. The Evoke project is a ten-week game that hopes to change the world. The social network game's goal is to empower people to come up with creative solutions to the world's most urgent social problems and to teach young people how to start their own social enterprises.
In the 10 week 2010 pilot, 20,000 students from 130 countries got involved creating 51 real companies around the world funded by global giving. Top players earned online mentorships with social innovators and world business leaders, seed funding and scholarships.
Now that's a productive game!
Hear Jane McGonigal at SXSW here or watch her TED Talk below
Most of us have seen the Interactive Viral video "Hunter Shoots a Bear." In the video you get to choose whether the hunter shoots the bear, and then you have a choice to choose an alternate ending. It's an ad of course for the product Tipp-Ex. If you haven't seen it, have a look below.
The way it moves from YouTube video to YouTube video is through the use of the annotations tool that provides a link to the next video. The SXSW session Decision Trees: YouTube's New Breed of Interactive Storytellers by Marc Hustvedt of Tubefilter and Rafi Fine of Fine Brothers explained the use of the annotations tools to create "choose your own adventures" on YouTube. See an example of an interactive game/story below:
We are all used to the range of things we can find on YouTube, but with the possibility of this kind of interactivity, we can have increased engagement with user feedback. There's potential here for creating interactive educational content in YouTube.
When I was away at SXSW I used Skype to talk to my dog every night. What can I say except that I love my dog. But while I was at the conference, I learned that there are some very creative ways that Skype can be used for artistic pursuits.
In the session Artistic Collaborations via Skype: Turning Distance into Drama, the presenters Beth Burns, Conner Roche, Derek Kolluri, Mimi Poskitt, Robert Matney and Rachel Watkinson talked about how their two theatre companies- The Hidden Room from Austin and Look Left Look Right from London worked to produce interactive theatre live in both Austin and London and on Skype to the general public.
The play documents the online fictional relationship of the couple, one who lives in London, England and the other who lives in Austin Texas.
The play is about 80% scripted but allows for improv that depends on the interactions created from the live audience and the internet audience who input comments and questions via twitter.
It's taken me awhile but I'm just getting around to blogging about SXSW.
One of the many keynotes was Clay Shirky who talked about the characteristics of technology that makes it revolutionary and how it can be linked to political revolutions. He spoke of the Dictator's Dilemma- when dictators shut down internet and communications it inevitably leads to more attention to exactly what they want to keep quiet. The most important thing the internet does according to Shirky is allow amateurs access to the public sphere. It allows easy access to others to form groups. Governments are not afraid of educated individuals, but rather synchronized groups.
Go Pileus might be a great tool for students collaborating on a project to share files.
To use the app just drag your file onto the gray box. What appears next is a short url that you can share with anyone who wants to download the file.
If you have not set up an account, your url will last for 30 minutes. If you create a free account you get 1GB free space and your url will no disappear in 30 minutes.
The Scamper Tool is a random question generator that can be used to spark creativity on your own or in a group.
All you have to do is state a problem or an idea that needs to be worked on then click the button to get a a question with helper questions and trigger words. Sample questions include:
Are there new ways to use it in its current shape or form?
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