Last Thursday, Gary and I ventured over to the MIT Media Lab for an event sponsored by NBC's Education Nation and DELL. The topic of the panel event was Technology in the Classroom: What's Next? and featured a wide range of panelists such as Boston Mayor Tom Menino, Head of MIT Lifelong Kindergarten Group Mitch Resnick, and NBC Special Correspondent Chelsea Clinton. The panel was focused on rather broad topics in the field of Technology in Education: reaching every student, conquering the digital divide, showcasing best practices of technology in the classroom and figuring out how to scale up those practices.
When you think about the problems humans will face in colonizing space, what do you imagine they'll be? It wouldn't be totally wrong if you said hostile extraterrestrials or back holes. But what if I told you one of our biggest problems would be the ethical dilemmas concerning the best way to keep sheep from being eaten by the native predators? Do you: poison the predators, capture them, or fence in your sheep at night? Well in our latest project, Quandary, you'll have to consider problems just like that! Quandary is a unique gaming experience that puts players in charge of the colony of Braxos, where human settlers have settled down and are trying to create a thriving civilization. We are proud to say that Quandary is an unprecedented gaming experience: players won't do any resource management, they won't fight in battles and they won't conquer alien worlds. Instead, players will have to consider urgent moral and ethical dilemmas that are integral to the livelihood of their colony. Each decision will have serious consequences for the settlers of Braxos. We are very excited about this game and its potential to help students learn about making smart ethical decisions in their own lives. It was wonderful to collaborate with our longtime partners at Learning Games Network--there's nothing better than making games with fun, smart people.
We like a good pregnant pause (and not just because everyone in the studio is having babies!) so please forgive us if we go a few weeks between Weekly Click articles. But time flies if we're not careful. Before we get too used to protracted absences, let's dive into another week of links.
Featured Article
We were very excited to see this great press for the New England Aquarium in the New York Times the other day. The article highlighted the challenge of zoos and aquariums to convey important information about climate change to their audiences without overwhelming them with fear and daunting doomsday statistics (of which, sadly, there are many). We're working on an exciting project with the New England Aquarium right now that does just that--empowers the visitors with information about innovations in the field of climate change. We use some fun illustrations and animations of sea life to draw in the user and then wow them with ways that they can take action and learn more about climate change. We hope to do many more projects with our friends and neighbors on the Seaport!
As the legend goes, when the Muppet Show was translated for broadcast in Sweden, the name of the Swedish Chef was changed to "The Polish Chef" to avoid controversy and presumably to avoid offending the local population. Meanwhile, the name of the chef was left unchanged when it was exported to Poland and the rest of Europe. Poles, on vacation in Sweden, would find themselves mocked by native Swedes with the Chef's "hur-dee-dur-bee-dur" only to misinterpret it as a Swedish lexical tic and comment to each other haughtily, "See? They actually DO talk like that!" (This story has since been rendered apocryphal).
So what is the truth, then? How do Swedes actually feel about their unofficial spokesman? As it turns out, their evaluation ranges from jovial acceptance to cool disapproval. But the worst of it? To most Swedes the "Swedish" Chef doesn't even sound Swedish! The Slate article linked above goes into good detail (with audio cues) and makes the case that the Swedish Chef actually sounds, well, Norwegian. Of course, it was never his "Swedishness" that was ever under scrutiny, it was his cooking. His incoherent pseudo-Swedish babble raised a gentle parody of our late-century obsession with cooking shows to ludicrous absurdity in a way that only Jim Henson could engineer.
We love tablets, and over the last few posts have discussed the effects of tablets on children and the possible impact these technologies will have on child development. For those interested, Mashable has put together a GIANT infographic that details the rise of Apple's mobile computer presence both in and outside of the classroom. The key take-away here is that devices like iPads and iTouches are becoming pervasive and in the near future will account for how most of us consume media from books to movies to music. Learnstuff.com has a great supplementary infographic that details how schools are being shaped by an influx of cheap, easy-to-use tech.
You know about games. They're things you play to bring you enjoyment. Sometimes you use cards, a board with pre-set spaces and rules, sometimes a game machine. However you do it, you know what a game is. So what then is "Gamification"? What exactly are its ends and what does it achieve? If you've ever wondered here's your simple answer. Gamification is the act of inserting game-like rewards, achievements and badges into your product to encourage players to continue playing it (often inserted into otherwise non-game products to hold a user's interest longer). Gamification can be incredibly fun and rewarding (see "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?") or horribly executed and uninspired. The article is also quick to note that games don't really even need to be created with an educational goal in mind to be used in ways that enrich a student's understanding of a topic. This is a really great article that emphasizes the core role of games: create a compelling world that a user can get lost inside of and will play to the end.
Well, here we are folks: Mid-August. Summer's wrapping up so let's dive headlong into some cool articles that our team has been reading in this season of extended daylight and broken-down subway cars.
Our featured article comes from a blog titled "Programming in the Twenty-First Century" written by James Hague. Hauge looks at what he jokingly refers to as the "growing literary genre" of "Wrote an [app] and it didn't make any money." Which is true or true enough for most programmers, especially independent ones or those working for small, local businesses trying to get their foot in the door of digital distribution. Hague, however, has no comforting words for those developers, nor is he quick to blame app-hungry consumers spoiled on a cheap apps from big, profit-heavy development houses that can afford to eat their initial losses.
Instead, Hague lays the blame of an app's failure strictly on its creator. More succinctly, Hague's argument is "You've created an app--so what?". But Hague's argument can be blown out and applied to any creative endeavor: writing, music, art, dancing, whatever. Point is, most creators fail in one of two very basic ways: conception or execution. Obviously those projects that are hastily conceived usually fail to make it off of the cocktail napkin. For those projects that make it to design and define or beyond, execution is literally everything.
Well, maybe it's not everything, but it's a large part of everything. Consumer tastes will change and people's whims will come and go. Not everything will remain in the designer/developer's control. Hague wants developers to approach app creation as craft, much like other artists would their art. Apps should look good and be fun to play or easy to use. Developers need to engage with their prospective audience and really have a firm understanding of what works and what people expect. Only after they've put in that work, and only then, can they complain that the system is stacked against them. Until then, there's no one to blame but yourself when you only sell a hundred copies of your "Angry Birds" knock-off.
Kids. When they want something, they really want something. And there's really only two ways that scenario can end: they beg you for it until you're ready to scream (or acquiesce) OR they go on ahead and use the tools at their disposal to make low-tech versions of the gadgets and toys their little, still-developing hearts desire. "Little Techie" is a Tumblr run by Summer Allen who documents all of the paper and LEGO creations of his son London. And here's the thing about London: he LOVES Mac gadgets. So much so that he's constantly building, creating and reinventing his dad's devices. Check out the pictures behind the link.
Time to toot our own horn! Entertainment Weekly has named its thirty favorite celebrity appearances. And while Tina Fey and Will Arnett (who appeared as a magician, ha ha. We love Arrested Development humor) stole the top two spots, Oprah Winfrey's The O Network skit made it to spot #4! The animation was developed by FableVision Studios and features the letter O -- voiced by Oprah herself --hosting her own O-themed talk show. In typical Sesame Street fashion, the skit is equal parts silly and educational, with just a hint of pop culture satire. It's a project that we couldn't have been happier to be a part of and are still very proud of. Watch the full animation below.
So you want to become a video game designer? Well it's going to take more than just playing a lot of video games. In fact, even if you know how to program and can do so competently, it's still going to take more. Knowing how is important, but having some evidence that you can and have is just as important. Which is why the Massachusetts Digital Games Institute set up a program at Becker College in Worcester, MA to facilitate just that kind of experience. The program invites students from across Massachusetts to design and develop their own game on a tight schedule. At the end of the program the students get to present their projects and network with The Tap Lab, a local Cambridge game company. It's a great way to help students cement their growing skill sets while giving them real-world experience they can use for resume building.
Tearaway is a new game coming out for the PlayStation Vita (successor to Sony's PlayStation Portable game system). Tearaway looks like it will take advantage of all of the ways a user can interact with the game via the game system. Users can tap, turn, shake, scream and blow at or on the system to effect in-game changes. It's a cool way to modify how people play games. Game systems just sit on a shelf while we hold a controller on the other side of the room. Even handheld systems require a limited amount of interaction. However, it looks like the developers are using every feature of the handheld to their advantage. While we're not ready to shell out the money for a handheld gaming system, we love the idea and would be totally cool with you lending us your PS Vita to play it.
Welcome everyone to the latest edition of FableVision's Weekly Click. We hope you're all enjoying your summer. Pretty soon it'll be August and all the comes with it: the last long days of summer, students getting ready to go back to school while the rest of us wonder where all of those balmy, sunny days disappeared to. It's been a little while since we posted a Weekly Click, so let's dig right in. There's a lot of stuff to work with this week.
Featured Article
One of the most contested education reforms in the last twelve years has to be "No Child Left Behind". The law has had mixed results and some criticize its obsessive focus on testing. In an attempt to ease some of the harsher restrictions, the Obama administration has begun to issue waivers to specific states on the condition that those states set their own standards for student achievement. The fact that these waivers still put an overwhelming emphasis on testing has left some educators cold.
Perhaps the key takeaway here is from Joseph Star, who commented to the Times that, "education reform should focus on incentives to help teachers collaborate and help students learn skills that could not simply be measured by tests." This is a big, important claim. Education has become narrow-minded in its focus to the detriment of its students. While the goals of No Child Left Behind are admirable, the clumsy execution has made very little room for educators to encourage play, discovery or creativity in the classroom lest it cause their students to deviate from their rigid lesson plan.
While there are no easy answers, what is sure is that neither Bush's "No Child Left Behind" nor Obama's "Waiver" process is going to adequately resolve the education crisis. Active engagement with school systems, their faculty and the students themselves is the right way forward.
There's an old thought experiment -- maybe you've heard it before -- that goes something like this: There is a possibility that the colors we subjectively experience are not the objective colors in the '"real" world. For example, we are taught that a certain shade and hue equals "red", so when we see a Rose or a Firetruck we immediately associate their dominant colors as "red". But what if that subjective "red" we see is really someone else's "blue"? We both associate two different colors with the same word because culturally and linguistically we've been trained to "see" that color as "red" instead of "blue" and vice-versa and so forth.
Admittedly, the hypothesis doesn't hold up under too much scrutiny but the main point (the one about language and subjective color experience) actually has some truth behind it. It turns out that language actively shapes what kinds of colors we can actively perceive in the external world. The paper linked to above goes into greater detail but the basic gist is that words pertaining to color influence color perception. There is no 1:1 ratio pertaining to color perception (that is, knowing more words won't make you better at seeing colors or differentiating between shades of color) but that color perception is built into individual cultures via their dominant languages. More research has yet to be done, but this is a fascination read and worth careful consideration.
We have been accosted by Klondike for the last ninety years about what lengths we'd go to, in no imprecise terms, for one of their frozen treats. While those lengths have been exaggerated, it turns out that in reality, we'd do just about anything to get free food. Pavlov would probably drool if he saw these videos. People slap buttons, dance, bow and perform just about any ridiculous task required of them to get their hands on a box of . . . uh . . . chips. I mean at some point someone should have pointed out that adage about time being money, right? Granted there's a depression on but we're hoping this isn't the future of snack distribution. Watch the video behind the link.
The technology that we use to host, create and distribute content on the web has changed drastically in the last twenty years. More accurately, the web that we know and enjoy now didn't truly exist until a decade ago. And if we bring mobile web into the equation, well, we don't have a lengthy history at all. Web standards have improved and the internet is more than just an information superhighway; it's a place where ideas are cultivated and exchanged. Hard as it is to believe, the Internet is still in its "wild west" days, although that time is rapidly coming to a close. The Evolution of the Web is a great info graphic that details the rise and expansion of the web. Look back as this info graphic traces the rise and fall of standards, web browsers and tracks the rapid expansion of internet traffic.
Here's a good one. We're all pretty tied to social networks at this point. So how can we use those social networks to our advantage when it comes to being productive at work? John Jantsch from Duct Tape Marketing has laid out in precise fashion what exactly productivity looks like in the media-hungry, app-savvy 21st century. He walks you through some pretty obvious options like Evernote and Gmail as well as some less-obvious ones like Stumbleupon and Instagram. This guide (in PDF format) is worth a look if you use any of these apps on a regular basis.
