6 Ways to the Gamification of Education

http://towerdefensenews.blogspot.com/

There are many more than 6, but I like the Duolingo model.  I also like Badges.

I like the idea of applying a 'simple' game goal to learning and watching what happens.  Tower defense is about keeping the baddies from getting across your territory --- you build 'towers', upgrade them, spend resources on heroes, traps, and other stuff to help you defend your space.

Simple. Don't let the baddies get through.

But when you work out all the layers and dynamics, any tower defense game is rich and multidimensional (I say there are about 11 dimensions in TD games).  How can this tool, this game type, be applied to learning (online and brick/mortar)?  There's some movement going on there already.  But how about a tower defense version of cellular functions?  Upgrade your mitochondria so you have enough power to divide before the viruses damage you beyond repair, etc.  And tower defense for orbital mechanics -- your space stations defend vehicles and planets from space debris and maverick rocks.  Great content can be folded into this genre.

Thinking on it.  Here are some things I like:

http://www.biomanbio.com/GamesandLabs/Cellgames/Cells.html

https://www.centreofthecell.org/learn-play/games/

http://interactivesites.weebly.com/cells.html

be researchers

Shifting language from 'reference librarian' and 'reference services' to 'research'. Research services. Be a 'researcher' -- someone who does research, who participates and publishes, and someone who teaches others how to use info sources (in any medium) to do their own research.

Nest Settling

Lookit:

http://woodyevans.wordpress.com/

http://towerdefensenews.blogspot.com/

facebook q&a

I've publicly criticized FB's use by libraries before -- but at the link below I don't even bother to mention the dissolution of reference services this development suggests.

http://woodyevans.com/public_html/archives/795

http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/NewsBreaks/Facebook-Questions--Askcom-Cashing-in-on-Mass-Ignorance-69187.asp

Happy Ada Lovelace Day: Donna Haraway

Ada Lovelace Day: Donna Haraway

Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

My hero of the day is Donna Haraway.

I think I first encountered Donna Haraway’s work in about 1996. I was studying up on Actor-Network Theory as part of an effort to get into an exchange program to Keele University (John Law had taught at Keele, and that’s how I got into ANT), and somehow that led me to theCyborg Manifesto. Once at Keele, Primate Visions was required (for a class about society and nature with Gordon Fyfe, I think).

Haraway’s work has really been important to me. She’s helped me to make sense of the interstitial spots between technology and bodies, between people and animals. So for Ada Lovelace day, I celebrate Donna Haraway!

img: rusten hogness via wikimedia commons

woodyevans.com goes archival

Grab it while you can, hoss:

http://woodyevans.com/public_html/feed

(teaching a class how to embed video for their blog projects... Dave ended up as the example for some reason...)

QR book to Web application: live

Via "Building Library 3.0" blog:

QR book to Web application: live

QR Library application -- this is very homemade, very "beta" -- actually very "delta".

I've described it before: QR code slapped on a book, a patron uses their phone to snap a pic, QR pic takes them to whatever online resource you want them to see.

Here's an example:

Imagine you've just picked up this book in the library, "Chess and the Art of Negotiation", and noticed a QR barcode on it.

You use your gizmo (to which you have already loaded Semacode or Kaywa, etc.) to load the barcode and are taken here:

Hosted resources -- online forums, chess resources, similar books, available e-books, etc. etc. Plus a place for patron comments, so they can add resources you hadn't yet found/ thought of / or approved.

This is a "proof of concept". Sorry I can't give the direct URL yet. Hope you'll work up something like this on your own. [http://buildingthree.blogspot.com/2009/08/qr-book-to-web-application-live.html]

===

Also see:

http://ishush.blogspot.com/2008/06/bidi-books-bidibooks-bidimensional.html

http://ishush.blogspot.com/2006/09/haiku-in-kaywa-qr-code.html

http://ishush.blogspot.com/2006/10/qr-code-in-action.html

http://ishush.blogspot.com/2006/10/5-cell-phones-in-library.html

cc open id

via bq:

http://www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2009/08/06/06readwriteweb-creative-commons-launches-cc-openid-profile-92620.html?emc=eta1

""Says open source advocate Chris Messina in a recent blog post on CC OpenID:

"Creative Commons is redistributing the brand equity and social capital their members have accrued over the last several years by letting people show and verify their affiliation to the organization.

With this simple example, we can start to see the symbiosis of making an intentional choice about identity: Creative Commons finds a new revenue opportunity and members of the community have a way to express their affiliation and promote the brand."

heather liggett on npr

Here's Ms. H. Liggett's twitter page. NPR's M. Brand (?) interviewed her on Fri. afternoon. Go take a look for yrself at her activism-type work:

http://twitter.com/hal512

Some good old libertarianista type ideas there, but not often fully formed... I wouldn't trade a corporate oligarchy for a collectivist-leaning republic, I don't think... but maybe some "libertarians" would. What would Ron Paul do?

use yr infoskillz

Here you go, see if you can find problems with Maddow's logic here:



Maybe you can't. But who else is going to try? And who the frak else is dissecting the layers of oligarchy at recessrally.com?

buildingthree blogspot wearable web

http://buildingthree.blogspot.com/2009/07/wearable-web-3-4.html:

Following on from last post's comment on gendering of the Web... it occurs to me that the Web won't be or can't be successfully gendered by in the way I suggested. Just because feminine terms out-rank masculine terms, etc. Bibliometric brute force won't make the Web pink nor blue. Many reasons for this (maybe more on the subject later), but the main idea is that since we can't 'gender' the Web, it remains for the Web to increasingly disrupt basic identity categories of us... that is, the tabs that we use to build up identity (gender, race or ethnicity, languages, others) will be subverted and (forgive the term) fractalized by the Web's presence in/on our bodies. There's something important here about the body really becoming a proving ground now for Haraway's feminist cyborgs, but I haven't thought it through yet...

Libraries as repositories for gestural web choreography?
Librarians as break dancing cardboard kings, pulling up the ghostest in the machine with the mostest?
Library programs on new paralanguage affectations based on efforts to disguise covert face-to-face real-time tagging of your interlocutor?

Wild stuff on its way.

--
re: haraway more:
http://criticalanimal.blogspot.com/2009/06/biopolitics-of-michael-pollan-and-donna.html
http://bumblejim.blogspot.com/2009/06/21st-century-relationships-did-donna.html
http://dprpatterson.blogspot.com/2009/05/in-1985-donna-haraways-now-famous-essay.html
http://rantnrave-88.livejournal.com/6460.html
http://www.iqdupont.com/blog/2009/7/12/communication-control-haraways-investigation-of-the-shift-fr.html
http://yasminlist.blogspot.com/2009/07/re-yasmindiscussions-r-re-ethnic-cyborg.html

cellphones libraries reminder, gee

2 COMMENTS:

quietman said...

Cell phones are not annoying in and of themselves, it is the abuse of cell phones that should be outlawed.

Unfortunately most people are too inconsiderate simply by nature to understand that a loud annoying ringtone or cell yell irritates everyone in their vicinity. They ruin it for everyone.

Until basic manners catch up with technology an outright cell phone ban is the only solution.

2:08 AM

Anonymous said...

that's a buncha bull.

either you embrace the gizmos or yr patrons find elsewhere to be, man.

the gizmos are here to stay. yr library may not be.

and if it's human rudeness yr trying to change, hey, you'll be trying for a real, real long time.

good luck.

WE

google os based on chrome

NY Times has (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/technology/companies/08operate.html):

SAN FRANCISCO — In a direct challenge to Microsoft, Google announced late Tuesday that it is developing an operating system for PCs that is tied to its Chrome Web browser.

The software, called the GoogleChrome Operating System, is initially intended for use in the tiny, low-cost portable computers known as netbooks, which have been selling quickly even as demand for other PCs has plummeted. Google said it believed the software would also be able to power full-size PCs.

Which is cool on a number of fronts -- Being an open source system (?) it'll further the general 'biodiversity' of the web as it invites modifications. It'll knock MS hard which is good for all of our imaginations (I'm tired of walking around in a Windows frame of mind, forced to crunch my numbers and words in Windows ways).

But the mainmost possibility here is that a Google OS will really be better for organizing the world's information than a MS OS or a Mac OS is. That could be good for librarians and patrons and knowledge workers etc. etc. depending on the particulars of how it falls out. Somehow that an easier integrated e-book search tool for example might become as workaday and common as the Microsoft Paint application -- this is the kind of shift we might be looking at. Operating systems are powerful cultural devices. They really do start working as metaphors, and if you spend lots of time with a program (hours per day at work for example) you can start thinking in ways that enables you to get along better in the OS (Jaron Lanier's idea orginally I think? [http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.12/lanier_pr.html]).

So, if nothing else, a new OS is good for the cultural imagination simply because it's something new and different for your head to stare at for 60+ hours per week.

We'll see.

--

Also: Google's OS is mainly for netbooks, at least at first (?). Wired news --

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/07/five-things-googles-chrome-os-will-do-for-your-netbook/

&

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/07/google-announces-pc-operating-system-to-compete-with-windows/

hunch, @ we blog

hunch

New work up at Information Today’s Newsbreaks.

“Hunch: Psycho-Social Divinatory Machine for the Masses”

(Thanks @ Chris Dixon for the dialog!)

Posted in info-sci, research, writing.

qik & sousveillance

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance

http://qik.com/

Sousveillance is about us all 'at the bottom' observing what goes on around and above us in an intentional way.  Missteps by those in power (censorship, abuse, illegal moves of other kinds) can be recorded and cataloged just as well as the illegal moves of those 'below' -- us -- can be recorded and cataloged by those in power.

Qik may be a tool that takes sousveillance where it really needs to go -- live feed.  It's got some kind of Facebook app too that I haven't explored yet.  Camera phones can be confiscated -- but if the video is streaming live, then you can imagine that security may become reticent even to take said phone away, as long as doing so is an illegal act (or an embarrassment for the org or polis they may represent).

This could hold feet to fire.  This could be a real tool for The People to document grievances against their states.  "Equiveillance" is the term, I think.

They're watching, and we're watching too.

addictomatic re:

For my money, Addictomatic is still a great way to grok the 'tone of the web' on newsy subjects.

http://addictomatic.com/topic/"frank+black"

http://addictomatic.com/topic/"swine+flu"+texas

http://addictomatic.com/topic/star-tides

Listening: "Rejoice" U2, October 

Reading: 'library ala carte' faqs

wolfram alpha semantic search

Wolfram|Alpha write up at InfoToday's NewsBreaks:

http://tinyurl.com/we-wolfram

new work by Reverend Doctor Hegwood

Jared Hegwood has new pieces out this year -- go read them:

“Like Fish” here at elimae

“Hugs” here at Keyhole Magazine

“Lately” forthcoming at Night Train

disinformation on education

If Mr Gatto is right, are librarians who really do equitably and on principle defend free access to any information for the common good systemically at odds with the system?  Are librarians acceptable enemies of the corporate state structure (that is, are we enemies that are necessary & have to be tolerated)?  What gives?

(Via disinfo.com...)