Wild Moose (Martin, 2005), and Mitchville (Martin, 2006) were both AR games that used GPS equipment and a handheld computer to mimic a communication device, which relayed up-to-the-minute information to the trip to help them in their task (Martin, 2008). What happened was that the game narrative motivated campers to move beyond the ease and safety of trail hiking. The difficulty of actually hiking off-trail, coupled with the uncertainty of what one might find there, challenged the campers, and pushed them to move slightly beyond their comfort level.

Here’s a description of what was done in the past:

Towards the end of each summer, while the older boys were doing manly things on the Allagash or at Katahdin, we others took part in the wild pursuit of thieves, kidnappers, and other nefarious individuals.

That first summer of mine, quite unexpectedly, as we were about to set out on our regularly scheduled trips one Tuesday morning, we were all called together and the cold facts were put before us. Something terrible had happened; I am sure that I don’t remember what. Plans had to be changed at the last moment, and all our energies were to be devoted to helping the local authorities, whoever they were, hunt down the criminals and bring them to justice. At the same time we would uphold the honor of the camp, and in all probability bring fame and fortune to ourselves and our counselors.

Assignments were quickly made. For the sake of expediency, the original trip groupings would be maintained, but we would travel unexpected paths. All of this had been well arranged beforehand; and I can visualize the counselors now constructing the complicated plot in the evenings after we had gone to bed. Now they were ready to play it out.

I can’t remember much of that first Mystery Trip except that it rained. It rained all the time. The villains, whoever they were, had left clues and trails as they challenged us to track them down. Coded messages were found and deciphered. The net was slowly tightening. In tracking those undesirables, we learned more than we at the moment wanted to know about following trails in the woods. I clearly remember looking for stone cairns on the mountain side under what were certainly not the most favorable conditions (Price 1986).

It turns out that we have many separate attempts and projects aimed at providing resources to many of the parties, but many of these “clearinghouses” of support options are local, populated by interested parties, but both terribly limited (because we don’t really know what everyone else is doing across the campus and state) and redundant (because what we do know is typically populated to multiple databases). So the specialized information that we might want or need is often not in the places or databases where we look.

A better idea might be to put the power of the users to use (crowd-sourcing), and let them fill in any gaps that we might inadvertently have left.

Here are a few things that that Amazon.com uses that we might also want to incorporate in our university learning support systems (technology/social/academic/financial, etc.). Amazon is just one example of how the university will need to change to better cater to the needs/demands of its users. I’d really like to further explore how to make higher education a much more integrated community where the informal support systems are formalized and participation is rewarded. I begin to play with this idea in this post: New Model for Schooling.

Learning Support from Amazon

Reviews: Amazon provides the “official information” from the company, but also includes reviews of the actual product from users. Imagine this a in a university IT document — there’s the FAQ, maybe a few knowledge base articles on different features, but then there’s also feedback from the users, ranging from the not so helpful “This product sucks; don’t waste your time!” to the very helpful “This product is especially useful for users who need to [x or y] but less so for those who need to [z]. I used it to [case study], and it worked very well. But don’t follow their recommendation to [something]; instead try [something else]. Highly recommend.”

Average Customer Review: (17 customer reviews). In addition to offering additional information to supplement the official line, reviews indicate that the reader is not alone in their need. Every review reinforces that there’s a living community of users of the service, and the date of each review highlights the life of the service, and how long certain issues have been issues, and how robust a service still is (or isn’t). This is good feedback for all levels of service providers as well, in that it helps to identify what areas need more work.

Was this review helpful to you?: (20 of 24 people found the following review helpful) Amazon also has a rating system where readers can offer feedback on how helpful the review someone wrote was to them, so the two reviews above could be given some context. These reviews can be sorted by, so the “Newest” or “Most helpful” can be at the top. There are huge advantages to this: less helpful reviews can be at the bottom, so as a user I don’t have to wade through it unless I’m not satisfied with the reviews that others found as helpful. The rating of the review system also addresses the need many feel to try and be helpful. Sometimes we just want to rate (with unhelpful rants reviews), but often we want our own painful journey of resolution to have some benefit, so we try to share what we learned to minimize the pain that others may be going through. So if we get rewarded, even with a “Thanks! This was helpful!” it goes a long way toward building a community of sharing/practice. People who liked my review on service A may want to read my other reviews of Services B, L, and N because they noticed in my review of A that I used it in many of the ways that they want to, so maybe they can learn more from me. A community is born.

Customers Who Viewed This Item Also Viewed: The point was brought up at the meeting, that in some search attempts, if I don’t know how to spell the name, or get the phrasing even a little bit off, I might not be able to find anything, or I might be close but-not-quite-there, and unable to figure out how to proceed if this service doesn’t quite do it for me. A “Customers Who Viewed This Item Also Viewed” option would point me further along a path of discovery instead of dead-ending me at that page.

Did You Mean: search item? (Instead of serch item): Sometimes we make simple typing mistakes. Can’t technology correct this for us? Having suggestions of what we might have meant to type can help with this as well as help people who aren’t sure what they’re looking for.

Showing 1 – 16 of 4,785 Results: (with excerpts) A better example of this is Google, but Amazon has an excerpt from the cover or first page as well. The point is that in my search results I get more than the title of the page; I get a short excerpt that I can quickly read in order to do some of my own filtering of whether it’s what I want, or not.

Customer Discussions — This Product’s Forum: Some services will need complete forums around them; others won’t. It’s a nice feature for those that do.

Look for Similar Items by Category/Subject: These are two distinct sections, but potentially pretty useful, right?

Continue Shopping: Customers Who Bought Items in Your Recent History Also Bought: This lets me know again, that I”m not a lone soul lost in the machine, but that others have been down this path (maybe), and identifies other steps that they may have taken, pointing me to future steps on my path and potential best practices that arise out of our collective experiences.

• With 24/7 access to trusted sources of information in their pockets, students no longer need to have information imparted to them. Instead, they need teachers to help them 
  • filter out the good from the bad (determine quality)
  • see the relevance of the good to their lives (determine value)
  • learn how to apply the good, relevant information to solve problems
• This requires a significant shift (disruption) in the nature of instruction that will make the disruption of having people surf, Facebook, and Tweet in class seem like small potatoes.
• Of all the learning technologies that we can use, the ones students already value and are experts with (phones) seems like a no-brainer to embrace.

SITUATION: Given the increased saturation of smart phones on campus, and the popularity of location-aware and/or social interactive experiences like foursquare.com, Twitter, Google Local, Facebook, Yahoo Answers, Amazon review “helpful” votes, video games, etc. Additionally, our campus population and surrounding community are both embracing these tools — indeed, there are 5 billion mobile phones in use in the world now, and smart phones are on their way to becoming the standard.

PROPOSAL: Let’s create a campus/community experience that breaks down disciplines and allows interaction according to location. In it’s simplest form, I am proposing a location-based virtual suggestion box where folks can leave ideas wherever they are on campus, without finding the office/email/”right person” to leave them with.

SCENARIO: Here’s how it could work: Beth spends time in Grainger and Science Hall. She sees something happening in Grainger all the time that she thinks would be great in Science Hall. The building manager of Science Hall doesn’t go to Grainger (I’m making this up, please forgive assumptions), so has no idea of what Grainger is doing. Beth opens her location-aware smartphone web-app when she’s in Science Hall and writes the suggestion. It automatically appears to others who are in Science Hall (and running the app), and gets “pushed” to the building manager (or whoever is “managing” whatever part of campus is pinged). Other users can vote on the suggestion. Beth gets a point for every up vote, and the votes also suggest (to some extent) to the building manager how good of an idea others think it is. The points can be used like Green Stamps (remember those?) for UW gear and ice cream as a way to encourage participation in this campus-wide endeavor.

EXPANSION: If we want to go whole hog on this, we’d could expand beyond location to more of a social game and peer academic counseling game/experience where students advise each other and vote on the usefulness of their advice; they level up in different areas accordingly as they get more votes of confidence (essentially grading each other); they develop areas of expertise and differentiation; they might even be able able to earn points in different areas (service, academics, community, wellness, eco, etc.) and are motivated to participate not only with UW Green Stamps (or maybe that’s just for non-students), but also because these points/levels can be demonstrated at graduation in their portfolio and permanent record.

BENEFITS/RISKS: This is ultimately a proposal to significantly change the way school is done. We could take this as far as the Board of Regents allow us and be a model for a new type of school. It’s innovative, but mimics much of life online, so is intuitive/natural to many of our students. It respects and deeply integrates the Wisconsin Idea’s connection to community (especially if expanded beyond campus). It takes advantage of new learning opportunities through mobile devices, and is certain to attract national and international attention.

NEXT STEPS: We have the technology to do this right now. The ARIS mobile platform being developed in Academic Technology is a grand prototype. I’d love to discuss this, or other location-aware ideas for teaching, learning, and community-building on campus.

I was talking to a colleague about the addictive nature of Foursquare (although I’m lacking an overly addictive personality), and the lure of becoming “Mayor” of someplace, and how that’s good for the place, and adds a sense of belonging to the player (“you wanna go where everybody knows your name…”)

Then I saw this article about the Badgeification of the Internet, and thought it wouldn’t be too hard to do this even at the University level in an informal manner as well as a formal manner. The thing is that (generally speaking) we like to teach each other; we like to help others; we like to be looked at experts, and are all have islands of expertise (Crowley and Jacobs, 2002) in something. So, why not feed that desire to be part of a community, AND the desire to play, AND the desire to share (show and tell), by making a sharing game about campus and higher education?

After all, what clearer, more luminous light are we ever afforded? Especially here where the light comes rising over the sea, just the opposite of my old California haunts. But in the old days one never could, because, of course, ordinarily it would be too dark to see the paints; or else, if you turned on a light so as to be able to see them, you’d lose the subtle gathering tones of the coming sun. But with an iPhone, I don’t even have to get out of bed, I just reach for the device, turn it on, start mixing and matching the colors, laying in the evolving scene.

Hockney continues:

It’s always there in my pocket, there’s no thrashing about, scrambling for the right color. One can set to work immediately, there’s this wonderful impromptu quality, this freshness, to the activity; and when it’s over, best of all, there’s no mess, no clean-up. You just turn off the machine. Or, even better, you hit Send, and your little cohort of friends around the world gets to experience a similar immediacy. There’s something, finally, very intimate about the whole process.

I asked Hockney whether he’d mind my sharing some of these images with a wider audience across a printed medium, and he said, not really, he more or less assumed that the pictures would one by one find their way into the world. “Though it is worth noting,” he adds, lighting one of his perennial cigarettes, “that the images always look better on the screen than on the page. After all, this is a medium of pure light, not ink or pigment, if anything more akin to a stained glass window than an illustration on paper.”

ABC News covered a similar story about a New Yorker magazine cover:

I would add (and will continue to) that iPhone drawing is but one of thousands of ways that mobile technology can change the way we teach and learn. Think of any other form of location-based fieldwork, and consider whether “there’s an app for that.”

I’m presenting on a panel tomorrow with Alex Games, Moses Wolfenstein, and Sean Duncan on developing a Designer Mindset when developing games. I expect to post a write up shortly afterwards.

I’m also looking forward to meeting up with some cool folks there (especially kathleencushman.com). And it’s NYC, which is always fun.

Since I’m only there one night, this is the first time I’ve traveled with just my messenger bag. No checked in luggage. No rolling bag. Just a flat change of clothes in an Eagle Creek packing envelope.

Here’s the 3.7MB PDFof the presentation I gave for the 2009 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry. It went well. The audience seemed engaged.

In it, I introduced my work in place-based games, explain how the “Mystery Trip” game was adapted to fit the structure of a Flying Moose Lodge trip, and what worked in its design — and my theories of why it worked as a place-based mobile game (and how and why mobile games are different from other game genres, as far as the design of their narrative and mechanics are considered).

I think there are some good, but simple points in it. I’m in the process of developing it into an actual paper…

Here’s a 2.2 MB PDF version of the first part of the presentation (that Kurt presented).

For those of you who signed up to play our experimental mobile game, I apologize profusely. I almost had something ready to go, but got side-tracked preparing for my dissertation defense.

A number of people have asked, so here is an unofficial DRAFT version of my dissertation: [2MB pdf].

I hope others can learn from this draft. I hope to revise a bit (e.g. for positionality), and publish more from it. Please email me if you’d like to discuss sections, have ideas on where to submit sections for publication, want to cite, etc. Or if you just want to tell me how crappy you think it is — I’m eager for constructive feedback and suggestions.

Many thanks again to the scores of people who have encouraged and supported me in the researching and writing of this document. You all rock!