Community Gardens near me.

Local Food Systems Scenario: Players locate and map where food comes from in their neighborhood. Dairy farms? Community garden plots? Organic Farms and CSA? Canneries? Egg farms? Beef farms? Cabbage? Cranberries? Orchards? Processing plants?

Play: In the map to the right, I’ve outlined in red the community garden plots near me. For going over to them and walking around both sets, I’d get some points, similar to the UNM game Chris Holden created. If I became an expert on the locations of the other community gardens in my city, I’d earn some sort of badge. If I learned more by interviewing some of the gardeners about what they’re growing (and why), and sharing that in the game, I’d earn some further expertise points. I could add restaurants that use local food as well. The game is limited only by what the quests are, and in this game, I can challenge — and accept challenges — from other players, so there really is no limit.

Basically, I have a notion that if we got together with a few interested peers and students/PAs, we could come up with a really interesting interdisciplinary place-based field experience that offered multiple quests at multiple levels of expertise (ala “I’ll take Botany for 200, Alex”) that could be replicated in different areas across the state (and country). Although my initial thoughts center on using ARIS, they only extend as far as using ARIS as a prototyping tool — the actual game might end up in a number of different formats for different technologies.

My goals are these. I’ve been passionate about place-based/embodied learning for decades, and am now in a position where I’ve got access to cool folks and cool tools (Google Maps and ARIS, etc.), and a job where I can finally start to coordinate the creation of something amazing that combines them all. My big evil scheme is to get smart  brains in one whiteboard-filled room, and let ideas cross-pollinate. I imagine a large scalable tour/game/field experience with new quests/activities being continually added as they’re developed.

If we build a structure/frame together, it will be easier to add components individually, as needs/resources arise. And we can recruit players by luring them from other quests (i.e. I’ve played the Astronomy Quest, and like this activity — maybe I’ll try out the Ecology Quest to supplement my points!)

I have no doubt that players would quickly find that many skills overlap from discipline to discipline. So if I kicked butt in and really enjoyed a Probability sub-quest in the Botany line of quests, I might want to jump over an rip through some Probability sub-quests in the Language line of quests (e.g. um… probability of multi-vowel adjacency in billboard ads in Wisconsin?).

It’s like a dream come true.

In 2006, I lobbied for a web-based version of MIT’s River City Augmented reality editor. ARIS delivered that for me in 2010.

The idea was that the web offered accessibility to folks who didn’t have smartphones — folks like teachers and their students. A web-based editor would allow classrooms to engage in place-based design. I used the few projects we had started at the time as examples of the type of projects that could be done by students.

We’ve reached that point, and with ARIS v1.6, I think we’ll begin engaging in some massive exploration of GeoAnnotation and Data-collection.

Good times a-coming!

It's Sorry and Parcheesi played outside as fast as you can run!

If you’ve not already read about in the Daily Page or on MacArthur’s Digital Media Spotlight, on April 18-20, we held our first “Global” ARIS jam. There were over a hundred participants from Columbia, the Netherlands, and Spain, and the U.S. including folks from the Minnesota Historical Society, 3M, Oregon Middle School, Whitewater Middle School, Oconomowoc School District, Middleton Alternative Senior High, University of New Mexico Albuquerque, University of Northern Colorado, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Parsons The New School of Design, University of Murcia, consultants from WiseGuys and IdeaMonkey Inc. And in the ensuing 50 hours of work, folks created 127 games (not counting the ones we made in the workshop!).

Pretty Cool, huh?

I held four ARIS workshops in that time. One for the opening group and three for high school and university classes that dropped by. Between teaching workshops and roaming the amazing Wisconsin Idea room in the UW-Madison Education building (thanks for hosting, SoE!!) helping participants work through design logic, I was only able to make one game ———>>>>

Adobe Connect slogged whenever we had more than 9-10 feeds.

Nonetheless, we were mentally and physically exhausted afterwards, and we learned a whole lot about creating interactive place-based experiences for learning through play.

The Six Technologies are no surprise to those of us who have been advocating and developing mobile learning practices and tools. They are:

1. mobile computing
2. open content
3. electronic books
4. simple augmented reality
5. gesture-based computing
6. visual data analysis

If these look at all familiar, it may be because you are already using them via your smartphone. They are all  fiercely personal, socially connecting, and deeply embodied. The iPhone and iPad has ushered in an era of apps that take advantage of the geo-locative technologies, brilliant displays, touch screen and accelerometers of these devices to make many of the items listed already either mainstream or nearly-so — highlighted in popular “near-future” media representations.

What they do no explicitly mention, but what is implicit in the current uses of many on this list is games. Mobile games are huge, often rely on complex visual data analysis and gesture-based input.

I’ll be adding more commentary to this as I have time.

The University of Wisconsin–Madison is excited to announce the Games+Learning+Society (GLS) Conference 7.0 to be held June 15–17, 2011 at the Memorial Union on campus.

Session Submissions are due by Monday, 7 March 2011.

The GLS Conference is the premier event in the field of videogames and learning. Now in its seventh year, this grass roots “indie” event is evolving to include innovative content formats and new programming. And after waiting lists for registration in past years, we’re now finally expanding our registration to reach an even larger and more diverse audience. The GLS conference is one of the few destinations where the people who create high-quality digital learning media can gather for a serious think about what is happening in the field and how the field can serve the public interest. Our event is well known for its exceptionally high quality of content yet “community event” feel. Each year, we foster in-depth conversation and social networking across diverse disciplines including game studies, education research, learning sciences, industry, government, educational practice, media design, and business. Our continued commitment is to reinvent learning both in and out of formal schools through the promise of games and simulations. And this year’s conference promises to be the most diverse, dynamic and biggest GLS event yet.

This year we are pleased to partner with the New Media Consortium [NMC] Conference to be held concurrently in Madison in June 2011.

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.