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.

Diana Rhoten, of Startl, speaks of the need to cater to the learning demands of the current generation of learners who, she argues, are following “Interest-driven Learning” — achievable now, and driven by the creation of an unprecedented technical infrastructure. Kids now prefer to follow a learning path of consumption, production, and participation. It starts by finding their interest and coaching them through their development of it. Although Rhoten focuses on younger kids than we find in higher education, much of what she says applies to the demographics that we serve. Indeed, higher education (and programs such as UW-Madison’s Digital Media Assignments) may be a grand testing ground for this, due to our demographic of already “plugged-in” students — an exceptionally large population of tech owners/users compared to the under-12 set that Rhoten works with.

It’s a beautiful video. Watch it and let me know if you think it makes sense.

• 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?