“We developed this publishing system (at great cost, no doubt), and are willing to give it away for free to anyone who would like to use it to create and freely distribute cool eTexts. If you want to profit from it (industries), we’re taking 30% to cover the cost of continued development of this and other cool tools. If you’re just looking for an easy-to-use, and elegant tool for getting your knowledge out to the world for free (schools, non-profits, self-publishing authors), you’re welcome to use it for free.”

Unlike the status quo method of paying for software, Apple is not requiring an upfront payment. Consider the model behind Adobe’s DPS, to use it for a one-off publication costs $395 (plus Adobe Creative Suite 5.5, plus a suitable computer that runs the software). Then you’re allowed to profit from that one-off as much as you can with no extra fees, right? Apple flips that around and says that iBooks Author is free to use (plus cost of suitable computer that runs the software) to create dynamic iBooks content that looks and runs amazing on their iOS — but also as a pretty decent PDF creator that displays (non-dynamic content) well on any browser.

I also bet we’ll see people “trying out” (prototyping) ideas for books here — something they might not have had the where-with-all to even approach before and if they think they’ve got a hit might decide to either publish with Apple or reformat with some other system to sell for more than 70% profit.

But for not-for-profit uses, it seems okay. For example, the director of a senior center might want residents actively engaged in creating a legacy artifact for their children, but don’t have the publishing expertise to pull them through the process? This seems like a fabulous tool for seniors to pretty easily publish a cool autobiography or family lineage book. They wouldn’t (typically) want to sell it to their family, but would want it to be cool enough to engage the next generation.

• You say that you’re a non-profit community health organization that wants to get good-looking, easy-to-read health information out free to your clients, but can’t afford Adobe?
• You say that you’re a teacher who wants to create course readers or study guides for your course, but don’t want to force your students to  buy textbooks?
• You say that you’re a graduate student, passionate about your research, but suspicious of the journal system, and you’d like to get your research into the hands of as many people as possible?

If you want to profit from it, and manage to do so, then you pay.

It’s a private version of a tax system – i.e. as a citizen (user), you’re free to use services (Fire, Police, etc.) as long as you don’t profit from them. If you profit from it, there’s a 30% tax to subsidize services for those who don’t. It’s definitely a bold shift from the status quo of software. But terrible? I don’t know yet.

First, a redirect — let’s take “mobile” out of it and look at the ideals of a Learning Strategy. Then, let’s consider how “mobile” could support that learning strategy.

Learning Strategy (Ideal)

1. Comprehensive: Rather than develop a bunch of different systems, one framework that incorporates all aspects of the university would be ideal.
2. Student-centered: If we approach that strategy from the perspective of student learning, we’ll need to recognize and address the fact that “classroom learning” (and much of what the current traditional university systems are built to address) are but one piece of the university experience for students. Our strategy must “play nice” with the other priorities of students to be incorporated fully into their lives.
3. Cost-Effective: Since we know that the most successful students are those who identify as being members of learning communities, the strategy must support student integration into, and development within, learning communities. Community support minimizes floundering time, and more fully immerses students into their career fields, minimizing the amount of time needed to finish school.
4. Personalized: Given that much of education is about the development of a personal path within a generalized curriculum, the strategy should support easy personalization, and allow flexibility for students to engage in learning activities in ways that both meet their learning preferences and challenge them to develop skills navigating alternative pedagogical techniques that others may employ/prefer.
5. Active: Embodied, experiential learning activities, such as lab work, group projects, presentation, and fieldwork can be pedagogically-powerful activities. The strategy should provide support for these types of activities by, for example, offering access to learning resources (content, process, mentoring) whenever students are engaged in learning.

Given these five ideals (and there may be others), let’s examine the role that mobile can play.

Mobile support for Learning Strategy

One feature/constraint of mobile devices is their size/portability. On one hand, they’re small and thus less effective for much rich content delivery (large visualizations, deep reading, etc.). On the other hand, their portability makes them amazing conduits for just-in-time connections to information, friends, and expertise — lightweight prompts that still put much of the learning on the individual.

1. Comprehensive: Mobile can support easy, anywhere, anytime access to a surface layer of all aspects of UW. This is great for reminders, prompts, and time and place-based notifications, but perhaps less effective for in-depth investigations of websites, texts, visually-rich lectures, seminar-style discussions, etc.
2. Student-centered: Mobile can play a huge role in supporting student schedules, and connections to classes, jobs, classmates, student orgs, family, friends, finances, food, laundry, sports. If students juggles it, it should be easily supported and accessible from their mobile devices.
3. Cost-Effective: Because mobile devices are intimate (pocket/purse/bedside) and accessible 24/7, students use them. We should tap into that by making their access to their UW life as seamless as possible — e.g. already-trusted personal devices should not require multiple logins (on small screens with tiny keyboards) to access their information. Let them choose to rely on their lockscreen password. If it’s a PITA to get to their “UW learning stuff” they won’t, and it won’t be cost effective. If they use the structure we provide, they will use it to develop their academic identity, and more effectively find their niche/identity in learning and affinity groups.
4. Personalized: For this, consider mobile’s role not as a content delivery system, but a route or means to connect with other learners. Perhaps the most effective way to allow personalization is to foster the peer-to-peer connections with like-minded learners in their learning communities. Fostering learning communities may also be the most effective way to challenge them to translate learning into formats that others prefer/understand.
5. Active: Mobile can support field research and investigation including citizen-science, citizen journalism, place-based investigations, tours, and interviewing. It can also provide portable spaces for note-taking and collaboration (e.g. peer review).

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 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.

Via: Voxy Blog

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.

1. Mobile Editing: For iPad, iPhone, and Android devices, being unable to even create and edit Google Docs has been a major missing feature — let alone being able to collaborate with others on that document. Imagine, for a moment what this could do for large class lecture note-taking, with 50 students contributing in real-time to a shared transcript of the lecture (okay, it’d be chaos; but groups of 3-5 would work)
2. Six new typefaces: Droid Serif and Droid Sans, Calibri and Cambria, Consolas and Corsiva. Consolas especially caught my eye as a monospace font that doesn’t suck horribly.
3. Editing in MS Word: Word docs can automatically be saved to Google’s cloud. I “grew up” in MS Word, delving into Power-User features as a technical writer. I just can’t quit you, Word. (Though I’ve tried). This may help to ease the pain of having to deal with Word’s many limitations, while allowing Word addicts to continue in their affliction.