Ninmah Meets World

happy towel day

May 25th, 2010

I know where my towel is

Today is Towel Day, in honor of Douglas Adams. Do you know where your towel is?

As a miserable high school student in the late 1980s, I memorized the HHGG series. I built an electronic thumb, with some help from my dad and a bunch of spare computer parts. I desperately hoped I could hitch a ride on an alien spacecraft and see the galaxy — though I suspect a lot of that was because high school was so appalling. Douglas Adams’ books helped make it bearable. At 10, my son loves the series. This photo of me with my towel is a little tiny tribute to an author who fired the imaginations of millions of devoted, if weird, fans.

Posted in: whatever.
Tagged: meme · travel · writing

auctioning my time

May 24th, 2010

by ninmah.

No comments yet

Allthis.com has a neat idea: you pick something you like to do, or something you want to sell, and you auction it through their website. The proceeds go to the cause, organization, or charity of your choice. There’s a tiny little listing fee, like a couple of dollars. You get to contribute something other than cash, and someone gets to contribute to a charity while still getting something they need or want.

I set up a listing for 4 hours of visual facilitation (the paper kind, not the iPad kind) for any organization holding a meeting in the Bay Area or North Bay. No bids yet, but there’s still time to get in on the action! The auction, if it sells, will benefit the Mt. Diablo chapter of the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) — I spoke at their meeting in March, and they are doing a fundraiser for their annual conference.

Charities and other organizations can register with Allthis.com and then ask supporters to list auctions, as well as spreading the word that the auctions are there. It’s an interesting solution to the problem of how to organize a fundraiser, and it seems a lot more painless than some of the ones I ran when I was a teacher. I remember the year I boycotted candy sales and had my students sell photography portrait packages instead. Talk about a market mismatch.

Posted in: cool stuff.
Tagged: visual practice

Urgent EVOKE: Season one comes to a close

May 14th, 2010

by ninmah.

1 comment

Some day I will again write a short blog post, but this is not that day. May 12 marked the official end of Urgent EVOKE Season One, and the last day to join EVOKE until Season Two opens next year. 10 weeks into the journey, I have a few reflections on the experience.

What’s Urgent EVOKE again?
Depending on how you look at it, EVOKE is either a game or a learning experience — or both. Designed and run by alternate reality game master Jane McGonigal, EVOKE is supported by the World Bank Institute. At the end of Season One, EVOKE has 19,329 member-players. It was conceived as a way to teach young people to become social innovators; each week, players explored a social issue by learning about it, taking action on it, and imagining a future where that issue has been addressed. Players posted evidence of their work on the EVOKE site and received credit in the forms of runes and points in different EVOKE Powers (creativity, collaboration, local insight, sustainability, courage, knowledge share, resourcefulness, spark, vision, and entrepreneurship — labeled as key skills for social innovators). This week, some players are preparing EVOKATIONS, or proposals for real-world projects they would like to work on. The World Bank Institute hopes to award up to 20 $1,000 grants to start the best EVOKATIONS. Originally, the rules specified that entrants had to be born in 1985 or later, but that was changed this week when the game runners realized that many of the players were actually older than the target demographic.

What I did
Players were assigned quests and missions. Quests were single-page questionnaires that prompted players to think about their own actions and motivations; taken together, the 10 quests make up each player’s personal story. I completed all 10 quests and you can read them on my profile page (the first one is displayed; use the “Select a Story” drop-down to see the other 9).

For the first five weeks, I dived into each mission, completing one per week, more or less. I temporarily cut way back on my World of Warcraft playing time so that I could focus on EVOKE, and I really enjoyed it. Right around the middle of the season, I had some travel and some other things come up and I fell a bit behind; at the time of this writing, I have completed at least one objective for each of the 10 missions, but only 7 missions are completely finished. I have until next Wednesday to submit the remaining objectives (I think; the rules are a little unclear). I’m hoping to do at least a couple more, but I’m not sure I will get through all of them. I’ve made my peace with this possibility :-)

What I learned
This was not only a 10-week course on social issues and how to make a difference, but also a journey into who I am personally. There are so many big, important problems in the world, and it makes me glad that people have different interests because there’s no way any one person can fully engage with all of them. I learned about local issues — for instance, I didn’t understand the connection between the salmon season and agriculture in the Sacramento River area, and now I have at least a tenuous grasp on how they are related. I learned about global issues and what daily life is like in a lot of other parts of the world. Not that I was clueless, but after reading the stories of people who live in those places I understand a little more than I did before. I also learned about organizations that actually help, and organizations that seem to help but don’t make efficient use of their resources, and organizations that try to help but don’t really look to see what kind of help is needed or wanted.

I learned lots of ways to make a small difference, things that I can do personally. I’m not really the evangelist type, and I know that my particular path is not to try to convince others to change their actions or save the world; EVOKE didn’t change that. But I did learn that I can be more aware and act more responsibly. I also chose to make a year-long commitment to give a small donation each month to an organization that improves the availability of water in places where it is scarce. At this point in my life, it’s not realistic to think that I’m going to go dig wells myself, but I can help in other ways. I also pushed the boundaries of my comfort zone a few times and then wrote about the experience in my EVOKE blog.

And, once again, I bit off more than I could chew. Early in the season I started a project to develop a curriculum guide for teachers who want to use EVOKE-style projects in their classes, either with or without a computer. I still want to develop this, but it was not the four-week project I imagined, or even a 10-week project. (If anyone’s interested in working on this, let me know! Love to have you.)

What I noticed about my own participation
The first five weeks were fantastic. When I was able to engage for a couple of hours a day (yup, I really did replace WoW time with EVOKE time, and it was usually one to two hours an evening, sometimes more), I was so energized and excited about what I was doing and learning. Later, when I had less time to devote and I fell behind a little, it was still important to me to put a real effort into each objective and not to phone it in — which is why some of them are still undone. If I do them at all, I want to do them well. I think if EVOKE had been a six-week course, I would have been able to maintain the momentum that I had in the early weeks. Ten weeks is a lot, and I travel a lot, so that made it tough.

I really enjoyed reading and commenting on other player’s work. There’s a lot of talent out there in the world, and quite a bit of it found its way into EVOKE. The system that supported the game (Ning) was set up in such a way that managing friends was difficult; I basically accepted friendship from anyone who offered, after I checked their blogs to make sure I could get along with them — not that they had to have the same opinions that I do, but that they weren’t spammers or narrow-minded nutcases — and I offered friendship to everyone whose work I liked. I ended up with 144 friends, and at some point, I read or viewed something created by each of them.

And it’s unfashionable to admit it, but I liked the points and the runes. I’m very goal-oriented and possibly slightly competitive. Depends who you ask. Anyway, I enjoyed playing a game while I was learning and I got a huge kick out of my personal epic wins.

Epic wins?
An epic win is something that is amazing and great and that makes the player happy and excited and triumphant. They can vary from player to player, especially in an open-ended game like this. My epic wins for Urgent EVOKE:

I started a teacher discussion group, initially just to find people who had interests like mine, and I was awarded 100 power points (Spark) on the spot.
My discussion was featured on the topic page for Agent Resources and Utilities, and for a while, on the main discussion page.
I was picked as a hero of the week, twice.
I was a featured agent — my profile was featured at the top of the agents page. These rotate, so it’s not there any more. But it was!
Best epic win of all: Jane McGonigal commented on one of my pieces of evidence. Score! It sparked a fantastic discussion in the comments section. Plus I think I agreed to build a wind-powered sewing machine.

What I noticed about the game itself
The structure of the game was well-designed for self-directed learning. Each week started with a comic to get you interested in the topic. The comic included several references that were framed as questions in an “investigate this episode” blog post, with links to primary sources online where answers could be found. (I really liked that feature.) Each quest invited the player to explore him- or herself, and each mission built a foundation of understanding with the “learn” objective that led into planning and implementation with the “act” objective. The “imagine” objective then invited players to exercise their creativity, both in terms of thinking about the future and also expressing their ideas.

A couple of issues came up during the season that the game runners dealt with very quickly and gracefully. Originally, every piece of evidence submitted for the objectives was to be reviewed by a game runner and approved before the mission rune would light up on the profile page. I can tell you that excitedly completing the first mission and then waiting three days and still not seeing the rune light up was NOT an epic win. The game designers know this as well as I do, though, and by the second week had rolled out a system where players could log their own evidence and light up their own runes. Very cool.

The leaderboard was another unexpected issue that was handled well. Originally, it was a list of the top players according to point totals. This led to people gaming the system for more points, not unnaturally. Unfortunately, some of the methods were disruptive, involving spamming other players or creating fake profiles to use them for voting. The game runners could have tried to police the bad behavior, but instead they made the wise choice to remove the incentive and developed the leader cloud instead. This gave exposure to both the top and bottom tiers of point-earners, offered more lists for people to be at the top of, and included some elements of randomness and effort-based recognition so that everyone might have a chance to show up there.

Then there was the drama. Oh, the drama. The game runners didn’t let it get in the way, and I won’t dwell on it, except to note that in any group of 19,000 people, some of them are going to get offended or upset and storm out of the room in a fit of pique. EVOKE was no exception.

What I’m hoping for in Season Two
I wrote a wish list about what I’d like to see in Season Two. There are a few convenience features that I want, like making it easier to find interesting or relevant content and better group management. I’m curious to see what issues come up as missions. I’m thrilled that there’s going to be a Season Two, even if I choose not to play, because I think there’s tremendous potential here for teachers and students. I think EVOKE got noticed this time around and I hope lots more teachers will bring their classes in next time.

Posted in: gaming, learning.
Tagged: evoke · gaming · learning · MMOGs · social networking · urgentevoke

the iPad is also good for…

May 13th, 2010

by ninmah.

2 comments

…games! Oh, yeah. Here are three that I like:

Creating Games: Labyrinth 2
Weeks ago, I wandered into an Apple store to pick up an iPad for the first time. Naturally, I dragged my son along, just to round out the playtesting. He had a great time playing Labyrinth 2, a beautifully-rendered marble-maze game by Illusion Labs. (Labyrinth is also available for the iPhone.) When I got my shiny new iPad, that was the first thing he wanted to play. I liked it too so I got the free one and then eventually bought the game. After we’d taken turns playing a few levels, David said, “I wish I could make a level. That would be COOL!”

Guess what? You can.

On the main screen, there’s a little button labeled “Create.” If you tap it, you get a URL, an ID code, and a password. Put ‘em together and you get a drag-and-drop editor that lets you make all the levels you want — and then they magically appear on your iPad! I gather that the gaming community is disappointed that editing can’t be done right on the iPad, and I can see their point, but I was delighted to find out you can make levels at all. David was thrilled and immediately created a very challenging level. I playtested it and he made some adjustments, and now it’s tough but doable.

Conanza, Level 1

He named it “Conanza” (because it’s a bonanza of cannons). I passed it around at Northern Voice last week and mocked my friends as they worked their way through it. I’m so nice. His second level is actually impossible; after painfully making it all the way across the screen, you can’t get the marble into the hole because there are two cannons in the corner that are too close together. This is not immediately obvious, though, because when you trip the laser switch in that corner, a siren blares and the screen starts flashing with red light that makes it hard to see. He claims he’s going to adjust them, but he giggled insanely every time I attempted this level, so I don’t think he’s in a hurry to fix it.

Maybe you can’t create all the same kinds of content on an iPad that you can create on a traditional computer, but maybe that’s not a bad thing. Maybe the kinds of content that you can create on (or for) an iPad or similar devices are sometimes things that you couldn’t create on any other kind of platform, like my visual notes or David’s latest Labyrinth 2 level, which was instantly delivered to my iPad all the way up in Vancouver, where I was stuck in the airport for a few hours last Sunday:

the Mom level

Best. Mother’s Day. Card. EVER. How cool is that?

3D Virtual Worlds: Avatar
I found Avatar (the game) while looking for Avatar (the movie) in the iTunes store. Created by Gameloft, it’s an actual 3D world, right there on the iPad. It’s pretty good, and I really admire what they’ve done with the controls given that you have to hold the iPad while you play it so you can really only use your thumbs. There are a few issues, but I expect those will be ironed out quickly. The premise is that you’re controlling an avatar and you have to go on missions. It’s a fancy levels game, kind of like Donkey Kong on steroids, where you run and jump and touch things and fight things.

Avatar, by Gameloft

The controls are very clever. There’s a thumb pad to move around with, and jump/shoot/other functions are handy buttons under the other thumb. The graphics are quite nice — not as stunning as the movie, but very pleasing — and the motion is smooth. And the fact that something like this can be played on a computer I can hold in my hands just blows my mind.

I do have a few issues with it. First, you can’t turn the camera around, at least not that I’ve seen, so if you have to retrace your steps you have to do it blind. Second, when you’re working on a quest (bring me 8 shrubberies*, for instance), the game doesn’t indicate how many shrubberies you’ve found. And dangit, I want to be able to pick a female avatar. Would that be so hard? And I want her to look like Neytiri, not like Barb Wire, please.

More 3D, plus Flying: Nanosaur II
I have Nanosaur II (by Pangea Software) on my iPhone, but it’s hard to play because the screen is so tiny and visual cues matter a great deal, and also because it chews through the phone battery. It’s much sweeter on the iPad. I can actually see where the little eggs are, and I can at last distinguish between mounted guns (that fire at me) and eye gate switches (that don’t) before getting close enough for an empirical test.

Nanosaur II

In Nanosaur II, you tilt the iPhone/iPad to direct a flying dinosaur equipped with missiles and a rocket pack. Your mission: to rescue stolen Nanosaur eggs. You can’t stop or land, and if you hit the ground, a tree, another dinosaur, the side of a cliff, or anything else, you blow up. It’s very exciting. The world that you fly through is simple but appealing, and it’s always clear how much you have to accomplish before you get to a new level.

There are hundreds of games for the iPad, of course. These are just three that I like. Gameloft makes a whole set of action/adventure games (and others), as do Illusion Labs and Pangea Software. The games that are being developed for in-between devices are going to have qualities not found on games designed for other platforms, either larger or smaller ones. At first, a lot of them will look like games we already play, but gamers and game developers are wonderfully ingenious. Even the three I mention here are beginning to push the boundaries; I can’t wait to see what’s coming in the next several months.

Posted in: gaming, technology.
Tagged: gaming · iPad · virtual worlds

visual notes on the iPad

May 9th, 2010

by ninmah.

14 comments

Author’s note: I can’t help but be aware that this post rambles a bit. I have inserted handy headers in bold so that you can skip right down to the bits that interest you.

Backstory
I’m hanging out in YVR, waiting for my very delayed flight back to SFO, and reflecting on the whirlwind that was Northern Voice 2010. It was such a wonderful, lively conference, and I got such a kick out of meeting people whose blogs and tweets I follow. The sessions were really quick and packed with information — which made it a challenge to take notes on my iPad, but that’s what I did.

A couple of weeks ago, Scott Leslie started to actually organize an AltMooseCamp, because MooseCamp wasn’t going to happen this year (after seeing the program for NV10, I understand why — so many great sessions — they needed both days!). I took one of the AltMooseCamp spots and said I’d talk about how to do graphic recording on an iPad. I had recently talked to Fred Lakin about visual recording on iPads, and he had tried it, so it was almost like I knew what I was talking about. At the time, I didn’t even HAVE an iPad, but I had one on order, and a lot of faith that it would all work out.

It did. My iPad arrived about a week before NV, giving me enough time to play with it a bit. I also ordered a stylus (this one) and I played with that too. I didn’t actually do any visual recording, but I bought a sketching app and played around with it to learn the controls. Then my iPad, my stylus, and I got on a plane for Vancouver.

I figured it would be best if I had something to show during my talk, so I recorded Bryan Alexander’s opening keynote on Friday morning. That’s it up at the top of the post. I was really pleased with how easy it was, once I had the hang of the controls. During my talk, I showed two apps and let a couple of people actually hold the iPad (it’s true, and I have witnesses). I was expecting about four people to turn up but there were at least 20 in the room. We talked about visual recording and what’s different, worse, and better when using the iPad. After my session, I went on to record almost every session I attended on Friday and Saturday.

Here’s What I Learned
Software. I tried Autodesk SketchBook Pro ($7.99) and Adobe Ideas (free). All the notes in my Flickr stream were done with SketchBook Pro. The controls in SBP are very easy to access while working: 3-finger swipes and taps get you to the brushes, the layers, undo, redo, and the menu; 2 fingers let you zoom and pan; and 1 finger is used for drawing. There’s also a handy “puck” that lets you change brush size and opacity quickly. To switch colors, you swipe down with 3 fingers (this brings up the brush palette) and tap the new color (30 swatches are displayed, or you can tap the color wheel to pick a custom color) — you can also change brush type, size, opacity, and other options here if you want — then tap once on your drawing and you’re back in business.

The controls in Ideas are a little harder to master and are a little too fiddly for me to use quickly while recording. They are housed in a panel on the side, and one button is used to change the context of the panel (color, opacity, or size). So to switch colors while drawing, you tap the brush button, tap the color button in the fly-out panel, and then either use one of the four default colors that appear in the context menu or tap the color wheel to access other colors. I’ve seen a screenshot of a larger palette of swatches, but I haven’t worked out how to make it show up yet. If you also want to change the size and/or opacity, it’s a few more taps to do that. I usually missed the button and had to tap more than once to get the fly-out panel, but that would probably get easier with practice.

Drawing Feel. Both programs have a good drawing feel. Ideas auto-smooths lines, which is nice (sometimes) and a PITA (sometimes) — if you’re a sloppy letterer, it’ll end up changing your a’s to circles — but the sensitivity is very good compared to other auto-correcting applications I’ve used. Mostly it just smooths out your writing, which is actually nice. SBP does no smoothing at all, so what you sketch is what you get. I didn’t have a problem with it.

Zoom. Both apps let you zoom in to do small writing and fine detail. Ideas has an infinite canvas, or something really near it, which is really nice. SBP does not; the canvas is the size of your iPad, and you can zoom in to make better use of the space, but it’s meant to be small. I found that one screen was perfect for an hour’s talk.

Stylus. I didn’t use mine to take notes. I found that when I held it, I wanted to rest my wrist on the surface of the iPad, as I would if I were writing on paper. Since the iPad is multi-touch, this resulted in really interesting but unwanted lines on my notes. Instead I used the tip of my finger, as if I were shading with chalk or pastel. Both programs gave me a satisfying variety of line widths. Neither is pressure-sensitive, so I had to adjust the width when I wanted it to change, but I found it worked fine. If you *do* rely on a stylus, I recommend Ideas over SBP, because it’s easier to switch tools with a stylus in Ideas and it’s easier to switch with your fingers in SBP. You have to put the stylus down or hold it awkwardly to do the 3-finger swipes in SBP.

Here’s a video of an actual artist (Dani Jones) using the same stylus and SBP to actually draw something really cool, just so you see it can be done if you have mad skillz. She also uses a lot more of the brushes and tools. It’s worth taking a couple of minutes to watch just to marvel. You can also get an idea of how SBP’s brush/color palette works. (Note: I initially, and mistakenly, attributed this drawing and video to Erik Mallinson, who had reposted the video on his blog. My apologies to both.)

Layers. SBP lets you add as many layers as you want, quickly and easily. Yay! Ideas has two layers — the one you draw on, and the one you can put a photo into to draw over. I couldn’t see a way to add additional layers.

Posture. Obviously this is something that will vary quite a lot from one person to another. I had the opportunity to try out a number of different kinds of seats during the conference. I found that the easiest way to take notes was to have the iPad resting on my knee, tilted slightly up from horizontal, when I sat with one leg crossed over the other. This worked best in chairs with no arms, and in right-handed student desks. When I used left-handed student desks or those long curving desk things in large lecture halls, the iPad was too high up for me to draw comfortably and it was difficult to keep it tilted at a slight angle (see “Glare” below). I also found that sitting cross-legged on the floor or on a bench with the iPad on my lap was a good way to draw, although it was harder on my back and rear. TMI? Sorry.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Notetaking Experience. Brilliant. I loved it. It’s still a little slower than using paper, for me, and still a little sloppier, but I really liked having different colors and shades and not having to cap and uncap pens, or keep them from rolling off the desk, or cart them around. I really liked having my notes digitized and ready to post on Flickr in a couple of taps, too. With SBP, by the way, all drawings are portrait by default, so if you turn the iPad horizontally (as I did), you have to rotate the image before you post it or it’ll be sideways. I’m hoping they’ll fix this somehow. I could not find a way to rotate it cleanly in the app, so I saved the layered version to iTunes and opened it in Photoshop. It was an extra step, but a quick one.

Glare. The Life Sciences building at UBC is gorgeous. Lovely wood, lots of light, the ceiling is entirely glass — just beautiful. It reflects perfectly in the shiny screen of an iPad. The glare in any kind of light is very pronounced — you can use the iPad to check your hairdo when it’s turned off — but in the atrium where the keynotes were held, it was astounding. If you’re recording in a dark lecture hall, you’ll have no problem at all, but if the room is lit or you’re in a lovely natural light setting, it can be challenging to find a way to tilt the iPad so that you can both see it and draw on it. Not impossible, just challenging.

Battery life. Awesome. I started with a full charge in the morning, recorded six talks (a one-hour keynote and five 45-minute sessions), checked email, showed the iPad off to anyone who looked even remotely interested or couldn’t outrun me, passed it around after dinner so people could play games, and ended the day with 20% charge. I didn’t have to plug it in at all during the day (which is good since the cord is really really short).

How Does It Relate to Visual Practice?
Well… I wouldn’t use it (yet) for visual facilitation, where I’m interacting with a group and helping them work through something. It’s not as natural as pens and paper yet so I would be too distracted, I think. What I was doing at Northern Voice was visual recording, where I’m just listening and making notes. Then there’s the issue of the size; when you’re doing visual practice with a group, either recording or facilitating, you want the group to be able to see what you’re doing. I have not tried projecting the iPad onto a screen while working, so I don’t know how that would work, but I’ve heard that not all apps can be projected yet (some can’t access the video out?). I also have some concerns about sensitive persons in the audience watching my mad panning and zooming as I work. I think this is a great process for personal recording, but not yet for group work.

I’m also very interested in the possibilities for remote visual practice through something like screen sharing, but I haven’t even begun to figure out how to set that up.

Would I Do It Again?
Oh yes, yes I will. All that stuff I said about Why I Need an iPad is actually true — the phone’s too small, the laptop’s too big, and it does what I need to do when I’m away from my desk during the day.

If you’ve used your iPad for something like this, please leave a comment about your own experiences, especially if you’ve tried other apps or if you have a different take on the experience.

Pix or It Didn’t Happen
You can see all the notes I took collected on Flickr. Also take a look at these visual notes from NV10 by Rob Cottingham — he did the same thing, only he’s a cartoonist so his sketches bear a strong resemblance to real-world objects and people. Here’s the one he did of my talk — I love it!

Posted in: cool stuff.
Tagged: northernvoice10 · nv10 · technology · tools · visual practice

do what you love, support a good cause

May 4th, 2010

by ninmah.

No comments yet

excerpt from a keynote by Gardner Campbell that I recorded in San Antonio, April 2010

A few weeks ago, I spoke at the Mt. Diablo Chapter Meeting for the ASTD (and I had a great time and a lovely dinner, I might add). Not long after that, I got a note saying that they are doing fundraising for their annual meeting. The thing that caught my eye is the system they’re using for the fundraising. It’s called Allthis.com and it launched today.

Allthis is an online auction where you can donate anything — things you’d sell on eBay, or your time doing something you’re good at — and the proceeds go to a charity or nonprofit. I was intrigued so I set up an auction for half a day of visual facilitation. If anyone bids on my auction and wins it, as long as they’re within driving distance and we can agree on a date, I’ll go facilitate a meeting of up to four hours for them. The money that they pay for the auction will go to the Mt. Diablo Chapter’s fundraising effort. My auction doesn’t open til May 10, which is the date that I guess the Mt. Diablo Chapter auctions start, but there are others that can be bid on now.

I really like the way Allthis makes it easy to give something that you really want to give, and still have the charity or nonprofit receive what they really need (money). From the Allthis press release:

Until now, if someone wanted to support a charity, there were only two options – write a check or volunteer. Beginning today allthis, the marketplace for things money can’t buy, offers a new way to support a cause: by turning an individual’s time and expertise into cash. Allthis is an all new way to give.

People have two options to support a charity – bid on an existing auction item or create a new one. Non-profits, clubs, companies, or any type of affinity group may also create teams to raise money together for a common cause, competing against each other to raise the most. The real winner is the non-profit, which receives the money from all the auctions in the end.

You can browse Allthis to find a cause to support, or if you ARE a cause (well, not you personally, but you know what I mean) you can set up a profile so that people can donate and bid on your behalf. It was very easy to set up the auction — only took a few minutes. It seems like a neat use of social media to facilitate what is essentially a barter system to support good causes.

Posted in: cool stuff, technology.
Tagged: social media · technology · tools

why I need an iPad

Apr 7th, 2010

by ninmah.

6 comments

I’ve been asked, and not unreasonably, why I think I need a device that I haven’t even held in my hands yet. Apart from the initial “Because it’s an iPad!” answer, which isn’t really very satisfying, I’ve been thinking about why I do feel I need an iPad, sight unseen. The reasons here are the result of conversations with a lot of different people, too many to name. If you recognize something you said to me in this post, thank you. See? I was listening.

I need an iPad because the iPad redefines portable computing.
It’s just possible that the laptop has too much overhead, and that we simply never noticed before. If I want to go sit on the back porch and read email, I have to unmount a couple of hard drives, turn on monitor mirroring, unplug my USB headset, and carry the laptop outside. That used to be fine because it was better than lugging a tower and monitor out there. But it turns out there’s another level of portability, almost satisfied by devices like the iPhone — but not quite. The screen and keyboard on the iPhone are too small for anything but really short emails. Forget document review or authoring — it’s really just too painful.

I want something bigger than the iPhone but smaller than the laptop, and I want to be able to pick it up in one hand and carry it outside — or pull it out on an airplane, even if the person in front of me leans back; or on a bus; or in the waiting room at the doctor’s office; or… you get the idea. I need an iPad so that I can overcome “the phone’s screen is too small” or “the laptop is too bulky,” which is true even though there’s no way I would have admitted either until there was a better solution. I need an iPad so that I can really work anytime, anywhere.

I need an iPad because I read and I write, and books are changing.
In this post, Books in the Age of the iPad, Craig Mod addresses the point that print is dying. He says that’s okay, though, and that having fewer books printed will result in higher quality of printed material overall. He also says:

“In printed books, the two-page spread was our canvas. It’s easy to think similarly about the iPad. Let’s not. The canvas of the iPad must be considered in a way that acknowledge the physical boundaries of the device, while also embracing the effective limitlessness of space just beyond those edges.

“We’re going to see new forms of storytelling emerge from this canvas. This is an opportunity to redefine modes of conversation between reader and content. And that’s one hell of an opportunity if making content is your thing.”

I think that’s just brilliant. “Let’s not.” Let’s invent formats that really work on this kind of device, and no other. Making content *is* my thing, or a big part of my thing, and I agree that devices like the iPad are going to change the way writers communicate with readers. I need an iPad so that I can imagine the possibilities for those new forms of storytelling — and so I can help invent them.

I need an iPad so I can use more of my skills in more places.
One of the things I do is visual facilitation (drawing on giant wall charts with big markers while a group discusses something). There are varying levels of portability: Sometimes I can just bring paper, tape, and pens, and tape the charts right to the walls or whiteboards. NMC has a nice set of portable walls for rooms where I can’t do that. But some rooms are just too small for the portable walls and also don’t have a place to tape the paper. I’ve also been in situations where the event was at a restaurant or other odd venue, where it’s just not appropriate or possible to set up the charts. And I’ve been in situations where the need for visual facilitation arises spontaneously, and I don’t have markers or paper or tape.

The iPad, and devices like it, may make it possible to do impromptu visual facilitation on the go. As Fred Lakin* points out in this post on graphic recording, it will depend on the resolution of the software, but if it does turn out to be possible, I could have an always-available set of “markers” and “paper” that I could use anywhere. It could be projected on a screen if one is handy, and the visual record would already be digital when I was done (I always spend time digitizing and cleaning up chart photos after meetings). I need an iPad so I can experiment with digital visual recording and, hopefully, help influence the state of the art.

I want an iPad so I can play games with it.
Okay, this may not be a need — although that could be arguable too, play being as important to learning as it is — but I really want to find out what kind of games we develop for devices like the iPad. Tim Bajarin says in a post on PCMag.com:

“There is some real innovation happening in the games space, as well. I downloaded the iPad version of Scrabble and found that it could be played with iPhones and iPod touches through the Bluetooth feature. You place the iPad down on the table between yourself and a group of friends. The iPad serves as the board, and everyone around the table uses their iPhones and iPod touches to create words, which magically show up on the iPad in the center.”

Okay, that rocks. What else can we do with this device? It reminds me of the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer from Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age (warning: link contains spoilers). This is a device — in Diamond Age, it looked and functioned like a book — that “contains” nearly all the information you could need to know, and lets you access it when you need it — the ultimate just-in-time learning device. I want an iPad so I can play games, watch movies, learn things, and be curious, in addition to reading and working, whenever and wherever I want.

But none of those is the main reason I need an iPad.
The main reason is the same reason I needed to build a web page in 1994 when a friend told me to. (I thought he was nuts, but I did it anyway. It changed my life.) It’s the same reason I needed a Second Life avatar in 2006 and a Twitter account in 2007. I had no idea what they might be good for, but there was a sense that they would turn into something.

The main reason I needed all of those, and the main reason that I need an iPad, is because I don’t know what the best reason is. No one does. But with some things, you can sense that there is a “there” there. You can sense that this train is going places, and that those are places you want to be.

The main reason I need an iPad is simply to discover why people need iPads. Or, if I’m really, really lucky, to help invent why people need iPads.

*Small update: The blog author formerly known as [the author who, despite my best efforts, I can only identify as Visual Raccoon] has been identified. Sorry, Fred!

Posted in: cool stuff, technology.
Tagged: iPad · learning · technology

Urgent EVOKE: Agent Ninmah is Born

Mar 5th, 2010

by ninmah.

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This week, I became an agent in a global network of social innovators.

Urgent EVOKE: A Crash Course in Saving the World opened on March 3, 2010. It’s a game, a learning experience, a training simulation, and a journey all in one. It was designed and is directed by Jane McGonigal for the World Bank Institute. For more on the game’s background, see this WIRED article or watch the video interview with Jane McGonigal below:

The Hook
EVOKE has been open two days and already has more than 7,500 members. The game will last 10 weeks, concluding on May 12, 2010, with a new quest unlocked each week. The hook or premise for the game is that players are members of the EVOKE network and have been called to respond — or will be called, in 10 years; the game moves back and forth through time fluidly — to an urgent food crisis in Tokyo. The story is presented in graphic novel form on the main page of site and also plays out in a 90-second trailer:

EVOKE trailer (a new online game) from Alchemy on Vimeo.

The Game
Each week, players get a new mission and a new quest, with three objectives (learn, act, and imagine). This week’s quest was very personal. On the surface, the first mission was to answer the standard “introduce yourself” question that many social networks include. But the format and the questions made me want to really think about what to say, and more crucially, made me want to see what other people wrote about themselves. The quest objectives are categorized as learn, act, and imagine; the “learn” one was to read an outside blog post (the hits for that page must be off the charts) that collected insights about social change, pick one of the insights, and respond to it. The “act” objective was to pick a hero to shadow, write about who they are and why you chose them, and then either follow their blog or Twitter stream, read their research or writings, and/or reach out and tell them you chose them as your hero. The “imagine” one was to write about where you would be in 10 years when the call came from EVOKE.

Players can either remain within the scenario — that is, choose heroes and actions that are consistent with the Tokyo food shortage theme — or make their own path, which is what I did. I’m interested in changing the world through gaming and play, especially in education. So I picked Jane McGonigal as my hero, and imagined myself volunteering in schools to help the kids construct and play games, and help the teachers work them into the curriculum. The important thing is that the quest made me think about the kinds of change I really can effect.

my EVOKE profile

Game Design
The game is essentially a challenge-based learning project, deployed on an enormous scale, where participants can pick their own problems. The game provides a framework, but it’s up to us as players to figure out what we want to learn, how to go about it, where to do research, and so on. The only incentives, unless you are going for one of the World Bank Institute grants, are your own motivation to learn and the comments and points awarded by other players or by the game shepherds.

The first quest was designed to push players past their comfort zones, but only a tiny bit. The questions about who we are were personal, but it was up to us how much to say. The suggestion to reach out to a hero of our choosing was brilliant — for some, that requires a great deal of courage. (My hero hasn’t answered yet, but I can only imagine how busy she is, with upwards of 7,500 people suddenly playing her game!)

Technical Aspects
The game platform is essentially a Ning network with some additions. I could even use my existing Ning ID to log on — yay! no new passwords! — and it had my photo in place already. Players can add blog posts, images, videos, and links very easily. It’s easy to find other players and easy to interact with them.

Community
Participating in the game gets you points in different powers (collaboration, creativity, local insight, knowledge share, and so on). You can award power points to others when you look at their posts (“evidence” in the game). There are also game shepherds; originally, they were supposed to review every piece of evidence and approve each one if it satisfied the quest, but they have recently announced that we’ll be able to do that for ourselves beginning next week. The Leaderboard shows the top point earners and is sortable by power, so you can see who has the most collaboration chops, for instance.

There are active discussions and I’ve found that lots of people are willing to comment on others’ posts. The game also has a Twitter stream and makes it very easy to tweet your progress, which I don’t because I’m sure all my followers could care less.

I’m very interested to see what happens as time goes on. I imagine that some participation will fall off after a while, and I’m curious to see who sticks it out to the end.

Posted in: cool stuff, gaming, learning.
Tagged: evoke · gaming · learning · MMOGs · social networking

I met a nice tank last night

Mar 2nd, 2010

by ninmah.

2 comments

First, a little vocabulary lesson; if you play MMOGs, you can skip this bit. By “tank” I am not referring to a heavily armored vehicle, except in the metaphorical sense. In World of Warcraft and similar games, the tank is the best-armored person in the group. His or her job is to engage and hold the attention of the big bad monster and stand there getting hit while the rest of the party kills the creature (or heals the tank, in the case of a healer). A party is usually composed of a tank, a healer, and three DPS (damage per second) classes. World of Warcraft has a new system that randomly matches up parties. Tanks and healers are in high demand, as there are more DPS players than either of those. Okay, now you’re caught up.

The relative scarcity of tanks and healers in this new system means that they can often afford to be jerks, and unfortunately many are. Something about the combination of being in demand, being anonymous, and in some cases being good at playing the game tends to bring out the worst in some people. I’ve known tanks and healers to quit a group, leaving the other players waiting around for a replacement, because they didn’t like the gear other players were wearing, or the way they talked in chat, or the method they used to move through the dungeon. Some of the ones that don’t quit feel that it’s okay to insult the other players, tell them how to play their toons, or just be generally rude. This behavior isn’t limited to tanks and healers; DPS classes are very easy to replace, though, and tend not to get away with it as much.

And of course not all tanks and healers act like jerks just because they can. I’d say the majority just quietly do the dungeon, and if they are annoyed, they keep it to themselves. The runs usually end in about 20 minutes anyway. But recently I actually met a nice one, which was rare enough that it caught my attention. This person was helpful without being pushy or rude, and when someone in the party made an error, he or she (the toon was female, but I don’t know about the player) was very forgiving and actually tried to make the person feel better. It got me thinking about behavior in a largely anonymous virtual space, especially where there is a different value placed on different players not because of their personal ability to play the game well, but because of the abilities of the class they are playing (tank, healer, or DPS).

It’s not really possible to find out who a player is, unless they have connected their character name with their RL identity elsewhere on the web (as I have by naming some of my toons here on my blog). A player’s identity within the game is persistent — that is, your character always has the same name in the game, short of paying for a name change, which is not common. But you can’t generally find out who someone really is. With the new dungeon system, it’s possible to be in a group with players that you will never encounter again, because the new system pulls people together from different servers, and you can only communicate with people on your own server (outside of random groups like these). You’d have to set up a new character on that player’s server in order to talk to them, and you may never get grouped randomly with that same person again. So the level of anonymity is really high.

The goals of the people in these random dungeon groups are related to moving as quickly as possible through the dungeon and moving on. You get rewards for completing them, and there are penalties for ditching a group in the middle, so there is an incentive to stay even if there are unpleasant people in the party. Most of the groups operate in near or total silence, without text chat (voice chat isn’t really a viable option and no one ever uses it in random groups). Yet there are still a few people who feel compelled to be insulting. It’s interesting to me that in the midst of what must be a cooperative activity — even the best tank or healer isn’t going to be able to solo these instances — some people are still willing to be rude. I’m curious about the characteristics these folks have in common; are they all young, and just don’t know any better? Are they all very good players, or do they all perceive themselves to be good? Is it a personality trait, and they’d be just as annoying if they weren’t anonymous, and were labeled with RL names or were in a face-to-face group? Mostly one gender or the other? Just like having a captive audience?

And in such a system, what personal characteristics make someone behave as well as the tank I met? There’s no special reward for being helpful. It’s easier to just keep quiet. What makes someone go out of their way to be nice to someone they may never run into again? Lucky for me, this tank plays on my server, and is now added to my friends list. But that’s not a “reward” from his or her point of view (especially if s/he doesn’t feel the same about grouping with me!). What makes people be nice in an anonymous environment?

Posted in: WoW, gaming.
Tagged: gaming · social networking · virtual worlds · warcraft · WoW

visiting Adobe

Feb 11th, 2010

by ninmah.

1 comment

I have to start this off with a little disclaimer: I’m an Adobe fan-girl from way back. I mean way back. Like before Photoshop had layers. Adobe’s apps are robust, capable, flexible, and not buggy. I’m proud of the work I’ve done with them, and like Kathy Sierra says, to turn users into passionate fans, help them not suck. Adobe does that for me. Now that you know that, feel free to skip the rest of this post with a superior feeling that I obviously can’t be objective, if you like. Or, read on to find out about a fan-girl’s visit to the mother ship.

I used Illustrator to not suck when I drew this

Yesterday, I spent the afternoon at Adobe with NMC CEO Larry Johnson. We talked with folks from Adobe’s higher education division, and we saw some really, really cool stuff. One thing that I loved is Adobe Rome (see the video demo of Rome from MAX 2009 last October). Rome is going to be a fantastic tool for K12 mediamaking and collaboration, I think. It makes it easy to pull together different kinds of media along with text and drawings, and then to output the project in different ways. I really want my son to play with it, because I’m curious about how the tool will feel to a young person. It looked very intuitive to me, but then I’ve been using Photoshop and Illustrator longer than my son’s been alive, so it’s hard to say how a new, inexperienced user would see it. The demo just blew me away because of what could be done with it in schools, if the Big 3 Issues are properly addressed (what does it cost? can I make the kids’ work private? do I need to install and maintain it?). I have high hopes.

We also saw some of the new features coming up in CS5, but I’m not sure which ones have already been revealed so I’ll just say this: Wow. I am so excited about what I saw. Photoshop in particular has some new powerful features that I look forward to playing with, and there are some other treats coming out as well. Keep an eye out for CS5 and Rome!

Posted in: art, cool stuff, new media, work.
Tagged: adobe · cs5 · nmc