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:

1. 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.
2. My discussion was featured on the topic page for Agent Resources and Utilities, and for a while, on the main discussion page.
3. I was picked as a hero of the week, twice.
4. 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!
5. 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.

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!

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.

This is a concept that has been recurring in my research over the past few years, getting a little clearer each time but still not quite in focus for me. The role of the teacher, in some places, is changing. A whole set of factors are contributing to the change, including ready access to experts and source material through the great communications medium of the Internet; open content; electronic, searchable, taggable resources that make it easier to draw (and keep track of) connections between things; and a growing recognition of the fact that not only is it often better for students to participate in constructing their own understanding, it’s actually possible to facilitate that process on a classroom-sized scale.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Bossanostra

The 2010 Horizon Report returns to this theme, too, both in the topics (open content and electronic books in particular) and in the trends and challenges noted by the Advisory Board. Classrooms are changing. Students are changing. The role of the academy is changing. It’s very easy to say that different equals bad, and that the anecdotal inability of today’s students to sit still and receive instruction is a symptom of the moral decay of our great society, but I don’t believe that’s true. I think, instead, that we stand at the edge of an opportunity to transform education into something that truly addresses the interests and the strengths of each student, rather than measuring each against an abstract ideal. I don’t know what it looks like. I know it’s more challenging to work individually with 25 or 30 different kids, or 60 or 120 different undergrads, to help them figure out interesting ways to learn what you want them to know instead of presenting material to them as a group and expecting them to master it. But I also feel so strongly that it’s the right way to go, because learning should be more than something that’s fed to you in school. It’s part of what makes us human and it goes on all throughout our lives, and it’s not right that so many students just can’t wait for it to be over so they can get on with other things.

I think we’re poised on the brink of figuring this out — how to really do it well, I mean. I think technology has a lot to do with it, not for its own sake but because of what it enables students to do. We’re still working out how to provide access, manage workflow, protect students’ privacy while opening opportunities to reach out to peers and experts around the world; we don’t yet understand how to assign, supervise, and evaluate the unusual kinds of work that contribute to individual learning; and there are many other obstacles, or puzzles, to get around or solve. Still, I think we’re on the way there, and it’s inspiring and exciting.

I spent the morning at Big Rock Ranch, which was once and may still be part of Skywalker Ranch (yes THAT Skywalker Ranch) and which is where GLEF makes its home. Marin County teachers and multimedia enthusiasts gathered to talk about multimedia in Marin’s schools. The event was sponsored by GLEF, the Marin County Office of Education, and the Marin Learning Conservancy.

The program was short — 8:30 to noon — but packed a big punch. Kristina Woolsey kicked it off by telling us all about the Golden Age of Multimedia and specifically the MacMagic Classroom, which started in 1991 at Davidson Middle School, and ran right up until last year. She showed a video of kids in the program that was just amazing: using multimedia in a collaborative environment to create projects that showcased learning and included student reflections on the process and on their own personal development.

Afterward, there was a panel discussion featuring two of the teachers from the 1991 MacMagic classroom (Karla Kelly and Steve Arnold), Kristina Woolsey, Reed School District Superintendent Chris Carter, and 8th grade teacher Anthony Armstrong. We talked about how technology tools can help kids get past learning blockages, and how teachers are really working on the same things now that they were then, although the tools have gotten more diverse and plentiful.

Anthony Armstrong spoke next, and he totally knocked my socks off. This is not to say that Kristina didn’t; I think my socks have been so repeatedly knocked off by Kristina that I just check them at the door when I go to hear her speak. Anthony teaches 8th grade history in Marin and he talked about how he uses Wikispaces in his classes. And he really uses Wikispaces. He knows it inside and out, and he pulls in videos and polls and Wordle diagrams and all kinds of other tools too. His students have to use primary source material that he pulls together and links from the wiki — including texts, videos, images, and everything you can think of — to construct their own understanding of events in United States history. Anthony is very firmly off the stage in his class, and the students are on it. His kids work collaboratively to understand why people made the historical decisions they did, to argue for other options that might have happened, to explain the context of events… they debate and write and record videos… and they do the wiki work as homework. In class, they work in groups using their own pencil-and-paper notes to have conversations about what they have discovered in their research. In short, at the end of his talk, all of us in that room were ready to enroll in his class. I know I was.

When he was done, the panel came up again to talk about how that kind of teaching and learning can happen in more classrooms. Anthony credited colleagues (in particular, Jennifer Carrier Dorman) that he met through their blogs for giving him ideas and helping him along the way, and pointed out that a lot of this work exists, because other teachers have put together things for their classes. He encouraged other teachers to reach out and contact someone whose projects they admire or have questions about.

All in all, it was an amazing morning. I came away with some practical things I can use, too, even though I’m not a teacher: a new angle for Smart Objects, which I’m struggling with for the K-12 Horizon Report right now; ideas for how to work on projects at home with my own son, who is in 3rd grade and not bored by learning, and who won’t ever be if I can help it; and a renewed desire to help public education be something more than what a lot of it is now, instead of just turning my back on it as I am so often tempted to do.

Thanks to all who organized and spoke at the event today. I am so glad to have gone.

We started with Georgia O’Keeffe and Matisse. We read books about them first (I recommend the Getting to Know series by Mike Venezia), and then we talked about some of their works using my extensive library of art books. That was the point at which I realized exactly where all my money went while I was in college. It really is a nice collection. We went to the grocery store and bought large flowers that interested us — we each picked out one bunch — and then brought them home and drew them close up, like Georgia O’Keeffe. Tomorrow we will be drawing with scissors like Matisse.

This morning David, Craig and I made the trip to the city and visited the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. They have Femme au Chapeau, which is one of the images from the Venezia book, and I wanted David to see it. It could not have been a more perfect moment had it been scripted. We climbed the stairs and turned to the left on the second floor — you can almost see it right from there, but there were people in the way. We moved over toward it, and when a gap opened he saw it and pointed and squeezed my hand and gasped, “That was painted by Henri Matisse!” Why, yes, yes it was. Imagine finding that here.

We talked about how it looked, and how it was bigger than he thought it would be. I had told him the colors would look different than they did in the book. He wasn’t convinced, but that’s okay. Then we wandered through the galleries, looking at whatever interested him. Fountain stopped him for a moment, but he was perfectly ready to accept it as art. “It’s sculpture, Mom.” Yup.

We spent a few minutes in the Koret Visitor Education Center, watching part of a film that talked about Matisse and Picasso and their models.

I have a personal tradition when I visit a museum of choosing a postcard from the gift shop to remind me of one particular work that I enjoyed on that trip. David made his first postcard choice today. He picked Les Valeurs personnelles by Magritte, which is the painting he spent the most time in front of during our visit. Back in the car, he showed me Femme au Chapeau in his Matisse book. He admitted that his favorite part of the visit was the translucent walkway on the fifth floor. Fine by me: he had a favorite part.

A ticket, a postcard, a map, and a blog post — David at SFMOMA.

Every night I read a book or two to my son, who is six, just before he goes to bed. Last night we read McElligot's Pool by Dr. Seuss. We've read it before — he loves all the funny fishes. After we finished, he climbed up into his loft and I tucked him in and turned out the light and said "good night, sweet dreams" as I always do. That's when it happened.

As I was about to leave, out of the goodnight-moon quiet of his just-darkened room, I heard him say, "Mom… would it be okay if I read McElligot's Pool one more time?"

"You mean you want to hear it again?" I asked.

"No, I want to read it myself. Is that okay? I'll tuck myself in again after."

Is that okay? Is that OKAY? Of course it's okay! My boy wants to READ! He wants to actually READ the WORDS in a BOOK before he goes to bed. Is that okay? That's totally awesome. That's one of those things that they don't tell you about. Sure, there are nighttime feedings for 15 months and you don't sleep through the night forever. There are epic battles over eating food, wearing clothes, and using the toilet. There are terrifying moments when he falls down and cuts or breaks or bumps some part of his body and you can't fix it with a band-aid.

But last night I left the light on, and my son read a book to himself before bed.

I had no idea it would feel that good.