Mike Lee wrote up our day in email and I’ll link as soon as it’s online (photos are up already), but in short, we tested and provided feedback on 5 of their activities. I worked on the GIS activity.

Etoys are powerful. I can see the good they (it?) can be put to. They encourage exploration. I think I may generally prefer a more linear approach to master a subject than Etoys in Space offer, but I’m not the target audience. On this note, see also Greg DeKoenigsberg’s recent post about disruptive technology, learning, education (not always the same thing), and OLPC-esque possibilities. I’ve seen this positive use of “disruptive” more and more in the last year or so. GDK’s entry discusses ways to get around resistance to the disruption … assuming one buys into the goals.

OLPCLCDC NASA Etoys Jam

Anyone out there got any head-first usability testing tips?

•  mint irish cream
• triple chocolate
• cinammon orange creamsicle
• vanilla raspberry
• another chocolate
• soda slushies

Sunday, the OLPC Roundtable and Fiction Genome panels I participated on went well; I’ll put more details in separate entries.  I got to see the liquid nitrogen splashdown in the pool, too.  I was disappointed that I didn’t actually get to attend anyone else’s technical panels, but it was important to me to get enough sleep to be alert for my panels.  Maybe the third time (next year) will work out better in that respect.

I didn’t make it to the game room except for 5 minutes once, but I did get to play euchre in the con suite Sunday night.  I like it because it’s a *team* card game.  I haven’t gotten to play it much since I  left upstate NY (Rochester).  My partner Bob and I did well at first, but Bill and Gerald caught up and beat us eventually.  It was a nice close game.

Penguicon has a very well-stocked consuite for food (fresh vegetables and sandwich makings, not just snack food), but I highly recommend these two restaurants within a short drive of Troy:

• Elie’s Mediterranean (Birmingham)  - the best of that cuisine I’ve ever had, in a lovely setting (cobalt blue hanging beads, rollaway glass garage door in the front of the store)
• The Inn Season Cafe (Royal Oak) – vegetarian and vegan; listed in Health Magazine’s top 6 US independent restaurants this month.

One can always try to influence the culture (storytelling, glory boards, begging). One can give individual incentives (rewards for best contributors, points systems). One can send out reminders … or put reminders right into the interface itself, so the people who are already using the system (and may already be contributing to it at least on some level) will see them every time they use it. One can try to get people to send each other reminders. One can even try to make a game of it. Each of these approaches may meet with some success, but also has drawbacks.

Culture influence is hard without a critical mass of enthusiasts. Incentives may be difficult to distribute appropriately if tracking information/access is poorly set up, and incentives may get people into a mindset where one has to *keep* giving incentives to keep the contributions coming. Emailed reminders are all too easy to ignore (or filter straight to trash). Reminders inserted into the system’s interface may take up valuable real estate onscreen, which can make users unhappy (see previous comments exchange with Tim Spalding following my entry about LibraryThing’s fielded wiki “Common Knowledge” insertion onto each main page for books). LiveJournal’s “nudge” feature has annoyed users who don’t want to be guilted into blogging (it might be more appropriate for task-oriented communities). Games such as CMU’s The Name Game (picked up by Google for their Image Labeler game) may have a high start-up cost.

I really like LinkedIn’s graphic reminder approach. LinkedIn is a professional networking site; profiles have more value (to the business, not just to its users) when they have more than just a person’s name and connections. At the top of my profile on LinkedIn, my view shows a little “Profile Completeness” graphic, with a green bar showing my progress, and a suggestion of what to add next. It’s given me satisfaction to see that green bar grow toward completion (I’m at 95%).

I think Wikipedia and other online information sources could profit by a similar approach — Wikipedia, for instance, could have a little globe on each page showing fill-in for completeness, perhaps with different colors indicating different needs (more references? more category links?). As with my profile or any kind of knowledge garden, “complete” need not indicate “set in stone”; it can just be an indicator of whether the sorts of info one might expect to find on a given page is there yet.

Further on the subject of words, it’s annoying to me how the gambling industry is using “gaming” to describe themselves more and more, since now I have to be more careful when mentioning my hobbies (by “gaming” I mean board gaming, and *some* card gaming) — I don’t want anyone to mistake me for a gambling addict!

Recently I noticed that Pieter Spronk, the author of my favorite PalmOS game, Space Trader, is the Director of Studies of Knowledge Technology at Universiteit Maastricht. He also teaches Logic and Games & AI and guides students in related studies. This intersection of interests makes a lot of sense to me; more work is being done these days in what games have to teach us about learning, and implementing these lessons depend in some degree to the capabilities of the knowledge technology infrastructure involved. Spronk has also written about various issues with knowledge-related technology (e.g., his short analysis of the trouble with USB sticks).

Space Trader is a single-player game (turn-based), with pirates, police, special missions, and, of course, trading. In this game, the only trading involves material goods (from water to robots). There is no trading of information or knowledge, though one can buy a newspaper or pass on warnings to others. On the other hand, I remember that CJ Cherryh’s Tripoint features Merchanter ships, and one of them makes a bundle by (spoiler below the cut) a particular information run (being the first ship to show up with a lot of new news and entertainment downloads at a remote location).

Cherryh has written directly and indirectly about the implications of technology (effects on society) in many of her novels. She made the point at a WorldCon years ago that as we have more and more information overload to deal with, more and more of us are going to rely on our friends to filter our information for us. This has benefits and drawbacks. I’m using this approach increasingly, and I’m seeing the pros (as discussed in the Penguicon blogging panel, I don’t have time to read all the news and blogs that I’d like, but I have a number of friends who blog the most interesting science news, for instance) and cons (e.g., risk of groupthink) myself.

If I weren’t going there, though, I might be tempted to run down to NC for another conference, The Future of Learning in North Carolina (Durham). Looks like they’ll have stuff about digital classrooms and game design applications to learning. I haven’t figured out how much of that con will be mere hype repetition, but I do think the immersive, informal, interactive approach to education shows a lot of promise. Case in point: I think there’s a lot of interesting and useful work being done for One Laptop Per Child (beyond the hardware, neat on its own). On the other hand, I’m not linking to them today because of what they’ve done to their site home page, which I find much less friendly (however colorful and graphic it now is) than the last time I was there. Trends can be fun, but when they get in the way, they’re just in the way.

However, it turns out that Jon Udell talked about “collaborative knowledge gardening” over two years ago. Which is great; I can point folks to his excellent column as an intro to the concept, and to him as another person excited about the possibilities of social software for collaboration and knowledge work.

Possibly further back (2000?), there’s the article Knowledge Gardening Through Music. I very much like the “Cognitive functions of gardening” section.

See also Knowledge Ecology.

Where I would like to be this afternoon: “Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Mechanics to Social Software” at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. I may write an entry later about what we can draw on from games to engage people in learning.