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{ music }
This morning Lee Rainie gave us
a good foundation of the research that his organization has been doing
on the current state of internet use and
some unique ways that people were using it. Especially younger people who are going to be
college students with us in the next few years. Now I'd like to turn this
over to our lunch speaker, Bryan Alexander, who is the
research director for NITLE. The National Institute
for Technology and Liberal Education. Did I get that right?
So in Bryan's role, he basically explores the way that
emerging technologies can be used in creative, effective, and
sustainable ways to teach at
liberal arts, a consortium of liberal arts institutions
throughout the country. I first met Bryan whenever he
was at Educause. There was a special forum on mobile learning.
And I feel like I'm pretty good with technology and everything, but what Bryan was showing
was completely blowing me away. He was talking about Smart Mobs and
geo tagging, digital storytelling using things like Flickr. And
I was just really impressed and thought that that would be a really
great asset to expose to the Penn State community. Because he's not talking
about frequencies or hardware or
what XML tag is gonna get you to where you want to go. He's talking
about real stories. Real teaching moments.
So with that I'll turn it over to Bryan and
I'm sure he'll be fascinating.
{ applause }
I better be. Is this loud enough?
I was hoping everyone would just fall backwards.
Whoa, it's too loud. Thank you very much for that
insidious introduction. I'm very glad to be here
and not just because there's still snow where I live. I'm very glad
to see all these people here. Not just because there are so many Twitterites.
I'm kind of stunned to see so many people tweeting away.
I'm gonna quickly run through a whole bunch of topics. But because this is
after lunch and that kind of post carbohydrate coma
is starting to settle in, I'll show you a movie first.
And what I'm showing you is totally
unremarkable.
{ sound effects }
{ music }
What you're looking at is a massive visualization
two years ago. This describes the decent of Quiggins probe
of the surface of Titan from orbit around Saturn.
This is a single movie. The orange ball in the middle
is the photograph of the surface of Titan glimpsed step by step
as the probe ascends. Titan shrouded the thick atmosphere so you can't
really see it. This was the first time we got to glimpse beneath the cloud cover.
On the right that series of boxes is readouts
covering altitude, magnetism, all sorts of chemical readouts.
The sound you're hearing is two different tracks.
A radar imaging going back and forth.
The whistling, it's partly composed of sound recorded by a mic
on the outside of the probe as it drops into this alien world.
You see the resolutions begin to peak up as the probe came closer and closer.
Let me speed this up a little bit so I can help you survive
the drama. As you get closer the distortion is caused
by the lens.
Sound pitch changes.
And then, poof!
That's actually a shot from the base of the probe
before it died. Now I'm showing you this
partly because it's so cool. But
I'm showing it to you because unremarkable. NASA,
the reason NASA survives, has nothing to do with it's science or
technological innovations. The reason voters don't exterminate NASA,
like Congress frequently wants them to do, is because NASA produces beautiful
eye candy. That's it's main appeal to the American voter who can't follow
telescopic science. NASA designed these things
very carefully. They assume that the average viewer would find this appealing.
And when I showed this to audiences, when I showed this Lee Rainie's crowd,
they say, oh, cool, can I download this? Where do I play? Are there other
people here? Can I see it? If you find that intimidating,
don't be alarmed, I think you should in some ways. But that is
unremarkable. That's part of the background of what I'd like to show you.
Now I have a powerpoint presentation.
Some of you know I like to apologize when I do that, I use powerpoint mostly to archive screen captures.
I like to present from the web, but I found that the more people watch me do that
the slower the web becomes. I think it's a scientific phenomenon
that it's an entanglement with the Heisenberg Effect. What I'm gonna do is
go through quickly. I want to sketch out a series of things
that are emerging. And this is what the type of ground that we covered in the Horizon report.
So I'm gonna begin maybe half of my talk talking about social media
Web 2.0. The reason is that's more fully developed than any of these.
And we can learn a lot lessons from that, which we apply to other fields.
Then I want to move on to talk about mobility, then gaming, and
then some emerging forms that are appearing all around them.
Two things to underline all this. One is going to be talking about
emergence. And when you hear emergence we think of Steven Jonathan's work for example.
We often think of emergence in time. Last night we were talking about Twitter and some one
yeah, I miss the old days of Twitter, a month and a half ago.
Things move fast and some things are like that. But at the same time some things
emerge in space. Especially in higher education in the United States. I'm often told
that wiki's are emergent technologies. I first used a wiki in 1999.
The first German financial institution to roll [ inaudible ] intranet is from 1998.
Wiki's are not new, but they are just hitting academia in many ways.
The second thing is I want to emphasize pedagogy. My focus here
is to emphasize teaching and learning and how that appears from these technologies and practices.
I also want to give you a little anecdote because movies work.
This is a little Web 2.0 story. How many of you have seen
the movie La jetee, 1962 Chris Marker?
Obviously nobody knows what I'm talking about.
How many of you have seen Twelve Monkeys, the Terry Gilliam film? All right, ok, well it's based on
La jetee. La jetee is a very short film. It's about thirteen minutes long.
It is entirely composed of static photographs with one exception, which I'll let you discover.
It's a voice over story. It's very, very compelling. Hard to find as
you can tell from none of you who have found it. So on the web,
I discovered this on a blog that I read. Those of you who
follow Second Life. This is Warren Ellis' blog. He's a [ inaudible ] reporter for Second Life.
Very funny guy. And he quickly commented on this. Copied it.
And put comments on it from other people as well who remarked upon it.
So I have actually hit other web sites that, oh, great, La jetee is available.
And went to Google Video. I went to YouTube. I found different translations.
French, Spanish, sub-titled, not sub-titled. Then I blogged it
myself over on one of the blogs I run called Infocult.
If you have a hard time sleeping at night, please go to Infocult, it will cure your insomnia.
And I copied this, put comments on it, continue the conversation still further.
Why did I mention this? Well one reason is because we tend to perceive
the web as being [ inaudible ], but in reality we have
a love, a pleasure, a depleasure in archiving. Some people
out there, some of us, like to put old things
before the web and put them out there on the web for people see. That's an important learning.
The second is this whole flow of conversation and communication is not
the kind of thing through iTunes. Not the kind of thing you can do in a closed [ inaudible ] database.
You can't do this from an Xbox. Something which depends on
fluid dynamic information at college. So that's one
little anecdote to get you started. Now how do you take a look at all this stuff?
We're talking about the future. We now know from academia that we have several different modes
for apprehending the future. One is, of course, the reliable
panic mode. We're very good at that. We've practiced that for some time.
We can also trust vendors who will give us things. And that is occasionally reliable.
That strategy is pretty popular. We could also use
establish futurist methods. Like the delphi method. What we do at
NITLE is we use networks. We have people all over the world who will send us
requests, comments, stories, observations, anecdotes, and we try to
surface how that could work. I could submit to you that that kind of network approach is a good way
for understanding a world with networks.
I want to compare how we can do that approach by looking at
gaming and Web 2.0 together. Quick show of hands, how many of you guys are
computer gamers? Look around the room. Look how few
hands have actually gone up. And those that do it are proud. I'm a gamer. I admit it.
Don't laugh at me. Gaming is still something of a stigma even though
it's quite large. Perhaps, how many of play computer games or have played
computer games? All of the hands go up. Because everybody has been afflicted with Tetris,
[ inaudible ], Mindsweeper and so on. When we take a look at Web 2.0 in gaming,
they're actually kind of similar from us and academia. These are huge
worlds. Billion dollar industries. Planets expanding.
Developing every day in rapid ways. They're also
worlds that get badly covered. If you read the Chronicle of Higher Education,
some of us joke that is the intranet, threat, or menace school
of reporting. It just is very, very intent on giving us bad coverage
of technology. In fact it's very easy to find coverage in CNN
or mainstream media elsewhere that emphasizes scary things.
Danah Boyd, for example, has observed that while most
print media like to emphasize predators on MySpace. It turns out that it is
more difficult to be predator on MySpace than almost any other environment in the surface of the earth.
On top of it, wiki's, blogs,
Second Life, to mention any of these risks being seen as not
very serious. The names are silly. And academia
we don't like the word game. We use game as a metaphor for something
frivolous, child-like. We can do some different approaches
to projects that are out there right now. I'm gonna come back to these as we go.
I'm gonna quickly leap into Web 2.0. For those of you who are familiar with it, please
nod like you know what I'm talking about. This is going to be, I want to cover some basic ground
and pull out a few features. The term itself is so
controversial. It is universally established. Everyone likes to use
it and no one has replaced it. You can tear it apart
in a few different ways. And I want to pull out a few elements that will be useful for you today. One is
that we used to say social software. And the reason we said
social software, is because our persistent school of thought that argues that
computing is anti-social. And that goes back to science fiction
and pop culture in the 40's through 60's and you have to say
social software. We have to emphasize in the fact that people keep using this stuff to talk to each other.
That was replaced or sub-zoomed into Web 2.0.
It also says that the web has a history. That we have a
decade of practice. Instructional technologists know that
most of the world likes to assume the web was born yesterday. Invented now.
And there's nothing we can learn from the past. The term Web 2.0 summons up
that history. [ inaudible ], Web 2.0
is about microcontent. If you ever author an entire page in HTML
or Dreamweaver or Arachnophilia, Web 2.0 is
a lot easier. Microcontent is a sentence that you add to it,
a blog post, a photo you upload to Flickr, a tweet in Twitter.
Small pieces of content. It's also
authored by multiple people. Now that's true of Web 1.0, which is
to say, everything in the web. But if you look at [ inaudible ] home page,
there's a banner authored by somebody. A menu authored by somebody else.
Content written by somebody else in Atlanta. But Web 2.0 emphasizes this
as a kind of default state. And when I was first giving a talk about this from a wiki,
at the top there you can see my notes, and the bottom someone edited the page as I was speaking.
And added really nice series of anecdote and examples which was very nice.
And I've used that ever since. Another feature
of Web 2.0, is that descriptively and prescriptively we say that
it's very open. Basement open content. So I can look at this Pepys blog
Has anyone here read this? I know you all read 17th Century literature daily.
So this is not entirely new. This is a diary of a British functionary
in London in nineteen, excuse me, 1660's. Fascinating fellow.
Hung out with a very broke, sex crazed, insanctifyingly oriented king.
Writes about his wife, his mistress, and his other mistress. And London burns down,
get'*** by a plague, and worst of all they lose a war to the Dutch. It's a fascinating
period. It's almost unteachable. But a London programmer
published it as blog. On a every calendar day an entry
from the calendar day in 1660 something so you can follow it along.
But you can only do this because it's open. No password required. No login. No purchase.
As a result when you come onto that open access,
to microcontent and social software, you get distributed conversations.
People post all over the Pepys blog for example devotays of Londo geography.
English teachers, first time readers, people simply randomly hitting the blog.
And the other people blog about this elsewhere, being the conversations rippling
across the blogosphere. Another part of Web 2.0,
are data mashups. Where you simply combine data streams from two or more sources.
And here this is a combination of putting Flickr to Google Images,
or Google Maps. Tim O'Reilly wrote the term up
and afflicted us with many side effects. And one is he declared
that Web 2.0 is a perpetual beta. I don't think that was true then.
But every developer has said, all thanks, Tim, I've been beta forever.
And so everything Web 2.0 is perpetually in beta.
Enterprises are built on beta solutions. But one key feature about that
is that Web 2.0 projects tend to be fluid. They're not released in a huge
over determinant way. They tend to tweak and emerge and adjust day by day.
Technology behind Web 2.0, some
insist it's AJAX. That's not true. It's also opened by Flash.
But with the mashups and with open content you can
build things on top of it. Let me see a quick show of hands for the sleep deprived, how
many of you use Pandora? Oh, yeah!
The rest of you, don't do this. Do not do this. This is like saying, here
grab ***. Try some. It's free. Pandora is
a music site that let's you find more music and weeks will go by and your family will abandon you.
Don't do this. But it's not social,
it's you versus the database. Well a programmer thought this was pretty cool and put the social function
and pumped it called Last FM and Last Pandora so you can take your Pandora music experience and afflict it
on the rest of the world. The key point is you can develop something.
Which you can't do with somebody else's page and a Web 1.0 way.
Examples and projects, I'm sure some of you are familiar with, but I want to put them out here just so you can see
how far this world has gone. That Web 2.0 is not just a fad.
The wiki platform of course, a few things about that
without going into detail. I can, at the end, come back if you guys are curious. One feature about
wiki's that's really interesting and surprising is they were textually productive.
They tend to reward people making more stuff.
This is a study through IBM showing that Wikipedia entries kept growing quantitatively
even when participants had every incentive to edit against them. This is from
WikiNews, which is based on the sub creator OhMyNews, a wiki based project
where participants add, contribute wiki articles, edit wiki articles
in order to make news stories. OhMyNews is now a first rank news source
in South Korea. WikiNews is actually pretty reliable.
The second chunk of Web 2.0 will be the blogosphere.
How many of you currently maintain blogs?
Oh, amazing, amazing! Please let me indulge in a personal moment.
Five years ago when I would ask about blogs, people would ask me if I had a
speak disorder. Or a technologist would say, server logs, they're very
interesting. No, no, no blogs. This is brand new in many ways.
But they've become enormous. A blog is website
that consists of microcontent arranged in reverse chronological order.
Each chunk of content can be addressed, linked to, dealt with.
They support distributed conversations of all kinds.
And it's big. When I try to convince academics that blogs
matter. I used to point to Tunezine, the first blogger in Tunisia,
who's arrested, tortured, and executed for his blog.
That usually depresses people. And they would say, oh, I don't want to do that. Let me try another
argument. Technorati now says there are about seventy million live blogs
in the world. And the charts all look like this.
Now the big worry is will the human race become
the blogosphere in a decade or will this merely become something small and
scope like say, the novel. It's enormous, enormous
field of content created by users. The diversity
of blogs is huge. Almost indescribable. Every topic
you can find a blog for right now. There are other Web 2.0 style projects.
I just want to touch on a couple of them and then move on to another topic.
But Flickr is a pretty popular one for social photo sharing. You can give microcontent,
social software, open content. Flickr is enormous.
If you join Flickr and you are a US citizen, please welcome to the minority.
Three quarters of Flickrites are not from the US.
Think about academic content and digital images. Think about what a global
world that is and how not using it, is a different choice.
It's searchable by tags, which we'll talk about in a minute.
The key thing here architecturally is
what I think Ton Zylstra hit on best, that if you have social software, if you have
an object that people want to look at. What you've done is created architecture based on the
social interaction with the objects. Let's refer to this as kind of triangle.
We view your digital object and somebody else in the world who'd interested
has a profoundly different way of organizing software than we've done in higher education.
Now the tags, Lee mentioned earlier
this morning, where you can tag objects as you go. These have
become very popular. They led to a movement for describing meta-data called folksonomy.
And these are still very controversial, but there are quite a few
projects. A folksonomy is when you tag your own content.
So you might remember back in the old days when you had print photographs. I love saying that.
I showed this pseumatic to my daughter and she thought, wow, what I cool thing. I'm
gonna make this. But in the 20th
Century you've heard of that I'm sure. But on the back of a photograph you would write a note about
where you were. You know, I was in Ireland here drinking too much or whatever.
You could take all those tags and you can then manipulate them digitally.
This is useful for all sorts of things. For a person you could use it to search
your own stuff. You could find out something about you. That haze of tags
there is unreadable at first glance. But when you run your eyes across it you
actually get a sense of what that person is about.
For community, you can have people tag and/or generate a lexicon
or ontology of words and interests that they're interested in.
You can then use this to surface attitudes that are beneath the surface to try to understand
what a community is thinking about. People use this knowledge advantagement in corporations
and the government all the time. This is an example from a museum project.
Here's an example from Penn Tags. You're probably all familiar with. A library project in the University
of Pennsylvania. In order to use tags so they could look at books as well as the web itself.
RSS is the most famous and I'm afraid
the most frustrating Web 2.0 technology. The reason it's most frustrating is because
it's geek only technology. If you try to use RSS
and you're not a geek, you will be punished. You'll be punished by XML
or by boredom. If you don't know what I mean by XML, see what I mean, and if you
don't know anything about boredom, I can show you some sources. RSS
however, once you get past the geek read, and I can get anybody past it in five minutes,
will make your life easier. It let's you read the web in a more efficient flexible way.
All of this, is the only way, I think,
you can get at MySpace and Facebook. You need to understand microcontent
to understand why people are online on Facebook all the time.
Because they're constantly twisting it and constantly checking that picture, tagging this,
putting comments on someone else's page. And if you don't the social object is the person,
now you begin to see why this is innovative and interesting. But
if you think it's gone too far, you're in the wrong country. Cause look at South Korea
and take a look at CyWorld or right now the population using
CyWorld in South Korea, is approaching one half of South Korea.
Not teenagers, but people living in South Korea.
That's pretty widespread. If you're a news junky,
you can take in your news through Web 2.0, which generates commentary
as you go. And this is how you can talk about
rich media. This is the first podcaster, if you don't recognize him.
Shame on you. With podcasting comes about an attempt
to try to take Web 2.0 and expand it to audio. There were a few attempts
to do this before it took off. Audio blogging, phone blogging,
none of them really, really worked. When podcasting took off, as you of course know,
many of you do podcasts or listen to podcasts, all of the charts
go up. I don't think that's interesting. I think the words are more interesting.
Neologisms, all we've to tell you something about what's going on for real. So to know about
godcasting, nanocasting, podfading
podcasting is so old now, that people have started podcasting
done it for awhile, and grown tired of it or burned out.
Podsafe, those of you who might be interested, that refers to either copyright
or adult content. Welcome to American politics 101.
Podspamming, podvertising, porncasting
well that's the world we live in, isn't it. There are also other audio
techniques. If you don't know Freesound, let me recommend it to you. This is a project from the
University of Florida. People upload sounds that they record. Footsteps,
rain, hammer striking CD case, and they upload
to be shared and used by other people. For you in your presentation or your movie.
It's a pretty exciting project. This is how you get
a Web 2.0 video. This is how you have to understand YouTube. It's not just about that
left part of the screen. It's also about all the tags
and everything that goes along side it. Here, I don't think
I can explain it fully. I think I might need an assistant to help me to explain.
[ silence ]
So when you take a look at this interface you'll see a bunch of these, where on the right
you have all the social, ho, ho, ho, I'm slowing down the web by touching it.
I told you this would happen. Well if that's gonna,
wait can it be? Hang on a second.
This is a podcaster, a great
academic heft. And you should listen carefully to this and take notes. There will be a quiz.
{ music }
Hiyah, ask a ninja
special delivery. What is podcasting? People
over the age of twelve have asked the ninja what is podcasting?
Right now you've got stuff out there like TV, which is like
a piece of wood. It's not even as interesting as watching grass grow. It's as interesting as
watching wood be wood. Podcasting is active, fresh text.
On one end you got the kid. Let's call him Jason and he's bored.
And he's sitting there going, um, um what's
cool dude? Yes, cause that's the way kids talk right now.
Jason, is a whale, and he's swimming around the internet and he's in
a whole pod of whales. That's where the term comes from. And they're looking to eat stuff.
And the content on the internet is the brine and it's just like, ok,
there's another shrimp and there's another stupid one video and there's a guy yelling
at a brick wall. That's interesting. And then, oh, look it there's Ava Longoria
juggling a chainsaw. But then it comes across us,
a podcast, every week consistent content coming out of like, hiyah, hiyah,
hiyah, and then if I kept doing that you'd see it's on a regular basis I go hiyah.
But it would consistently coming at him like an apple pie and if
you're a whale and all you've ever eaten is shrimp and then somebody gives you an apple pie, you're like, holy smokes
this is delicious, and then when you find out that there's a factory that produces
apple pies every week, then those whales just line up outside the factory.
And then we feed them apple pie. That's the simplest way to explain it.
We are a factory that produces apple pies for whales. I look forward to feeding you apple pie soon.
That didn't sound threatening all.
I guess I'm really
done, but
that's Ask a Ninja, and if you haven't watched it,
you should. It's an example of something that we don't have a good term
for, videoblogging, vlogging. There's actually an award called the
Vloggy. And it really does sound like you're talking about Dracula instead.
But videoblogs are increasingly popular. The reason they're not as big
podcastings is because they are much harder to do. As anyone who's made video knows.
But they are popular. In fact I used to talk about Rocketboom and Amanda Congdon.
She started the video blog. Already got fired and is now working for a major news agency.
All of this is pedagogical. All of this
is pedagogical impact that we have case stories or cases of people trying
them for the first time. A lot of these, a lot of Web 2.0 technologies
pick up Web 1.0 pedagogies that we already know about. Here's the list. I don't like to read
powerpoint slides out loud to people, but you can see most of these are pedagogies that we know.
Web 2.0 makes a lot of these easier. You can also take
pre-web technologies like journaling and media literacy and they
apply to Web 2.0 in many ways even more so. Course management
systems, you use ANGEL here, some of the other ones like Moodle,
Sicai, Blackboard, Web CT, often are starting to look at
Web 2.0 technologies. Moodle, for example, has a wiki built in.
Blackboard, I had a lunch meeting with the head of marketing for Blackboard,
he said, so tell me Bryan, what is Web 2.0? A week later they released this.
I feel guilty. Blackboard Beyond, is their attempt to do Web 2.0
They bought the domain scholar.com, which is kind of a social bookmarking system
for people using Blackboard. There are the
principles you can derive from this that are unique to Web 2.0 and here are a couple.
Distributed conversation has all sorts of pedagogical needs when you have a student
who's entering into a global conversation. That's different than having them participate in a single
discussion board behind a firewall. Collaborative writing, wiki's, and blogs
are very different tools for collaborative writing. Very powerful ones. Object-oriented
discussion is when you take an object like this photo here, this is used by
a professor of the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and hang discussion
threads from it. This is a very basic pedagogy for images you can do it with sounds and video.
Web 2.0 has a few principles with it. It's easier to make
Web 2.0 projects than it was Web 1.0. It's easier to personalize.
Lee talked about the net generation that's already accustomed
to this in many ways. I don't need to repeat it. It's an enormously influential
study that Lee helped shepherd. I would add
this comment from a writing instructor. We're worried about
digital technologies versus reading. Digital technologies versus writing. It's important to
realize that these digital technologies are often about reading and writing.
Kathleen Yancey observes, students are making all this stuff and no one is
making them do it. I'm gonna pop on
ahead and skim through here. Pause on one detail. American
culture netted the idea of the public intellectual. That's because America invented the
idea of restraining the intellectual. So it became notable when the intellectuals
came out and spoke to humans in public. That idea is back to the 1920's
every generation or so will go through a cycle of celebrating them, denigrating them, wishing
they were back and making some new ones. Podcasting and blogging has brought
that back. That's not pedagogical as such, but it is a researcher for
this. Some of the most widely bloggers are, of course, academics.
There are a problems with Web 2.0 pedagogy and I'm gonna skip that slide.
If you're curious, we can come to it, but I'm conscious of time.
Mobile phones, well they take all
of Web 2.0 affordances and make them even more. They take
everything that we know about Web 2.0 and make it ambient. So if we have
ubiquitous computing? If you're always on access, of those you who are using your pocket pc or your
cell phone, or laptops accessing a computer like those Mac guys there right now,
you begin to have more access to editing wiki's, for blogging as you go.
Another feature is that it accelerates all this transformation.
Wiki's are pretty good. Twitter is great.
And you can edit it from cell phone. You have more opportunities to Twitter than you normally did.
So the pace has changed. The development, the audience grows on top of that.
If you're mobile and have wireless you can annotate the world.
There's a term for this from MIT and the Department of Defense that is ugly, but we
still use it, called augmented reality. This is when you take
a piece of digital information, you locate it to a physical object.
There are many projects that do this right now. The most famous one is 34
West, 118 North in Los Angeles, that have a city block and they give people
cell phones, excuse me, GPS phones along with tablet PC's walk around this block
and pull down digital content chunks associated with different
points on that block. So if you walk in the front door you get the introductory text
walk around a bit here, sound [ inaudible ] comes down and so on. That's something that's new.
We have a weak for of this with Google Maps. Those of you who have built any kind of
virtual reality you can use that kind of thing here. But with mobility you can actually
annotate the world as you go by. Which is to say revolutionary is something of an understatement.
There's more to it.
But this is one, I don't mean to be too referential here, but
every presentation of mobile technology has a slide like this. And the reason is because
device convergence has not happened. Quite the opposite.
has happened. We have device exfoliation. We have multiple
devices. We tend to use them for one thing only. Except in the US.
The rest of the world has gone off and discovered the cell phone.
The US has buried it. The rest of the world is convinced
the cell phone is a powerful computing tool. There are businesses around the world that
use the cell phone. There are books about that. I helped edit Howard Rheingold's, Smart Mobs, out there in the lobby.
Buy it now. It's a good copy. One of the things he observed was that
social transformations that happened. Social movements by mobile computing,
except in the US. Media capture, media production enabled by cell phone,
except in the US. We use the phone for yacking. We tend not
to use it for text, for photography, for video. Think about Lee's chart with
the two columns. We have devices that can do these things and we tend not to use them.
Even the capacities are poor. You get better hardware and software for phones
in North Africa than you do in the United States. Not to mention coverage.
This is one example here, the London bombings. The best photography
of the event came from British citizens going through London with their cell phones
uploading to the BBC. The BBC reconfigured itself
so it could publish these photos as you went. Imagine using this in the US. You simply wouldn't.
They're are pedagogy's that emerge from that in the US
in the second world of mobile computing. We're beginning slowly step by step
to come closer to them. So I wanted to show you a few of them in
this kindergarten level so that maybe next year when we're in third grade
we begin to see how they grow. You can pull down information anywhere.
That might not seem very sexy or obvious until you've had to settle a
bet in a bar. Which has been by the way the source of a wonderful Swedish
Geonomics. Information demand when you're walking across a quad.
When you're in a movie theatre being able to pull down Google within your movie database.
That's very powerful. Your time uses changes. When does the student working
day begin? 10:00 pm?
People are seriously saying, 11:00 pm. It's a serious issue. You can change time
with your mobile devices because you can carry it around and work in different timed areas as you
move around. These are a few of the other pedagogy's that I'm sure you might be familiar with.
The personal intimacy with units, though, I do want to emphasize. If you give
someone a mobile device and they carry it with them close to their body
and you ask them to write, they're more likely to write a personal subject
than if you give them a laptop computer or a desktop computer. It's kind of obvious when
you think about it. If you go to a computer lab you're not as likely to write about your
sweetheart or about your first kiss where everyone else can see, but if it's
your pocket pc, where you can carry it around. It's
a little different. And that changes pedagogy. We ask students to write and that starts to change the way
they approach digital material. There are some new forms of pedagogy
beginning to appear. Mostly you have to look to Japan, South Korea, France,
to get examples of it. Scandinavia is especially good. The world
Economic Forum rated Denmark as the most technology sophisticated country in the world.
And that's one of the reasons because they have such wireless. But you can see some cases
in the US too. This is a project from John Schott at Carleton College
in the mid west. Where he had a bunch of media students go on a road trip to
examine media production facilities. New York, Hollywood, Berlin, give them laptops
in order to capture media as they went and blog about it.
And they annotated in full Web 2.0 style so their parents could follow them as they went
and people at these different installations could see this crowd coming
respond to it, and blog as they went. And you could follow the whole process from the
outside. It's a form of public social journaling.
Gaming, well I saw the hands that went up, so I
know my task here is kind of daunting. There's a lot to cover. But I want to
start at a meta-level. How can you talk about gaming in higher education?
Why? Maybe a few serious sober reasons
that don't involve fun. One is gaming
is like film or print now
in terms of it's ubiquity around the world. It is too
big. It is not for teenage boys in New Jersey.
It's for the elderly, men, women, girl's, boy's.
It's an enormous cultural presence. That alone makes it
worth looking at. A second, remember the NASA video I showed you?
They wouldn't have made that without games being so popular. The interfaces of
basic technology are beginning to change. Watch CNN or Fox
News' TV layout and you'll see the number of buttons beginning to increase.
Gaming is driving that in part. We're also using gaming
to create content. How many of you know what machinima is?
Aah, those hands, watch these people. They're dangerous.
Machinima refers to videos created by computer games. Not by the game
themselves, by somebody using a computer game to produce three dimensional images.
I can show you a clip if we have time at the end. The most famous example is
a comedy show called Red Versus Blue created using the Halo game.
Some of you may remember the French riots of a year and a half ago, a sixteen year old created a
thirty minute french political film in one day using a video game called
The Movies. This is a different production platform.
There are a few other issues as well. If gaming is this big,
it's part of the information ecology. It's part of the media that we need to study it.
And we teach students how to perceive media. It's worth studying. There are
conferences, scholarly books, scholarly articles, classes, programs, that's another
feature of it. And on top of it, the pedagogy. Gaming has all sorts
pedagogical handles and affordances to it. Moreover,
it's not easy. Here are a few of the problems you might want to think about. The violence
issue is overrated and overstated, but it's nevertheless an important one.
The size of players. The Matrix Online is considered a failure
cause it had only a million players. That's pretty small. World of Warcraft, eight million,
this is why people obsess over the numbers in Second Life, which looks like it has about
a hundred, two hundred thousand. These are very large projects.
Henry Jenkins at MIT said, gaming is a an instance of what he calls transmedia
storytelling. When people have a story that occurs across multiple devices and
media. You see a film. You then play the game. And then read the novel.
On top of that, gaming addresses all sorts of topics. They're
current events games. There are war games. Economics games. Sleeping games.
Dating games. Political arguments. Religious games and literary games.
And gaming is racked with becoming something as widespread as say
poetry [ inaudible ] topics. Now there's
intersection Web 2.0. Not much of one. Because most gaming is too big.
It's macro content, not micro content, but there are some connections.
One is, people love to use social media to talk about games. If you go through
YouTube you'll see video after video of people playing World of Warcraft or Line Rider or something else.
Plus they like to talk about their experiences. Even developers write up their experiences.
And in some of the games you can make
microcontent, which you can then share. So in Second Life, one of the reasons for the popularity,
is because in there you can create an object in one minute and share it
with people in Second Life. Second Life itself,
has grown two major types of pedagogical use.
And you'll see these if you go through Second Life and I can give you a tour if you want.
But you'll see these begin to grow as long as Second Life is around. One is good old
fashioned virtual reality. Back to the early 1990's producing
three dimensional objects. A Rome from the first century. Chinese house from the
1600's. We've got all of that. The second, and this is
the creepy one, if I can pick on you for a second, I mean that you and I have a beard,
Linden Labs calls this "emotional bandwidth." If
you're on a chatroom, those of you who are, or an instant message or an email,
and you want to tell somebody you're joking, how do you do that?
lol, laughing out loud,
smiley, I am joking, I'm serious,
whatever you like. JK for joke.
Well we'll get there, we'll get there. In Second Life, you have other
options for it. So the Second Life people, the Linden Labs company thinks that you should be
able to watch peoples expressions and their body language that is true,
but also this works. If you tell me something, and I do this,
what's your immediate response?
I don't like what he's saying. If you watch avatars move around Second Life
without thinking about it, without doing media criticism, you'll see people respond emotionally.
If he walks away from me, I feel sad, what did I do? Unless I wanted him to go away.
Oh, a success, I've done it. Emotional bandwidth is part of the affordance
of Second Life. In fact, if you watch closely, watch your avatar
it does things that you don't ask it to do.
And it's kind of fun because it usually looks bored or flirtatious.
And you're there typing away, and somebody else, you're typing that avatar,
and they're doing the same kind of thing. And they're you know scratching and
your avatar is flirting with the avatar. You're trying to serious conversation.
But in effect that it can work shows there's kind of an emotional hook.
So you should think about Second Life as something like half way between video
conferencing and instant message. There's storytelling
going on in Web 2.0 and through gaming.
Do you all know Lonelygirl 15? This was a story told through YouTube where you
take microcontent and you release it socially. But that's not a very impressive one.
What's really impressive, and if you ever feel that you are too geeky,
please take a look at this. This is the Web 2.0 game
form. This is a very avongard form of gaming and storytelling.
And I recommend taking a look at it because it's fascinating and complex.
Anyone in here play alternate reality games?
Ok, watch these guys. These are truly dangerous, odd people, and brilliant.
Alternate reality games are web based games that take
digital content, distributed it throughout the world, but without telling you that it's
a game. This can be web science, email messages,
ICQ messages, it can be physical objects mailed to you. It can even be located
in the physical world. The most famous one was built for the Steven Spielberg A.I.
Which had ultimately about a hundred thousand people playing it. There is one right now being designed
for Nine Inch Nails for their new album. There was a political one
that's due to be released later this month. These are played collaboratively
by hundreds of thousands of people around the world. They're puzzle based.
They have great complexity. I can tell you more about them. But I just want to put this out there.
Because this is an emergent form of storytelling that is already creating businesses and
educational models. People study these in class and now are starting to make them.
Let me close out with a visual.
Every form of art is based on some kind of limitation.
Some kind of artificial constriction. We like to do that.
Like to have a haiku with a certain silabury. We like to have poetry with a certain
number of lines that you can do. We do this with the
digital media in all sorts of ways. Here's one example, Flickr,
has a group called Tell a Story in Five Images.
That's how you do it. You submit five photographs.
The only text allowed is the title. Nothing else. Can't be
four, can't be six. It's like Monty Python, the number of the images must be five, it can not three.
And you tell a story. Let me show you one.
This is, the only text is called "Gender Miscommunication." Can you see this ok?
I'm sorry I keep blocking you. I'll go over here and block them. This is
the first image.
Second Image.
She looks a little sad.
Third image. Suddenly he's
doing something in this fourth image. She's looking what, scared, anticipating,
[ laugher ]
Fifth image. One of the things I like about this is if you go back
to, you see the first one, see the couple back there. They kind of fade out.
But then they come back and as a kind of counterpoint. They're going at it.
And you don't need any text to describe this. And could you have done
this with HTML? Yeah, yeah, yeah! Could you have emailed this to somebody? Absolutely!
But A Flickr makes this a lot easier to do.
Again the ease of entry. Microcontent, all you're uploading are individual photos.
And B, it's social. Check this out, this is the commentary for something else. Every one of these
object oriented discussion has a comment thread hanging from it. So here we have a series
of responses to another story. Where one person, Gustavo G, says
consider seeing the photos in a different order. One, five, two, three, four.
Somebody else, Violet Danger, interprets it.
And that at the bottom, moliere 1331 is the author and explains what she had in mind.
It's a workshop. It's a social workshop. So that people get feedback.
You get to learn about photography and about storytelling. Now you could
do this with Web 1.0, but it would be [ expletive ] hard.
This makes it easy as can be. And if want there's more stuff here. If you want Violet Danger
that's an interesting interpretation. Who is that? Click on it and see her photos and so on.
This is a new form of storytelling. Is it pedagogical?
Well I hate to do this, but I have to mention my daughter.
This is Gwynneth Alexander, she's now twelve, going on thirty.
And not a geek. Not a technologist. She likes to read
fantasy novels. She likes to berate her sixth grade classmates for
not being feminist enough. She likes to terrorize her younger brother of course.
And she uses technology
without thinking about it. She started a blog cause she wanted to talk about fantasy novels.
It wasn't fast enough. So she started a multi-wiki page. She invented
a game which she plays with two friends across the United States. A storytelling
game through the wikis. I have done nothing with this. I just watched this go by.
But she took a class online in Web CT,
which is a course management system. And found it almost unusable.
I was asking about it, I'm watching her carefully, it turned out that that interface
is about five years old. She doesn't use that. It's hard.
It's not very Web 2.0ish. It's not fun. There's something
off with the design of that. Her world now has advanced
way beyond that. So here's a provocation, if we design
for Lee Rainie's generation of rising kids, are we actually designing for them?
Are we carrying over all these older technologies and pedagogies?
Are we doing that thoughtfully. Second provocation,
this is a slide from a computer scientist with the greatest name in human history.
Valdis Krebs, I wish I was named Valdis Krebs.
I tried to get that in Second Life, they wouldn't let me. He's a computer scientist. Does wonderful
work at org.net. I recommend it highly. He does a lot of work about
network and [ inaudible ]. And this is a project. I know you can't see all the titles. Let me just explain
You know on Amazon.com, aka, one-third of my income,
there's the recommendation system. People who bought this also bought that also bought
that also bought that. You still have money left Bryan you could spend it. Buy this too. So what he did was
he went through in 2003, 2004, 2005, and tested the
eco-chamber principle. That is to what extent is the web an eco-chamber?
You know you want to blog about your pizza making school and nobody else.
Especially not that republican [ inaudible ] over that. You want to have that over there. So he went through Amazon
because it's open and found all these books. And if you'll
look at the left it tends to be liberal left democrat books.
The buying of the president, how much money war daddy
built, Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore and so on.
And those are all linked together, like people who bought this also bought that. On the right,
you've got Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, more Bill O'Reilly
Rush Limbaugh, and they're all linked together. And in the middle,
are about three books out of ninety. Now this isn't really good
touch of the eco-chamber. People have found that in reality bloggers
actually like to link to people they despise. So you can actually go through back and forth.
But this is a good description, I think, of American political polarization.
I don't think that's a very deep analysis, but you can see that. My question,
is when we take a look at Web 2.0, put that on one side
of this model. When we use
closed databases, when we have students publish to a class only
environment for what ever reason, aren't we creating two different worlds?
Aren't we separating out two different information architectures?
Two different sides. That's a kind of grim note
to end on. I don't mean to end on a grim note. But I do want to
provoke you and ask you, as Web 2.0, it's not emergent, it's
already emerged. It's a planetary creature. It's huge. And most of you
are already part of it in some way. In fact if you Google you're already
using Web 2.0. Because Google loves blogs. Because blogs
hyperlink like mad. Google rewards hyperlinking. Even if you're not searching
for blogs. If you search for stuff, you're increase is likely to find blogs
as an entry. That is a triumph in many ways
of human creativity and sociability. Now I want to pause here,
because I'm ranting too much and I want to take questions
and comments. How am I doing for time though? You're about up. About up.
So one quick question. Do we time for a quick question? One quick question.
One quick question. People are all
standing there like. Yes, please!
[ inaudible question ]
Can you hear her?
Perfectly attired in pink by the way for that question. Do I have hope for the future?
Well I have dark worry
and a hope. The dark worry is we have lots of policy
that makes these things even scarier. Every year congress considers a law
to criminalize MySpace, block Amazon, I mean we've gone through this
every single year. Most of the political candidates running for office are very keen to
bash computer games. I think a lot of digital media are suffering
for a lack of respect for the first amendment and some of the other amendments
and also for copyright. Those worry me. But what I do love
is the fact that more and more people, as Lee mentioned this morning, are creating content.
That students are increasingly published authors and then making their own stuff, which
often means they're their copyright authors. That we're watching the renaissance
at a planetary level at something like a global village for the first
time we can participate in. And the kids are the ones who are driving it.
Man, that's something I'm very optimistic about. Good question.
{applause}