Games for change

So you know the next two weeks will be thin on the ground for me – I’ll be flat out like the proverbial lizard preparing for my KM study meeting in Taiwan, flying to Taiwan blah blah.

I don’t want you to hit the Unsubscribe button though because I’ll be back with those long, raving and ranting posts I know you love so much. But to clear up my backlog of interesting stuff to share with you – here’s a great site I found that uses games to bring attention to the most pressing issues of our day, such as poverty, human rights, global conflict and climate change.

So a lot of arty geeky types, along with academics, journalists and individuals from the nonprofit and government sectors have collaborated on the site Games for Change. I’ve been dabbling with some of them because I need to design curriculum in the next few months.

There are various game channels – I really wish I had access to this sort of interactive, educative stuff when I was a teacher back in the mists of time. I particularly like the games on global conflict and human rights. They deal with real-world issues.

Check out this game – 3rd World Farmer - designed for ages 11+ years, the game lets players manage a small virtual farm in a developing country and experience the hardships and dilemmas faced by the poor.

Ars Regendi is a political game where a player can found their own State and lead it according to his or her political ideals. And Escape from Woomera is probably a very timely game for Aussies to play given the current situation with Sri Lankan refugees. The game gets players to try and escape from an immigration detention centre.

And my favourite? It’s a game called Civilization IV: Quality of Life and involves players in using their moral values to reward a society.

Given Gen Y and Millenials penchant for virtual worlds, these digital games are a fabulous way of raising social, legal and moral issues and facilitating social change. The site also has a toolkit of the game-making process and prompts you to think about the sorts of questions you need to ask if you’re thinking of designing a digital game. Cool!

Designing for social interaction

Awhile back, I blogged about an experiment I found fascinating. Students of museum studies (at the University of Washington) were given the task of developing an exhibit in public space that would encourage strangers to talk to each other.  With my interests in history and photography, I guess I’d get old postcards with writing on them and old photos and bung them up on walls to trigger discussion. Perhaps have some colourful Post-It notes available for people to write down their reactions or thoughts and place up near the postcard or photo. But I don’t think that would cut it because individuals might just stare silently at the photos and write on a Post-It with no interaction or discussion going on. The question is: how do you encourage unfacilitated interaction through the use of social objects? So the goal is not design based around objects but design based around social interaction. Could be some good lessons for me as a knowledge management practitioner!

It was with some interest that I read the results from the student task of designing exhibits or artifacts that inspire interpersonal dialogue. You can check out the Museum 2.0 blog for full details of the participatory exhibit, including the project wiki. The exhibit was run at the University’s Student Centre. This is what the students came up with:

• they brainstormed ideas and concepts that would guide interactions, rather than discussing what collection to feature. You can read their brainstorming ideas here and here.
• they settled on an exhibit called Advice: give it, get it, flip it, fuck it. Really, I think this is a smart concept – everyone loves to give advice or obtain it. And what does advice usually involve? Usually some aspect of knowledge transfer – “this is how I’ve always done it”, “from my experience, you should try the following” and so on.
• they designed a website that allowed participants to send in advice via Twitter, phone, audio, photos and other media. This was the online component of the exhibit.
• they also had a physical exhibit with advice-giving booths of volunteers sharing their knowledge; a space for people to pose their own burning question; a simulated bathroom stall on which visitors could write or draw advice; pre-selected questions (called Questions of the Ages) which posed age-old problems like “”What should you do for a broken heart?” were popped up on glass walls and people could write responses on Post-It notes and place under the question.
• the advice booth business was smart – children, money managers, tattoo artists and people making buttons or badges were on hand to dispense advice on any topic and compose advice phrases to pop onto badges.

In any facilitation I do (and I have two sessions coming up over the next two weeks), I liberally use colourful Post-It notes, so I was glad to see that the students used them too. In fact, they discovered that stuff written on Post-Its can be content rich.  In response to the question “How do you heal a broken heart?”, participants created a chain of conversation with offshoot questions:

The American Philosophical Society (I found them on Flickr) seems to have done a similar thing with their Dialogues with Darwin exhibit:

So I thought this was a really great way to apply Web 2.0 technologies to museums and I’m going to reflect on what lessons I can take away for my KM work.

China, wikis and blogging

Some shorter posts this week as I’m flat out with my “day jobs” and preparing for my upcoming international address at the 7th Annual Information Management Summit in New Zealand. And I just found out I’ll be chairing Day One and even introducing myself – so I’d better prepare some flattering notes about moi!

First Monday has just published the latest issue of their journal. Some interesting pieces.

• Chinese internet censorship: how Chinese Internet companies censor user–generated content, usually by deleting it or preventing its publication.
• Wordlings in a Web 2.0 world: how public language has become impoverished by ‘managerialism’, which frequently reduces language to strings of ‘weasel’ words.
• Learning in and with an open wiki project. There is a chance that Wikiversity will become the Internet’s free university just as Wikipedia is the free encyclopedia on the Internet.
• Not sure if you saw last month’s article on Twitter under the Microscope – so I’ll include it.

Web 2.0 and exploitation

Over the last few weeks, there’s been a fur fight about exploitation of photos belonging to a member of a photography group I belong to on Flickr. This member’s photo was used by a company in an advertising brochure without permission from the member. Debate erupted over whether this was permissable, ethical, exploitative – you get the idea.

Which brings me to today’s post on Web 2.0. We’ve heard the mantra: Web 2.0 technologies bring us democratisation of media production; the opportunity to play with identity; the power of social networks; increased flow of information and so on. We rejoice in indulging our creative impulses. We tear down or blur the boundaries. We become empowered. Individual and collective social identity can be articulated.

But perhaps what we lose sight of is this – Web 2.0 technologies are dominated by media and telecommunications providers. And the unintended consequences of this domination is that they have the power to shape what enters the public discourse. They can exploit free labour for commercial gain. They can use surveillance tools to monitor our search habits. Recently, I read that this Web 2.0 dominance was referred to as the dictates of a neoliberal socio–political hegemony and that we only have contingent freedom.

We could argue maybe that Web 2.0 is an architecture of exploitation. Flickr and YouTube, for example, rely on you and me to post content, which could be exploited for commercial gain. We exploit each other – a young mother from South London was gang-raped by three youths whilst her two young children cried helplessly. The whole sordid affair was captured on a mobile phone cam and plastered all over YouTube. It was watched over 600 times before YouTube took it down.

Anyway, to avoid a rant coming on, I’m going to refer those of us interested in how Web 2.0 might have unintended social, political and ethical consequences to the online journal, First Monday. It contains a collection of articles that looks at the rhetoric surrounding Web 2.0. A good read!

Jesus 2.0

Gotta love this. GodTube.com is a social networking and video-sharing site for Christians who want to connect, pray and harness technology as a force of worship. Talk about Christianity 24/7. As the site says, GodTube is about: Representing Baptist, Catholic, Episcopal, Evangelical, Messianic, Methodist and all of the traditional Christian denominations, GodTube is unique in its appeal and in its mission to “Broadcast Him”.

There’s a bunch of people behind GodTube who view videos before posting to the site. Apparently, 14 seminary students act as a board checking into people’s backgrounds, aiming to exclude sexual or violent criminals, before giving someone a profile. Not sure whether this means if a sexual pervert or crim has “found the Lord’ they are not allowed on the site. Not to mention I’d be worried about the privacy aspects of checking into people’s lives.

I didn’t spend a lot of time on the site, but I noted some maybe disturbing aspects. There’s a fairly liberal use of scare tactics if you ask me. Check out this video on the Rapture.  Then there’s a bit of an attack on Islam.

Source: AlterNet 

Flickr and Library of Congress

I’ve only recently started putting my photos on Flickr as I’ve been using another photo sharing site. Seems the Library of Congress is the same as me: a late starter on Flickr. Whilst rummaging around on Flickr, I found the Library of Congress is making copyright-free images and photos of historical and cultural interest available so that the public can tag content. It’s a pilot project but there’s already some amazing stuff:

• the 1930s and 1940s in colour collection
• 1500 photos from 1900-1920 New York depicting disasters, sports events, strikes and celebrities (yep, even way back then, we were celebrity-obsessed apparently)

And what is really exciting is that a trio of photos had been incorrectly labelled by the Library of Congress as images from the administration of Ulysses S. Grant in 1869. A user was browsing through the online collection of photos and alerted the Library to the high probability that the photos were from 1865 and therefore from the Lincoln administration. The Library checked the negatives and confirmed that the podium shown in the photos was that of Lincoln and not Grant.

According to the Library of Congress blog, there are more than 14 million photos and other visual materials but the project is starting off modestly with the two collections mentioned above. The Library is hoping that key information sometimes missing from photos, such as who took the photo or where the photo was taken, will be provided by the public tagging items.

Flickr has created a new publication model for publicly held photographic collections called “The Commons”. If you want to participate, here’s the FAQ site.

I spent hours on the Library of Congress Flickr site. Here are just some of the images that caught my eye and I’m tempted to answer the question “How would you tag this photo?”:

There’s something about the power and drama of an old black and white photo that (IMHO) modern DSLRs can’t quite match. Have a browse through the collection – you’ll wonder what people’s lives were like and you’ll become caught up in the history and stories.

Source: Los Angeles Times

Navigating the web

How cool is this! I read that some people think this is a totally useless map (can’t recall where) but I reckon it’s pretty funky. Japanese company, Information Architects, has just released its 2007 map, which is basically a journey of web trends. It looks like a map of the London Underground and depicts the 200 most successful websites on the web, ordered by category, proximity, success, popularity and perspective. Mostly, it features English language websites but does include some Japanese, German and Chinese sites.

Click here and check out the map. By placing your mouse over any named site, a pop-up will appear. And the map has been organised to show different “trend lines” – so for example if you follow the Social News Line (dark green), you’ll find Digg, Netvibes, Reddit etc. The rise of political blogs is shown via a thin pink line, so here you’ll find the increasingly influential Huffington Post and Daily Kos sites. The Know How Line consists of sites like Wikipedia, WebMD Health, Answers.com and Yahoo Answers.

Apparently, there are some insider jokes embedded in the map, which may require a good knowledge of the Tokyo transit system. But I did find this one amusing: “Google has moved from Shibuya, a humming place for young people, to Shinjuku, a suspicious, messy, Yakuza-controlled, but still a pretty cool place to hang out (Golden Gaya)“.

Online social networking: what’s your perspective?

I came across this interesting article in Social Computing Magazine about the different actors, archetypes and discourses that exist in the online social networking world. A number of attempts have been made to map the various cultures prevalent in online worlds. Patrick Lambe of Green Chameleon looked extensively at archetypes in a specific online community and major personas that represent patterns of behaviour have been identified eg Needlers: the type who has a point to make and will make it repeatedly to the point of aggravation; Energy Vampires: a person who drains the energy of an online community perhaps by always taking and not giving back; Elders: the acknowledged expert whose knowledge is respected by the community.

The article outlines 35 online social networking ‘perspectives’ or lenses, which are not strictly archetypes but ways of talking and thinking about social networking. If you are a teenager using MySpace page to stay in touch with friends, for example, the lens through which you look at online worlds might be different from that of an entrepreneur who is looking at ways to market and create business.

I won’t list all 35 perspectives, you can check them out yourself. Some of them are predictable – for example, the Social Perspective – social networking sites help young people to build social relationships and communicate. Or the Paedophile and Predator perspective – social networking is an opportunity to prey on the innocent or vulnerable. But I found some of the other perspectives interesting:

• The Source Critique perspective: social networking sites force younger people to critically assess and be skeptical of what they read online. Partly I agree with this but only to the extent that people are equipped with critical thinking skills – something I’ve ranted about before.
• The Bullying perspective: social networking sites are places were people can bully others, be confrontational or intimidating. Aside from the fact I don’t have time to participate in some of the online communities I’d like to, I hesitate to engage in them because the ones I’m a lurker in are full of often ego-fuelled types who jostle for the top spot of being seen as the most intellectual. Dave Snowden had an interesting observation recently – he reminded us of the Dunning-Kruger effect – where people with little knowledge think they know more than people who have more knowledge. I suspect (rightly or wrongly) that social networking sites are clogged with victims of the Dunning-Kruger effect and this leads to chest-beating, arrogant remarks and so on. There’s a book I’ve ordered – The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen – I’m hoping it won’t be one of those broad-brush “I’m having a rant” type books and will have something meaningful to say about what I presume he sees as digital narcissism that potentially leads to the type of bullying and arrogant behaviour we often see in online communities. I’ll let you know what I think of the book in a future post.
• the Language perspective: online worlds are spaces for the creation of shared language often peppered with misspellings or abbreviations. The Anti-Social perspective will say that this has led to people who cannot write or communicate properly.
• the Surveillance perspective: well, this is clearly my lens. Social networking sites allow for the Identity perspective – constructing, reconstructing and displaying their self-image and identity, but the downside is that your digital identity is public, open to misuse, monitoring and so on.
• the Community of Practice perspective – people with a passion for common interests can gather together, discuss, debate and share.

Speaking of surveillance, the article led me off to 21 Perspectives on Surveillance a run-down of the different lenses through which you can slice and dice surveillance from control to invasion of privacy to Little Sister surveillance. Here’s a sense of a few of the perspectives – check the site to read all of them.

• Big Brother perspective: surveillance is simply a way for Government and private companies to nose around and invade people’s lives – from public webcams to DNA databases and fingerprinting.
• Foucauldian perspective: surveillance is disciplinary and prison-like.
• Security perspective: surveillance provides a sense of security and protection for the individual and society.
• Care perspective: surveillance can provide care and a watchful eye, similar to the kiddie cam in New Zealand I blogged about recently.

The different filters we use in our daily lives informs the way we make sense of the wonderful collage of our physical and online worlds.

Facebook for dogs (and cats)

Forget Facebook, MySpace and all the other social networking sites for humans – now there’s Dogbook. Yep, social networking for your beloved canine. Dogbook is available through Facebook (new applications section) and really isn’t for dogs as such – more for pet-obsessed humans.

So now dogs and their owners can post profiles and photos, find dog friends living close-by and share news about the likes and dislikes of their furry friends. Dogbook was created by a 21 year-old – a darn simple idea I wish I’d thought of – and has been a four-legged run-away success.

I was about to utter “this is cat discrimination” but then read news that this same 21 year-old has recently added Catbook, which already has about 45,000 users. What next in the social networking world I wonder: Fishbook?

Class distinctions in cyberspace?

I admit I have a MySpace page but don’t really do anything with it and I’ve dabbled a bit in Facebook. But this article from BBC News – on class distinctions in cyberspace – took me by surprise. If you believe the hype, then social networking sites are supposed to be leading to a society based less on social status and more on connections between peers and like-minded people.

But PhD student, Danah Boyd’s research is showing that there is a sharp division along class lines between US teenagers who inhabit the two social networking sites. Apparently, teenagers on Facebook come from wealthier, predominantly white backgrounds and are more likely to attend college. Those using MySpace tend not to enter college as they seek employment following high school. Boyd also found that teens on MySpace tend to be from Latino and Hispanic families and are not part of the after-school social activities that occupy Facebook teens, such as proms.

Interestingly, Boyd comments: “This division is just another way in which technology is mirroring societal values“. So she’s saying that socio-economic factors leads to a stratification in cyberspace. You can read her work here.

I’m wondering whether MySpace and Facebook have created a whole new social class rather than a mirror image of class distinctions in “real society”. Maybe these social networks are “youth space”, which can’t be controlled by parents and other authority type figures. Sort of like hanging out at a mall in public space or private time in a teenager’s bedroom with the door locked. But it’s different because parents can maybe look (if they know about MySpace and Facebook) but can’t really control.

I think Boyd’s paper is well-worth a read!