Play with Learning
Archive for August, 2010
Adapting to new technologies
A report in the current issue of the Journal of Service Research describes the changing nature of customer relationships and how new technologies have altered the way consumers interact with businesses. The authors from Europe and the US describe a ‘pinball’ framework that characterises the to-ing and fro-ing of these more equal relationships, which they say is “highly disruptive” for those seeking to manage the relationships in a more traditional way.
“Managing customer relationships in the era of new media resembles pinball playing, with extensive information being available on brands and products which can multiply, but also interfere with the companies’ marketing messages (such as bumpers do when playing pinball) and make it more complex to control brand images and relationship outcomes such as customer equity.” (p324)
While paying particular attention to the ease of access epitomised by the increasing use of mobile technologies as consumer tools, the report seems to overlook the critical skills of discernment required to make educated decisions. It suggests that search engines have:
“diminished consumers’ need to classify and organize information about products and markets and to store them in their internal memories.” (p320)
The researchers have, like most users, imbued search engines with enormous trustworthiness and impartiality. They talk about the value of the ‘database of intentions’ to forecast future patterns of behaviour and personalise search results still further.
The downside of personalisation is the potential to only see what’s deemed specifically relevant.
This presents an interesting dilemma as search engine technologies become more sophisticated and present an ever-decreasing set of results because they reflect our preferences and previous behaviour. The downside of personalisation is the potential to only see what’s deemed specifically relevant. Far from enabling and empowering consumers, the ‘intelligence’ of these systems might well concentrate results to well-trodden paths and familiar territory.
All this reiterates the need to monitor the dominance of the likes of Google, and the importance of instilling a healthy sense of scepticism among users if we want to retain critical independence and the joy of serendipity.
Friendship Business
A couple of weeks ago I talked about a piece of informal research I’d conducted with teenagers about their use of Facebook and wondered aloud how their average of 400 ‘friends’ correlated with Dunbar’s number of meaningful relationships? Could those many hundreds of connections translate into a genuine social circle?
Twitter followers
Likewise, Twitter’s ability to broadcast minutiae to the world amplifies our ability to share intimate moments with friends and strangers alike. Does it make everyone a friend? Conversation with David Squire highlighted the illusion of intimacy that these insights present: it feels like we know the person tweeting. But of course the relationship is entirely unequal – celebrities, real or virtual know nothing of us – any conversation will be one-sided at best and embarrassingly superficial at worst.
Charismatic individuals have always flourished. That ability to make people feel important is a priceless gift. Even if not telegenic, I remember one friend telling me how utterly beguiling was John Major, the ex-Prime Minister. Clinton, Obama and Cameron are charmers too. It’s rare that politicians become leaders without an ability to woo (although perhaps Gordon Brown took Machiavelli’s advice that fear was a more consistent instrument for maintaining power). And politics isn’t the only business where personality is the dominant factor in success, showbiz and finance depend as much on an ability to ingratiate as any particular vocational skill. But does the social media industry cynically trade on friendship too?
It is easy to be sceptical. Chris Brogan (146000+ Twitter followers, 4500+ Facebook friends) shared some thoughts about the potential for a social crash in his blog recently. He warns us of a need to be content with ‘ambient connectivity.’ So is that merely an excuse to justify professional acquaintances and maintain the veneer of sincerity? I don’t think so for Chris but then Chris is an exceptional human being.
Just as I was losing faith in anyone’s ability to sustain that many relationships, Chris sent a note to me based on the fleeting moment we met. Given the number of people he meets on a weekly basis, that refreshed contact felt astonishing. But then you don’t forge a career like Chris’s without being extraordinary.
I wonder about us mere mortals though. And the prospects for depth rather than breadth of relationships in everyday social life. Perhaps the two positions are not exclusive. Wily celebrities will always exploit new technologies to endear themselves to a wider audience and I suspect we will always be willing participants in the delusion of a “relationship” but I see no evidence in the mainstream of people expanding their connections online at the expense of intimacy with their real-world friends. More likely, social media enables us to enrich our real friendships with ubiquitous access to their lives and simultaneously increases the penumbra of our personal society by exposing us to people who might otherwise pass us by.
Grown Ups and Growing Up
At the weekend I joined many others in celebrating my mum’s forty year’s service to the Girls Brigade in Coventry, England. Forty years. Forty years. Since she was sixteen, apart from a break to have her own children, she’s encouraged, supported and empowered thousands of girls by giving her time and energy to provide safe, worthwhile activity for them. I think that’s amazing. And utterly admirable.
She’s not alone, there are thousands of adults regularly volunteering their spare time to offer young people safe places to go in the evenings, weekends and holidays. This is an invaluable, possibly life-saving, contribution to the lives of teenagers, particularly those from poor background who have few, if any, recreational options.
According to research from Boys Town published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, “youth from low-income backgrounds were twice as likely to report early sex onset (by age 11) and more likely to report early delinquency (by age 10) than those from middle-income backgrounds. By contrast, youth from middle-income backgrounds were 1.5 times more likely to report early alcohol use (by age 10) than those from low-income backgrounds. Furthermore, those that showed early and frequent involvement with risky sex, delinquency, and alcohol use beginning in late childhood and extending throughout adolescence showed an increase in long-term crime, alcohol use disorders (AUDs), and risky sex behaviors in young adulthood.” The report powerfully makes the case for early interventions to transform the lives of young people. An earlier study by Cohen and Piquero (2009) calculated that a life of crime typically costs society £2.5m for each individual, £640k for heavy drug use, £320k simply for dropping out of school.
Even if one doesn’t recognise a moral duty to nuture and support our young people, there is a compelling economic case to give them every opportunity to excel and live a productive life.
Despite age and organizational rules forcing my mum to retire from an official capacity in the Girl’s Brigade, she’s still committed to helping each week. And I suspect she’ll continue to do so until the day she dies.
As she looks back over her life, I hope she recognises how her positive influence may have changed so many lives for the better. I hope one day, I’ll be a be able to say the same.
This Week’s Review
Some of the articles that have caught my eye this week:
General Issues
- Did you know there have been more than 2000 nuclear explosions on the planet since 1945? I didn’t. Displayed in an animation from Pink Tentacle
- Guillermo del Toro to make games – but what other film directors would you like to see join him? Article in the Guardian
- Black Friday for many strategic players in the voluntary and community sector. The UK government cuts funding to Third Sector.
- Nicholas Lovell’s graph showing massive rises in game sales against consistently falling violent crime.
- UK government cuts funding for 1000s of playgrounds. BBC article. Emma Kane organises a campaign to fight the cuts.
- How the Economist sells cleverness. Thoughts from the NYTimes.
- Ushahidi launches simplified crisis-mapping service. From the Guardian.
- DeviantArt’s Muro Drawing App Is Pure HTML5 Awesomeness. From Wired.com
- Poverty linked to mental health disorders according to study funded by Wellcome Trust
Learning
- Student Undergrads study ineffectively on computers according to research published in the Journal of Educational Psychology
- Research from NSF shows a good kindergarten education makes dollars and sense.
- Focus on results can make children do worse, Institute of Education study finds.
- Learning a Language From an Expert on the Web. Article from NYTimes.com
- Microblogging in higher education. Research from Upper Austria University and others.
Games
- Study in BioMed Central of medical students attitudes towards video games.
- Women Set the Pace as Online Gamers from NYTimes.com report
Psychology
- Negative stereotypes have a lasting impact according to University of Toronto study (pdf).
- What your perceptions of others say about you – research from Wake Forest University (pdf).
Stopping Children’s Play
Children's Playground
The news today made me cry out with primal rage.
The UK government is cancelling the funding for thousands of community playgrounds. The Playbuilder scheme was a key element of the 2007 Children’s Act and was establlished in response to the universally acknowledged need for safe outdoor places for children to play. Now the government has decided that we cannot afford them.
Play is the cornerstone of child development. By cancelling this program the government diminishes many children’s opportunity to play safely and socially. In doing so they damage their chance of acquiring all of those skills that come from playing; not just the physical health benefits (such as reducing childhood obesity, tackling vitamin D deficiency, improving dexterity, strength and flexibility) but the cognitive, emotional and social skills of building conference, experimentation, problem-solving, teamwork, the ability to deal with failure, imagination and role play. The benefits of play and public life are beautifully described by Alison Kadlec for the National Civic Review (pdf) (Thanks for Pat Kane for that reference).
Removing opportunities for children to play reduces their chance of developing their potential. This cut of playgrounds across the country will amplify the effects of previously announced reductions in the education budget (including the cancellation of the schools building programme). This short term budget-saving will not only impoverish the lives of a generation of children, it will reduce our nation’s long term ability to recover from economic collapse.
Recession Risk
I spend a good deal of time trying to respond to the social media/ online/ learning needs of all sorts of organisations. There is a commercial imperative to my efforts. Bluntly, I sell ideas. But these are peculiar times. Recession changes the game.
In economic straits, all business, but public organisations especially, are less likely to take risks. Good ideas aren’t necessarily marketable because failure is a luxury associated with the safety net of good times. Lots of novel ideas have to be diluted to make them ‘safe.’ Organisations replicate, possible iterate but rarely innovate when ‘efficiency’ and cost-saving are the paramount considerations. It is enormously frustrating. And possibly counter-productive. New ideas offer a way out.
So when does a good idea become a great idea? An idea worth risking? And more importantly, how do you convince those wanting a service?
Clever Fools
CASP9 Refinement Puzzle 2
Now, here’s a clever science game. A game that actually generates valuable scientific outputs.
Foldit is a game from Seth Cooper and his colleagues at the University of Washington where players score points by squeezing as many proteins as possible into a chemically stable configuration. Understanding how proteins can fold together is essential to establishing bio-chemical processes and hence the creation of new drugs. This is significant work. Performed by gamers.
The team have just published a paper in Nature and their accomplishments have been picked by the Economist and others.
A few things jumped out at me as I read the research:
- Players have performed better than the best available software algorithms.
- Few of the highest scores come from experts
- Many of the best results are reliant on collaboration.
Of course, none of these things are especially surprising but they are exciting nonetheless. Although players haven’t proved as good as the algorithms at folding proteins from scratch, they have excelled at risk-taking – remodelling using structures that are temporarily unstable – a strategy dismissed by the software.
And enthusiastic amateurs have produced some of the highest scores. This might just a consequence of the number of participants – there might be relatively few biochemists in the player pool or it might indicate that the ‘fools’ offer real advantages. It’s not an insult. The liberating aspect of being an enthusiastic amateur is not knowing ‘the rules’ or being confined to play by them. This has resulted in multiple novel strategies as the ‘unschooled’ have experiemented wildly. It’s a winning approach.
And finally, many of the best scores have been the result of teams of strangers working together. The effectiveness of collaboration demonstrating that again that (for adults particularly) dialogue is the core of learning. It’s also an example of Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus at work. Together we’re capable of more.
Foldit epitomises many of the advantages of using games to serious purposes – it’s team-based fun, it’s unconventional and it’s generating real transferable scientific value. Good game.
This Week’s Review
Some of the articles that I’ve seen this week.
Pathological internet use by teenagers can lead to depression according to School of Medicine, Sydney and SunYat-Sen University.
Childhood traits predict adult behaviour according to report from University of California Riverside.
Behind the scenes of the museum…there’s real value. Director of the National Media Museum, Colin Philpott, argues the economic benefits of museums.
Nieman Foundation from Harvard discusses whether Twitter can be a reliable source of news.
The flawed reporting behind headlines of eleven-year olds on the pill.
Short-sighted response from UK government regard IE6.
Russians face security scrackdown for crimes yet uncommitted.
Social media becomes the most common popular activity online, games come second according latest Neilsen research.
How games might improve literacy from the Reading Agency.
How the middle-class are about to be financially proletarianised from the Daily Telegraph of all places.
Self-fulfilling Prophecy
I get quite cross when some says “I’m no good at that” or “I can’t do that” or worse “You’re stupid.” I’m especially conscious of it as a dad of two small children. I believe talk like that can become a self-fulfilling prophecy: if it is said often enough about someone, they’ll live up to it. It’s a genuine curse, not just for impressionable young children but for us all.
So I was fascinated to see a report from Indiana University researchers describing how negative stereotypes affect behaviour and learning. Although the link between performance and stereotypes has long been known, this is the first time a study has indicated a link to the learning itself. The study explores Stereotype Threat (ST). Stereotype threat (ST) refers to a situation in which a member of a group fears that her or his performance will validate an existing negative performance stereotype, causing a decrease in performance.
“For example, reminding women of the stereotype ‘women are bad at maths’ causes them to perform more poorly on maths questions” say the report. The study was designed to examine “attention and perceptual learning in a visual search,” not mathematical learning specifically, because the tasks used in the experiments allowed researchers to easily differentiate between learning effects and performance effects. By doing so, the researchers were able to show that actual learning had not occurred in the group of women who had been reminded of the negative stereotypes. Basically, not only do we prove low expectations true, we undermine our ability to change.
Of course there’s a balance to achieve: too many of us have wholly unrealistic expectations of life and a completely flawed understanding of our own abilities because of well-meaning but unhelpful flattery. Still, it’s a prompt for us, me, to think about how we talk to others; to remain truthfully encouraging while believing in everyone’s potential to be better than expected.
Carlton Reeve
Carlton is the founder of Play with Learning. He has a PhD in the design, development and deployment of game-based learning resources. Complementing his academic background, Carlton has years of practical experience at the BBC and commercial media production companies producing and commissioning world class and award-winning media for the likes of the United Nations, BBC, National College for School Leadership, Open University and the Victoria & Albert museum.