Bouncers weighed each cue differently. Social network mattered most, gender followed. For example, a young woman in jeans stood a higher chance of entrance than a well-dressed man. And an elegantly dressed black man stood little chance of getting in unless he knew someone special.
From Kottke.org
It's another reason that we need to raise an expectation that social networks' ins and outs need taught rather than caught. All amateurs get their appearance wrong at some time - we all get refused entry to the club. But some of us get refused less often than others since we learned, or were told, how to dress, behave and hang out to get the things we want in life.
Trust me. I used to work in showbiz.
Bouncer pic is from Lomokev
Imagine being able to interact with content on the screen, with a game or experience, without needing any console control at all. That's what Kinect does (formerly project Natal for XBox 360), and it's about to dramatically change the way things are made in games, as well as experienced.
The video above shows the well-trodden animals-pets genre in a new light, but the technology brings a whole new console-control-less angle to sports and dance games. No more dance mats or flying Wiimotes!
Milo, in production by Peter Molyneux's Lionhead, will be unveiled at TED in a couple of weeks, where Peter's company seek to give users a sense of wonder like they've never had before - a computer game-experience where your computer game can hear you and talk back. It's what Jesse Schell saw as part of the final picture in his Gamepocalypse.
In the space of two days at GameHorizon we've gone from about to happen to happening in two weeks. That's a pace of change.
This summer and autumn I'm embarking on an eduTour of proportions that are slightly scary, but I hope you'll join me on the journey, keep me right, contribute your own glowing examples of interesting practice and let me know how I could be doing things better as I seek, after two years of feeling out to pasture in medialand, to find my education voice once more. I'm lucky enough to be doing large parts of this with some of my best friends in the education world.
Six months ago I wanted to see if it was possible to bring the lessons I had picked up from the world of digital media investment and product management back into the classroom, the school leader's intray and policymaker's desk. I've been working with a few teams of brilliant educators in the UK this Spring, testing ideas, hypotheses, practices and concepts from one world transferred to another. It's time to give those ideas a bigger airing.
It's a chance to take our messages to a wider, fresh group of participants who will help emulate and expand upon practice that many of us have been developing for nearly a decade - or longer. It's also an enviable chance to learn from the amazing practice in all the countries that I've chosen for this initial tour, places I believe there is the best in schooling, informal learning, digital media development and investment.
Here's the schedule of meetings, rencontres, masterclasses and keynotes that I'll be working with over August, September and October. Many are open to those working nearby or can be ticketed by the organisers. I'm looking forward to meeting as many educators as possible, sharing stories and approaches across a wide array of activity.
This blog and my other websites will be getting a 360 degree overhaul this summer to make the experience delightful for you, too, with the help of amazing graphic designer David Airey and NoTosh developer Fraser Waters. I'll be capturing daily photo stories, videos, audioboos and, of course, blog posts of what has struck me most. Please join me!
Seth Godin proclaims:
A sad truth about most traditional b2b marketing"People who don't care, selling products to people who care less."
He's arguing that companies who sell to other companies all too often don't have the end user at the heart of their product. All business to business (b2b) companies would say that this would never apply to them, but the sad truth is indeed that they have little inherent motivation to make a product that the end user wants. Their customer is the middleman.
Transfer this to education markets and you have a catastrophic truth to face up to: few virtual learning environment providers, education software as a service makers, or education publishers can - statistically, at least - get away with saying that they always have the end user in mind. They have the purchaser (Local Authorities, Schools or teachers, but not children) in mind first and foremost, with their best effort to balance the needs of the end user (the child) running alongside at best, second place at worst.
What examples have you seen in education where the b2b company, selling to Local Authorities, Schools or teachers, but not to children, has first and foremost an unbending loyalty to what the end user - the child - wants, over and above any competing demands of the middleman buying the product?
I'll start with the only one that comes to my mind: Moshi Monsters, which in 15 months has gone from 1m learners to 22m, nearly all of them 7-11 years old and making the choice to turn up there to learn.
Adendum: I say it's the only example that comes to mind given that any efforts to market directly to parents have failed completely for Moshi - direct referral through word of mouth, one kid to another, is what makes it spin. I wish VLEs worked on the same principles :-)
Pic of salesman having a bad day by Kenyee
I was fortunate enough to spend two days working with Anil Dash at the Macarthur Foundation in Chicago back in April. He's great fun to be around, highly perceptive and shares the dry humour that tends to get me through long days in Board rooms.
His talk at Ignite NYC, Defending The Indefensible, brings him together into a neat 5 minute YouTubed talk. Next time you're facing up to something that seems totally wrong and indefensible, or are stuck in a Board room for 16 hours, just play this on loop.
(I actually thought this whole question would make an interesting exercise with youngsters in the classroom - what have they seen that is indefensible, and can they make it completely defensible using the facts, history and a good bit of empathy?)
This Monday, 12:00 p.m PST, 3:00 p.m. EST, 8:00 p.m. British Summer Time, I'll be hosting another of my regular 45-minute 'office hours' sessions with the GETinsight gang, looking at how leaders can look towards crowdsourcing techniques to make better policies that actually work on the ground.
Given the budget and education department cuts in the UK, and similar challenges around the world, the time has never been more ripe for those working in the public services, particularly in education, to harness the social tools around us and co-create policy, classroom strategies and tactics.
I come with the bias that the projects I've undertaken in these environments, such as eduBuzz, the BectaX process and the fairly hands-off development of 38minutes, have nearly always ended up more useful on the ground than they would have been had we organised things by committee in a Head Quarters building. Crowdsourced ideas tend to be more sustainable in the long term and free of the organisational red-tape that kills too many great ideas before they've got off the proposal paper.
My GETinsight blog post on crowdsourcing policy sums up the examples that come to mind from an educational perspective, and will be the starting point for Monday's live web chat. I've also been thinking recently about how business at large could benefit in these times from thinking about using the value of users/customers in their decision-making, instead of doing all the thinking themselves behind the metaphorical closed door of the intranet.
If you've got other examples you would add then please drop them into the discussion here, there or on Monday in the live chat. I hope plenty of you can join us as we hurtle into the summer holidays!
A quick pre-registration is required, and you will need to be sat near a telephone to take part in the WebEx discussion on Monday.
Catriona would love this. It's an iPhone 'book' within a book, taking the best of both worlds, and my daughter's insatiable desire to turn the page (No, Dadddy! Don't you turn the page!), her delight in fun animations and adding some of the interactivity the iPhone offers. It's from the clever Mobile Art guys in Japan.
Thanks to the Swissmiss for the tip of the hat.
The app in the video above shows how augmented reality can help give you the answers to a Soduko quiz in your local newspaper. You can also ask it just to give you a hint. Now, imagine that this device, primed for heating, were constrained to solely giving you the interesting question, the clue or hint. We begin to see how augmented reality contributes towards Dan's mantra of "be less helpful" to make learning better.
Can you imagine holding the app over a French language text or physics problem and getting that little contextual nudge that great teachers have always offered? What would that free the teacher up to do? How could it add to the learning experience in homes where parents take less of an interest in (the learning of) their children?
Tip of the hat to my favourite polymath, Noah Brier.
The old reason for banning mobile phones and the use of 'always on' internet-enabled devices in schools was that children 'cheated'. We're beginning in some places to see over the top of that particular mountain, but how about this for a contentious question: should we allow smartphones and internet-enabled computers into examinations?
I'd argue it's worth thinking about. I was a French and German teacher, subjects which, when I was at school, did not allow the use of a dictionary in the examination. For some time now, students have been able to use dictionaries, something that tends to bring lower results to students who have not been taught well in specific dictionary and reading skills.
If we were to teach students how to effectively use the web, search, social search and shared bookmarking techniques within a pressure environment, in much the same way as we've done for decades in languages and dictionary tuition, what would we be left with?
My guess is that many educators and examination bodies would still not be happy, since too many of the answers sought could be machine programmable or searchable.
So, we need to change the way we ask questions, we need to change the way we test and assess. The remaining question is therefore: how?
Well, in a lovely example or two of truly higher order thinking, analytical and creative thinking, Bill Boyd mentioned two things.
First Dan Meyer's talk on how we should teach mathematics to be "less helpful", and construct a creative rub against which students can learn. His talk is a superb 20 minutes for any teacher:
But further still, and totally new for me, is the concept of Fermi Questions. These are questions named after the Nobel Prize-winning Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, who was well known for solving problems which left others baffled. There is no searchable answer, and no one way of answering them. They are the true meaning of "there is no right way to answer this".
Update: Had they not already written a blog post which is now Googleable, I'd have said that finding out how to play the world's shortest possible game of Monopoly would make a great Fermi question. But they did, and it is, so it's not.
