cc >> Tom Zinnen: Welcome,
everybody, to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.
I'm Tom Zinnen and on behalf of the UW Biotechnology Center,
UW Extension, Wisconsin Alumni Association and Wisconsin Public
Television, welcome to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.
We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year.
Tonight I'm delighted to introduce David Gagnon who is an
instructional designer with the Engage Project here at
UW-Madison where he consults with faculty about innovative
teaching practices that leverage emerging media.
He's got an undergraduate degree in computer science and a
background in media production, and he has slowly transitioned
into the educational media research field.
He has directed numerous instructional projects for the
Wisconsin Department of Health and Family Services and
UW-Madison's Division of Information Technology.
As his work has become increasingly more interactive
and simulation-based, he has discovered the games, learning
and society community and finding the entire field of
study an interesting way to go about these kinds of media and
the ways they can be applied to education.
Dave has directed a number of game design teams and has
consulted on many other projects.
He's been co-author on two papers in the last year,
and has given over 25 talks. So tonight's 26.
That will be very good. Please join me in welcoming
David Gagnon to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.
[APPLAUSE] >> David Gagnon: Thanks, Tom.
So tonight I will be joined and kind of interspersed with John
Martin, a colleague of mine who is kind of a mentor and kind of
a colleague. He's been doing place-based
learning and mobile learning for quite a while.
He literally has a PhD in iPhones and we'll kind of bounce
back and forth with some examples and stories and really
we're just going to be talking about some of the things that
have inspired us that we've seen happening in kind of the
contemporary world and how that's been applied
to educational design and educational research.
So that definitely is the paradigm I'd like to start with
tonight to come up front is I think a lot of the time with new
media and new technology a common reaction is to start out
with well that's not how we used to do it.
We start with, well that's different than what we're used
to. And there's a scholar by the
name of James Gee who wrote a book called "What Video Games
Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy."
He's a well known literacy scholar, and he did a really
interesting thing in that he wrote a book all about being
inspired by watching his grand kids actually play games.
And he took just a pause, just a moment to say why is this
working so well? Why are these kids so interested
in this media? What can he learn from it and
how can it might inform or speak to some of the theories that
we're already aware of? And I want to have that kind of
spirit as we go into the discussion tonight saying that
there are some really interesting things that are
happening within contemporary media, specifically mobile
media, and what can they say to us about the kinds of things
that we're doing. So starting with that promotive
kind of attitude I think is where I'd like to begin.
So let me make a really strong statement to get us started.
And that is this. Mobile media is the most
ubiquitous communication technology on the planet.
Well, I can back this up. There's about 900 million
cable televisions in the world and there's about 1.2 billion
computers, personal computers of any kind.
There's about 1.4 billion devices connected
to the Internet. There's about 1.5 billion
televisions in the world, and there's about 3.9 billion
FM radios in the world. But as of just January,
I'm sorry this is January of last year, the most recent data
showed us that we had about 4.6 billion cellular phones
on the planet. So let me suggest this make ass
pretty big difference in how we approach media communication and
the way those things are used in modern society.
Not only is that taking place, not only is mobile the most
ubiquitous communication technology, but they've
transitioned to start looking like this.
These aren't telephones anymore. They have a processor that's
on par with the laptop you had about six years ago.
So we're kind of at that level. They have this interesting new
interface they call multi-touch which means instead of wiggling
a mouse that wiggles a thing that touches a thing,
you just touch it. My 18-month-old daughter has no
problem, for example, navigating an iPhone to open her favorite
app, this is a product placement, Peekaboo Barn.
She just loves this program, and she can do it all by herself.
They have broadband connections, each and every one.
So as Kurt Squire says, the conversation of whether we
should have Wi-Fi in schools is moot because they already have
broadband in their pocket all the time.
It doesn't matter what you decide.
They already have it. It's got full AV so it can
record audio, video and play it back at kind of the level you'd
think of as pro gear from about six or seven years ago.
So it's high definition video, high definition audio and you
can plug external devices into it.
They have these things called accelerometers so it knows how
it's moving around in space, knows when it's been wiggled.
And it has gyroscopes in it so it knows exactly what direction
it's pointing at any one time. It has a compass so it knows
what direction it's pointed in as far as the earth is
concerned. And it's got a GPS so it knows
where it's at. It also has Bluetooth which
means it can connect to anything else.
And it's got this new thing called the app store which means
you can download software onto your phone the same way you can
put it on a computer, in similar ways.
I think what we're looking at now is a new kind of computing
device. And I think the same way that
the computer changed the way that everything takes place and
the same way the Internet changed everything takes place,
I think what we're looking at now is a hyper-personal
computer. It's an all the time connected,
AV compatible, multimedia device that has all the power of your
laptop in your pocket all the time.
And the delay from you to the hive mind or the Internet
has just been reduced further and further and further.
For example, how many people have cell phones in the room?
Just curious. How many people have noticed
that they have to remember a lot less phone numbers these days?
It's called distributive cognition and the books were the
first example of this. As soon as you can write
something down your brain knows it doesn't have to remember it.
As soon as it trusts that external storage.
So I think we're seeing this more and more with the Internet,
this distributive cognition that's taking place.
Where more and more of my brain actually lives outside my brain.
It's having a massive change on society.
And as Marshall McLuhan put it, sometimes societies have been
shaped more by the nature of media than by the content
of that communication. And I think we're dealing with
this in a way that isn't just theoretical but I think it's
becoming more and more tangible. Only a few years ago I remember
reading Wired magazine looking at an article about Wikipedia,
and the article basically was saying, can this be?
Does this make sense? Do scholars agree?
And it was such a funny article in retrospect because for years
people argued and thought about the idea of social
constructivism but Wikipedia substantiated it.
It put it right in front of our eyes.
It said obviously people without a master, without an organizing
force can come together and produce high quality written
works. And that's interesting.
So I think there's a shift taking place that's more than
just the technology and more than all the little things that
we're going to identify, but we're having a fundamental
epistemological shift. And we're seeing how that plays
out in education as one of many possible venues.
Here's how I would break it down.
We've shifted from FM radio to mobile phone.
And we can see the value structures that are implemented
in each one of those. The FM radio is about
centralized authoritarian kind of information that's being
uniformly distributed to a larger audience and it's done in
a just in case format, meaning we push out content just in case
anybody needs it. We have the audience's role is
pretty singular, mostly as a consumer.
Every once in a while you have the call-in kind of show.
But in general it's a push media.
We're definitely, the way that you know something is true or
relevant is because they have some sort of authority, a stamp
of approval has been put on a radio station or on a particular
program. And obviously it's operating in
an institutional way. So we see the mobile phone,
though, as a whole different kind of network.
Everybody is an equal node in this thing.
There's no central anything. Information is based on how
useful it is within a given peer or social group.
We're seeing production of content and information is done
in a widely distributed way. It's all about social capital
and it's completely relational. It's a fundamental shift in how
we look at authority, truth, reality, all of these things as
far as this communication media is concerned.
If this isn't apparent, that's kind of scary and kind of
interesting and something that we should pay attention to.
We'll leave it at that. I want to give three examples of
things that are inspiring, I think, that are coming out of
contemporary media and how we can see this effect from FM
radio to mobile as a representation of how different
areas of our world are shifting. And I'm going to start with one
that might be a little shocking. It's an app that came out called
I Am T-Pain. Now T-Pain, as you might guess
from the slide, is a rapper. He's actually quite a famous
rapper. And he came out with an iPhone
app that utilizes a particular technology that was first made
popular by Cher in a very famous song called "I Can Believe
in Life After Love." And I don't know if you've heard
this song or not but there's an effect that's put on her voice
that's really unique. It's called auto-tune.
And it was used in studios for a long time, but you can sing into
a computer and if you were a little bit off pitch, it would
just change it so you were on pitch again.
And it allowed people who weren't that great of singers to
sound really good. So that's not all that
interesting. What is interesting about it is
the iPhone now as an app does this vocal effect for you in
real time so you can sing along, kind of in a karaoke way, but at
the same time it broadcasts this to the whole world.
So as you're doing this, everybody in the world can hear,
and you can put a map up, if I go to IAmTPain.com,
and you can see all the people live that are singing
right now. And I'll spare you all from
doing that. I've had some interesting demos
that have come out of doing that because they don't necessarily
stick to the lyrics. But let me just suggest here
that the way that we consume music is fundamentally changing.
We're producers, we're involved, we're part of a group of people
that are all participating with music not just listening to it.
And this is just an inspiring example, kind of at the edge.
This one is from John. >> John Martin: So the app
that's up here right now is the sleep cycle app.
And it uses the accelerometer. The cool thing about this is you
just put it on your bed right next to the pillow at night as
you're sleeping and it charts out how you're sleeping that
night. So this example over here, this
is not my example, but I did this Monday night.
I gave a talk in Buffalo about this and at about
2:00 in the morning I had an idea that I needed to introduce
into my talk. And I absolutely had to
introduce that in my talk. I got up and so I had this nice
low graph where I'm a good sleeper.
Nice, low, deep sleep all along except for this one big spike in
the middle because it measures how much I'm moving around and
how much I'm kicking and how much I'm snoring and things like
that. And it just sort of charts it
all out. That's kind of a neat thing.
It's an especially neat thing because it's coming from a
phone. And that makes this no longer a
phone. The phone is not the thing that
I use this for the most. I use it for a lot of other
things besides making telephone calls.
That's kind of amazing. >> Gagnon: So groups like the
NIH are really interested in this device as how can it be
used for new kinds of data collection, what are these
sensors in it, how can it be hooked into things like
heart monitors and the like. And this is kind of our first,
I think, contemporary example of how you're using the hardware
that's already in it to have this interesting effect on
health. Another example I think that's
becoming more contemporary is this notion of distributive
journalism. And I'm going to show a clip
here that came out of a recent TED talk.
Microsoft is kind of at a bit of a war with Google right now
around the maps. Who's going to control the
information structures around maps.
As you can imagine, Google maps are really interesting.
It's another one of these areas that's really changed the way
I do things just day-to-day. Well, Google has a product
called Bing, and they hired a really bright guy and he's a
computer scientist specifying in computer vision.
And what he did that was so interesting is that we went out
to Flickr, you know that photo sharing site, have you heard of
this, where people can upload their photos and put them on the
Internet. And it looked at the photo and
then it looked at the street view kind of information they
already have where they drive little cars around and get
photos of everything and it blended them together figuring
out what angle that photograph would blend into the background
so that can you go to places like DC where lots of tourists
take lots of photos and you can pop down your little street view
character and look around but inside of that landscape you'll
see areas where citizen-created photographs can be clicked on
and you can zoom into that one. And you'll see then maybe
someone took a photo of this part of that photograph and you
zoom into that one. And it's taking all these
different data sources and combining them together.
So let me show you what it looks like when you do that in
real time with live video streams.
People out with their phones recording video live, mashing it
all back together with one map interface.
All right. I'm pressing play.
I'm live. All right, there we go.
These are our friends at the market.
[APPLAUSE] Thank you.
Gagnon: So I apologize about the brightness here, but do you
see how there's a plane that's moving across?
And then there's also kind of the background that's been
navigated by the presenter with a mouse.
So the same way you'd drop into street view when you look
around, you have a virtual camera, now you've got virtual
live feeds intermeshed with that.
So again, let me suggest that journalism will absolutely never
be the same. I don't know how many times
you've watched the news and watched the same three clips
played over and over and over. Now we're talking about, imagine
something like 9/11 if you could drop your virtual camera down
and walk around within the scene with diverse media sources
coming from every angle. It's the kind of shift that I
think we're talking about with these devices.
So here's a real practical narrative, and this comes pretty
much right out of my life. And it's a set of things that I
might do during a given day and have done on a given day that
starts to set up what it looks like to be a mobile media
learner. So I'm on State Street,
let's say I haven't been there before, but I'm hungry.
I whip out my phone and I pull out an app.
It's called Siri and it's a personal data assistant.
So I pull this thing out and it allows you to speak out loud
human languages. Hit the button.
I say, I really would like to find some good noodles around
here, is there any place that's highly reviewed?
And I'm not even kidding, that's what I say.
It grabs that. It starts looking that up.
Next thing I get a list of all the different places that might
sell noodles, and near each one is citizen-created rankings, so
people have left comments on it about certain items, maps that
get me to those places, and a single button just to call in
case I want to call into them. But I don't know how to get
there even though it's got a map that shows me where to go.
So I hold up my phone and I get ago augmented reality view, I
don't know it if you can see the little dots, of where the bus or
train stops are as I walk around with my phone.
That's really dark, I'm sorry. So as I scan my phone around,
it's telling me, hey there's a bus stop just literally right
over there you just need to keep walking in that direction.
I finally end up, got my bowl of noodles, some nice pho here.
And while I'm eating them, again I pull out my phone instead of
my newspaper and I participate in an ongoing social game called
Foursquare. In Foursquare I get a couple
points for leaving a tip about what people should do at a given
venue and for doing a thing called checking in, which
basically just means I'm here. For whatever reason this little
task, I guess, this little motivation, I do it because I
get a couple points and because John is still on top and I want
to beat him among all my friends.
And at the same time, since I check in, it drops a point on
the map saying where I am at and where all my friends are at
in case anybody wants to drop by for lunch.
That night I head back to my house, I'm sure you won't see
that, and I'm looking at the stars with my wife in the
backyard. We have a fire pit and we spend
a lot of time having dinners and such outside.
And just recently we got into an argument about what a particular
star was. And my wife jokes, for example,
of how before the iPhone we would back up such arguments
with all kinds of ridiculous links of reason.
Well it could be this because of blah blah blah or it could be
that because of blah blah blah. But instead what happens is we
hold this phone up and there's an app, I forget what this one
is called, sky star? >> Night sky?
Star chart? Star chart.
And this one you hold up and it uses the GPS and the gyroscope
and the accelerometers so that as you move it around it tracks
in real time with the stars right behind it.
Kind of like a window into the sky.
Drawing the lines, connecting the constellations and allowing
me to touch on a star to find out more information about it.
And we find out all about that star.
So this is kind of a day in the life of.
And these are not hyperbolic examples I'm giving.
This is really practical. Particularly this came into
handy last time I was in New York.
If you're ever in a city that you don't know as well as your
own, all these tools all the sudden become very relevant.
They allow you to navigate a place you haven't been or don't
know anything about in a really kind of fun, genuine way.
It takes a lot of the noise out. So what does this mean?
We've got this kind of activity happening for a student, this
kind of an activity happening for a teacher more and more, but
then we get to class and it's like everybody starts faking it,
like this isn't what life is really like.
And I would suggest that we could take that same chart
between FM radio and mobile and we could do the same thing for
school versus life. That in school we still operate
in certain ways and we think in certain ways and authority is
distributed in certain ways and backed up in certain ways and in
life we're operating in these other ways.
We're operating in a just in time contextual,
location-centric kind of way of learning.
But in school we're in a just in case, authoritarian different
kind of view of learning. And I find that puzzling.
And I specifically wonder what might be done about that.
How can we leverage some of the things that are good about
this new way of thinking, these new medias, for the benefit of
education, knowing darn well that there are all kinds of
things that aren't that great about it as well.
So let's transition then into some things that we've actually
done. These are the inspirations
but we've produced a number of designs over the last decade.
And I think John will start here.
Martin: David joked that I had a PhD in iPhone,
but I actually have a PhD in education so it's the learning.
It's taking a look at schools and seeing how can they be more
interactive, how can they be less of what I'm doing right
here with you and more of a two-way conversation.
More of that chart that David was talking about.
One of the things that Tom talked about earlier was this
idea of expeditionary learning where you actually go out and
you go out into the field and you learn stuff about what's
happening. A lot of that is what we did
from 2005 to 2008 as part of a US Department of Education
grant. We created these games.
We brought them to the schools. We took the kids out.
This is fifth grade through high school, through 12th grade.
We brought them out to the field for a roughly a two-hour field
experience, taking a mobile device that had a GPS connected
to it through Bluetooth and they would go around from point to
point and they would interview virtual characters that they saw
on their iPhone and the virtual characters would ask them
questions and say, you know, what do you think
is causing this. And it would cause the students
to have to look around the actual environment.
That's very important. We're not saying education
learning is happening here. We don't want them to do this,
and we took great pains to design games that didn't focus
their attention here. We wanted to ask them questions
about what was going on in the environment.
And it was pretty cool. And the kids loved it.
But of course kids love anything that goes outside of school,
right? You get to go out on the bus,
get on the field trip, it's great.
One of the examples was called South Shore Beach.
And what we did is we took real data about contamination around
South Shore Beach Park in Milwaukee and we put it into a
hypothetical, sort of, based on real data but fictionalized
scenario about some kids getting sick and why did they get sick.
Well, our seventh grade students had to go out, they had to walk
around, they met individual people, they stepped in goose
poop and they're like oh, I've got goose poop all over
my great shoes, this is bad. And then it hit them wait a
second there's all this goose poop all over the place, maybe
this had something to do with it.
Maybe it had something to do with a parking lot.
There's also a well and it was one of the only wells in
Milwaukee that's not hooked up to the city water system, but
people still drink from it so it might have been that.
There was that big parking lot that cars and trucks would take
the boat trailers to, the geese would poop all over it and then
the rain came down and boom, that parking lot water
went right into the lake. It might have been that.
It was up to the kids to look at.
I can't really tell what this is.
And then there's a rain garden that was put in, and boom that's
a great opportunity to learn about rain gardens and how rain
gardens collect some of the contaminants and filter
the water and control that. There's another one that we did
around Lake Wingra right nearby in town here in Madison.
Great you can't see the map at all, it was played on a
Dell Axim, an old machine three years ago, two years ago even.
And they had different roles that they played.
Groups of three kids would go out.
One of them would be the landscape architect, one of them
would be a watershed ecologist and one of them would be an
environmental historian. They would meet a condominium
developer who wants to put condos all around the lake.
And they would meet a deep ecologist who wants to tear down
all the buildings around there and let's get the natural
native plants back in here. They would meet a jogger who is
like I love running around the lake, I wish there was a path
that went all the way around the lake, you should build a path
so I can do this. So we had all these three
competing interests. And the kids went out there and
they met these people and then it was incased within a 10-day
curriculum. So they had this two-hour
experience that gave them some concrete information,
some concrete examples that they could take back to the
classroom, and they had a real experience, an authentic
experience with a real place and real interests, even though the
people were fictionalized they were real interests, that they
could bring back. And it happens like this.
You just get there on the bus. You get the PDAs and the GPS
units, the PDA is a little handheld computer and you went
through and you did all kinds of amazing fun stuff which you
can't see here. You walked around and you met
and interviewed the NPCs. You learn about the issues
surrounding Lake Wingra and you learn about them from different
points. You make your own observations
and that is key. And then you take notes, of
course, so you can remember later back in the classroom.
The different NPCs represented different interests.
And when I say NPC that means a nonplaying character.
Those are the virtual characters that we were talking about.
It was up to you as a player in your group, and really having
the three people is key because the landscape architect got some
information, the watershed ecologist had a different
professional view about it and got other information and the
environmental historian had a third idea and information set
of data about it. And so the three of them had to
talk, and they had to come up with a plan that worked out
among all of them what worked best.
So there was a lot of negotiation in there.
So you'd look for evidence to refute or support your claims,
you'd use that evidence later and then they all have their
unique opinions. So now I'm going to throw it
back to David to talk about something we're doing right now
for the iPhone. It's kind of fun.
Gagnon: So all of those projects that were listed on the
first slide were done inside of an authoring tool that was
created by MIT called the Outdoor Augmented Reality
program. And it's something you can get
on the Internet right now, and it allows you to create
applications that run on pocket PCs.
So they run on the Microsoft platform.
A couple years ago, though, we noticed when the iPhone came out
that there were some things that were really compelling about it,
specifically the fact that it had a GPS built in, you don't
have to have the external one like the devices back then did.
And the other thing was this idea of the app store.
It's really easy to get software on one of these things.
And it was kind of cumbersome and such to with the pocket PCs
especially then. So we started building our own
platform here locally for doing this kind of stuff.
And sometimes there's a real advantage to starting over from
scratch. You just kind of take what works
and learn some lessons and just really pare down to some of the
things that are really interesting right now.
So along with some funding from DoIT Academic Technology and
MacArthur, we came up with a platform that we called ARIS.
It stands for Augmented Reality and Interactive Storytelling.
And it's a platform for the iPhone for you to make learning
style games, activities, tours, stories, citizen science
kinds of games. So let me talk a little bit
about some of those projects. Project one, it should be almost
common sense. It's a Spanish game that takes
place in New Mexico done by a colleague of ours Chris Holden,
and it draws on a really simple idea.
Why are we teaching Spanish in a classroom with a bunch of
non-native Spanish speakers when we're in New Mexico.
All we have to do is open a door and everybody speaks Spanish
outside, let's go interact. At the University of New Mexico
they designed a game that plays off on the iPod Touch,
actually, that has students involved with a narrative,
a story, about a murder mystery that gets them out into the
community talking with real Spanish speakers and playing out
a choose your own adventure like game but in the actual Spanish
speaking space. Some of the screens look like
this. You're talking with different
characters and making choices that illustrate how you're
understanding or not understanding Spanish.
You go to these different places like the taqueria, and you end
up talking with people there, gaining information, entering
kind of codes that you find at those places.
And this is used as a two-week unit within their Spanish 101
curriculum at this point. And that was something done
inside of ARIS. Another example is one that you
can actually play right now and might even know a bit about.
Is anyone familiar with the two days in October
known as Dow Day? A couple of people.
I was unaware of this but a colleague of ours, Jim Matthews,
was looking for really interesting times in the
university's history. And one of them that comes up
very clearly is what's known as Dow Day.
So the Dow Chemical Corporation, kind of right in the middle of
the Vietnam War, was recruiting students from the UW campus.
And there was obviously a lot of push back against Dow because
they were also manufacturing Napalm.
So a number of students gathered together and had a peaceful
protest that turned bigger and bigger and bigger until it
turned into a violent kind of conflict between police,
administrators and students. A number of people were hurt in
it, and it was definitely a very, very unique time in the
history of this school. So to make this come to life a
little bit more, to understand a story like this, you could just
say it, but we're here in Madison and the places in which
these events took place are right here.
So Jim built what he's calling a situated documentary.
It's a documentary situated within the spaces that it
actually happened. So practically what this looks
like is things like this. You walk out to Bascom Hill and
as you look down it you hold the phone up and footage from that
time allows you to see kind of like a window into 30 years ago.
The marchers coming up at you, singing the songs and playing
horns, getting ready to come up to the top of the hill.
Or as you stand here in front of the clock tower and you hold the
phone up, instead you see what we call an augmented reality
view of what this scene looked like 30 years ago when there
were crowds and crowds and crowds of people standing here.
[INAUDIBLE] I'm sorry, I guess the dates
are slipping by. So Dow Day can be played right
now if you have an iPhone. It's something that's out there
on the Internet and it's free. We're also involved with a
number of art projects, and this was one of them called bike box.
It took place in New York City in Brooklyn.
It was done by two professors here, Sabine Gruffat and
Bill Brown from the Comm Arts Department.
And we're collaborators with this as well.
The idea was really simple. Let's take this device, let's
literally bolt it to a bicycle with a little PA system and then
let's put a number of stories, sounds, experiences, at
geographic places. So everything from historians to
storytellers got involved in this project and recorded bits
of audio that were placed all around Brooklyn.
So at the show you would check out a bike and you would go
drive around. And every time that you would
get to a place where one of these story elements existed, it
would jingle like a bike bell and then start playing out of
this PA system, forming kind of a miniature performance art
piece that was designed to kind of draw a crowd around you.
So that's interesting locative storytelling
or locative micro-narrative. But what was even more
interesting was that at any point in any place that hadn't
already had something deposited there you could hit the record
button and leave your own story. So of the people that attended
the three-day show that took place over a weekend, there were
dozens and dozens of people's own stories that were dropped
in these areas. And it was interesting the
reactions that people had around this.
Everything from kind of childhood narratives of things
that were really intense experiences to even an idea of,
one bicycle shop owner for example, got kind of confused.
Whose right is it for someone to leave their story on my
doorstep, because it's kind of like claiming a space.
It's kind of like putting a flag down in some sort of virtual
map. So it was really interesting the
way people started talking about places and the way that they had
a unique relationship with those places, especially when you said
only one person can own a place. So this is kind of what the
screens look like. You walk around, you have your
camera, you can enter a title in or record an audio, and at the
end it all gets put on a big map that we had back at the venue
where you could see different spots going up on the map and
see where people were at and what they're up to.
So that really takes us to where we're heading now.
We've done a lot, and this is a very short set of the some of
the projects that we've done, but we've done a lot with
narrative, a lot with play and games.
We've done a lot with kind of citizen science activities
as far as designed scientific explorations that are kind of
highly designed and play out exactly how they're planned.
And we've done a little bit with different artists in different
parts of the world. Right now we have a group of a
little over 120 people around the world that are using our
platform to build all kinds of things like we're describing
right now. But I think we're right at
kind of a pivot moment for a lot of our research and that is that
we're moving pretty heavy into the sciences and all the fields
that surround citizen science. So let me give a couple examples
of this. I think the first one that
really brought up this idea most clearly was a project that had
to do with birders. So I mentioned before
Foursquare, the game that I play where you check in at a spot and
you leave a tip. Well, we met with a man named
Mark Berres, and he's a professor here.
I'll throw these up. He did a pretty fantastic thing
in that he wrote a program for the iPhone that allows you to
hold your phone up and record a bird singing, and then with
incredibly high accuracy it will be able to tell you what bird it
just heard, what species. That, combined with the fact
that there's already a very rich community of people that do bird
watching and that those people already have a bit of a social
motivation system in play, we've seen a couple of the email lists
that exist around people that are really into it where you
report that you saw a certain bird and people argue about it
or maybe other people affirm it, but what's interesting about
that whole field is that for the most part the people that are
practicing this, hobbyist scientists really, are
disconnected any findings they have from the formal science
community that's paid to be scientists to study birds.
There's a disconnect here. So what we're aiming to do with
this project is join those two together using what we're kind
of calling a social locative casual citizen science gaming
platform. There's a lot of words there.
The basic idea would be you're already a birder, you already
enjoy birds. You're already out in the woods.
You hold your phone up and you grab a bird call or you type in
that you saw a bird, and we have your GPS and you're connected to
the Internet. So right at that moment we look
at National Weather Service. We know the temperature,
barometric pressure, altitude, just about everything else about
the situation you're in right now, how much wind there is, all
that. And we also have the bird that
you say you've spotted and we shoot that into a database.
And this database already exists actually.
That just keeps getting fed and fed and fed and fed.
And scientists will come back and be able to do research
against those sightings. But to make it more interesting
for the participant in this, it has a very practical use for you
as well because if you sight all the possible birds in a given
area, you get an awards badge. If you sight a couple random
birds that not many people have seen, you get an award badge.
And we're dropping back to these really simple motivation
structures that are quite compelling actually.
Along with that, it notifies all your bird-watcher friends that
you just saw a whatever or you just earned a whatever badge.
And the kind of benefit of the whole thing is you then you say,
hey I'm looking for a whatever bird, and it said your best
chance of finding that is going to be out on Picnic Point about
this time of day during this season because we can use all
that data then to feed back into where you should go to find
certain birds. So it's one of these things
we're looking for these elegant design solutions where we have
not only a community of people that are already invested in a
field that is really a scientific field, but we're
using, this is a new kind of data collection device, but
we're combining all of that with a motivation structure that's
embedded within a social circle instead of trying to think that
we're going to get a bunch of people to do something they're
not already doing. A very related project and one
that I'd like to see continue to move forward is actually with
collaborators right in the room right now, Catherine Woodward.
We started a prototype with Catherine for a project that
she's had going for years. The prototype that we have is
actually quite simple. It takes this device and turns
it into an identification program for plants in Wisconsin.
And so it turns out at least, with these trees that we have
this list of trees, and if we do an identification key, meaning
it always asks you two questions: is it bigger or
smaller than a bred basket, does it have leaves or this kind of
thing? I found that within, I don't
know, five to 10 choices usually we end up with an identification
of a given plant. So this is the equivalent of
being able to match the audio signal.
We've got a way to stand in front of a plant and zone right
in and figure out through questions like this,
how long are the leaves, what plant that is.
So that's phase one. And hopefully, well we were
supposed to have that out last week I guess.
We're going to have that identification program out soon.
The part that I'm really excited is how that might play back into
something kind of like we were talking with WiBird.
Now you've identified a plant, now that can be used as data and
now identifying new kinds of plants can also be used.
So we can create these social, locative, casual gaming
environments, new ways to explore the arboretum.
In my mind the goal of this really isn't to get you looking
at your phone like John was saying.
That's what we're trying to avoid.
The idea is hopefully that we can use the phone to unlock the
world that we don't see. Because I know, for an example,
when I walk through the arboretum or ride my bike
through there, there's just layers and layers and layers of
things I don't see because I don't know to look.
I just don't even though they're there.
I don't even have a grid for it. And I think some of these
projects, really their goal is to give people a new lens to
look through, a new way to look at the arboretum, a new way to
look at their city, a new way to interact with the things that
are taking place there that actually unlocks the world
instead of hiding it in the back of a three-inch screen.
John's going to talk about another project that we have
upcoming.
Martin: So this is actually very exciting.
We just talked about using the iPhone or iPad or iPod Touch
even, out in the field but what happens if you can't get out in
the field at the location that you want to study right now?
So this is very exciting. I went to the University of
Buffalo yesterday. They have a new collection
called Cravens' World, and it's thousands of objects that were
donated by Annette Cravens who collected them from all over the
world. But here they are,
they're in one room. It's not geographically
exciting. But what we figured out that we
can probably do with this ARIS platform is if we have, they
bring in field trips, again, so 30 kids at a time will be in
that room looking at this beautiful globe of Lucite cubes,
and each one has a little artifact in there and some of
them are really cool that kids would have loved to, there's
access and stuff there. So the kids would be able to
take a photo of it. They would be able to
immediately be transported by that photo that they take
to a spot on the planet where that one came from.
So this little yellow dot in that picture there that you can
probably barely see is from Cameroon, and it's part of this
figure that with the eyes, you can kind of see the eyes, it's
kind of spooky looking there, but that's where that figure
came from. So you click on that then on
your iPhone or back at the classroom again after
the experience, you can start collecting these things.
That's kind of taking this idea of field research and flipping
it back upside down and turning it around so it's going the
other direction. And that's kind of a neat thing.
Finally what we did is we made a game for you, something that you
can go to the Apple store right now if you have an iPhone or an
iPad or an iPod Touch, the iPod Touch won't work so well but you
can still play it on the screen because the iPod Touch doesn't
have a GPS unit in it, but you can explore Henry Mall.
It's a game that has knockout mice.
It has a cow from the single grain study.
It has the ghost of, this is Joshua Lederman.
And it's kind of a fun adventure that's part historical, has some
historical stuff anyway, and part fictional and it's kind of
fun and you can download it right now on the app store and
get out there and play it. There's a little hint of it.
It's kind of fun. So that's about all that we have
to say tonight. Why don't you come up and I
don't know if you anything else to say.
Gagnon: Yeah, kind of one more wrap up.
This game you can go out and play right now.
Yeah let's actually end here. I said the stuff that we're
working on with ARIS is something that is inviting
storytellers and teachers, new kinds of scientists to
participate in, and we're really curious about finding more and
more of these partnerships. We're starting to see some
really neat ones with the Smithsonian and now we've got
the Library of Congress and some groups like that that we're
working with and a whole bunch of local ones, but we're looking
for more partnerships. I'd also be curious, if you're
an educator to come up to these two websites and places
actually. Engage is the group that both
John and I work with that just constantly asks the questions
how can we improve teaching and learning here at UW and how do
we do it through having an open mind around new media and new
technology. And we just finished a grant on
games and simulations and we're now moving into a grant on data
visualization. So if you're involved with any
field that's using data visualization as a way to teach,
it's something that we're putting some money and design
time behind. And then our last part is that
there is a really interesting group of scholars that just
happen to be located here at UW-Madison called the Games,
Learning and Society group. And they're constantly asking
this question: how is new media changing our world?
Video games were kind of the introduction to this.
It's definitely moved into all kinds of social media.
And there's a yearly conference here that, in my opinion,
I go to a lot of educational conferences, is by far the most
interesting, passionate conference about education that
I've been to. And it happens right here in
Madison. And this year it's happening
alongside another group called the New Media Consortium.
So it's kind of a power play of these two conferences that will
be taking place in Madison. >> When will those be?
So both of these are taking place in June.
So I wanted to give some links to both of these places that
we're part of it and invite you to come out and look at ARIS if
you want to play some of these games and hear about new
projects that we've got going on.
I think we'll leave it there. So thanks a bunch for having us.
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