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everybody, to Wednesday Nite >> Tom Zinnen: Welcome,
I'm Tom Zinnen and on behalf of the UW Biotechnology Center,
UW Extension, Wisconsin Alumni
Television, welcome to Wednesday Association and Wisconsin Public
We do this every Wednesday Nite at the Lab.
Tonight I'm delighted to night, 50 times a year.
instructional designer with the introEngage Project here atis an
UW-Madison where he consults
teaching practices that leverage with faculty about innovative
He's got an undergraduate degree emerging media.
background in media production, and he has slowly transitioned
into the educational media
He has directed numerous research field.
Wisconsin Department of Health instructional projects for the
UW-Madison's Division of and Family Services and
As his work has become Information Technology.
and simulation-based, he has increasingly more interactive
and society community and dfinding the entire field ofng
study an interesting way to go
the ways they can be applied to about theseducation. media and
Dave has directed a number of game design teams and has
consulted on many other projects.
He's been co-author on two
and has given over 25 talks. papers in the last year,
That will be very good. Please join me in welcoming
David Gagnon to Wednesday Nite
[APPLAUSE] at the Lab.
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.
learning and mobile learning for He's been doing place-based
He literally has a PhD in iPhones and we'll kind of bounce
back and forth with some
we're just going to be talking examples and stories and really
have inspired us that we've seen about some of the things that
contemporary world happening in kind of the
to educational design and andeducational research.ied
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
with well that's not how we used common reaction is to start out
We start with, well that's to do it.
to. dAnd there's a scholar by thed
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
interesting thing in that he scholar, and he did a really
inspired by watching his wrote a book all about being
And he took just a pause, just a grand kids actually play games.
working so well? moment to say why is this
in this media? Why are these kids so interested
how can it might inform or speak What can he learn from it and
we're already aware of? And I want to have that kind of
spirit as we go into the
there are some really dinteresting things that areat
happening within contemporary media, specifically mobile
media, and what can they say
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
And that is this. stMobile media is the mostd.
ubiquitous communication
Well, I can back this up. There's about 900 million
cable televisions in the world
computers, personal computers and thereof any kind. billion
There's about 1.4 billion devices connected
to the Internet.
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
showed us that we had about la4.6 billion cellular phonesta
on the planet.
pretty big difference in how we approach media communication and
the way those things are used in
Not only is that taking place, modern society.
ubiquitous communication not only is mobile the most
transitioned to start looking technollike this.hey've
These aren't telephones anymore.
on par with the laptop you had They have a processor that's
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
you just touch it. that touches a thing,
problem, for example, navigating My 18-month-old daughter has no
app, this is a product an iPhone to open her favorite
She just loves this program, and placement, Peekaboo Barn.
They have broadband connections, she can do it all by herself.
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
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,
can plug external devices into high definition audio and you
They have these things called accelerometers so it knows how
it's moving around in space,
And it has gyroscopes in it so knows when it's been wiggled.
it's pointing at any one time. it knows exactly what direction
what direction it's pointed Iin as far as the earth isws
concerned.
where it's at. And it's got a GPS so it knows
means it can connect to anything It also has Bluetooth which
And it's got this new thing called the app store which means
you can download software onto
put it on a computer, in similar your phone the same way you can
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
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
laptop in your pocket all the that has alltime.power of your
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
Just curious. hHow many people have noticed
that they have to remember a lot
It's called distributive less phone numbers these days?
first example of this. cognition and the books were the
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
this distributive cognition more athat's taking place.ernet,
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
of that communication. media than by the content
this in a way that isn't just Atheoretical but I think it'sh
becoming more and more tangible.
reading Wired magazine looking Only a few years ago I remember
and the article basically was at ansaying, can this be?edia,
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
It put it right in front of our substaeyes.ed it.
It said obviously people without
force can come together and a produce high quality writteng
works.
So I think there's a shift And that's interesting.
just the technology and more taking place that's more than
we're going to identify, but than all the little things that
epistemological shift. we're having a fundamental
out in education as one of many And we'rpossible venues.t plays
Here's how I would break it down.
We've shifted from FM radio to
And we can see the value mobile phone.
in each one of those. strucThe FM radio is aboutented
centralized authoritarian kind of information that's being
uniformly distributed to a
a just in case format, meaning larger audience and it's done in
anybody needs it. wWe have the audience's role ise
pretty singular, mostly as a
Every once in a while you have consumer.
But in general it's a push the call-in kind of show.
We're definitely, the way that media.
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.
an institutional way. AnSo we see the mobile phone,in
though, as a whole different
Everybody is an equal node in kithis thing.rk.
There's no central anything.
useful it is within a given peer Information is based on how
We're seeing production of or social group.
in a widely distributed way. content and information is done
and it's completely relational. It's a fundamental shift in how
we look at authority, truth,
far as this communication media reality, is concerned.things as
If this isn't apparent, that's
interesting and something that kind of scary and kind of
We'll leave it at that. I want to give three examples of
things that are inspiring, I
contemporary media and how we tcan see this effect from FMf
radio to mobile as a
areas of our world are shifting. representation of how different
that might be a little shocking. And I'm going to start with one
I Am T-Pain. It's an app that came out called
from the slide, is a rapper. Now T-Pain, as you might guess
rapper. And he came out with an iPhone
app that utilizes a particular
popular by Cher in a very famous technology that was first made
in Life After Love." song called "I Can Believe
this song or not but there's an Aeffect that's put on her voiced
that's really unique. It's called auto-tune.
And it was used in studios for a
a computer and if you were a long time, but you can sing into
just change it so you were little bit off pitch, it would
And it allowed people who weren't that great of singers to
sound really good.
interesting. So that's not all that
the iPhone now as an app does Whthis vocal effect for you ins
real time so you can sing along,
the same time it broadcasts this kind of in a karaoke way, but at
So as you're doing this, to the whole world.
and you can put a map up, everif I go to IAmTPain.com,ear,
and you can see all the people live that are singing
right now.
doing that. I've had some interesting demos
that have come out of doing that
stick to the lyrics. because they don't necessarily
that the way that we consume But let me just suggest here
We're producers, we're involved, music is fundamentally changing.
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.
that's up here right now >> John Martin: So the app
And it uses the accelerometer. is the sleep cycle app.
just put it on your bed right Tnext to the pillow at night asu
you're sleeping and it charts out how you're sleeping that
night.
is not my example, but I did So this example over here, this
I gave a talk in Buffalo this Monday night.
2:00 in the morning I had an about this and at about
into my talk. ideaAnd I absolutely had toduce
introduce that in my talk.
low graph where I'm a good I got up and so I had this nice
Nice, low, deep sleep all along except for this one big spike in
the middle because it measures
how much I'm kicking and how how much I'm moving around and
that. mAnd it just sort of charts itke
all out.
It's an especially neat thing Tbecause it's coming from a.
phone.
And that makes this no longer a
I use this for the most. The phone is not the thing that
things besides making telephone I use it focalls.t of other
That's kind of amazing. >> Gagnon: So groups like the
NIH are really interested in
used for new kinds of data this device as how can it be
sensors in it, how can it be collection, what are these
heart monitors and the like. hooked into things like
I think, contemporary example of And this is kind of our first,
that's already in it to have how you're using the hardware
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
Microsoft is kind of at a bit of TED talk.
around the maps. a war with Google right now
information structures around Who's goinmaps.control the
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.
called Bing, and they hired a really bright guy and he's a
computer scientist specifying in
And what he did that was so interesting is that we went out
to Flickr, you know that photo
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
already have where they drive vilittle cars around and gety
photos of everything and it blended them together figuring
out what angle that photograph
so that can you go to places would blend into the background
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
zoom into that one. parAnd it's taking all theseyou
different data sources and
So let me show you what it looks combining them together.
real time with live video like whestreams. that in
People out with their phones
all back together with one map recording video live, mashing it
All right. interface.
I'm live. All right, there we go.
These are our friends at the market.
[APPLAUSE]
Gagnon: So I apologize about Thank you.
see how there's a plane that's the brightness here, but do you
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
live feeds intermeshed with camera, now that.e got virtual
So again, let me suggest that journalism will absolutely never
be the same.
you've watched the news and watched the same three clips
played over and over and over.
something like 9/11 if you could Now we're talking about, imagine
and walk around within the scene drop your virtual camera down
coming from every angle. with diverse media sources
think we're talking about with It's the kind of shift that I
So here's a real practical these devices.
much right out of my life. narrative, and this comes pretty
might do during a given day and Ahave done on a given day thatI
starts to set up what it looks
learner. like to be a mobile media
let's say I haven't been there So I'm on State Street,
I whip out my phone and I pull before, but I'm hungry.
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.
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.
Next thing I get a list of all It starts looking that up.
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.
there even though it's got a map But I don't know how to get
So I hold up my phone and I get ago augmented reality view, I
don't know it if you can see the
train stops are as I walk around little dots, of where the bus or
That's really dark, I'm sorry. with my phone.
it's telling me, hey there's a So as I scan my phone around,
over there you just need to keep bus stop just literally right
I finally end up, got my bowl of noodles, some nice pho here.
And while I'm eating them, again
my newspaper and I participate I pull out my phone instead of
Foursquare. inIn Foursquare I get a coupleed
points for leaving a tip about
venue and for doing a thing whacalled checking in, whichiven
basically just means I'm here.
task, I guess, this little For whatever reason this little
get a couple points and because John is still on top and I want
to beat him among all my
And at the same time, since I check in, it drops a point on
the map saying where I am at and
in case anybody wants to drop by where all my friends are at
That night I head back to my for lunch.
that, and I'm looking at the house, I'm sure you won't see
backyard. We have a fire pit and we spend
a lot of time having dinners and
And just recently we got into an such outside.
star was. And my wife jokes, for example,r
of how before the iPhone
with all kinds of ridiculous we would back up such arguments
Well it could be this because of links of reason.
that because of blah blah blah. But instead what happens is we
hold this phone up and there's
is called, sky star? an app, I forget what this one
Star chart? >Star chart.?
And this one you hold up and it uses the GPS and the gyroscope
and the accelerometers so that
in real time with the stars as you mright behind it. tracks
Kind of like a window into the
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
So this is kind of a day in the life of.
And these are not hyperbolic
This is really practical. Particularly this came into
handy last time I was in
If you're ever in a city that you don't know as well as your
own, all these tools all the
They allow you to navigate a sudden become very relevant.
know anything about in a really plakind of fun, genuine way.n't
It takes a lot of the noise out.
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
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
location-centric kind of way of just inlearning.textual,
But in school we're in a just in
kind of view of learning. caAnd I find that puzzling.nt
And I specifically wonder what
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
things that aren't that great that about it as well.ds of
So let's transition then into some things that we've actually
done. These are the inspirations
but we've produced a number of
And I think John will start designs overhere.last decade.
Martin: David joked that I had a PhD in iPhone,
but I actually have a PhD in
It's taking a look at schools and seeing how can they be more
interactive, how can they be
here with you and more of a lestwo-way conversation.ight
More of that chart that David was talking about.
One of the things that Tom
idea of expeditionary learning talked about earlier was this
you go out into the field and wyou learn stuff about what's
happening.
from 2005 to 2008 as part of a A lot of that is what we did
grant. US Department of Education
We brought them to the schools. WWe took the kids out..
This is fifth grade through high school, through 12th grade.
We brought them out to the field
experience, taking a mobile device that had a GPS connected
to it through Bluetooth and they
point and they would interview would go around from point to
on their iPhone and the virtual vircharacters would ask them saw
questions and say, you know,
is causing this. what do you think
to have to look around the And it would cause the students
That's very important. actual environment.
learning is happening here. We don't want them to do this,
and we took great pains to
their attention here. We wanted to ask them questions
about what was going on in the
And it was pretty cool. And the kids loved it.
But of course kids love anything
right? that goes outside of school,
get on the field trip, it's You get to ggreat.on the bus,
One of the examples was called
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
Well, our seventh grade students sick and why did they get sick.
around, they met individual hpeople, they stepped in goosek
poop and they're like oh, I've
my great shoes, this is bad. got goose poop all over
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
There's also a well and it was with a parking lot.
Milwaukee that's not hooked up one of the only wells in
people still drink from it to the city water system, but
There was that big parking lot so it might have been that.
the boat trailers to, the geese would poop all over it and then
the rain came down and boom,
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
a great opportunity to learn that was put in, and boom that's
gardens collect some of the aboucontaminants and filterrain
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
Groups of three kids would go that thout.layed.
One of them would be the
would be a watershed ecologist landscape architect, one of them
environmental historian. and one of them would be an
developer who wants to put They would meet a condominium
And they would meet a deep condos all around the lake.
all the buildings around there ecologist who wants to tear down
native plants back in here. They would meet a jogger who is
like I love running around the
that went all the way around the lake, I wish there was a path
so I can do this. laSo we had all these threeth
competing interests.
they met these people and then And the kids went out there and
curriculum. itSo they had this two-hourday
experience that gave them some concrete information,
some concrete examples that they
classroom, and they had a real could take back to the
experience with a real place and experience, an authentic
people were fictionalized they real interests, even though the
could bring back. weAnd it happens like this.hey
You just get there on the bus.
units, the PDA is a little You get the PDAs and the GPS
through and you did all kinds of handheld computer and you went
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.
course, so you can remember later back in the classroom.
The different NPCs represented
And when I say NPC that means a nonplaying character.
Those are the virtual characters
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
professional view about it and ecologist had a different
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.
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
created by MIT called the Outdoor Augmented Reality
program.
on the Internet right now, And it's something you can get
applications that run on pocket and it allowPCs.u to create
So they run on the Microsoft
A couple years ago, though, we platform.
that there were some things that noticed when the iPhone came out
specifically the fact that it whad a GPS built in, you don'tt,
have to have the external one like the devices back then did.
And the other thing was this
It's really easy to get software idea of the app store.
And it was kind of cumbersome and such to with the pocket PCs
especially then.
platform here locally for doing So wethis kind of stuff.ur own
And sometimes there's a real
scratch. advantage to starting over from
and learn some lessons and just really pare down to some of thes
things that are really
So along with some funding from DoIT Academic Technology and
MacArthur, we came up with a
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
non-native Spanish speakers when we're in New Mexico.
All we have to do is open a door
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
speaking space. Some of the screens look likeh
this. You're talking with different
characters and making choices that illustrate how you're
understanding or not
You go to these different places understanding Spanish.
up talking with people there, gaining information, enteringd
kind of codes that you find at
And this is used as a two-week those places.
curriculum at this point. uAnd that was something done1
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
university's history. And one of them that comes up
very clearly is what's known as Dow Day.
So the Dow Chemical Corporation,
the Vietnam War, was recruiting kstudents from the UW campus.f
And there was obviously a lot of
they were also manufacturing push back against Dow because
So a number of students gathered Napalm.
protest that turned bigger and together and had a peaceful
turned into a violent kind of bconflict between police,t
administrators and students.
it, and it was definitely a Avery, very unique time in then
history of this school. So to make this come to life a
little bit more, to understand a
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
It's a documentary situated within the spaces that it
actually happened.
like is things like this. You walk out to Bascom Hill and
as you look down it you hold the
time allows you to see kind of phone up and footage from that
The marchers coming up at you, like a window into 30 years ago.
horns, getting ready to come up sinto the top of the hill.ing
Or as you stand here in front of
phone up, instead you see what the clock tower and you hold the
view of what this scene looked we call an augmented reality
were crowds and crowds and like 30 years ago when there
[INAUDIBLE] crI'm sorry, I guess the dates.
are slipping by.
now if you have an iPhone. So Dow Day can be played right
on the Internet and it's free. It's something that's out there
number of art projects, and this We're also involved with a
It took place in New York City was one of them called bike box.
It was done by two professors here, Sabine Gruffat and
Bill Brown from the Comm Arts Department.
And we're collaborators with
The idea was really simple. Let's take this device, let's
literally bolt it to a bicycle
let's put a number of stories, with a little PA system and then
geographic places. sounds, experiences, at
storytellers got involved in So everything from historians to
of audio that were placed all this praround Brooklyn.ed bits
So at the show you would check
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
So that's interesting kind locative storytellingd you.
or locative micro-narrative.
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.
the three-day show that took So of the people that attended
dozens and dozens of people's pown stories that were droppedre
in these areas. And it was interesting the
reactions that people had around
Everything from kind of childhood narratives of things
that were really intense
one bicycle shop owner for experiences to even an idea of,
Whose right is it for someone exto leave their story on myd.
doorstep, because it's kind of
It's kind of like putting a flag like claiming a space.
map. down in some sort of virtual
way people started talking about So it was really interesting the
a unique relationship with those places and the way that they had
only one person can own a place. places, especially when you said
screens look like. So this is kind of what the
camera, you can enter a title in You walk around, you have your
end it all gets put on a big map or record an audio, and at the
where you could see different spots going up on the map and
see where people were at and
So that really takes us to where what they're up to.
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
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
And we've done a little bit with exactly how they're planned.
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
right now. things like we're describing
kind of a pivot moment for a lot But I think we're right at
we're moving pretty heavy into of our research and that is that
that surround citizen science. the sciences and all the fields
of this. So let me give a couple examples
really brought up this idea most I think the first one that
to do with birders. cleaSo I mentioned beforet had
Foursquare, the game that I play
you leave a tip. where you check in at a spot and
Mark Berres, and he's a Well, wprofessor here.n named
I'll throw these up.
in that he wrote a program for He did a pretty fantastic thing
hold your phone up and record a tbird singing, and then witho
incredibly high accuracy it will
just heard, what species. beThat, combined with the factit
that there's already a very rich
watching and that those people community of people that do bird
motivation system in play, we've already have a bit of a social
that exist around people that seare really into it where youts
report that you saw a certain bird and people argue about it
or maybe other people affirm it,
that whole field is that for the but what's interesting about
practicing this, hobbyist mostscientists really, areare
disconnected any findings they
community that's paid to be hscientists to study birds.e
There's a disconnect here.
this project is join those two So what we're aiming to do with
of calling a social locative together using what we're kind
platform. There's a lot of words there.
The basic idea would be you're
enjoy birds. already a birder, you already
You hold your phone up and you You're already out in the woods.
that you saw a bird, and we have grab a bird call or you type in
the Internet. So right at that moment we looko
at National Weather Service.
barometric pressure, altitude, We know the temperature,
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
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.
for the participant in this, it has a very practical use for you
as well because if you sight all
area, you get an awards badge. the possible birds in a given
birds that not many people have seen, you get an award badge.
And we're dropping back to these
structures that are quite recompelling actually.on
Along with that, it notifies all
you just saw a whatever or you your bird-watcher friends that
And the kind of benefit of the just earned a whatever badge.
hey I'm looking for a whatever whole thing is you then you say,
chance of finding that is going to be out on Picnic Point about
this time of day during this
that data then to feed back into season because we can use all
certain birds. where you should go to find
we're looking for these elegant design solutions where we have
not only a community of people
field that is really a that are already invested in a
using, this is a new kind of scientific field, but we're
we're combining all of that with data collection device, but
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.
that I'd like to see continue to A very related project and one
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.
actually quite simple. The prototype that we have is
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
it always asks you two an identification key, meaning
smaller than a bred basket, does questions: is it bigger or
thing? it have leaves or this kind of
know, five to 10 choices usually I found that within, I don't
of a given plant. weSo this is the equivalent ofon
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,
So that's phase one. what plant that is.
supposed to have that out And hlast week I guess.were
We're going to have that
The part that I'm really excited identification program out soon.
something kind of like we were is how that might play back into
Now you've identified a plant, talking with WiBird.
now identifying new kinds of now that can be used as data and
So we can create these social, plants can also be used.
environments, new ways to lexplore 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.
when I walk through the Becarboretum or ride my bikele,
through there, there's just layers and layers and layers of
things I don't see because I
I just don't even though they're don't know to look.
I don't even have a grid for it. there.
projects, really their goal is And I think some of these
look through, a new way to look at the arboretum, a new way to
look at their city, a new way to
are taking place there that inactually unlocks the worldt
instead of hiding it in the back
John's going to talk about of a three-inch screen.
another pupcoming.at we have
Martin: So this is actually very exciting.
We just talked about using the
even, out in the field but what happens if you can't get out in
the field at the location that
So this is very exciting. I went to the University of?
Buffalo yesterday.
called Cravens' World, and it's thousands of objects that were
donated by Annette Cravens who
world. collected them from all over the
they're in one room. But here they are,
exciting. But what we figured out that we
can probably do with this ARIS
bring in field trips, again, platform is if we have, they
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
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
probably barely see is from Cameroon, and it's part of this
figure that with the eyes, you
kind of spooky looking there, cbut that's where that figures
came from.
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.
Finally what we did is we made a And that's kind of a neat thing.
can go to the Apple store right now if you have an iPhone or anu
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,
It's a game but that has knockout mice.all.
It has a cow from the single
It has the ghost of, this is grain study.
And it's kind of a fun adventure Joshua Lederman.
historical stuff anyway, and that's part historical, has some
fun and you can download it pright now on the app store and
get out there and play 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
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,
participate in, and we're really new kinds of scientists to
more of these partnerships. cuWe're starting to see somend
really neat ones with the Smithsonian and now we've got
the Library of Congress and some
working with and a whole bunch groups like that that we're
for more partnerships. of local ones, but we're looking
an educator to come up to these I'dtwo websites and placesu're
actually. Engage is the group that both
John and I work with that just
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.
field that's using data visualization as a way to teach,
it's something that we're putting some money and design
time behind.
there is a really interesting Agroup of scholars that justat
happen to be located here at
Learning and Society group. And they're constantly asking
this question: how is new media changing our world?
Video games were kind of the
It's definitely moved into all introduction to this.
And there's a yearly conference here that, in my opinion,
I go to a lot of educational
interesting, passionate conference about education that
I've been to. And it happens right here in
Madison.
alongside another group called And this year it's happening
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
we're part of it and invite you to come out and look at ARIS if
you want to play some of these
projects that we've got going games and on.r about new
I think we'll leave it there. So thanks a bunch for having us.
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