Wisconsin Public TV University Place Wednesday Nite at the Lab  John Martin and David Gagnon, "Mobile Devices for Research and Learning"  December 1, 2010 UP529     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. [APPLAUSE]