A recent interest timesuck addiction um,, interest has been playing Words With Friends… with friends. I’ve been on a lucky streak, and have beaten a few people who are smarter and more educated (people who actually use words like “epistemology” in regular conversation.

But its really not about winning, it’s the joy of playing, challenging your brain.

Who am I kidding? It’s better to win! Give me the X on a TL box sliding down to the TW score.

And maybe I will start using “words” like “QI” “XI”, “NEF”, “AE” in everyday language.

But that’s not the point either.

Here is the word I have been thinking about.

cc licensed flickr photo “M” and
cc licensed flickr photo “O” shared by Leo Reynolds

I can’t remember if I was 7,8,9 when my Mom showed me this word game with the wooden tiles. I just remember the warm times together playing games on the kitchen table. It was in a few years that something happened, I eventually won a game from her (she was not one to give a game away), and then I was winning them regularly.

But it was less about being the winner, then the joint winners, as we played along the guidelines that a combined score of above 500 meant it was a good game on both sides.

Another thing I am finding is that, like photography, most people can sit down and play (click a shutter), but the more you play (take pictures) the better you get just be the act of reflection on what you are doing, experience. Learning by doing.

And you don;t have to have the sharpest and most in depth vocabulary, you just need to know how to make the best of compound words, of knowing something of the letter frequency counts, and most of all, a lot of luck in the draws.

A game of Words with Friends can play out quickly but is asynchronous, when you and your friend bat it back and forth like a tennis ball, but it can also dribble out for weeks. I like both ways of play. I’ve had only 2 people I played for months, but after tweeting something about it, i have a rack of 3 or 4 games going. One player I had no idea who it was, until I connected it with someone who has been responding to some of my tweets this year (with a flair for humor), yet ti was not even until I looked closer at their twitter name, than I realized it was someone I’ve known online for like 10 years.

So thanks M₃ O₁ M₃ for getting me started with this love for word games- in which I am just learning by doing again and again.

Qi ya later, XI!

One more.

A day or so ago, on scanning the flow of tweets, I saw this message from Roland Tanglao

Who knows why one tweet grabs your mouse as opposed to another? But with that I was fallen into a fun time of exploring the noticings site which taps into many of my interests- flickrs+daily photos+geolocation+a bit of gaming, with a simple premise “the game of noticing the world around you”

The elegant aspect of noticin.gs is that it has cleverly simple rules. Your goal is to notice details, objects, interesting things, lost items in your surroundings. Take a photo, post to flickr, geo-tag the location, and tag the photo “noticings”– the web site does all the rest. Every 24 hours, the site crawls flickr and awards points based in criteria like:

• Noticing something near someone else’s noticing.
• Noticing something.
• Your first noticing in a neighbourhood.
• Being first player to notice something in a neighbourhood.
• Noticing something every lunchtime for a working week.
• Noticing something every day for a week.
• Noticing something that’s been lost by someone.

plus the teaser

Of course, there may be hidden rules, which can only be discovered by earning them.

And it amps up the challenge by making scores public. I just started so only have 50 http://noticin.gs/players/cogdog

So for me, I saw a lot of ties of this and the noticing I do when finding my daily 2009/365 photo.

I wanted to share this back in twitter, and thanks Roland, and mentioned something about the parallels (me) of doing the daily 2009/365 photos. The joy of this crazy web is that we see things differently, for Roland, he sees one as self induglent and one as with others, in his case Your Mileage May Vary

I have to respect that, since Roland has long been one of the prolific flickr photo posters (he must have 9 gazillion pictures on flickr)– and he’s just a nice guy, too.

But I find that remark curious, as I see a lot of “indulging with others” happening in our 2009/365 space- people regularly comment (some as soon as I post), there is an active community -I don’t fell alone at all. This was the gist of my 2009 Northern Voice preso on Say/Blog it in Pictures – it is one of the most informal, unstructured, yet appropriately bounded in structure groups I’ve been in.

So i don’t agree with Roland at all– for me, MMDV- My Mileage Does Vary.

And all of this is besides the point- it is all about playing the noticings game- start noticing today! rack up some points.

And its part of the newly arranged area on flickr called the App Garden- a place to find those clever apps people outside of flickr create with the API- where noticin.gs has a nice corner garden spot

It’s hardly news to hear of a public library experimenting game setups to attract people to come, stay, be part of a library. A google on “public Library” and “wii” brings in.. oh… 383,000 results (no I have not looked at them all!). Is that astounding or ordinary? Is that yet another one of those fun measures I like to use to suggest the scale of the size of the net?

I had a fabulous time in at the "Gaming in Libraries’" session of the Midwest Library Technology Conference, where they not only talked about games, they let us play. It’s more than a Field of Dreams approach, just tossing games into a room; I have worked with, read about, and heard from those clever librarians who design activities, resources that do what librarians do so well, put information in context for us.

This is not even meant as a post to ponder the implications, more of an observation I had a few weeks ago when I stopped by the Isabelle Hunt Memorial Public Library in Pine, Arizona — the closest town (3 miles) with a gas station (actually 2) and a market (1) to where I live. The population of Pine is likely a bit over 2000, and the library is a real gem.

Housed in this tiny building is a diversity of books, magazines, videos, audio books, community resources, computers connected to the internet, and a gung ho team of librarians that politely fall over themselves to help you.

And darned if on my last visit there, they had re-arranged the checkout racks of DVDs to make room for a single Wii station!

Yep, this little library has got Wii.

Your host, Damian Lacedaemion, sporting a camouflage full body armor and range of high powered weapons, is using a commercial multiplayer game to invite special guests in for discussions of life, music, art, society as the characters leap about the typical post apacolyptic environment of machinery and blown up buildings, and of course, shooting.

The guests thus appear in this environment, walk, fly, jump, shoot around, and have conversations, which are all recorded and made available in a series of episodes in QuickTime and Windows Media formats.

Now before you go and dismiss this as fluff, listed to module 3, an interview with Bob Stein, the visionary behind Voyager Multimedia, as Bob and “Damian” talk about the future of the book (see module 3). Bob is wearing the magenta shiny metal armor.

One subtle note is in the comments early on:

One difficulty with trying to transfer these places into communal space is just the number of weapons around… they’re hard to avoid!

So the question is, can people follow along and pay attention to the interesting dialogue here and not be distracted because all of the things going on in this world are not directly related to the main topic? Later Bob talks about the future of books:

I’ve been thinking about how books will evolve over time– and when I use the word book, I am using iot metaphorically, not the objects, but the vehicle humans use to move heavy ideas around. And that vehicle is shifting from page to screen…

The book of the future will be networked and it will not be frozen. They’ll change over time rather rapdily… The problem becomes how does an editor make navigating among such a large data space useful?…

But I’m sitting here watching this and seeing there is a third component= one is rich media, another is that it is networked and not frozen, and the third is… how to navigate in 3 dimensional data space…

To be able to walk around inside a “book” this way will be brilliant.

Even if you do not like games, cannot see their appeal, you cannot help but be taken back by the originality of using a networked 3D game space for “community activity” (sans the shooting). What other ways other than talk shows can this format be exploited? Play this, open your mind, and think.

A tip of the blog hat to hip cool faculty Shelley Rodrigo at Mesa Community College for sending me the link (Shelley, you need a blog!)

Presentation and Game Analysis Packet available
http://idt.und.edu/

A good session with a sound approach to Game-Based Learning, look for resources from the presentation. Good discussion form the audience. Bottom line- games are interesting, have great potential, yet we have a huge educational struggle to soundly integrate without trying to produce at the level of commercial games- recommendation is to integrate rather than create.

We should be interested in and skeptical of games.

Interactive Digital Software Association
Increasing interest in games 47% Americans bought will buy computer game in 2005, 248 million games sold last year, 35% of players are under 18, 43% are 18-49

Games & Learning
* many examples in education and industry (long list of research citations)- Games can be effective but any innovation used well can be
* Education Arcade: Environmental Detectives
* Virtual U – simulation of running a university
* why and how to they work?

Cognitive Benefits of Games
* Flynn effect- documented increase in IQ scores
– not attributed to education, nutrition, etc
– complexity of mass entertainment like video games may be responsible (Steven Johnson)
* requires high order cognition (not necessarily in a recognized content domain- this is the problem)
– congitive disequilibirum- more learning when there is a shroud of uncertainty
– problem solving, hypothesis forming/testing, rules formed, concept learning

Ingrained prejudice against “play” (if you “play” at “work”, you get fired).

Digital Game-Based Learning (DGBL)

Three approaches:
* Games created by students, game designers, programming, time intensive
* education games built from scratch- designed to seamlessly integrate learning and play — problem is that most games like this are badly executed- Shavian Reversals, offspring inheriting our worst traits “Instructional designers suck the fun right out of games” (Prensky)
* Use commercial games integrated into curriculum
- most cost effective
- quality maximized by leaving game design to game designers and learning up to teachers

Bates Taxonomy of Games matched against Gagne / Blooms Taxonomy (big diagram with examples)

Challenges:
* Commercial games not designed to teach
– limited topics (there are ways around it)
– content may be incomplete, inaccurate
* Commercial games are expensive
* Doing it right
* lots of examples of how NOT to implement tech-based learning
* Moore’s law leads to “build it and they will come and learn” approach

No Signficance Difference – never accounted for strengths and weaknesses of media for a particular skill, mistook use of media for integration of media

Integrating games is no difference from history of integrating media and technology in the classroom.

See reference provided for 20 page game analysis packet from http://idt.und.edu/ designed to help teachers integrate game

There are teachable moments in innaccurate or missing content in games, maximize learner responsibility

Design Instructional Activities- examples of activities
* Math and numbers: budgets, spreadsheets, reports/charts databases
* Writing: diary, scientific report, letters, legal briefs, faxes, write from multiple viewpoints
* Science: design, duplicate experiments in real world, write feasibility studies, hypothesis testing
* Research: assess veracity of game, provide missing information

Making the call: is it worth the time? And being brave enough to say “no”.

Example of DGBL:
Physicus

There are many physical inaccuracies (meteor hitting earth and stopping rotation)-
Good parts- physical reference section, tutorial on optics

How much is applying physics