al Jazeera @ the 140 conference

As usual al Jazeera is at the cutting edge. Here is the Al Jazeera Twitter Strategy at the 140 character conference in New York – day 1 June 16, 2009:

State of Play: when governments come out to play

Here are my notes on this session. Quite interesting…

Liz Losh, Jean Miller, Bill May

Tory Horton: Public diplomacy: what is it? Information and info overload that redefines public diplomacy that focuses on communication and dialogue, collaboration and group work. With this shift came a change: listening, policy alignment… Opportunities include: VW can fulfill an ideal which is collaboration across cultures and have a place for coordinated action. They can have a new relationship. Geography collapses. Credibility is important in relationships and in public diplomacy are important. Building relationships requires credibility and basing your opinion not on what one looks.

Limitations: VW are unattainable [too difficult to learn and too difficult to get etc]… The 2^nd reason is that govnt’s are unable to control the space. 3^rd issue is that public dipl. Is viewed as the end result. It should not be.

J. Miller:

• what did govts want? They were after the hype as a short term goal. Some wanted to get an online campaign: would a virtual space be better or go on youtube and it would be better?
• Who is the audience? Knowledgeable teens or elderly who need more time to learn or their own internal teams.
• Who knew what within a govt agency? They were the group of the convinced and now wanted to convince others within the govt.  There were concerns about finances. Many underestimated the resources. The Swedish Embassy and the Maldives are there. How do you engage community?
• Is this all relevant? When we engage communities and engage cultures, does it actually bring about change?

Losh:

Code and servers and files can be used for unintended stuff and therefore have unintended consequence. Choosing proprietary environments affects how it will work.

Military video games: people coming in from different paradigms: game development or social media.

Bill:

Mutual understanding between the govt and others around the world. Giving context to US policies. The idea was to create space where children could interact and go back home thinking well Americans are not so bad then. People can come and have discussions and talk about things. Tracking the industry 4 and a half years ago. Do people get to know each other in virtual spaces? It is not about building presence but how to use it. Cultural events. A mixed media event with Egyptian bloggers in second life.

State of Play: Across Cultural Boundaries

Panel on Across Cultural Boundaries

This was a delightful session. The speakers were all great. Here are my notes on the session:

Herbert Burket [German law professor]

Three devices in games that maintain the interest in winning and create a taboo in losing: diversion, avoidance and reinterpretation.

• Diversion: a game gives you an indication of losing and lets you try again.
• Avoidance: bringing forward advertising games where you cannot lose at all.
• Reinterpretation: to reinterpret losing as winning.

There is room for thinking about the losing experience in the gaming world. Rather than giving players the experience of losing but losing is an opportunity to take them out of the game and have a more reflective view of the losing experience. There are three strategies that help deepen the experience of losing:

• The tragedy games: when a player has an unsurmountable barrier.
• Winning is losing: eg players upload their friends pics and think they are on their team but end up shooting them.
• Dependence games: other players constantly redefine what is success and leaves each individual players chasing other goals that other individuals are setting.

Not to dwell on the experience of losing in a game is itself a loss.

Mia Consalvo [MIT]

Western Otaku: games crossing

Globalization.  VW as transnational spaces. People play SL and final fantasy play on shared servers. You can play it on any platform so it is also cross platform. Otaku are fans of Japanese who like Japanese culture. Gives them space to encounter ‘the other’.  Impact on culture?

Spectrum of interests: interest in stories/gameplay; might lead to further interests such as learning language; creates possibilities to be exposed to different people, your beliefs challenged etc.

Torill Mortensen [Norway]

Physical playspace: how do people integrate machines into their lives – especially gamers? Game objects come out of the game – eg. Dragons come out in art and drawing.

Results:

• The use of game technology is adjusted to the needs of the players, illustrating social structures as much as game structures.
• Often behaviours overlap mong fields, highlighting cultural synchronicity.
• If we define vw the way bart simon did as ways of living which are artificially constructed and depend on tech, independent of georgraphy, then the ‘rane’ world
• The time spent in digital spaces is as real a the time spent in cars.
• The vw is already in the world.

Will Leverett

What happens when we give people the most sophisticated tools today? Realtimeworlds [will be out in Feb]. Detailed views of avatars – muscles, tattoos, skin color, facial expressions. It also has its own music creator.

State of Play: Surveillance and Security in VW

Surveillance Panel at State of Play, NY

Very very interesting session on surveillance and security on virtual worlds. I actually thought it would be all about ‘Muslim terrorists’ and I was quite apprehensive, but then found the session to be absolutely fantastic and very informative.

Here are my notes on the session:

Intro from British intelligence: What can they do for bad-guys: Voip, recruitment..

What can it do for good-guys: twitter for example. There was an operation Crevice to bomb London.

Wikipedia, twitter, facebook, vertical content: the possibility of it spilling over in VW is great. Re the future of VWs going to be where warfare is conducted? [e during the Gaza war: Gaza and Israel in SL].

Bart Simon: perfect surveillance – worries about invasion of privacy. Jeremy Bentham and Foucault’s panoptic. It is not about being watched, but it is about a state that requires minimal surveillance. It is about the people watching themselves – they do the surveillance themselves and they start watching and get info about themselves to police themselves. Surveillance is a systematic exertion of influence on someone’s life and the second is systematic attention. People don’t watch people any more. Now we have dataveillance: where data is collected and put in a database. The surveillance is not of the person but the data about that person and the key is to connect the data to the person. It ends when that person ‘confesses’ that you got him. But VWs make that difficult because you disengage who you are from the data about you.

Oscillating between the concept that VWs is dangerous and the concept that it is not. We don’t want their confessions any more but we want their genetic information. When we increase the individuization of avatars people make surveillance easier because they claim their data directly.

Everything in VWs lets you act as who you are not – it encourages role play and encourages you to be someone else – which real life is difficult to do. How do we create a VW where people will not role play? This is for example for marketing projects.

Charles Cohen: is surveillance technically possible? And is it lawful? [a murder case where normally you would talk to friends etc.. and trace behavior, but he spent 20 hrs online and they decided they had to go there to make the investigation]. Distribution and production of child porn. Found in VWs but as it gets more photorealistic it becomes more difficult to prosecute: is this really a child? How to prove that?

Currently it is more of a challenge than an opportunity. What about servers outside US jurisdiction?

Michael Schrage: raises sociological and legal questions. You design honeypots – in VW what constitutes a honey pot where you trap avatars to do get them – which may sound like entrapment. How do you design a honey pot? The issue is how the VW interacts with the real life. The rise is malevolent mashups. VW as media for trust and media for verficiation. Trust but verify as Reagan said. How do you verify?

Creating jihadi bots. Assembling botnets is not that hard.

The evocative aspect is not the evolution of VWs but because of the proliferation of devices we will see grey markets and black markets and improvisation. It will create interesting collaborations in the community.

Michael Theis: the world has changed fundamentally in such a way that people can steal stuff because it is in a computer in some place. It takes 3 things for protection:

1-      An aspect of trustworthiness: what do I trust and who

2-      Right size my permissions: the software does what it is designed to do. Information about them but not give out info about myself.

3-      Effective monitoring capability: not surveillance but monitoring.

We look at people in real life, and see how they would act in cyberspace. Would someone who shares music steal from best buy for example? Not necessarily.

Trustworthiness: looking at people and assessing facial and physical expressions during an investigation. It is difficult to do that in VWs and cyberspace.

People believe in anonymity but it is not true. In voice it is an issue of meter and tone etc.. pausing, the ummms.. Could I do that in VW? Could I ask questions to determine their trustworthiness?

People also act differently in different VWs. Anamiah.. people could take on multiple personalities but then after a while you can tell that the two are the same people.  What is needed is something that identifies those aspects.

We have to consider how we go about doing monitoring.

From the question/answer session:

Could griefers be prosecuted? For example for sexual harassment?

In terms of constitutional law, how much can you do in terms of going into someone’s virtual home? It has to be viewed as an intercept to do that rather than as a search of the home that needs a warrant. Currently the law does not specify that at all. But also that should fall into the laps of the VW owners and their TOS.

World Refugee Day Live

Today is the UN World Refugee Day and it is being broadcast live on UNCHR’s website. It includes interactive Twitter and chat so join in if you want.

The site is at UNCHR

State of Play – New York

I am attending State of Play conference in New York. The opening speech was interesting – by the creator of Metaplace. Here are some highlights of what he said:

Raph Koster: A New Kind of World

Where is virtual world’s relevance? Virtual worlds are web 1.0 not even 2.0 not to mention 3.D. Why does the web work today? Because it is open: html, Mozilla, apache, CGI, CSS, DNS, Google. The biggest underlining assumption is that everyone can do what they want. Virtual Worlds don’t work this way. It is  a network and does not run on a single centralized server. Can they become relevant and can they break out of the plateau? When will VWs become more like the web? Metaplace tries to do that – it leaves open template content, etc. Problem is, we don’t know if anybody cares. What is the killer app for VW? It is wasting time and having fun – not education nor distance collaboration.

Do users care that they are beyond entertainment? What does it mean to build that? How do we evolve our thinking? If we actually give users the ability to work it as the web [not centrally managed, not on a single server etc].. how do we think about commerce? Eulas? Privacy?

Metaplace TOS: gives rights of creators and rights of users unless overridden, responsibilities of creators and users. It is rights of avatars. Freedom of expression, ownership, including earning money and running their own world, privacy, develop their own TOS. The declaration of the rights of avatars is now in place. They told users not to break the law. This was of course challenging.

Could we have this any other way? What areas are public? What things are private? What about people hopping across worlds? Which TOS do they belong to?

Modeling after the web: hotlinking or deep linking for example could it be the same when avatars are actually walking around through links?

Future: what will VWs be?

• Ambient: are you in your browser frame?
• Pervasive: what’s the TOS for a widget?
• Preamble: what’s the privacy policy of a multidirectional stream?
• Overlays: what’s a world in the first place?
• Relevant? The new kind of world isn’t this; it’s the new hybrid.

Looking for the new model. Old worlds will not go away but there will be a change. If they are to be relevant, how much can they emulate the web and take down countries [as did Twitter].

NMC: Mobiles in Learning, Socio-Economical Development and Knowledge Work

Talk by Teemu Leinonen [from Finland]

• Finland has 5.2 million population and 6 million cellular phone subscriptions and 2 million broadband connections.
• In 2007 Apple Computers Inc. dropped the name Computers and is now Apple Inc. because it does better now with mobile phones.
• Annually about 1 billion mobiles phones are sold
• 50% of the world have the basic type of mobile phones

Two trends:

1. >mobiles and wikis
2. Mobile wikis
3. Future of mobiles in learning

Mobiles:

• phones
• multimedia phones
• handheld devices – ipods, games etc.
• phone computers [eg. Iphone]
• internet tablets
• ultralight laptops

Half of the world population will be using mobile phones and multimedia phones and will never reach the other types because they are very expensive.

Entry level mobile phones have:

• text and talk [sms]
• clock/alarm
• calculator
• torch/flashlight
• mobile network

They could stand about two weeks without charging.

The Second mobile phone: [multimedia phone – Nokia is best]

• talk and text
• music/audio – mp3/FM radio
• camera: photo and video
• you can write software for that such as java/python, flash light etc.
• mobile network – Bluetooth that helps sharing in close networks without much expense

Mobile phone is one-to-one media.

Wikis:

how many have used it? How many have edited articles in wiki?

It currently has 1600 administrators for the English wikipedia. It is global.

Wikis are many to many media.

If we combine them it would be more powerful. Many to many media becomes a forum for discussion and build knowledge together in a certain shared space.

2- Mobile wikis: Mobile Audio Wiki Video

MobilEd in South Africa. It is a mobile initiative. They created an audio encyclopedia.

They tried it out in an educational setting. You can also record your own entries and it creates a podcast for you.

Mobile many to many media?

Why people want to do media? Because they can: they have the tools and time.

3- Future of mobiles in learning:

the ability for more people to talk to each other.

Informal learning: communication, news, ads

Launched in China in 2007 MobilEdu provides wireless learning directly to your device.

Nokia has Nokia Life Tools: access to agriculture, education, entertainment. It was launched in India.

OtaSizzle: ubiquitous social media for urban communities. .Oopen experimentation environment for testing mobile social media services.

Shedlight concept: [shed light application which enables people to place notes] made in a new media and learning workshop 2006 in media lab Heslsinki. You move the phone and take video of the scenes around you and people can connect to it and annotate it.

NMC 2009: Teaching Well with Innovative Technologies

Greg Leihman

One of the best talks I attend was Greg Reihman’s teaching well with innovative technologies. Here is a brief of what he said:

No discussion of particular technologies but think about what it is we want to do when teaching. How do we plan a course or help others do that to use technology effectively? Was teaching humanities [studied philosophy]. How do we make a session better? The program he is in is called the LeHigh Lab. On a paper: Think of a specific course. What is one thing your students aren’t learning as well as you would like them to learn? What technology are you thinking about putting to use to help solve that problem?

Designing classes:

1. plan backwards: Outcomes: don’t think of you as instructor but think of the outcomes, learning objectives. What do you want students to do when they take your class? What will they learn to do? Think in term of verbs. Putting it out to them in their language. Assessment: what tools will you use to know if they learnt what they needed [quizzes, tools etc.] Activity: what will they DO to learn with their minds and bodies to gain those skills? The primary activity is they listen and they sit. Or they could do other things that could push us to a higher order of things: ruminating, creating, analyzing, debating, thinking, comparing, debating, writing, visualizing, critiquing, applying, evaluating, reading. Think of things they will do alone and others they will do with others. In the presence of instructor they usual listen and sit, but the others are done away from faculty member. When they get stomped when they are alone or with their peers, how far away will you be to offer support? All these things need to match up. Create a week on a paper and say for example on Tuesday they will listen and Thursday they will discuss – or have discussion on Tuesday and then follow up discussions on Thursday. How about writing? Use informal writing assignments – eg in blogs.
2. What’s hard about teaching a seminar? Preparation, participation, depth Participation 30%, Final Project 20%, Paper 2 analytic Essay, Online Journal 15%, Paper 1 Comparative Essay 15%. There needs to be a midterm assessment and individual feeback that they do about themselves and that you help through. Setting up forums is important and bringing topics from that forum into the class is useful especially because you can draw in shy students. Using audio with the forum is great because you are not involved in the forum where students will start addressing you instead of each other. Ask them about the one post that they found generated comments. Now they are not only participating in the forums but they are also thinking about what makes a good conversation. Monday: lecture; Tuesday Read; online group discussion; Wednesday: write a question based on what the students wrote on the forum. Group discussion summary that I write and then give it to other groups for them to comment on. They come up with discussions for the groups. So group 4 takes the summary of group 14’s responses and come up with questions of their own to that group.
3. Find a ‘conceptual splinter’: they are divided into groups of 5 and they bring one thing to class that they are puzzled about the following time and share what they were talking about. We took that splinter and passed it to another group. Then find a way to remove splinter: how do you make sure they all make the work? They need to write it down and at the end of the class he collects them all. Then they come back together and pick the three best solutions and from those three they need to pick one that is most plausible: which one makes a good logical argumentation? Inside the wiki he wrote the four speculations and why each is not a good answer and then one that makes sense and why. And then he writes his own comments at the bottom of the page. Knowledge survey: he asks them 20 questions in the beginning and writes their answers in a graph – the question is: could you give a philosophically sound response to this question – rate it from 0-5 in terms of confidence. Then at the end of the semester give them the same 20 questions and then put it all in a graph that starts from No confidence to complete confidence.
4. Team teaching: bring out the sheet you wrote and see if particular technologies fit with your course and what you want to achieve.

worst places to be bloggers

Worst countries to be a blogger in: CPJ announced its worst ten countries for bloggers… and guess how many are in the Middle East?

Relying on a mix of detentions, regulations, and intimidation, authorities in Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Egypt have emerged as the leading online oppressors in the Middle East and North Africa. link

Nice. Congrats Middle East, you broke a record. Again.

Tunisia: Smiling Oppressor

This slideshow with narration is from CPJ [Committee to Protect Journalists]. link