UNICEF Rapid Prototyping Lessons

Interesting lessons learned excerpted from UNICEF’s Stories of Innovation …

This video is a synopsis of the projects, themes and trouble-shooting expressed at the Design Days event on May 10-11 at UNICEF NYHQ.

We have edited down a conversation between UNICEF sponsored rapid design prototypers to profile what they have created in order to respond to and alleviate actual needs of families and children. This video is intended to help make transparent the iterative process that development must undergo in order to create a new device that can respond to global concerns. Also touched on are ways for the organization to make the process of creating prototypes more streamlined, and the best method to take what is developed and to make it open source in order to create a sustainable and beneficial outcome to those that need it.

For Design Days we invited designers and engineers who have worked with us to discuss UNICEF, the design process, and recommendations for future design collaborations.

Lessons Learned:

UNICEF needs methods for iterative and flexible design contracting; we can’t always know what the end result will look like.

UNICEF would benefit from understanding and discussion of the design process before embarking on projects.

We need to work with open-source designers and engineers so that whatever we pay to have produced is public domain.

“Research” and “development” need to happen with end users, in the field.

Related article:

• UNICEF to Offer Free SMS to Nepalese Youth (appscout.com)

Cloud-Based, Open-Source For Teachers?

A computing device for every teacher and student so they can access the Internet at school or at home? That, along with an embrace of cloud computing, Creative Commons, and open-source technologies is part of a new set of recommendations from the U.S. Department of Education.

On March 5, the department released an 80-page draft of its National Educational Technology Plan entitled Transforming Education: Learning Powered by Technology. The plan lays out an ambitious agenda for transforming teaching and learning through technology.

Much of the NETP emphasizes “21st Century learning” as the path to transforming education: “engaging and empowering learning experiences for all learners… and leveraging the power of technology to provide personalized learning instead of a one-size-fits all curriculum.” The plan seeks to challenge the traditional model of the isolated teacher in a classroom, promoting the idea of “always on” learning resources and online communities for both educators and students.

In addition to changes to the US education model, there are some bold technology recommendations in the plan.

• Adequate broadband and wireless access inside and outside of school
• At least one Internet access device for every student and educator inside and outside of school
• R&D into the use of gaming, simulations, and virtual worlds for instruction and assessment
• Encouragement of cloud computing for school districts
• Use of Creative Commons and Open Education licenses
• Changes to FERPA (Family Educational Rights & Privacy Act) to open access to student data
• Changes to CIPA (Children’s Internet Protection Act) to open access to the Internet and rethink how filtering works in schools.

Continue reading via Read Write Web

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• Cloud-Based, Open-Source Future For Teachers? (readwriteweb.com)
• Should School be Taught in the Cloud? (chris.pirillo.com)
• Free Classroom Management Software Now Supports Mixed Platform Environments (prweb.com)
• Tom Vander Ark: The 3×5 Learning Revolution (huffingtonpost.com)
• Debunking the Myth of Isolated and Inaccessible Learning: 3 Resources (conversationagent.com)

Virtual Worlds as Scientific Tools

Building Up Social Sciences in Synthetic Spaces

Virtual worlds as modifiable simulation tools are finding a foothold in all levels of academia and professional research, and the names and organizations being linked to virtual world research are no longer unknown fringe researchers. This is because the mechanics behind virtual worlds are evolving with emerging technology, and because institutions like the University of Texas are making virtual worlds a research priority instead of a secondary or tertiary concern.

The great visual effects community blog Vizworld has some excellent reporting on just how expansive virtual world-based research has become. Among Vizworld’s best points? The emergence of virtual therapy – something we covered a week or so ago – and the potential ethical questions raised as an old discipline adapts to the shifting and nebulous rules of a virtual landscape:

Several psychologists and sociologists view SecondLife as a rare sandbox of human behavior.  The open nature of the system removes several of the restrictions found in online games, allowing more natural interaction between avatars, but also allows people to assume whole new personalities.  The distinctions between the user’s real persona and their chosen avatar has been the subject of many psychological studies and books.

Books like John Suler’s ‘Psychology of Cyberspace’ is a great resource that discusses the observed group dynamics and psychological behaviors monitored inside virtual worlds, and lays out possibilities for psychotherapy and clinical work inworld.

Vizworld writer Randall Hand notes that, disconcertingly, little ‘hard’ science is conducted in Second Life. This is a legitimate criticism of virtual world research as it stands – the great palaces of research organizations seem to serve as libraries of completed and pending research instead of virtual field labs for virtual experimentation. But as more open-source and behind-the-firewall worlds come about, that paradigm is changing. As it turns out, getting researchers in front of virtual worlds may yield a long-term dividend for applied science.

Putting students and researchers in front of virtual world technology – be it Second Life or something else – creates familiarity, and with familiarity comes the confidence to create ever more refined social and scientific experiments. In time, graduates with research experience in virtual worlds could develop their own virtual worlds – an interactive laboratory of indefinite size and scope, suitable for any number of experiments that real-world limitations may render impossible. UT Dallas made a name for itself building virtual laboratories in Second Life. The future of virtual research will be much more ambitious.

The standards for this kind of in-world research are already being debated in academic circles. A recent conference session over at the New Media Consortium focused on best practices in respecting the privacy of researchers and research subjects in virtual social experiments. The presentation’s PowerPoint notes are available at the aforementioned link, and they make for fascinating reading. When universities begin looking at virtual world research in earnest, they’ll lean on the best practices developed by forward-thinking organizations like NMC.  Continue reading…Via Pixel and Policy

Related articles

• Where virtual worlds once ruled, Farmville dominates (news.cnet.com)
• Social Week End off Second Life & Links review (makemyworlds.blogspot.com)
• Hello, Second Life! (blogs.secondlife.com)
• Reaction creates attraction (deangroom.wordpress.com)
• After Frustrations in Second Life, Colleges Look to New Virtual Worlds (tc.eserver.org)
• Considering Virtual Worlds (weber.k12.ut.us)
• Shouldn’t Schools Have Embraced Second Life By Now? (readwriteweb.com)

Why Mobile? Rick Rasansky and Roy Rosin

Chariot Solutions sat down with Rick Rasansky CEO of Yorn, and Roy Rosin VP at Intuit in their offices to discuss why it is important for web developers to be paying attention to mobile development (in the video below). E-learning developers should take heed as well because mobile technology offers the ability to deliver untethered content that your target audience can use where ever they choose to use it when ever the time is convenient. Offering a user the ability to learn when and where he/she is most comfortable is highly effective.

The limitations of this technology lie in the fact that there is no single platform that is universal. In the smartphone marketplace Blackberry is dominant with business oriented users, but the iPhone is gaining users rapidly, while Windows 7 Mobile, the newly open source Symbian OS, and the revitalized Palm OS are also attempting to gain a piece of the marketplace. Yet the most dominant  demographic is the host of individuals still using text only mobile devices. In developing countries text only mobile technology is sometimes be the primary access users have to the web, so understanding mobile delivery is paramount to companies seeking to deliver content outside of the US. Creating the use cases and understanding the platforms of your user group is vital to develop an effective mobile learning application.  Here are two key players in the mobile industry take a look at the video below to get their perspectives on why you should be considering mobile delivery for your e-learning content.

Related articles

• Symbian lays out mobile OS road map (infoworld.com)
• Symbian Foundation Teases with Symbian^3 (phonereport.info)
• Shaping the Future of Mobile (eon.businesswire.com)
• Intel and Nokia merge platforms (news.bbc.co.uk)
• Why the Next BlackBerry Browser Won’t Be So Terrible [BlackBerry] (gizmodo.com)
• MeeGo: A New Linux OS to Fight iPhone, iPad and More (readwriteweb.com)

Google Labs + News = Living Stories

Google Labs always has something interesting for me to explore. This time the guys at Google in conjunction with the Washington Post and The New York Times are tackling online news. I think this tool has allot of value, and if it is adopted widely it could change the way we discover, read and research news topics, using online news outlets. The fact that they are offering a open source API makes it even more compelling. They came up with a very powerful way to explore a news topic. They used their search algorithms that are already searching out all of the online sources on any given topic to add context and pull together a research hub on the desired news topic.

Here’s how it works. After a search is completed, and a story is selected you are presented with a variety of links of varying importance from any site that has covered the topic. There are a wide variety of ways to filter the content from media type to personalities in the story. It also offers a time line from the stories’ development across the web.

The implications for education are immediately apparent. Students now have a way to do one stop research. If they understand how to validate and attribute sources it can save them allot of time. This is an important factor, as classes in media literacy are not currently taught as a requirement in most school district’s curricula. This API is powerful enough to change the way modern news is interacted with and if newspapers are smart they are already implementing it as part of their online offerings.

Since most “old school” news (and publishers in general) organizations are nowhere near as open minded or nimble as they need to be, we may never see wide spread adoptions of this new delivery method. Most news organizations are too busy building subscription based,  “walled gardens” in the futile effort to protect their content and retain advertisers to consider any innovative open source offering that helps a reader understand a topic better. Especially one that pulls together a variety of sources from around the web to build a re-mixed conglomerate version of the story that is more informative that any single story can ever be. All said, judging by how quickly news papers are folding under this mind set, they may not last long enough to benefit from the increased exposure from this new browsing option. Kudos to the New York Times and Washington post  for their insightful work and Google for pulling them together. Here is an overview of the Living Stories feature set:

Related articles

• Google Open-Sources its Experimental News Format (mashable.com)
• Google Declares “Living Stories” Experiment Success, Offers as Open Source (readwriteweb.com)
• Google Launches a New Way to Read the News (mashable.com)
• Google’s news experiment Living Stories to go open source (guardian.co.uk)
• Exclusive: Google News to Share “Fast Flip” Through Open API (beet.tv)
• Read news fast with Google Fast Flip (googleblog.blogspot.com)
• Google and Top Newspapers Experiment with a New Way to Deliver the News (mashable.com)

A Wireside Chat with Lawrence Lessig

Lawrence Lessig, is the foundational voice and an advocate of the free culture movement, Creative Commons and Open Source. The Open Video Allience will present a live webcast of a talk by Lawrence Lessig at the end of Feburary. For more background on his ideas view his speech: Free Culture: What We Need From You (Ogg). This was Prof. Lessig’s keynote speech at LinuxWorld in San Francisco. (via Lessig.Content: Audio/Video ) In this video he discusses the emerging remix culture as both the source and outcome of societies embrace of digital technology. Lessig feels a new literacy has emerged due to these changes which should be embraced and taught because it is the key to preparing society for further innovation into the 21st Century. Last year at Educause 2009 he stated:

The ‘ecology of education and science,’ Mr. Lessig said, is inherently collaborative, and it is being strangled by copyright-law principles based on exclusivity…”Scientists and educators are busy creating,” he continued, “so it is up to chief information officers and other information-technology specialists to devise ways to make those creations both legal and widely accessible.”