EU study endorses games for learning

The article Video games encourage creativity is interesting, not because of any new findings in the study that it describes, but rather because the study was commissioned by the European Parliament Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection and that it endorses games as good for learning.

It’s always encouraging when governments take a mature view on video games, when they recognise “the benefits and no definitive link to violent behaviour.”

The study calls for more parental involvement — this is obvious and necessary.

Ushahidi: crowdsourcing crisis information

At Web4Dev, Erik Hersman, the White African, spoke about Ushahidi, a free, open-source platform to crowdsource crisis information. It allows anyone to submit crisis information through text messaging using a mobile phone, email or web form.

It has been used to report on the botched elections in Kenya, the DRC and the war in Gaza.

Crowdsourcing Crisis Information

The next big thing for Ushahidi: how to overcome information overload. Taking all of the SMS reports and filtering the huge amount of data. Since the Mumbai bombings they’ve been working on a project called SwiftRiver, which is focussed on making sense of information received in the first 3 hours of a crisis. There are machine and people ways to filter the information — they’ve chosen the people approach.

The motto of the project: if it works in Africa, it will work anywhere.

Innovations for the poor, Grameen style

At day 2 of the Web4Dev conference, Kazi Islam, CEO of Grameen Solutions, spoke about Innovations for the poor: Challenges OR opportunities. He described a number of projects and companies within the Grameen family.

He spoke about how when Dr Muhammad Yunus decided to create a bank for the poor, he simply did what the regular banks did not do.

Regular bank: aimed at richer people; his bank: aimed at the poor.
Regular bank: needs collateral; his bank would be based on trust.
Regular bank: mostly male clients; he would cater to woman.

He has since won a Nobel peace prize based on the success of Grameen Bank.

A key point that Kazi wanted to make was that our solutions need to challenge the status quo and be about people. It’s very important to “get down and dirty” and understand the needs of the people you want to reach. “Go and live with the poor,” he suggested, and develop solutions that work for them and their real needs.

Grameen Solutions is a for-profit company. Kazi assured us that there is nothing wrong with making a profit, in fact it is essential for sustainability.

The need to enable participation for TB management

Dr Christopher Dye, Director at the World Health Organisation (WHO), spoke at Web4Dev about his work around TB. WHO works with top-level governments and large networks to try to obtain TB information in a country. What he’s realised is that the information is at the bottom, with the people. If only they could be brought into the information sharing network.

At the “top” is the IT, processing power and tools for analysis. At the “bottom” is the data and information.

Enabling participatory activities that allow for that information to flow more freely from bottom to top and down again is critical to moving the needle in this space. This is what my presentation will be about.

Thinking about innovation

The Heroism of Innovation by Tony Salvador, Intel, at Web4Dev. He is an anthropologist and ethnographer, who spoke about following the Hero’s Journey as a tool to think through innovation. He touched on complex adaptive systems and about preparation around innovation.

Complex adaptive systems resist external influences — which cause change — to maintain homeostasis. Social structures manifest in this system. So, when we want to bring a new ICT or service to a group of people we need to ask: who will think that this new thing is a threat to the system? This helps us to manage the resistance to change, the push back against any new external input into the system.

Innovation/development is 1% ideation and 99% preparation. We should:

  • Plan strategically 5 or 10 years out; for each prediction have one or more end-state and estimate the probability of each.
  • Network systemically: vertically and horizontally.
  • Understand explicitly how local institutions manifest local social structures and power and what social power you and your partners actually have and don’t have. For me: do the unions hold the real power in SA in education: should I try to influence them?
  • Think about your “new development” as a threat.
  • Use pilots or case studies to test and push the social system, not the technology.

Of golf balls and flirting: Web4Dev intro notes

Ann Venemon, Exec Dir of UNICEF and John Gage introduced the Web4Dev conference:

  • Both spoke very much about mobiles as the ICT for development. Also on biotech innovation as key to really moving the needle in reaching the MDGs.
  • It took 72 days for Christopher Columbus to reach the New World. Information can traverse the same distance at almost the speed of light — 280 million times faster than Columbus. This means that relatively speaking, the earth is now the size of a golf ball.
  • John Gage loves the Kindle and predicts that within 3 years ebook readers will cost $10.
  • A very powerful way to change behaviour is to show people what they’re doing and how much it costs them. For example, showing people how much carbon they emit and what they pay for that,will bring it home to them that they need to change.
  • Using the locative capabilities of mobile phones, providing services can become much more efficient. Efficiency is the most important thing in a downturn.
  • Someone asked how best to get people in the developing world to participate in ICT networks. John Gage responded that when it comes to engaging youth, the best way is through music, sport, gaming and flirting.
  • John Gage: leave traces of yourself on the web, what you’re doing, thinking about, etc. Buy every UN employee a basic camera to share their experiences. That’s how to spread information about innovation. (Clay Shirky articulates this very well in Here Comes Everybody.)

Web4Dev kicks off

Tonight the Web4Dev conference kicked off with a pre-conference reception. It felt pretty good to be at UN headquarters in New York, overlooking the East River and listening to Ann M. Veneman, the UNICEF chief. It doesn’t get more hifalutin than this.

Web4Dev conference Since the theme is Innovation for Access, let’s hope the conference includes great networking, sharing of ideas and showcasing innovative projects!

I’ll be blogging about the best of it over the next 3 days.

Yes, you can teach with copyrighted material

Copyright Confusion Conquered is a great post from MIT’s Project New Media Literacies about the use of copyrighted material for educational purposes.

For educators, venturing into this territory is usually a scary exercise, with the threat of a law suit always in the background. But read the post and be empowered. Yes, you can use that content even if it copyrighted. Woop!

Annotating the web

My esteemed colleague. Steve Song, has written a blog post about an Annotate-ipedia, a shared mechanism to annotate content on the web. It is only an idea at this stage, but a damn good one. We first discussed this concept last year when considering submitting a paper to Innovate journal’s forthcoming special edition on the Future of the Textbook.

Over the holidays I read Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. My copy has an introduction and notes by Richard Maxwell. While the book is brilliant, the notes really made reading it a richer, more enjoyable experience. They set the context, explained links to real people (the novel is historically factual), framed the theme within Dickens’ own personal struggles, etc.

But how much better if I could read notes from others? From school teachers, historians, Dickens’ fans and teens? How cool would it not be if I could ask a question about a particular historical point and have it answered right there, alongside the text? Then the book could become a resource for History students learning about the French Revolution as well as English language learners.

Bring on the Annotate-ipedia!

Note: The only thing that I’ve seen that is related to this is Trailfire, although it’s not exactly what is needed because it let’s users add notes to whole pages only, not to words or paragraphs within pages. (Still, it’s a nice way to create a web trail across different sites that you like, e.g. your 5 favourite blog postings about twitter.)