Playpen

Alexander Stojanovic makes an interesting comparison between the Nintendo DS and the OLPC. Having bought both for his five year-old daughter at Christmas he has been able to compare:

The Nintendo DS (NDS) is the clear winner as an interactive device and learning platform. It truly is a paradigm shift for UI/UX. Our daughter was able to figure out how to configure two DSs for PictoChat (via WiFi) and now constantly wants to “IM” pictures and text with me. It’s an eye-openning experience.

The OLPC is the utter disappointment though. Everything about it is sluggish, unresponsive, cryptic and just sub-optimal.

Like Alexander and as someone who works in both interaction design and educational futures I really want the OLPC project to be a great idea, but I’m pretty worried it isn’t.

The first objection is that really the world would be a much better place if every child had enough to eat, was healthy and happy quite apart from having a laptop.

The second is the potential environmental hazards of sending out so many laptops perhaps not all that environmentally friendly.

Finally, everything is in the execution. Nicholas Negroponte is keen to stress that the OLPC project is “an education project, not a laptop project” and that is, of course, highly laudable, but I’m worried that in the quest to make them so cheap, the user-experience might have been lost in the process.

Alexander Stojanovic’s post seems to be confirming these fears for me:

The OLPC delivers a very - how shall I put this - “academic” idea of what people (children) will want and like. The NDS was clearly tested and usability done on each aspect. The OLPC looks like all the decisions were hardcoded early on by a brain trust of “experts” without any thought of the actual experience of using, maintaining or enhancing the device.

Having created several interactive projects whose primary audience is children, I have experienced first-hand the need to test ideas on children. Looking through the “lens of the learner” is one of the first tenets of teaching and learning.

Engaging people is one of the first tenets of interaction design. Without that the rest doesn’t even get seen. Whilst I congratulate the OLPC team on their achievement I really hope they don’t forget those two principles.

[tags]OLPC, UI, Nintendo[/tags]

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A few of weeks ago I presented at a Social Learning Masterclass at Northumbria University to an invite from Stephen Farrier from the e-Learning Innovations Enhancement Group.

If you’re interested in having a listen, I posted the podcasts and presentation over at the Omnium blog.

[tags]omnium, presentation, futures[/tags]

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If you have been missing the sound of my voice (or have no idea what my faltering, mumbling sounds like) the podcast of my seminar at Urban Learning Space about Creative Collaboration and The Future of Education that I posted about a couple of weeks back is now available from ULS’s iTunes feed.

There’s a PDF of the presentation (which also had a lot of animation not in the PDF) that accompanies it.

It’ll be almost like you were there.

[tags]Urban Learning Space, future[/tags]

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Interesting piece in the Guardian about a new (but already out of date) British Council report (PDF link) on what education is worth to the UK. I’ve always wondered where the philosophy that universities or education should be profitable in the most basic, business sense comes from - it makes little sense with something so crucial to the fabric of society. That is, one would hope, what taxes are for.

It’s the same narrow economic thinking that asks hospitals to make a profit too. Nobody, however, seems to ask the military to make a profit (”Please make sure that $1.9m missile gives us a decent ROI when you blow up that desert village. Don’t miss.”)

The answer to the title question in the UK, by the way, is £27,771.50 million. More than financial services or the automotive industry.

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I presented my seminar on Creative Collaboration and The Future of Education at Urban Learning Space yesterday and very much enjoyed the Glaswegian hospitality of all the folks at ULS.

Although it would have been nice if I had managed to leave a little more time for discussion, I was really encouraged by many of the responses and questions afterwards. I gave me a sense that there are plenty of like minds out there wanting to try make some real changes in the system and philosophy of education that align better with the creative/knowledge economy and the Play Ethic.

Ewan McIntosh, in an amazing feat of very fast typing and live blogging, has some thoughts on the first part of the talk here, in which I went through Omnium’s projects and Creative Waves 2007 in particular. He also added some great links and thoughts about the second, Future of Education, part in a separate post.

The slime mould you can see above is a metaphor I used for lots of small trends that are developing in parallel suddenly connecting up and coagulating into what appears to be a complete, coherent organism (which is essentially what ‘Web 2.0′ is a case of).

It can happen suddenly and there is the potential for this to happen in education and completely upend things. I think the likelihood is probably that it won’t be as upended as it could be because of the established mechanisms for controlling that status quo. (I also talked about outlying villages and towns coagulating into suburbs and finally being absorbed into major cities as a similar, slower, example).

However, the change will happen in any case and the real challenge is to be asking the right questions far enough in advance to work out how to deal with these rapid changes. At present I haven’t seen much evidence of this from within institutions themselves.

Incidentally, I owe the use of the slime mould metaphor to Steven Johnson and his excellent book Emergence.

ULS will be putting up a podcast and the presentation material on their website soon, I’ll post a link when it’s up.

UPDATE: It’s not on the website yet but you can find the podcast by subscribing to ULS’s iTunes feed.

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I’m going to be giving a seminar called Creative Collaboration and the Future of Education at Urban Learning Space in Glasgow who have a number of really interesting projects concerning future ways of working, playing, thinking and learning.

I’ll be presenting the Creative Waves 2007 - VIP project in detail, talking about the using a design process and creative collaboration for cross-disciplinary projects as well as a look at the issues facing the future of education. Much of which I have developed since writing about these issues a while back. I’m planning a bit of a brainstorming session with the attendees too. There will hopefully be a podcast and a download of the presentation on the ULS website afterwards.

It would be great to catch up with any of you there and if you want to get in touch before hand, please do.

Details are: 30 August 2007, 10am – 12.30pm. It’s free, but you need to contact Yvonne Kincaid to register.

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A year or so ago I heard about plans to set up the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID) and I’m really happy to see that they are now ready to launch their pilot year for 2008. Many of the people involved are ex-Ivrea and I notice that Live|Work’s Lavrans Løvlie and Frog Design’s Fabio Sergio are amongst the invited faculty, so there should be some great talent around the students.

The real trick is to build a structure that allows for the very best teaching and learning experiences. But as many of them have a background in service design they should be able to apply those skills to their own institution (but it’s always hard to be your own client).

Apart from the obvious interaction design connection, I’m interested in the way they might have set up the courses and their process there. Given many of my writings on education I have often wondered “what would I do if I were to start an institution from scratch?”.

It’s not a trivial task and most probably pretty scary to be doing. It was nice to stumble across this comment at the bottom of the CIID page:

This is an experiment – we’re diving in head-first and hope you will too. There’s a chance it might not happen, but we’re willing to take the risk and we’re looking for those daring enough to join us.

Something you would never see on any dull established university’s pages, yet the truth is all of them are hanging onto dear life in a whirlpool of change. The founders of CIID are at least happy about it and willing to be transparent.

I wish them the very best of luck.

p.s. They’re only looking for 15-20 students (the luxury!) in this pilot stage, so if you are interested head to the admissions page. Applications close at the end of August this year.

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