Is facebook a game? Is eBay? YouTube?

Amy Jo Kim makes a case that they are in her Google TechTalk on Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Mechanics to Functional Software.

On the other side Urgent Evoke, one of the new genre of serious games, presents itself as a game.

But really game or not is not the question. The quesiton is, is the experience fun?

Game mechanics can make life more fun. Games reinformce your behavior and keep you in Flow.

 Amy's talk gives some examples.

• Points - remember, variable reinforement is more effective)
• Collecting - for instance friends.
• Completeing a set - badges or in Urgent Evoke's case you get to complete missions
• Leaderboards
• Feedback, both from the system and from other players, graphic presentation of it
• Structured social exchange - leaving comments, giving points for each other
• Customization - create your secret identity!

Life should be fun. I think even the most serious of sites should look at these elements.  Engagement is important in everything.

P.S. Friend me on Evoke and lets save the world together! http://www.urgentevoke.com/profile/CarolineMeeks

There has been a case in the new lately of a student suing a school district for spying on them at home with a school laptop.  It reminded me of this video of a 1:1 school in NYC.

 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/learning/schools/how-google-saved-a-school.html?play

At about 4:38 in the video you can watch the administrator using this capability. I think it is completely legal inside the school.  The whole video is worth watching and its interesting that they included this disturbing clip in an overall very positive piece.

Details on the current case: http://www.eschoolnews.com/2010/02/20/official-fbi-probing-school-webcam-spying-case/

  The full article is here: http://www.hks.harvard.edu/news-events/publications/hks-magazine/archives/winter-2010/learning-from-pakistan/

The Atlantic published an article discussing the 20 years and 7,300 teachers worth of data collected by Teach for America.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201001/good-teaching

 Its a great article and for this blog post I want to focus on what it says about assessment.  When we've discussed assessment on Sugar's Its an Education Project mailing list there was a tendancy to think of it in terms of the high stakes, once a year or less frequent, standardized tests. The results of these tests take months return and they are not all that useful for teachers to use to modify their teaching.

This exerpt from the Atlantic is the other end of the spectrum on Assessment.

Mr. Taylor begins to walk around the class, reading problems aloud. “How many 5’s are in 45?” The kids have to do the math in their heads. All of them write their answers on their cards and thrust them up in the air. With a quick scan, Mr. Taylor can see if every child has written the right answer. Then he says, “What’s the answer?” And all the kids call out, “Nine!” When they get an answer right, they whisper-shout “Yes!” and pump their fists. If some kids get it wrong, they have not embarrassed themselves by individually raising their hand and announcing their mistake. But Mr. Taylor knows he needs to give them more attention 

Later..

Mr. Taylor calls on students to help solve the problem. But he does this using the “equity sticks”—a can of clothespins, each of which has a student’s name on it. That way, he ensures a random sample. The shy ones don’t get lost. 

Later..

  Before they leave, all the kids fill out an “exit slip,” which is usually in the form of a problem—one more chance for Mr. Taylor to see how they, and he, are doing. 

Mr. Taylor, the article's example of a teacher that moves his students ahead more then 1 grade level, is constantly assessing all the individuals in his class' understading of the material.  Like a good engineer, he collects data continuously.

This is something we need to remeber and support in Sugar activities.  When designing Sugar activities we can ask the questions, how can we providng real time, easy to access data to the teacher on who is understanding the material.

Last week I went up to Durham and visited the friendly folk of NHs Linux User Group. I had a wonderful time and here is a write up from one of the attendees.

http://www.tedroche.com/blog/2010/02/09/seacoast-lug-caroline-meeks-sugar-on-a-stick Here is the presentation:

• You are not redirected to an external site.  Google instead adds a frame at the top of your page and keeps you at your current URL.
• Google intercepts the a href links so that if you click on one it gets translated as well.
• You can easily switch between the translated page and the original page using one click of a button (Google adds the button to the frame).

• It won't intercept dynamically created links.
• It won't intercept form submissions.
• You are limited to Google translator's engine.  You can't specifically display the translation as how you want it to be.

1. Visit http://translate.google.com/translate_tools
2. You'll be presented with a screen similar to the one below where you can choose the options for the widget (e.g. your site's language, the languages you want to appear in the dropdown).  Customize these settings.
   
   
3. A javascript code will be generated for you.  Copy the snippet and add it to your site's template.
4. Test. That's it. It's that simple.

I have been volunteering with the Haiti Ushahididi effort doing mapping of SMS and Twitter messages for help.  I also worked at Crisis Camp Boston on Saturday.  I'll write more about all of these but I think the most compelling thing I learned is:

Having your street name on a map on the internet can save your life.

Open Street Maps has been getting better and better for Haiti. On Saturday while the hackers were upstairs hacking Haitian volunteers were downstairs working to help identify street and place names to make the maps better.

There are places in the world without many computers or computer literate people, but I think there are very few places that haven't sent some of their young people into the cities where there are computers. If we could crowd source a large number of people making sure their parents, grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles and extended family. all had street and place names on the map we could add a lot of coverage.

I hope that Google and Open Street Maps will tell the world to Map thier Grandparents.  We need some media coverage on mapping saving lives and a publicized event to map more of the world.

We were recently tasked with an Elgg project that requires forum discussions to behave like mailing lists.  There's already a community contributed plugin that does something similar but doesn't quite meet the client's required specifications, notably with regards to permissions.

During the initial design, the client mentioned that we should think about reusability since the system might require other functionality that makes use of incoming emails in the future.  So instead of just coding a plugin that will take care of discussions via email I decided to write a plugin that can handle incoming emails in a generic way and then trigger plugin hooks.  The different plugins will then be responsible for implementation on how to handle the incoming email.

This resulted in the creation of the incoming_email_handler plugin and an add-on that registers a plugin hook for incoming emails to handle forum posts.

For backend processing of the emails, I used the php-mime-mail-parser PHP class.  This requires the PECL PHP extension mailparse.

The following are the plugin's initial capabilities:

• support for handling the various encodings in emails
• support for extracting email attachments
• triggers hooks for different object types depending on the mail's sender email address
• support for both HTML and plain text
• mail credentials are configurable using plugin settings

The add-on for forums has the following initial capabilities:

• handle attachments and post them as files belonging to the group
• rewrites the sender email so that the user only needs to reply to the received email
• prevents duplicate emails from being sent out if the user happens to be subscribed to both incoming emails and group notifications

This plugin is already in production use but contains some custom client specific code.  We are still in the process of cleaning it up to "just work" with stock Elgg code.

We added a new post_status method to Moodle's mnet enrol library that allows us to push updates from Moodle to ELGG. Once we had this function enabled we modifed a few of the Moodle features to call this function to update the eportfolio. These included course enrollment , successful completion of a questionnaire, earning a certificate, and posting to a forum. A simple function call for each action is all that is needed. To find the correct place in the code, I noticed add_to_log was called with similar information for the different actions so I added the code for Elgg posting in the same places. Since the users are already authenticating using MNE, we can match the corresponding user on Elgg so that the status goes to the correct student's River.

On Elgg's part, we coded a new portfolio extension to the mnet-lib php library in order for Elgg to accept the incoming data using XMLRPC and post it into the student's River. Using this every time a user performs one of the actions that is enabled a corresponding entry is shown in the user's ELGG River updates.  This method also accepts the remote url location that corresponds to this moodle activity post so that the student's River item will contain a link back to moodle and go directly to the activity referred to.

At the risk of revealing my age, there was a time when I had hoped there was a website that could map the world. A site that could tell me where to find what on the globe and show me how to get there.

Obviously a site like that would take an enormous investment and effort to build and I'm glad, thrilled even, to see companies like Google take on that challenge when they released Google Maps  to the public in 2005.

What's even more exciting is that Google makes this data available thru an application programming interface (API) to web developers like you and me.

So in what cases can Google Maps or an equivalent service help your website ? 

• If your website stores address information.  Having a map that shows exactly where that address is helps people visualize the location.
• If physical location is important.  When people need to see where an event occurred. In a news article for instance, the site could show you where the event took place via Google Maps.
• If proximity matters. When you want to show how far or close one place or event is to/from another.
• Directions. When you want to show people how to get to a location.

One such project Solutiongrove worked on had a library of case studies with address information. The data was there on the page but there was no way for people to visualize what place a case study was talking about or how close it is to other case studies.

We put a Google Map on each case study page and put markers. One marker shows the location that the case study was referring to, one marker for each of the case studies that are close to it and markers for organizations or contacts that are within the area.

The first challenge was Geocoding. For you to be able to plot markers on a Google map, you need the longitude and latitude for the location. Geocoding is the process of finding the geographic coordinates from an address. Google didn't have a geocoding service at the time so we used Yahoo's Geocoding API. Coordintes don't change, so once we had the longitude and latitude for an address we saved it to the database and associate it with the address so geocoding is part of the process that works in the background when a new case study with a valid address is inserted into the database. Note that the latest version of Google already has Geocoding built-in via the "GClientGEocoder" function.

The Google Maps API is a frontend API. It's not rocket science but you do need to know some javascript to be able to get it to work. You can actually break it down into 4 steps :

1. load the javascript file from google with your api key from the head section of your html file
2. instantiate a GMap object and pass the html element where you want to render the map
3. specify map options like adding controls, zoom level and where to center it
4. create markers

For more information about how to use Google Maps in your project visit the Google Maps API website.
You can check out how we used Google Maps visit the Context Sensitive Solutions website and take a look at their case studies.

What is even more interesting is what the future holds. HTML5, the next generation core language of the world wide web, will have a Geolocation API. Imagine one day being able to tell where your users are located. Yes, creepy I know, but this will allow you to serve more relevant information based on their location, instantly making your website much more intuitive and location aware.

HTML5 is already available today with Firefox 3.5