When it comes to learning technologies games have been around for quite a while. However with technology progressing as fast as it is there is now a whole new way to develop games and serious games for all aspects of learning.
Continuing in this light the Shuttleworth Foundation will be holding an Indaba on games and learning in South Africa on the 14th of August.
It will be exploring, amongst other things, the state of gaming among the youth, opportunities for using games in education and learning, and identifying barriers to increased use of gaming in learning.
I have been a long time fan of Danah Boyd and I recently saw on PSFK theat she has updated her list of research on social network sites and social media.
Last night the first ever Pecha-Kucha evening in South Africa was held at the What If The World gallery in Woodstock.
For those who don’t know what Pecha-Kucha is, you basically have 20 slides and 20 seconds per slide to explain yourself… It was started as a showcase for designers and creatives but the theory behind it could be implemented in various areas where you don’t want someone hogging the spotlight.
Go to http://www.pecha-kucha.org/cities/cape-town to sign up and to see dates of the next get together. Judging by the response last night the next event will also be standing room only. Lets hope they decide to have it more frequently than bi-monthly.
One of my favorite writers once said; “Being the best is the enemy of being good“. By that he means that to succeed you don’t have to be the best. If you are good at what you do you can be successful. If you strive to be the best you often just end up losing. (both the plot and the race.)
It is more evident now than ever before with the amazing amount of interaction on the web. If you strive to be the best in your field you are going to be competing with a lot of others. The only way to be the best is through hyper-segmentation and even then you might have competition. It really goes hand in hand with the idea of the long tail, with the amount of information on the flattened web there is so much knowledge and you can never really know it all.
You can no longer sit around resting on your laurels, you need to be out there learning, getting it wrong, getting it right… Collaborating, learning together. It’s time to let go.
More and more enterprises are using social networking systems to run various areas of their businesses. Project management programs are taking over from project managers and my Remember-the-Milk is working nicely as a kind-of-seceretary.
But when implementing or designing a system there are a few things one has to take into account.
What is the purpose of the system?
What maintenence does it need?
What will it cost? (both in setup and training costs)
I recently picked up on an brilliant article by Nicholas Carr on how the internet is changing the way we think. The article, Is Google Changing the Way We Think is an amazing insight into how the internet is rewiring our brains.
He says “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” It seems too much information is reducing our reading pleasure, or at the very least giving our brains massive information overload.
There was always the view that innovation can come about by people not knowing that their solution can’t be right.
There is the classic (true) story of the man who walked into a lecture late and copying down the problem on the board, solving it at home that night and dropping it on his lecturers desk in the morning only to be called later by his excited lecturer telling him he had solved an “impossible” equation. He just didn’t know the problem was unsolvable so he gave it a go and solved it.
I was recently in a meeting with a few older people who I was consulting for and they asked me for some things that I knew couldn’t be done with the software available. I duly told them that and there it ended. Now I sit and think, wait, maybe they weren’t wrong, maybe it CAN be done… We shouldn’t discount someones opinion just because we think they don’t have any idea how a program works. They might be able to offer an insight that we haven’t thought of because we haven’t taken time to step away from the problem and view it from the ‘outside’.
It often takes a change of perspective to really come up with a solution.
