Doko: Tween Social Networking With A Twist

Today sees the launch of Doko, a social networking game aimed at the tween market which claims to be “The World’s First Global Trading Game”. The game revolves around metal discs about the size of poker chips that are emblazoned with unique identifying tags. Friends are encouraged to trade discs with each other, which accrue virtual points on the Doko website (these in turn can be exchanged for real-world prizes).

Dokodiscs will be available for purchase at retail stores including Toys R Us. Kids are encouraged to register on a family-friendly social networking site, where they are assigned overly innocuous screen-names based on their favorite number and animal (I was given musmus13, a real keeper). From there, they can enter the codes found on each coin to receive their Doko Points, which can be traded in for prizes. The more often a coin is traded with other players, the more valuable it becomes (though it expires after five trades). The site tracks each coin during its journeys across the world, offering a cartoony 3D world perspective that reminded me of TwittEarth.

The game sounds like it could be a hit, but I’m left wondering what kind of strange effects it could have on its target audience. I can’t help but envision a bizarre, pre-pubescent mafia that will horde and distribute discs in an attempt to maximize profits. Or maybe I’ve just read Lord of the Flies too many times.

In any case, the social networking aspect of the site will likely appeal to many parents who would like to foster their child’s social interactions without letting them graduate to the “big kid” networks like Facebook and MySpace. Among Doko’s competitors for the tween market include Zwinky, Club Penguin, and Gaia. Even Facebook is making attempts to appease parents – yesterday they announced a number of new policies designed to safeguard against sexual predators.

Doko is a product of the Mammoth Brand of NSI International. Mammoth has been responsible for marketing more than $700 million worth of toys.

By Robert Andrews – Wed 30 Apr 2008 01:11 AM PST

British-based music industry umbrella the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry is now rapidly acquiring the reputation the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has in the US for heavy-handed but thinly-veiled anti-piracy measures. It’s produced a booklet it’s distributing through schools and colleges, libraries, record stores, teaching portals and websites in 21 countries that “aims to help young people use the Internet and mobile phones safely and legally to download music”. In other words, it leverages the education system to teach kids stealing music is bad. The RIAA has previously targeted US schools and university campuses with information campaigns, before launching legal action against some last year.

Good luck – research this month from TNS showed 51 percent of youngsters think illegal P2P music downloading is nothing like as bad as shoplifting. But the IFPI’s “Young People, Music and the Internet” booklet campaign has even wheeled out Ronan Keating to warn about the “constant worry about the security of the internet with children” and child safety group Childnet to sound alarm on the “risks to children including breach of copyright the threat of viruses, loss of privacy and security”. You be the judge…

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MP warns parents of social networking dangers, discovers daughter is an underage user

Conservative MP, John Whittingdale, discovered firsthand about the problems of underage usage of social networking sites when it was revealed his daughter was one of those breaking the “over 13s only” policy.

In a parliamentary committee meeting Mr Whittingdale, chairman of the culture, media and sport committee, questioned representatives of the Bebo and MySpace websites as part of an inquiry into the dangers of the internet.

Quizzing Rachell O’Connell, Bebo’s chief safety officer, he observed “My daughter is 12 and she has been on Bebo for at least 18 months and I think every single one of her friends is and spends hours on it.” “Do you think that is inappropriate?” he asked.

To which O’Connell smoothly pointed out that his daughter is breaking the age limit of 13. And without so much as a smug grin either.

“I shall plainly have to go and talk to her,” the MP observed.

All this was revealed just a few weeks after Ofcom reported that more than 25% of children aged eight to 11 have profiles on a social networking website.

Parents and teachers have been shocked to discover that when it comes to drop-down age verification measures, those wily urchins have developed an ingenious means of circumventing them… by telling porky pies.

God, but they’re devious little bastards aren’t they? Next thing you know they’ll be able to complete complex logic puzzles and will become self-aware.

The upshot of these shocking revelations is still being considered. Bebo’s safety officer admitted that “We still need to educate parents and young people about using the internet safely.” Education is a good start of course. Perhaps that will prevent mass hysteria when more parents learn that their pre-pubescents have all signed to a morally corrupting social networking websites.

However, if Bebo really did want to prevent under 13s from using its service, it would have done its research and realised that there is an utterly infallible means of accurately calculating someone’s age: the 1987 Leisure Suit Larry age verification test.

Not only did it prevent me as a teenage boy from goggling at the pixelated titties, but when I went back to the series in a fit of nostalgia some 15 years later, it correctly calculated that I was then over 25. Genius.

Bebo (via BBC)

http://captology.stanford.edu/

http://peace.stanford.edu/

I will actually write about him at some point.

MacArthur Foundation follows half-million dollar grant to professor’s Quest Atlantis project in 2006

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Feb. 26, 2008

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has granted more than $1.8 million to the Indiana University School of Education to expand the immersive learning environment “Quest Atlantis.”

Sasha Barab

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Sasha Barab, associate professor and Jacobs Chair in Learning Sciences and Instructional Systems Technology and the director of the Center for Research on Learning and Technology, created the Quest Atlantis project. It is a learning and teaching tool for students ages 9-12 that uses a 3-D, multiuser environment to immerse children in educational tasks.

The new three-year, $1.8 million award is designated to help Barab expand the reach of the program. The MacArthur Foundation awarded Barab $500,000 two years ago to build upon the program originally funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation. Quest Atlantis is already used in the United States and several other countries, including China, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Malaysia, Turkey and Singapore. At the end of three years, Barab expects that worldwide participation in the program will have grown from five thousand to tens of thousands.

The grant, Barab said, is about wide-scale change in media literacy, an agenda central to the current MacArthur Foundation initiative. It also will push implementation of Quest Atlantis to a new level.

“It’s been really exciting to feel like I’m part of this bigger movement,” Barab said.

Barab is the principal investigator for the MacArthur-funded project titled, “Scaling Out Virtual Worlds: Growing a 21st Century Curriculum,” with co-principal investigator Melissa Gresalfi, assistant professor of Learning Sciences. Also on the grant are associate professor of Learning Sciences Dan Hickey and assistant professor of Learning Sciences Kylie Peppler.

“The MacArthur grants are some of the most prestigious a faculty member can receive. This speaks volumes for the quality of Professor Barab’s work and that of his Learning Sciences colleagues,” said Gerardo M. Gonzalez, University dean of the IU School of Education. “The Quest Atlantis project has certainly had international impact already and it will only grow with this funding,” said Gonzalez.

A screenshot of Quest Atlantis

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Through Quest Atlantis, players use strategies they might also use in commercial games on lessons from educational research on learning and motivation. Users travel to virtual places to perform these educational activities, or “quests.” There, they can speak with other users and mentors and build virtual personas. The program supports students in learning academic concepts in a variety of disciplines, including science, art, math, and writing, while at the same time providing children with an engaging way to appreciate the value of these concepts. For example, as part of a virtual storyline, students might use their understanding of water quality indicators to determine why fish are dying in a body of water.

The program is used in the fourth-grade classroom of Lana Cummings, a teacher at Bloomington’s Binford Elementary School. She said she was among the first to use the program and initially thought it was a nice tool especially for teaching writing.

“But then after we used the program, we found it’s so much more valuable than that,” Cummings said. “It cuts across all learning styles, all levels. There’s sort of something for everyone.”

Barab said the teaching element is vital to the use of the program. During a typical lab session, Cummings will spend much of the hour and a half guiding her students through various parts of their quest. The teacher receives assignments from students through the program and can monitor progress and push students to reflect on and think more deeply about the issues introduced in the game experience. Students can access the program both at school and over the Internet.

The project is starting to add staff to carry out the program expansion, particularly figuring out the needs of teachers and students in various countries.

“What are the challenges we will notice if we go to train teachers in North Carolina as opposed to a group of teachers in Shanghai or a group of teachers in Lagos, Nigeria?” Barab said.

The money will also pay for more computer server capacity, a particular concern since the number of participants will increase dramatically over the next few years.

Among the new parts of the program Barab is developing is a mission that engages players inside the story of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. But, more than readers of the story, players become first-person protagonists making bio-ethical decisions and observing the consequences in the game. So, for example, is it OK to do unethical medical experiments if it means saving a town.

Barab said the worldwide focus on the program makes creating such an environment more challenging, particularly, for example, given the questions of life, creation and ethics presented by some storylines, such as the one mentioned above.

“It’s much simpler if I’m just going to my backyard and working with teachers and kids I know and I can go sit down and talk with those parents,” he said. “But what happens when I take those issues and a child in China is going to take up this story, or in Bangladesh, or in India?”

The program is also another step for the educational community responding to changing learning styles and the growing popularity of computer games. Barab pointed out that commercial games now generate more revenue than movies.

“Do I really want the storytellers that are educating my children to be Sony, Blizzard and Electronic Arts?” he said. “I think there are a lot of wonderful games out there that have good messages, but I think we as educators need to enter that market and start to develop compelling stories that kids will want to adopt.”

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is a private, independent grantmaking institution helping to build a more just, sustainable, and peaceful world. MacArthur’s $50 million digital media and learning initiative, launched in 2006, seeks to help determine how digital technologies are changing the way young people learn, play, socialize and participate in civic life. More information is available at www.macfound.org or www.digitallearning.macfound.org.

A video feature on the Quest Atlantis program and the MacArthur Grant is available on the IU School of Education Web site and through the IU Podcast page, http://podcast.iu.edu. Look for the IU School of Education podcast page under the “General” heading.

Media Outlets: The following comments are available as mp3 files on the IU School of Education Web site at http://www.education.indiana.edu. Look for this news release under “News” on the home page. The sound bites below will have a clickable link to hear and to save the files.

Barab (pronounced ‘bear-ab’) says the Quest Atlantis expansion funded by MacArthur can send a big message to commercial gamemakers:

“Do I really want the story tellers that are educating my children to be Sony, Blizzard, Electronic Arts? I think there are a lot of wonderful games out there that have good messages, but I think we as educators need to enter that market and start to develop compelling stories that kids will want to adopt in addition to those commercial ones. What this grant allows us is to kind of enter that game, to bring up the quality of our software, to bring up the quality of our storylines and then ultimately to show to the commercial industry that you can actually develop a space that will not be used by 5 or 600 because no budget’s going to allow that, but by 30 to 40,000 kids worldwide.”

What games can do, Barab says, is take students into the real world and show them the applications of knowledge:

“So, I think games offer us something that traditional curriculum really is missing and a lot of the way schools are arranged with walls where ‘Oh, we go in here and we’re going to do mathematics for 45 minutes and the reasons why we do mathematics? Well, that’s somewhere outside that’s not here, you’re going to use it later on so you really should know it.’ But with a game, we can bring those worlds into the classroom, make those available to kids, so we can travel to Tanzania or into a Van Gogh painting within that 45 minutes that they have to do science or to do art.”

Quest Atlantis does not operate independently of the teacher, Barab says:

“They’re collecting data and having to make decisions about how to operate in these worlds. Well, the teacher’s role is incredibly necessary; in a lot of the research we looked at ‘What is the teacher’s role in these spaces?’ Because of the big fear of ‘Are the games going to replace the teacher?’ What we found is exactly the opposite. It’s really hard to make a game that a kid can’t click on and move through and kind of win with a cheat code. So what the teachers do is, they really get kids to think deeply about what they’re submitting, about the questions that are going on in a space, about what science is necessary to make sense of it.”

Barab says the expansion of Quest Atlantis to many more students across the globe can help transform methods of learning acquisition:

“What’s exciting about being part of MacArthur’s views on changing part of media literacy is you feel like you’re part of something bigger than your own research. I just got back from a meeting at the MacArthur Foundation and there was a sense that we were on the edge of something really big and they were trying to kind of break out of the box, to expose the world to new types of literacy, to new ways that kids can learn that ultimately could change us from the notion that there’s this kind of content that was done by these people who are now dead and your job is to acquire it. To switch us to tools to help kids become producers, to become critical creators, not just simply consumers of information that they’re taught not to question.”

For more information, contact Chuck Carney at 812-856-8027 or ccarney@indiana.edu.

Technology transforms teaching; Schools are bringing the latest methods into classes, but some question the impact on learning

Posted By Moira MacDonald

School principal Cheryl Paige is a self-described “Mother Hen,” who dotes on her students like they were her own children. Her kind, grandmotherly smile as she walks her school’s halls and gives hugs to her students – hugs! in this age of lamentable “no-touch” policies belies the fact Paige has her veteran educator’s finger firmly on the cyber-tech trigger.

Paige’s modest-looking school, Joyce Public in Toronto, is a cornucopia of digital tools used in everything from teaching the piano (Paige says all students can play something) in a digital music lab, to reading, to math.

A product called Front Row creates surround-sound amplification for teachers as they roll out their lessons, and ensures students whose learning may be compromised by even the smallest hearing or attention deficits can take in everything.

Serving a mostly low-income neighbourhood, where almost all students live in apartments and have English as a second language, Joyce may be an unlikely place for the latest electronic gizmos. But Paige says these tools, many cobbled together and sustained through government and research grants, have made her staff better teachers. And, they may give her students an unusual digital fluency that will allow them to thrive in our evolving cyber-world.

“You still have to have a really competent teacher, but what this does is transform teaching practice,” Paige says. “Initially there was teacher resistance. Now there is no resistance because they see [technology] as a tool.”

Paige shows her elementary school’s provincial math test results to back up her claims. The most recently available results show 84 per cent of Joyce’s Grade 3 students met the provincial math standard, compared to a 69 per cent provincial average and a 66 per cent board average. It’s not just the tap water. Back in 2003, Joyce’s results were a dismal 39 per cent, but have been steadily climbing.

One of the latest technological additions has been the use of interactive whiteboards (IWBs) in every classroom, better known by the most common brandname, Smart Boards, developed in Calgary. These boards are a digital re-invention of the traditional chalkboard and are steadily gaining popularity as their price drops (the board and a projector cost about $2,100) and research emerges showing positive results. The technology has gone international and even Britain decided in 2003 to get IWBs into as many classrooms as possible.

Early research into the British experience showed no rise in student achievement, but a report noted that was to be expected so early on and students and teachers liked the technology.

Instead of a blackboard, students have an interactive giant computer screen at the front of their class which they and their teacher can manipulate by touching with a finger or inkless pen.

I watch one student in a remedial reading tutorial move consonants with his finger to attach at the front of “ill” to make new words like “pill” and “will.” The software stores the results of the exercise so the teacher can pull them up later to analyze the student’s progress.

The IWB can also make abstract math concepts concrete, such as illustrating the concept of fractions by allowing students to manipulate the size of the stripes on a flag directly on the screen. Success debated

Whether technology improves student success is still a matter of debate. But Kevin Bradbeer, the Toronto District School Board’s program coordinator for information communication technologies, says most research agrees technology gets students’ attention.

“If you want to improve kids’ learning, they’ve got to be interested.

If you don’t have that, forget it,” Bradbeer says. He estimates there are about 150 IWBs in TDSB schools and adds they are only useful if teachers are given adequate training and support.

Joyce teacher Andrew Schmitt calls the Smart Board “an essential tool” that makes his lesson-planning clearer and more logical.

“We’re dealing with students growing up in a digital age,” Schmitt says. “If there’s a way to engage multi-media in a lesson, why wouldn’t you do it?”

by Dave Nagel

Ed tech developer eInstruction this week launched its new Content Meets Technology contest, which challenges educators and students to share their “vision of the role of technology in education.” Winners of the competition will receive an interactive classroom makeover.

Those wishing to enter must submit their thoughts on the role of technology in education using no more than 250 characters–that’s characters, not words. Entries will be posted on a Google Map mashup on eInstruction’s Web site.

Prizes will be awarded in three grade categories: K-5, 6-8, and 9-12, one for each group. Prize packages will include:

• Interwrite Board;
• Interwrite Pad;
• Interwrite Workspace with ExamView reader;
• 32-Pad CPS RF Clicker System;
• Epson PowerLite 400W projector;
• Epson short-throw projector wall mount;
• One year subscription to ExamView Learning Series; and
• Installation and online training.

The sweepstakes is open to all schools and is open until May 13. Winners will be announced May 19. Further information can be found here.

by Mike Masnick

Fri, Apr 11th 2008 10:45am

Fewer And Fewer Parents Freaking Out About Kids Chatting Online