Week 7

Raymond Scott -- Electronic Music Pioneer -- by Jeff Winner and Irwin Chusid

Interesting article about the fundamental contributions made by a musician named Raymond Scott, whose creations from the 1930s were used as musical riffs underscoring classic cartoons, and whose work laid the foundation for all sorts of developments in electronic music. This is something that one just doesn't think about -- the sounds that are such an integral part of something as basic as a Tom and Jerry cartoon. It becomes part of your memory bank at such an early age that it's kind of like the sound of the wind outside or the sound of cars passing by. If you don't actually try to create a cartoon yourself you would probably never think about how the effects are created, exactly how the story is told. And a lot of it happens with sound and music.

Music and the Brain -- Norman Weinberger

I was especially interested in this article because when my daughter was in elementary school, she actually took a class called Music and the Brain. It was an experimental curriculum designed to take advantage of the benefits of musical training, which was supposed to relate especially closely to the development of math skills and "numeracy." The class was simply a class in keyboarding skills and reading music on a pretty basic level. I think it was for 2nd and 3rd graders, and the idea was that learning musical skills would help kids learn math skills. I don't recall the class making any special impact on my daughter, but would be interested in finding out whatever happened to that program and if they ever proved it to increase mathematical intelligence or skills.

This article covers a lot of ground in exploring the role of music in human life, history and development, particularly as it relates to the human brain. Modern imaging technologies have made it possible to study what happens in the brain when a person makes or listens to music. Studies have shown that exposure to music and musical training change the way the brain responds to music. They have also shown that music activates the same parts of the brain that are involved in the response to food, sex, and addictive drugs. The way that music affects emotions has also been explored. Music is a powerful form of communication, and the article discusses how it makes its impact.

Playing by Ear: Creating Blind-Accessible Games by Gavin Andresen in Gamasutra.com

Another topic I never would have thought existed -- computer games for the blind, and how they use sound to replace the information that graphics usually conveys to the computer game player. This article describes the creation of a game designed to enable both sighted and blind people to play together. This involved creating audio navigation cues so that visually impaired players would receive the same information as sighted players. Text and menus were read as well as displayed. Sound cues were devised to convey where the player was in space and what was happening. Audible landmarks were created to help orient players. The sound design required for this is intricate and complex, and not all problems were immediately solved.

The point was made that designing products for people with disabilities often creates advances in design for people without disabilities as well. The innovations in a program like this can be used to enhance any computer game with more interesting and communicative sound.

Grooving to the Rhythms of Language from The Multiple Intelligences of Reading and Writing by Thomas Armstrong

The close relationship of language and music is the topic of this chapter. The author shows that it can be advantageous to consider the rhythmic and musical properties of language in the teaching of reading and writing. Different types of writing can be related to different types of music and choosing an appropriate type--one that appeals to a young reader -- is one way to excite more interest in the written word. In addition, there are many literary works that deal with music in one way or another, and these can be lively additions to classroom reading. In this way musical intelligence or aptitude can be put to work in the service of developing literacy.

What's interesting here is the sort of cross-pollination of various types of intelligence. By now, we are used to hearing about the different types of intelligence, but we don't necessarily think about their interrelationships. The implication is that strength in one type of intelligence can be leveraged to help develop another type that may be inherently weaker in a learner.

Week 6

Multimedia Learning – Richard E. Mayer—Chapter 14

A summary of Mayer’s theory of multimedia learning that puts forth five conditions for effective multimedia presentations: 1. Spacial contiguity, when related words and pictures are near each other on the page; 2. Temporal contiguity, when related words and pictures are presented simultaneously rather than successively; 3. Coherence, which calls for extraneous words and pictures to be kept to a minimum; 4. Modality, when words are presented as speech instead of text; and 5. Redundancy, when words are presented as speech rather than speech and text. Three assumptions apply: learning involves separate visual and auditory channels; there is limited capacity in these channels; and meaningful learning requires actively selecting, organizing and integrating information.

These are good basic guidelines to keep in mind – and they also seem sort of obvious and common sense principles. Still, it’s good to have research to back up intuition. Another point made is that multimedia learning is more effective for some types of learners than for others. It is best for learners who are low in prior knowledge about the subject and for those who have high spacial ability.

Elements of Experience Design –Nathan Sherdoff

Provides a broad view of all the elements to consider when analyzing an experience or designing one. These include stages of an experience-- attraction, engagement and conclusion—as well as presentation and organization; visualization and design; and navigation, interactivity and creativity. The article is all theory and abstraction and thus kind of hard to plow through – but again provides a framework to help you think about experience design. This would be handy to refer to when working on a project.

Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21^st Century—Jenkins White Paper

Really interesting exploration of the contemporary youth media culture, the challenges and issues it raises and how it is affecting society, education and young people. This is certainly a topic I have gotten to experience first-hand as a parent. I’ll offer a few observations of how the culture and experience of the internet has affected my daughter. First, she doesn’t have enough patience to read an entire book. She is used to getting information quickly and in short chunks. She has relied on Spark Notes her entire school career, much to her parents’ dismay. I will not claim that ALL teenagers do this, but I think many do – so many that even my daughter’s English teacher at one of the best public high schools in Manhattan said that she had given up on assigning novels. She was moving to short stories because she couldn’t get the kids to really read an entire novel.

My daughter’s social life was conducted largely online. She came home from school and went immediately online and stayed there for hours, just as we used to get on the phone with our friends. Then texting started and consumed even more time each day than Facebook. Only when my husband and I started using Facebook and texting ourselves did we start to understand how addictive they are and also how truly new and different online social life is. For my daughter, the experience of going away to college and leaving her high school friends is quite different than it was for previous generations because she can still be in constant touch with her old friends via Facebook and texting. Yet she can also watch them as they move on into a new life. When we visited her at college early in the semester, I noticed her looking at a friend’s Facebook page where he had posted photos of himself with his new college friends. I had a sense of how this may have been hard for her – to be connected to him and yet actually be able see him making new friends and possibly starting to move away from a close relationship with her. It sort of dramatized the fact that she was losing her old ties, or at least they were changing significantly. It struck me that this is really something new. It adds an element that has never been present in social life before--kind of a blending and blurring of old boundaries. It’s just a small example of the vast changes the Jenkins paper addresses.

Panwapa observations

Overall I didn't love this program. The home page (is that what you would call it? or just the interface?`) offers an array of characters for kids to explore, so it does incite curiosity and involvement from the start as kids would tap on he various figures to see what they say and what happens. (Thinking skill: ability to explore). However, I felt as if there was not enough set up/direction to help kids understand what they were seeing and what they were expected to do.

The "Movies" section contains short videos showing kids in different countries, giving a portrait of their lives and culture. The first thing I noticed was that some of the videos had the child speaking in English, which seemed just weird. Do you want kids to think that English is spoken everywhere in the world? I thought that hearing the kids speak their native languages with a voiceover translation would be better -- and then I saw that at least some of the movies were in fact done this way.

The movies play twice -- the second time the onscreen guide presents a challenge/game to the viewers, such as "Hit on the Panwapa sign (a globe) whenever you see the clock in the clock tower."

The little games seemed a bit too simple/boring, though perhaps not for a four-year-old. They seem designed to develop the ability to listen and look closely, since you have to hear and understand the instructions and then see when to perform the action requested.

In one case the game posed an open-ended question, "What could you do to make guests feel at home in your house?" (Thinking skill: brainstorming.) The feedback at the end of the game was "Good job" and "Try again" (I think - I only elicited 'good job' not that I am bragging.) This is, according to the reading, not engaging or helpful enough as feedback -- though for a game at this level, what else could you do?

Another thinking skill called upon here -- I believe inappropriately -- is "interpreting data." After the game based on the movie was over, there was a choice to answer a question related to the movie and then see how other "Panwapa kids" had answered it, which brought up a bar graph I thought beyond the comprehension of most or all of the target audience. (Though not, perhaps, beyond the skills of the tiny "Speyer Scholars" I read about in today's Times, students at a new private school for gifted kids.)

And the movie section took a long time to load, by which time a lot of kids would have gotten restless and gone off to do something else. Not sure how you get around that.

Week 5 readings

What Every Game Developer Needs to Know About Story -- John Sutherland

PART 2 (I posted on this reading before)

Looks at video games from the lens of story, analyzing them in classical story terms of protagonist/hero, inciting incident, "gap between the hero and an orderly life," risk taken by hero to overcome the gap, reversal in which the hero learns something but then confronts yet another gap, another risk that has to be taken, followed by another reversal, another gap, etc. All the while the hero is moving toward the "object of desire," "usually an orderly life." Sutherland delves into different types of conflict (internal, interpersonal, external), the use of empathy in games, considerations of pacing and use of dialogue, and why the hero must be the cause of the ending not just an observer. The author says that the old rule of "show, don't tell" in games becomes "do, don't show." The player must experience the game/story as the main actor as much as possible. He stresses the collaborative nature of game creation, including the creation of story.

The Designer's Notebook: Educational Games Don't Have to Stink! Ernest Adams

Adams outlines what he recommends for designers of educational games in terms of what he thinks doesn't work: games that are too much fun or not fun enough, games that are too long, games that aren't focused enough, games that do not include opportunity for users to be creative, that do not include an "advisor" to help and prompt the user, games that try to be what they are not. He holds up what he calls the "Socrates Standard" in stating that the best education comes from interaction/dialogue, not speechifying. Although I am not certain how that directly relates to educational games. He raises interesting points to think about when designing/evaluating educational games.

The Effect of Positive Emotions on Multimedia Learning --Um, Song, Plass

A study demonstrating that positive emotion in a learning situation enhances learning, promoting knowledge construction and problem solving. Further, positive emotion can actually be created by good instructional design. The authors state that the creation of positive emotion has not often been considered as a component of instructional design, but has rather been relegated to affective learning domains. They recommend that emotional design be incorporated and considered in the process of instructional design.

The Jenkins White Paper

MacArthur Foundation-funded study of the rapidly changing media environment that looks at many facets of media and society. It presents a series of snapshots that together create a portrait of how the changes in the forms of media and their uses is affecting every part of our lives. The importance of teaching media literacy to kids is underlined. A topic that particularly interests me is the idea of distributed cognition, which looks at knowledge creation and transmission from a social, networked point of view. Each person is just a part of a larger intelligent social organism that collectively possesses greater intellectual power than any one person alone. The creation and use of this power is unprecedented, enabled by advances in technology. All the social networking tools fall under this category -- Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, YouTube. There is constant immersion in multiple forms of media and full participation in media creation by users/consumers.

Week 4 readings

The Importance of Being Playful-- Elena Bodrova and Deborah J. Leong

A defense of play as an essential part of learning for young children -- probably in response to the ever-increasing pressure for "academic" work at earlier and earlier ages. The authors give suggestions for how teachers can help kids play in the most fruitful way possible -- how to stay out of their way, how to guide just enough and not too much. They recommend "supporting mature play" to facilitate language acquisition, literacy development and enhancement of social skills.

Affective Aspects -- Sharp, Rogers, Preece

A basic introduction to the topic of emotional responses to educational technology and how they vary according to different design choices. Reading the piece was nostalgic because it brought back memories of the old smiling and sad Apple icons and that annoying "Clippy" --which I remember but never knew by name. It's interesting how fast innovations in technology become ridiculously out of date. The article shows how every tiny detail-- including things as simple as the type of error message used-- contributes to the overall experience, making it a positive or negative one, and how eliciting positive emotions enhances learning. The authors describe interesting experiments such as the pairing of stuffed animals with cell phones in an effort to make phone interruptions less annoying.

Designing for Interaction --Saffer -- Chapters 5 &6

A simple and very clear introduction to working with/organizing data and various aspects of interaction design. Saffer recommends ways to gather, group, sort and categorize data. He says there are four major ways to analyze data: analysis, summation, extrapolation, and abstraction. He also shows different types of conceptual models that can help designers think about a project and make their ideas visible. Some of these are linear flow, circular flow, spider diagram, sets, Venn diagrams and maps. He describes another type of conceptual model, a persona, used to bring to life different types of potential users of the software or website, which helps designers explore and understand behavior and motivations of users-- a process that will strengthen the design solutions.

Chapter 6 offers methods of concept development including brainstorming, which Saffer presents in many different formats and flavors. Some of these include brainwriting (words or images used as jumping off points), "break the rules," "force fit," which juxtaposes opposite ideas to spark new thoughts, poetry, questioning, laddering up to more abstract ideas or down to more concrete ones, swiping (borrowing from another field or domain), and "bizarro world," wherein you try to design for the opposite result you really want, just to see where it will take you. These techniques are interesting and take the process of brainstorming further than the usual procedure of simply throwing out ideas, writing them down, and seeing what results from the ensuing creative conflict/conversation. Saffer is full of great advice about how to direct your thinking and analyze your ideas and solutions.

55-word story

“I love your husband.” Impulsively, she blurted the words out as her friend sat down beside her on the subway. Her friend looked sharply towards her, startled. Then she laughed. As the train pulled out, they started talking about the column her friend’s husband had written about a controversial rape case for that morning’s paper.

Week 3 Readings

Designing Gestural Interfaces and Tap is the New Click (video) – Dan Saffer

These are complementary introductions to gestural interfaces, their current uses and the considerations that go into their design. There is a huge amount of information here – lots to think about. I am intrigued by the idea of finding the most natural way to match people’s natural behavior to the technology –enabling gesture. It reminds me a bit of the notion of distributed cognition—how, for example, a calculator functions as an extension of the human brain to offload certain mental tasks and free up mental resources for tasks that cannot be automated. In the same way, gesture might enable technology that would seamlessly enhance and extend physical functioning. The idea of potentially using the entire human body as the tool for enabling technology is so interesting and opens up a huge world of possibility.


What Every Game Developer Needs to Know about Story – John Sutherland

Oy. I hate games. I have never in my life played a computer game except when I had to play around with Second Life for an ECT assignment. My daughter used to love Sims, and she would sometimes ask me to sit and do it with her, and I just went into a coma I found it so boring. I literally could not make myself pay attention to it. These fantasy worlds, especially the ones featuring kill-or-be-killed scenarios are just immensely boring and irritating to me. They’re for the adolescent boy aged 6-96.

Maybe if a game were something set in the world I live in, I would be interested. I have in mind a Dilbert-inspired game in which the story and all it entails – protagonist, inciting incident, risk, reversal, more risk, more reversal, character-revealing choices, triumphant or disastrous ending—was built around the absurdities of the work world. An “Office”-like game – that would be interesting to me, one in which I would get to plot against an irrational, semi-competent, passive-aggressive boss like the one I actually have. This is actually a good idea – to use a game format to teach people how to deal with workplace situations/conflicts and how different choices lead to different results—questions like “Should I go to HR about this or just ignore it or find a way to deal with it head-on? “ Hmmm…..


The Design of Everyday Things – Norman—Chapter 2

An elaboration of the psychology of people who tend to blame themselves when they have trouble operating machines or devices due to poor design. He reiterates the principles of good design:
• Visibility—the user can easily tell what to do, how to effect a result and where to start
• A good conceptual model – one that is logical, consistent and easy to understand
• Good mappings – strong, logical relationships between actions and results, controls and their effects, the system state and what is visible
• Feedback – the user receives feedback so he knows what the system is doing

The story about the airplane was a sobering reminder of just how high the stakes are in product design.