Babies, Toddlers, Preschoolers and 'new media'

The Kaiser Family Foundation recently aired a new report about New Report on Educational Media for Babies, Toddlers, and Preschoolers. Some of the conclusions:

Many child development experts believe that the qualities inherent in some media – such as interactivity, repetition, and the ability to customize content – have tremendous potential as learning tools. Some argue that for children who come from disadvantaged homes, or who lack access to quality child care or preschool, “toys” like educational video games or DvDs could play an especially important role in literacy, numeracy, and overall cognitive development. And certainly many schools already use media-based curricula for older children in the classroom.

But others point out that, as a rule, products for the home market tend to be less strictly curriculum-based than those developed for schools. And while products for the classroom may go through a formal review and approval process, the main tool many parents have to assess the quality of products for in-home use is the product’s own affordable and easy way to make learning fun, to turn play time into education time. Many of the unique properties of media lend themselves not only to making learning fun – like engaging characters, compelling images, and attention-getting sounds – but also, potentially, to making learning more effective. Many child development experts believe that the qualities inherent in some media – such as interactivity, repetition, and the ability to customize content marketing and advertising. Many of these home-based products are created for very young children, for use at an age that is critical to children’s brain development, but when the effectiveness of media as an educational tool is, at this point, unproven. In fact, preliminary research indicates that the various media may be less effective in educating very young children than are the other activities that they may well be displacing – such as one-on-one parental interaction.

Wearable computing and Mobile computing convergence

Via Roland's sunday trend: What Would You Do with a Wearable Computer? By Mark Long.Here is a summary of the pertinent statements the article presents:

  • "Although we've been talking about wearable computing for a decade, it is only now that the general public gets what that is, there's still a long way to go before the technology is embedded right into our garments." (Michael Sung)
  • "we could start taking steps in the right direction by putting advanced technology in the electronics devices that people are actually willing to carry for extended periods, such as cell phones or wrist watches."(Michael Sung)
  • "The whole wearable-computing space is folding into the mobile-computing environment these days, and it is becoming tough to draw any lines of distinction between the two" (Bruce Lambert)
  • "Early efforts to introduce wearable computers failed because of what used to be perceived as the inherent "dork factor,", "When you used to see a person talking to himself while walking down the street, you'd have thought he was crazy. But with Bluetooth headsets and other wireless technologies so prevalent today, we now see this type of activity as normal" (Stephen Glaser)

Although there are some issues I don't agree with ("We see the biggest market growth coming from people having video streamed to a cell phone," ) the article gives a good picture of how computing is now pervasive.

Ray Ozzie interview

In ACM Queue, there is also the interview of ray Ozzie (by Wendy Kellog. There are some very clever ideas raised in this article:

When I was at Lotus in the early ’90s, companies were a lot more vertically integrated than they are right now. At that time, people were attempting to use fairly nascent technology to break down the walls within the organization, meaning they were trying to get different departments within an organization to work together. They were trying to flatten organizations internally and get people to work together across stovepipes, within organizations, just to make processes operate more smoothly. Fast-forward to today, and you find that we all take that for granted. Most companies nowadays use a mix of technologies: certainly e-mail and, in various flavors, some other types of collaborative technology internally. But now the business imperative is much different. Essentially, many, many companies have to integrate outside business partners into their core practices. Companies are, for better or worse, needing to distribute their operations geographically, in many cases into Asia and other places where people are operating on the same project but in different time zones. Essentially, the walls are coming down in so many different ways, and organizations have to figure out how to effectively do what they need to do in a very, very decentralized manner. (...) The default technology for collaboration is e-mail because it seamlessly crosses those enterprise boundaries, but e-mail is 30-some years old and has been stressed well beyond its original design center. That’s why I believe a number of customers are looking for other types of technologies to support those cross-boundary interactions, and that’s why you see products such as Groove, products that are appearing out on the Internet, that are more or less boundary-spanning, whether they be wikis or blogs or Skype or a number of interesting technologies like that. (...) Enterprises are really different from the public Internet in that they have fairly substantial compliance issues. They have control hierarchies related to technology acquisition and enablement of end users. They mandate the use of certain technologies and mandate that others not be used. They control the upgrade tempo. I’ve never seen the technology environment as divergent as it is right now between what’s going on outside enterprises and what’s going on inside enterprises. (...) A lot of the social software that is now appearing on the public Internet, which is a bit like a petri dish, really must be thought of from the perspective of how it would play inside an enterprise. How can some of that software be adapted for use in the enterprise? It’s difficult for me to conceive of how some of that petri-dish software will become accepted inside the enterprise because of some of the overwhelming compliance and security issues that exist there.

The most interesting issue is certainly the following:

WK What should technologists within businesses be worried about or thinking about in the area of emergent collaboration technology? What technical challenges do they face?

RO The first thing to recognize is that collaboration and communication technology is not a panacea. Many people, particularly in the early years when I first brought Notes to market, would have problems that they were trying to work out within their company, and they would deploy this collaboration software thinking it would solve the problem. In fact, many times what they were really trying to do was institute business process or culture change at the same time the technology was deployed. When the initiative failed because of inadequate recognition that they were trying to change the process, or the culture, they would blame the technology. Technology can assist the change, but it can’t make it happen on its own. People really have to understand what the role of technology and the role of leadership are when it comes to effecting change within corporations.

The conversation offers good food for thoughts; besides, I particularly like when technologist put the emphasis on the fact that technology is not the best solution to world's problem.

Deaf people and cell phones

An article about how deaf persons benefit from cell phone features in french journal Liberation has caught my interest this morning. Actually there are two important things: SMS (+IM on blackberry) that allows them to communicate and the number/caller display that easily tell them who is calling. This reminds me an australian article about this toopic: Everyone Here Speaks TXT: Deaf People Using SMS in Australia and the Rest of the World by Mary R. Power and Des Power in Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 9:3 2004:

This article examines the extent to which Short Message Service (SMS) messages are breaking down communication barriers among deaf people and between deaf and hearing people. It is predicted that deaf texters will use SMS to increase the bonds between themselves in deaf communities, creating new opportunities to develop relationships, understanding, and intimacy with those not physically present. The most exciting question raised by this article is whether those kinds of relationships, understanding, and intimacy will develop to the same extent with hearing colleagues, friends, and intimates.

The article in Liberation also shows how the SMS syntax is different since some persons first think in sign language then translate it in french and finally in SMS ("en langage texto" as french people says):

Recevoir le texto d'un sourd peut surprendre. La syntaxe est approximative, les bouts de phrase parfois en désordre. Ainsi celui qu'envoie Yohan, 24 ans, qui passe un bac pro informatique : «Après midi qu'est ce que je peux te voir après midi 14 h ?» Des incohérences inévitables, selon Hamadi Abid, directeur du Centre d'éducation du langage pour enfants malentendants (Celem), à Paris : «Les sourds sont privés de l'apprentissage du langage, alors ils approchent l'écrit avec un décalage énorme.» Et comme l'analyse Pierrette Pouliquen, mère d'une petite fille sourde et traductrice de Yohan, «ils pensent en langue des signes, puis essaient d'écrire en français. Alors cela donne des textos compliqués, un peu à l'envers».

The 3G however seems to be a failure (bad transmission, need to hold the cameraphone in one hand...).

Virtual ethnography

Issues in Virtual Ethnography by Bruce Mason (2001). In Ethnographic Studies in Real and Virtual Environments: Inhabited Information Spaces and Connected Communities. Ed. K. Buckner. Proceedings of Esprit i3 Workshop on Ethnographic Studies. Edinburgh: Queen Margaret College, January 1999. Pp. 61-69. The paper is a good discussion about the very concept of "virtual ethnography". I was intrigued, among other things by the following issue:

A virtual ethnography is one that fully immerses the ethnographer into the consensual reality experienced by groups of people who use computer-mediated communication as their primary, and often only, means of communication. As such, the online or virtual persona of the participants are the main focus of the ethnographer. Generally, researchers have wanted to focus on the person at the keyboard, a virtual ethnography reverses this and works instead with the persona that has been projected into cyberspace by the typist. This is not the only way to do fieldwork via the Internet but it is useful and it helps to realise that when we do participant-observation we usually do it in the same medium in which the culture we study is communicated.

Also he adresses some relevant questions:

A virtual ethnography is then, simply, an ethnography that treats cyberspace as the ethnographic reality. In many ways this is a controversial step. As a personal anecdote , it has been noteworthy that at every conference I have attended every time Internet-based fieldwork turned up in a paper that the same question is asked, “How do you know that your informants are telling the truth?” (...) A virtual ethnography takes exactly the opposite view: rather than verifying informants’ veracity in other media one fully immerses oneself within the virtual community being studied. As with any ethnography it is the detailed, systematic, and exhaustive participation within the group and building of relationships over time that allow the ethnographer to build with the help of the participants an account of the culture created within that group.(...) The virtual ethnographer then should conduct detailed, systematic and principled research within the community. Starting with simple questions such as how many people belong to this community? how long has it been here? how does it define itself? what is its focus? who belongs here? The virtual ethnographer should then immerse herself within this community with as much effort and energy as she would a “real world” ethnography.

Why do I blog this? I have to work on MMORPG communities, maybe using virtual ethnography. Though the article is 6 years old, it still raises some interesting issues, and some of the anecdotes are worthwile.

Workshop about mobile devices use

A relevant workshop at Pervasive Computing 2006: PERMID 2006: Pervasive Mobile Interaction Devices - Mobile Devices as Pervasive User Interfaces and Interaction Devices -:

The main goal of the workshop is to develop an understanding of how mobile devices (particularly mobile phones, smartphones and PDAs) can be used as interaction devices. We will provide a forum to share information, results, and ideas on current research in this area. Furthermore we aim to develop new ideas on how mobile phones can be exploited for new forms of interaction with the environment. We will bring together researchers and practitioners who are concerned with design, development, and implementation of new applications and services using personal mobile devices as user interfaces.

Possible topics for the workshop include (but are not limited to): Interactions between mobile devices and the real world Interactive context-aware services on mobile devices Augmented, virtual and mixed reality on mobile phones and PDAs (tracking, markers, visualisation) Using mobile devices as user interfaces for terminals and vending machines Portable music players (e.g. iPod Video) and personal servers as mobile interaction devices Multimodal interaction taking mobile devices into account Usage of sensors in mobile devices (camera, microphone, GPS, etc.) for pervasive applications Interaction metaphors for pervasive applications and services Gathering, management and usage of context information User experience, user studies Applications and scenarios

February 18, 2006: Deadline for submissions of workshop papers

One of the most interesting issue the organizers want to address is the following question: "Why are pervasive interactions using mobile phones still only a research topic and what is preventing them from being realized outside of the lab? ". This statement is obviously true and should definitely be of interest. When I read things like future perfect, I cannot help feeling that some relevant innnovation are around (i.e. about how people use technologies in new way) and people should have to pay attention to what's happening!

Video games and "the economics of fun"

A relevant article about Edward Castranova's work in The Economist. Entitled "Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games", the book shows how the online game industry is an excellent way to study what the author calls "the economics of fun". Of course it deals with MMORPG economics but the review describes two other issues I am interested in:

The starting point of his thoughts is very insightful:

While scientists developed sensory-input devices to mimic the sensations of a virtual world, the games industry eschewed this hardware-based approach in favour of creating alternative realities through emotionally engaging software. “It turns out that the way humans are made, the softwarebased approach seems to have much more success,” writes Edward Castronova in an illuminating guide to these new synthetic worlds.

Indeed, what is important is less the super-3d realism (given the 'uncanny valley' phenomenon), but instead the social components (as what I blogged the other day with the Trip Hawkins interview).

Also the final point is important too:

As technology improves, players could make enough money to pay for the upkeep of their real-world bodies while they remain fully immersed in the virtual world. Mr Castronova is right when he concludes that “we should take a serious look at the game we have begun to play.”

Meeting at Imagination Lab, Lausanne

Today I had an interesting meeting with Johan Roos, the Director of Imagination Lab Foundation. Imagilab is an independent, non-profit research institute founded in 2000 and operating from Lausanne, Switzerland.

Its raison d’être is to develop and spread actionable ideas about imaginative, reflective and responsible organizational practices. The Foundation’s underlying philosophy is to value imagination as a source of meaningful responses to emergent change and play as an effective way to draw on this human capacity.

Johan's point is that strategy should be practised in ways that fuel our minds by engaging our bodies in new ways: "When we do strategy rather than think strategy, we engage our senses so that we describe, create and challenge what we know in ways that pure intellectual reasoning cannot". Johan's work is directed towards developing ideas and activities that can help leaders transform strategy into a more imaginative, reflective and responsible practice. For that matter, he used for instance interactive drama or lego play.

I was impressed by the word they did with LEGO, it's called Serious Play. Some examples are here:

LEGO SERIOUS PLAY is an innovative, experiential process designed to enhance business performance. Based on research that shows that this kind of hands-on, minds-on learning produces a deeper, more meaningful understanding of the world and its possibilities, LEGO SERIOUS PLAY is an efficient, practical and effective process that works for everyone within an organization. Participants come away with skills to communicate more effectively, to engage their imaginations more readily, and to approach their work with increased confidence, commitment and insight.

Roboblog: close to the blogject idea!

Chris pointed me on this funny/impressive Aibo roboblog that can blog and upload photos in the form of an 'Aibo Diary':

Hello, I am Manuel, owner of Pedro, a Sony Aibo ERS-7M3/W. This is one of two companion blogs to Pedro's Aibo Roblog #1. Here, you can read Pedro's Diary, going back to Nov. 9, 2005, the date his Mind was upgraded to v3. Disclaimer: Pedro is the sole author of these posts and I accept no responsibility for them!

You can also check the blogroll, there is plenty of others!

Why do I blog this? I am very interested in the blogject concept lately (objects that blog) as a subset of the Internet of Things. This is a relevant implementation of such an idea.

CaffeMug: a tangible interface for regulating caffeine consumption

Previously, we had the mediacup designed by TeCo that I blogged about last year: "an ordinary coffee cup augmented with sensing, processing and communication capabilities (integrated in the cup's bottom), to collect and communicate general context information in a given environment.":

Now there is CaffeMug by Neeti Gupta, Kazue Kobayashi, Jason Nawyn, Jun Oishi, Jennifer Yoon .

a ceramic coffee cup that has been augmented with computational capabilities to help users monitor and regulate their caffeine consumption. Caffe Mug features a visual display that consists of four circular illuminator nodes that glow in accordance with the user’s caffeine levels. The visual display provides an appropriate mapping between the accumulative process of caffeine intake and the summative qualities of illuminating multiple feedback nodes. Caffe Mug is offered as an example of how computational augmentation can transform everyday objects into agents for behavior change. With Caffe Mug, we explore the effectiveness of embedding subtle “ambient” feedback into devices that enable certain behaviors. We believe that this form of embedded feedback will play a central role in the development of more effective behavior change technologies.

Amnesty International and Web2.0

One of the project we selected for LIFT is carried out by Amnesty International and is called "web2.0 mashups and human rights".

Internet strategists from Amnesty International will present project proposals based on web2.0 principles.

The basic idea is innovation in assembly, using RSS to mashup existing web2.0 services (such as mapping) with Amnesty data (for example, information on people disappeared during the 'War on Terror'). Making this part of an architecture of participation should allow activists and volunteers to add value to the result and also to generate project communities.

Working from a swift overview of web2.0 examples, this presentation aims at stimulating discussion of concrete projects that apply the potential of new wave internet developments for direct human rights and social impact.

Why do I blog this? I think it's interesting to see what NGOs like Amnesty can do with Web2.0 concepts and how it can help them to meet their needs.

Symphony-Q: A Support System for Learning Music through Collaboration

Symphony-Q: A Support System for Learning Music through Collaboration by Kusunoki, F., Sugimoto, M., Hashizume, H presented at the CSCL Conference 2002 in Boulder.

This system integrates a sensing board and a computer, and is used for collaborative learning in a face-to-face setting. One of the aims of Symphony-Q is to enhance music experiences: children who do not have music skills can easily participate in music learning, enjoy making sounds, and play rhythmically to music in collaboration with others. (...) The system creates an immersive environment by using augmented reality technology, and allows learners to play music by placing pieces on a board in a face-to-face situation

CatchBob replay tool

Fabrice is moving forward in the development of the new CatchBob! replay tool. Here are some snapshots of the prototype:

The project consists in developing a tool to replay sessions of interactions with a mobile game called CatchBob!. This game is an experimental platform in the form of a collaborative mobile application for running psychological experiments. In our lab, we are indeed interested in studying how people use mobile devices to carry out collaborative activities.

In this context, a replay tool is a piece of software that displays all the actions undertaken by the players. Such a tool is intended to rebuild and enrich our comprehension of how users performed the activity and to elicit their social and spatial behavior. This visual information might be used both by the researchers (to better understand what happen and compute statistics about it) and the players (to offer a visual support in order to explain the researchers what happened).

Space, cognition and collaborative work

As an echo to Renzo Piano's quotes I blogged this morning, I read an insightful paper entitled "Understanding complex cognitive systems: the role of space in the organisation of collaborative work. " by Spinelli, G., Perry, M., O'Hara, K. in Cognition Technology and Work, Volume 7, Number 2, pp. 111 - 118. The paper aims to provide some insights about the role of space as computational resource in collaborative practices. In line with this objectiv, it focuses on collaborative design activity within a consulting firm in the UK using ethnographically inspired methods to investigate collaborative work. Here are some interesting parts I found relevant with regard to my work:

physical space, augmented through the use of external resources, embeds the constraints and the operators through which decision-making is performed. The progressive arrangements of the physical space and of the external artefacts at ID-Co embodied at least a part of the knowledge necessary for the team to perform their collaborative activity. The transitions between the group’s shared cognitive stages are externalised in artefacts that, augmented by the role of space as an ordering and interpretative structure, provide a shared cognitive support for collaborative design and also reflect the status of past and upcoming group decisions. (...) Physical space adds an informational dimension to the artefacts collected within it, since it frames their use in a larger context of use. The very feature that space has to structure artefacts also results in a configuration that is an artefact in itself that is able to cue behaviour by its inhabitants. Actors orient themselves in the space, point at resources, reduce or increase their proximity to the informational artefacts to support their cognitive tasks and move to prominent areas of the space to mark the importance of their actions. This lexicon of physical gestures, generated and supported by the use of external resources and enhanced by the physical space, can facilitate communication and coordination among participants.

Why do I blog this? This approach is important and leads to results close to what we found when doing research about collaborative behavior in virtual environment or in mobile settings. Some other references about it: in Nova, N. (2005). A Review of How Space Affords Socio-Cognitive Processes during Collaboration. Psychnology 3(2)

Renzo Piano's conception of space

The Guardian recently featured a nice article about italian architect Renzo Piano. I was not so interested by his take on french's so-called riot (even though his take about it is relevant: "The peripheries are the cities that will be. Or not. Or will never be"), rather his thoughts about space and emptiness are clever:

Piano wants to introduce the European idea of urban planning to the British capital, ideas which he characterises as understanding the difference between a piazza (good) and a plaza (less good).

"A piazza is not a plaza," fumes Piano. "The plaza is the theme park of the piazza; the plaza is the commercial version. A piazza is an empty space with no function. This is what Europeans understand." A space without function allows one to be "in the moment", he says, and to counter what he sees as a major flaw in modern life - the habit of interpreting all experience in the light of achievement, as a means to an end. We should, he thinks, learn to lighten up, and the creation of empty, purposeless spaces within cities might encourage that. "You don't have to struggle to give function to every single corner. You can just wait and see and enjoy."

Finally, one of the last quote in the article is a good food for thought that reflects all his thinking: ""Architecture in some way has the duty to suggest behaviour".

Why do I blog this? I find pertinent to have insights from architect's vision of space, how they think about it and how they envision spatial features as well as their connections with behavior. As a 'user experience' researcher, I am interested in how spatial features frame people's behavior.

Positioning system through sidewalk pattern recognition

Via networked_performance, and amazing positioning system that uses sidewalk pattern recognition (by Jason Kaufman and James Sears from Gumspots):

GSPS: GumSpots™ Positioning System--by Jason Kaufman and James Sears--is a pattern recognition technology which can be used for a variety of location aware services. Their demonstration of GSPS lets you enter and view hidden data on city sidewalks. A user would take a photograph of the GumSpots with a cellphone and submit it to the GSPS service. The GSPS service would then determine the location and orientation of the image and return the image with extra hidden data displayed on the image. In this case the hidden data will be text as well as 'connect the dot' drawings. A user also has the ability to add hidden text by submitting a note with their image.

Why do I blog this? I like this kind of trick that uses an environmental feature for a new purpose, that emerges from the designers creative thinking of how he can fix a problem (i.e. doing positioning).

Trip Hawkins about mobile games

Via Stowe Boyd, this article in USA Today about the social side of video games. It's actually about Trips Hawkin's new company Digital Chocolate.

Hawkins started to feel that something about video games was lacking. (...) And that's connection and community. People want to go to Super Bowl parties or interact while playing fantasy football, Hawkins concludes. Fidelity is important to an elite segment of the market, but social connection is important to just about everyone. (...) That's Hawkins' epiphany: If you're going to make games, make them social and mobile. (...) Neither game tries to use all of a cellphone's processing power. The graphics are minimal. The allure is in the social connection, Hawkins says, not the on-screen experience

Why do I blog this? I think he definitely gets the point: not having super high-tech features (like 3D on mobile phones) but focusing on specific needs/human beings characteristics (social aspects) to design games on cell phones. I also have the same feeling, espeically when reading this paper about Neopets

Mobile games and psychology

This talk proposed at ETech 2006 seems to be very appealing to my interest: Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Design to Mobile Services by Amy Jo Kim:

obile games are becoming a big business. But on the horizon, there's an even more exciting opportunity to develop compelling mobile services that help people get things done--services like restaurant reviews, weather reports, stock quotes, diet support, and meal planners. Developers who are interested in building these services can learn a lot from game design.

In this session, we'll review the psychology and system thinking behind game design, and learn how to use game mechanics to create a mobile experience that's fun, compelling, and addictive. We'll conclude by showcasing some cutting-edge mobile services from Europe and Asia that incorporate these ideas and show us what future mobile applications will look like.

Why do I blog this? This is the approach we have at the lab and the one that I try to promote when working with video game companies. I am looking forward to see what she says about it when it comes to mobile games.