Presenting at GLS 2011

http://www.glsconference.org/2011/

Presenting our work with Geographic Live Online games at the Games + Learning + Society confrence in Madison, WI. Great location and very vibrant crowd here and many stimulating presentations to digest. Unfortunately I could not attend the first day due to another meeting but coming here the second day was still great to hear Eric Klopfer's breakfast keynote look at games through the lens of ecology. My own presentation can be found here. Katie Salen's lunch keynote began by the idea of game-like learning (as opposed to game-based), not necessarily using games as such for the learning experience, but pull ideas from good game design. E.g. drop students into a challenging situation where they will have to learn incrementally, collaborate through succcess and failure towards a goal. While her work with Quest to Learn has successfully done this, in a way moving many components from the K-6 to the 7-8 level and possibly 9-12, I think moving the same idea to the College level will meet a tough challenge in overcoming the individualistic structure of faculty-course ties and virtual absence of a team taught curriculum. Looking forward to see and learn from the many other sessions ahead. Jeremiah McCall, as always engaging to listen to, concluded with the thesis that the written or spoken word is not the only source for facts and learning. We know that discussions, documentary movies, and personal experiences are important sources of learning, and why not games? His teaching where students are allowed to critically examine historical videogames provides a prime example of how to instill critical thinking. Check out his website.

GeoGame 2.0

Great times!
Our small team look forward to do some serious development of the next generation geographic live online map game. What's in store then? Through a new partnership with Esri we will work with GIS technology to put all game functionality into a browser environment so there is no need for the sometimes cumbersome installs and Java downloads that we had to deal with in our first prototype. This also allow us to easier tap into the rich support for geospatial processing that no existing gaming platform can provide.

Maybe the folks at Epistemic Games are closest to what we are looking for. Their Land Science/Urban Science games take a new spin on planning games like Sim City by incorporating the real world in the game dynamics. The benefits are obvious. Not only do we get a joyful experience, but there may actually be some important knowledge generated for use by non-participants.

I look forward to hear Art Graesser and David Hatfield this Friday present here at OSU on Embedded Assessment in Video Games.

When: Friday, June 3, 11-1 p.m.

Where: Rm 1089, Center on Education and Training for Employment

Registration:  https://registration.it.ohio-state.edu/node/336

Presenting today at Innovate

Exciting conference today at OSU http://blog.it.ohio-state.edu/elearning

Me and Shaun will be presenting "Development of a Platform for Spatial Thinking Through Online Games" and here are some links to go with that presentation:

Maps and games – Simple map trivia - http://bensguide.gpo.gov/flash/states_game2.html
Combining online maps and games - www.fleck.com, www.planetinaction.com
MMOG WoW – Leeroy Jenkins clip - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkCNJRfSZBU
Debunking some myths -http://www.pbs.org/kcts/videogamerevolution/impact/myths.html
Microsoft Surface Touch table – Calculation game - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnVTNbpXR-A
The GeoGame website - http://www.geogame.osu.edu/
Fate of the World - http://fateoftheworld.net/ - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Pk3QDC84Go
Cityone IBM - http://www-01.ibm.com/software/solutions/soa/innov8/cityone/index.html

References:
Roper Public Affairs. 2006. National geographic-roper public affairs 2006 geographic literacy study. New York: GfK NOP, 89p.
Steinkuehler, C., & Chmiel, M. (2006). Fostering scientific habits of mind in the context of online play. In Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Learning sciences (p. 729). International Society of the Learning Sciences.

Mike Batty, CASA at OSU

We're wrapping up an exciting visit by Mike Batty (http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk) here at OSU. He has generously spent many hours with faculty and students, discussing cutting edge spatial visualization, simulation, and modeling ideas. Of particular interest to this blog is the work on loading game engines and Second Life with spatial data through which the game avatars get to interact directly, sort of, with the virtual landscape model, which then becomes...real, sort of. Reality is broken! Lots of other innovative ideas and examples can be found on the http://www.digitalurban.org/ blog and in this video.

Neogeography: disseminating geographic content with Web 2.0 technologies from Andrew Crooks on Vimeo.

CIA - the Crowd-sourced Intelligence Agency

The private production of geospatial intelligence is increasingly getting into the spotlight. We saw the successful crisis mapping efforts in Haiti and now we see The Satellite Sentinel Project (SSP) produce volunteered spatial analysis and mapping from high resolution imagery and field reports. The quality of these reports are impressing even to seasoned military commanders. As with any tool it can be used for good and bad, to inform and misinform. It's great when goodhearted people get together and make this possible. The scary thing is that the 'bad guys' also will do this.

Next generation Digital Earth - 2020

Responding to a survey from the International Society for Digital Earth got me thinking and offering some thoughts, mostly bits and pieces from previous ramblings on this blog, but maybe some new nuggets. The whole idea of a digital Earth was well formulated in Yale Professor David Gelernter's book “Mirror Worlds” (1991) where he outlined a vision of a future when “You will look into a computer screen and see reality”. Seven years later, then U.S. Vice-President Al Gore outlined his vision of a “Digital Earth” (Gore 1998) which became the benchmark 'vision'. now it seems clear that many of the elements of what these two visions articulated have become reality. Definitely in terms of information management and infrastructures, but also getting closer to move away from a desktop map metaphor to an immersive 3D virtual reality representation of the Earth.

So, for a new vision, Digital Earth 2020, we'd have to think about how recent and emerging technologies and behaviors will contribute. Clearly, the cloud computing paradigm will be instrumental to offer device independent services, and social networking has demonstrated a radically different way to think about data use, production, and analysis - users become producers in VGI and users become analysts in VGA (Volunteered Geographic Analysis, see post above), just look at the protein folding example from last fall. In that context, I maintain that gaming technology and similar simulation platforms will become an essential part of next generation digital earth solutions.

As a way to prescribe attrictive developments, activities like CityOne (mentioned in a previous post) could be embedded in a real data context, allow live data feeds from all types of sensors and mix simulation, what-if scenarios, with individual decisions with a potential to scale into massive multi-user environments doing agent based simulation with real human agents as part of the model, blurring the boundaries between human and machine agents.

The Digital Earth of 2020 will work as a switch-board space for interfacing with the real and the represented world.  A person will use DE-20 to interact with the real world through the digital representations of historic, real-time, and simulated projections of the world to be. Through immersive technology “different place” interactions will become “same place”, you can interact in your place with remote friends through virtually present avatars, and in the reverse, travel places with your avatar and become immersed in those places. See this Microsoft demo  from last year to get a glimpse of what I talk about (they haven't done the avatar yet as far as I know).

Most importantly though, I think the next generation Digital Earth will have to be a cross-cutting venture, across professions and other domains. It should be formed as a trans-disciplinary dialog, not just from a GIS, Comp. Sci. or Remote Sensing perspective, but embrace ideas and approaches in the social sciences, humanities and the arts. All who feel engaged in this development should make sure to invite and bring in riends that are not so engaged and communicate these ideas and extend the invitation to them. Let's build our real and mirror world together!

GIS-based games rising

Finally there seems to be several initiatives underway to combine the power of GIS and Gaming together. This year's GeoDesign meeting had several speakers mention games as a potential for simulation of policy or design scenarios.

MITAR Games is a current project at the MIT Step Program http://education.mit.edu/projects/mitar-games that take augmented reality into the hands of teachers and students.

Another interesting AR platform is provided by Layar. This company based in the Netherlands provides a development platform for mobile devices and all kinds of fun, serious, useful, and weird augmentation is featured in their layer catalog,  400+ layers in the U.S. Still, playing pacman in real life, running around the streets of Columbus and being chased by those monsters...not sure, but absolutely sure I want to learn & develop tools for geography education.