Yes its true...I'm getting ramped up for the eLearning Guild's DevLearn 2008 conference coming up next week in San Jose, CA. Brent Schlenker has already set up a Twitter hash tag (#DL08) and I'm sure more social media will be coming online. Part of my excitement is about the next iteration of "The Great ILS Challenge" that we'll be putting on. For those of you unfamiliar with the Challenge, I should explain that the idea for it is a direct and conscious ripoff of Eric Zimmerman's BRILLIANT "Game Design Challenge" sessions at GDC. Those GDC sessions are amazing moments when world-class designers really stretch the bounds of what it means to design games and you leave the session almost breathless with the potential of what you could do. I really wanted to bring some of that kind of excitement back into the learning realm where we too often, seem concerned with rapid devlopment and templates and so on (with good reason I understand). The problem with that focus though is that we never stretch our mental boundaries about what kind of products we could be making. We need that stretch to expand our offerings and to get closer to a really immersive, engaging learning environment. This year, our stretching coaches will be Clive Shepherd and Deborah Todd. Clive Shepherd of the eponymously-named Clive on Learning, will be bringing his unique insight and UK-perspective to the challenge and I'm greatly looking forward to his effort. He will be joined by game designer and author Deborah Todd. I just had a chat with her about this project yesterday and I am psyched!The first year the challenge was to design a game to reduce the recidivism rate among recent convicts, the next one asked for a game to align two cultures of a recently merged company and this year, the challenge is: given the recent financial issues, how about we design a game that will help predict or evaluate a player's ethical qualities - could you design a game that would reveal the 'truth' of aperson?What do you think? Want to shoot me your idea? How would you solve this issue?

So here is the deal. A few years ago, after being completely knocked out by the Game Design Challenge at GDC, I proposed to the e-Learning Guild that they do something similar but with a learning bent. I really wanted to catch some of the magic that Eric Zimmerman inspired with his design session. We're on the third year of doing the "Immersive Learning Simulation" Design Challenge at the Guild's conference. We've had some interesting design issues like creating a game that reduces the recidivism rate among recently released convicts and creating a game that would help align the two cultures (one African and one Asian) of a two recently merged companies...and we've had some great design responses...like Clark Quinn's focus on the film noir look of the prison game to Alan Levine's use of "everybody has a mom" as a unifying theme for the merged companies.This year one of the panelists is Deborah Todd (I'm psyched, see game bio here http://tinyurl.com/6fo7fx) and I had a great guy from the UK all lined for the second panelist - unfortunately personal problems got in the way and my second panelist had to drop out at the last moment. All that leads me to this...I am including the challenge for this year below - if you'd like to  - put down some thoughts - a couple of images would be great too - on a couple of slides and send them to me - I'll use them in the session in front of the entire e-Learning Guild DevLearn08 conference on Thursday at 10:45 - yes - please include your logo/site....I'd love to see a great variety of responses and if no one has any issues - I'll put the coallated set of slides up on slideshare and send the link back out to the whole list? Wadda ya think? Wanna jump in?Here is the challenge: The challenge this year is "given the recent financial issues, how about we design a game that will help predict or evaluate a player'sethical qualities - could you design a game that would reveal the ethical 'truth' of a person?"Please send to me offlist at mark dot oehlert at gmail dot comI look forward to a deluge of responses...c'mon, its just a couple of slides! :-)Mark Oehlert

     Veteran's Day is November 11

So some folks sent in some very interesting comments and ideas on this challenge but not in the form of a slide deck. I wanted to include those pieces as well so here they are below in as best order as I can arrange them...I will say that I don't know if some folks who sent stuff in, wanted their name publicly attached so I'll try to err on the side of caution...If I missed anything that anyone sent me...pls resend...things got a bit crazy there for a while. Thx all!! MarkOne of the first comments I got was: "With all due respect Mark, I think this question is ill posed. People react to all of the inputs around them. Someone who is ethical in matters concerning a hundred dollars may be unethical in matters concerning billions of dollars. Someone completely ethical in his family sphere of life may be unethical at work, and vice-versa. Etc. This question also implies that the current financial crisis is simply the results of unethical behavior. I think a lot of other human factors went into its making. Its comforting to think there are good people and bad people, but that line of thought can lead to some very, very nasty places. Too late to change the question?"My answer is yes - the point of the challenge is to pose a difficult, unfair and potentially impossible hurdle. I mean at GDC, two of the challenges were building a game based on love and then build one on the poetry of Emily Dickinson. The designers have an unlimited budget and staff and don't actually have to build the game so yes, its dificult..its a challenge."I learned at my mother's knee (and my Dad's poker table) that game ethics are not real-world ethics. Mercy (for a simple example) so precious in social life, would ruin chess."Right. That's why we need to build a new game.Whoops! Totally forgot Marco Greco's input (Web site/slides) - Marco brings the ethics discussion back around to negotiations and posits a system of repeated plays that provides a data set pointing to an ethical valuation. This idea of establishing multiple data points came up in a number of the designs. Thx Marco!Celine Llewellyn-Jones added:  "as far as I'm aware there's no such thing as a universal set of ethics against which to judge players which means it would certainly be hard to establish their "goodness" or "badness" ;-)  But anyway you say ethical 'truth' which is very wise wording...One way to deal with this might be to let players declare their own set of ethics at the start (maybe thorugh something like a simple questionnaire) and then establish the consistency with which they are able to maintain them in a number of increasingly complex situations where there's no right or wrong answer.  You could throw a number of increasingly difficult short scenarios which require players to act very quickly, and to therefore react on their gut instinct - that would limit the "I'm being watched I'd better do the right thing" approach to play....The closer you stick to your original dclared rules, the better you do in the game.  I suppose what it really establishes is how well you know yourself!  But the fact that you have to declare what you 'believe' to be your own ethics would be revealing in itself.a example scenario is that of the run away train which you've probably heard before...you're asked first whether you believe all human life is equal or whether some life is more valuable than others - I can't remember - I'll have to check because it's something along these lines - maybe you know better than me but you're then faced with a dilemma in which your beliefs are directly challenged by having to react in the following scenario.  You're standing at a railway junction and you suddenly realise there's a driverless train careering along the track towards three people who haven't noticed and are certainly going to be killed if you don't act.  You can switch the junction so the train moves to a different track however there's a man standing just past the junction in the other direction.  Do you do nothing and indirectly kill three  people?  Or switch and be directly responsible for the death of one person...In some ways what this scenario does more than anything is make you question your own declared values....I think a lot of people don't know what they believe deep down (I'm still trying to work out my own ethical leanings).  I think this would be a great game to help people understand themselves as much as anything.  Of course whether ethics are truly constant - whether they change day by day, depending on who you're with, time of day, whether you have a hangover, whether you're feeling good or bad or lucky, whether you just watched a gangster film...all these things would need to be factored in somehow...you'd have to have your player play over a long period...Or you might create a game that reveals players attitudes to rules/social values in general - after all games are all about agreeing to play by rules, you might argue that ethics aresimply game rules establish by a society.culture....(maybe?), do players wish to stick to the 'rules' - to the letter even when it means hurting a fellow person?  do some players like to break the rules?  Do some players break the rules only when they're not being watched?..Do some players start out sticking to the rules but find themselves persuaded to break the rules later on when they find things aren't going their way?  That would be a very interesting game - a game where it's OK to break the rules but perhaps once they're broken you have no idea what the repercussions will be for all the players....well - bit of a rushed flurry of ideas - but your question inspired me so I thought I'd just dash something off quickly!  sorry - very rough." Karyn Romeis weighed in with:"This is a huge ask, Mark, and I wish you all the best with it. However, I must warn that most tests of this sort are fairly transparent and anyone with a modicum of intelligence is usually able to manipulate them to reflect them in the best possible light. I would say that in order to try to combat that, you will need to have several things going on at one that give the individual little time/capacity to think about the 'right' response. I think a multiplayer game is more likely to be revealing, here. And you need to state the goals very carefully without revealing or concealing too much.I have often used a 'physical' game that might have some bearing, here. It uses circles cut into three pieces. There are enough circles for each 'player' to have one. No two circles are cut in the same way. The pieces are all shuffled and then each player receives three pieces.The instructions are as follows (and it's important to word this carefully): each player should wind up with a completed circle in front of them. You may not speak to each other or use gestures. You may not take a piece yourself, you may only accept a piece that is offered to you. Then you set them a time limit. The thing is that the beahviours that people exhibit are very telling..."  Thx Karyn!!

This screencap shows the danger of letting morons have access to the whiteboarding tools. This is the main site for the conference. There are some bumpy patches getting started but I think Jane, Tony, Jay, Harold, et al....deserve HUGE props for putting this things together with largely free tools. Awesome job guys!

In live session now....not a presentation but a conversation...look at the image...see how people have been able to write in their own topics on the screen..very cool....I don't know if you can see but I am also impressed with the fact that we have 75 people in session now from a variety of global locations....

 So I'm about to TWexplode from all the TWesources that I have been quietly gathering of late. Symptomatic of our 2.0 world and open APIs...when a particular resource explodes in popularity, so too do the number of associate resources to twist and tweak that service in whole new ways...its actually quite lovely in one way and absolutley vertiginous in terms of trying to track all of it. I've decided then to just go ahead and purge myself of all these tabs relating to Twitter-centric resources - fully understanding that #1 I shall never be as complete nor as dilligent in my coverage of these things as Jane is and #2 that the list will be hopelessly out of date as soon as I stop typing and hit publish. Bearing those 2 caveats in mind, here we go...We'll start with the best:Jane Hart's Ever-Growing List of Learning Professionals (& Others) on TwitterJane Hart's List of Twitter AppsJane Hart's Twitter Reading ListTwitter Tools for Community and Communications ProfessionalsTweetburner: Shorten and track the URL's in your tweetsTweetStats: Wadda you think it does?47 Awesome Twitter Tools You Should be Using: As long as they're awesome....Twubble: Supposed to graph your Twitter fiends, I've never actually had it finish oneTwitterKeys: post on how to add super-needed icons to your Twitter feeds...Group Tweet: ability to send Tweets to specific group...you would've never guessed from name right?Twitter Matters #4: social capital discussion evolvingTwitter's Hockey Stick MomentTwitterspeak: 66 Twitter Terms You Don't Need to KnowGreat pic of TwitterCamp in action at DevLearnTwistory: "Add your Twitter backlog feed to your favorite calendar application and browse through your personal Twitter diary, making your Twitter history both fun and useful!"TwitterFountain: "we mash up tweets and Flickr-images that share the same tags into a spectacular visual."181 Free Twitter Buttons, Badges, Widget and Counters to Help You Find Followersphew....

OK...so I get one day of rest to do laundry and then I head off to the Interservice and Industry, Training, Simulation and Education Conference (IITSEC). If you are not within the U.S. Dept of Defense sphere or its international partners, then let me hip you to this gig. Imagine 15-20K people from all over the world who deal in training, simulation and education for various militaries. Now imagine an expo floor (pdf), kinda like COMDEX meets E3 meets an arms dealer. Now toss in a program full of 'paper sessions' with titles like: "Semantic Web Technology for Training to Meet a Changing Threat", "CultureGear: Upacking How to Teach Generalizable Cross-cultural Skills", or "Harnessing the Power of Social Networks Using Instructional Theory." Now you start to see the parameters of IITSEC.Now the other kicker to IISTEC is that if you are in this industry and dealing with U.S. DOD, then everyone in your work universe or their bosses, will also be here. We used to joke that you could get more done in a week at IITSEC than you could in a year back at the office. I'll try to cover what I can but if you look at the program and see something specific that you'd like me to scope out for you - let me  know.   And if you're going to be in Orlando next week, we'll see you there!