Take a gander at this part of InSTEDD's mission: "InSTEDD works with universities, corporations, international health organizations, humanitarian NGOs and communities. Together, we work to identify or craft and then field test technologies for better data collection and analysis, more efficient communications, and more effective response. InSTEDD will, for example, be adapting new social networking capabilities for humanitarian coordination, and testing inflatable satellite dishes able to be carried in a backpack. InSTEDD’s mission is to discover, develop, test, deploy and share information about technologies that buy critical time. Through better disease detection and response times, outbreaks can be contained and possibly prevented. Through better disaster response, more lives can be saved. Through collaboration better answers can be found." ...wow...makes you wonder...if people like this can dream big about the impact that technology could have on responding to disasters - can we dream bigger about what learning can do?

Training as a competitive advantage.... "IBM, which expects to unveil better-than-expected quarterly figures, has announced it will spend some of its cash on incentives to encourage some of its largest partners to invest more in training and other areas. On Wednesday, the company introduced a scheme to help its business partners who are cooperating on its New Enterprise Data Center strategy. The scheme involves incentives for IBM partners to improve their knowledge in three specific areas: virtualization and consolidation; energy efficiency; and business resiliency." Imagine...using your own internal money to train your customers to use your systems and push technology forward...

Kongregate, my favorite place for demonstrating the endless variety of Flash-based game potential (currently 8,334 free games), is now hosting a tutorial section designed to teach you how to build Flash-based games. They provide a side-scrolling game called "Shoot!"...so you play the game, then you download the source code, and off you go. Currently they have three tutorials up with 6 more in the pipe. I love this - how smart is Kongregate being?

How about "Second Life gets its suit on!"? Or..."Hey, Its take your virtual world to work day!"? Er..."Your avatar got so drunk at the holiday party...?" Help me out here. What we have are multiple channels (Virtual World News, Massively), including official ones from River Runs Red and Linden Lab, bringing us the news that Immersive Workspaces 2.0 has launched. This news has a couple of important points I think. First, it links Second Life (SL) with Immersive Workspaces 2.0 - a 2D environment that integrates tools such as screen-sharing, media sharing, note taking, polls, room scheduling and more that businesses will easily be able to see the utility in. Second, and perhaps more importantly, this moves Linden a step closer to a true, behind-the-firewall solution.While the articles do indicate that this solution allows an enterprise to set up a virtual space that is not connected to the main SL grid in anyway - that's not the same as having an instance running behind the wall. A well-played move is that Rivers Run Red has explained "that if customers buy into IWS 2.0, upgrades toward that end down the line will be included. That future proofing is part of the ROI that Rivers is pushing."  The only lingering doubt I have is one related to design. As I watched the video, I kept asking myself "what on earth do I need the 3D for?" I still think there is a design gap here. I mean honestly, we still have people putting a "Next" button in the lower right-hand corner of page-turning HTML courses and now we want to go 3D? There is a place for this...but please, let's think it through first.

(story link)**As an aside, I love the new editing UI in Typepad...good job guys!So IBM is releasing something called OpusUna (which means something like "work as one"); "OpusUna enables participants to collaborate and communicate from within the same browser space, incorporating widgets, audio, and video cameras to display themselves on the screen. IBM envisions, for example, collaboration on patient care via sharing of medical images. Financial traders also could collaborate from around the world."Right now I guess its only working in Safari...??Anybody know any good change management or org dev conferences? I think I really need to hit some of those to see if our thinking about organizations and how they function is keeping anything close to the pace of tech advances....

thnx to a tweet from @cogdogblog...these are just gorgeous

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!

My netvibes page is rapidly falling into disuse thanks to Twitter. I still have much love for all the feeds in my reader but it feels more lecture-like with people talking AT me. I understand that there is a masked asymmetry involved in Twitter but it just feels like a great rolling conversation in the hallway of this awesome conference where everybody interesting just happens to be chatting it up. So before I head to IITSEC, I wanted to pass along a few of the tidbits I've picked up in the hallway.  BigTweet: A way to post to your Twitter feed from any Web page. You can post sequenced Tweets so that you can send out 280 characters at a time. I want to play with this but as with alot of these tools/services, I find myself pausing to ask ' how loose do I want to be with my Twitter credentials'?Block Posters: I may have mentioned this one already but you upload an image, tell it was size paper you have in your printer and how big you want the image to be and presto...you get a PDF that you print out and make a wall-size poster from. Nifty. Found it through Twitter of course.TweetGrid: Set up your grid (up to a 3x3), enter your search terms and watch the grid magically update as TweetGrid scans the Twitterverse. This is a nice Web site but I think someone on Twitter said it best when they said "it wants to be an Air app." Tweetsgiving: Here is a great social media success story. This site, created by Epic Change, managed to raise $10,000 in 48 hours from 336 contributors using nothing but social media. The money will go to fund a new classroom for a school in Tanzania. People Browsr: Twitter is like this ridiculously deep trove of social interaction. People Browsr is one of those tools that begins to peel back some of the layers of that onion. You get a similar feel from Tweet Deck's multiple column view but People Browsr allows you mix in feed from all your online networks. Dizzying really. Who to follow?: Now a great place to start that I've mentioned before, is Jane Hart's Directory of Learning Professionals on Twitter. Another collection of lists that I am currently plowing through is this growing set of niche Top Tens from Darren Rowse at ProBlogger. I am also following Mr Tweet, who seems to aimed at helping people expose folks they should follow. edmodo: Just like Yammer is an attempt to take Twitter (aka microblogging) inside the corporate firewall, edmodo seems to be aiming at the teacher/class market. Stowe Boyd has a great post outlining his initial survey of this as a tool which allows teachers to set up private networks for their classes, and send each other files, notes, etc. This one will bear watching. Best Online Learning Games-2008: This is from Larry Ferlazzo and while it has nothing to do with Twitter per se, that is how I found it. The same goes for these last two items: FeedVis: Top 50 Edublogs and Show/World. Jason Priem put together this great visualiztion tool for looking deeper into the posts from the Top 50 EduBlogs. As Jason so eloquently puts it "It's an animated tagcloud that lets you compare word frequencies accross different time periods and authors, then check out the posts that used the words." The coolest thing though is that Jason put the code for feedvis up for download and all it takes to parse another OPML file, is to change one line of code. Finally, we'll close with Show/World. Click through the available maps to see the world change in proportion to the population, the percent of broadband penetarion, the rate of infant mortality and illiteracy. Not always comfortable but always revealing.

So I'm back from IITSEC and I'm starting to dig through all the backlog of stuff (emails, Tweets, etc) but I did want to post something about this conference since it is a unique experience for me. The unique aspect is that usually I post a lot of stuff from the conferences I attend/present at but not this one. Why?'IITSEC is different' seems to be a woefully inadequate description. How is it different? First - its huge. Attendance is usually 15,000 to 20,000 and doesn't really seem to take a hit during tough economic times. Secondly, it really does cover an entire industry - there is no corollary conference on the corporate side, not DevLearn, Annual Gathering, ASTD ICE or TeK Knowledge,  or ISPI, SALT...none of those conferences even come close to as complete coverage of an industry as IITSEC does - it just has no competition. So if you work in training, simulation or education in the defense industry, for this one week, just about everyone you know or need to work with is at IITSEC. Third, it is overtly and openly commercial and about getting business done. There are paper sessions at IITSEC but while important for the authors to get their papers accepted - the presentations are only 20 mintutes long and all the papers are published on a CD that comes in your bag so physical attendance at the paper sessions is not the heart of IITSEC. The heart of IITSEC is the expo floor and customers come to IITSEC and to the expo looking for solutions and looking to make connections and do deals at a level that I just don't see at other conferences. Fourth, while the fine folks who plan and execute  IITSEC do provide a wifi hotspot (thx ADM Lewis and Barabara), the cheap bastards who run the Orange County Convention Center want to charge me $25 for a freaking day of 'net access! Tar and feather! Draw and quarter! So bad connectivity equals less posts/tweets coming out.Fifth, because it covers a domain so fully...everybody is there and once you've gone a few times (I think this was my 9th time) and I had the dumb luck to come in to DOD at the top of the pyramid - so I met a lot of people - now, IITSEC is very much an 'old home week' for me. This isn't a purely social exercise though. With about 3.5 million people and a half a trillion dollar a year budget, turns out that DOD is actually a fairly tight circle to work in. So IITSEC really has this incredible value WRT reconnecting with people who are in new jobs, looking of new jobs, starting cool projects, etc etc. Plus you have this vibe about the revolving door between consulting and government that is full effect at IITSEC as military folk or govt folk look to move into the private sector and some from the other side (a much smaller number) look to head into the Fed. ...and don't forget the technology. Nowhere else will you find the kind of displays you'll find at IITSEC. The latest in large-scale (try 270 degrees by about 15 feet high) displays, the latest weapons training platforms (from infantry squad level to flying the new F-35) to a whole truckload of exhibitors selling everything from e-learning tools and systems to cargo helicopter training packages. So its a huge face-to-face social network opp, an insane tech expo, the world's largest and longest business lunch +parties +old friends +a chance to 'publish' ....that is how IITSEC is different. Phew.

So I asked my Twitterverse this question and have been getting a few responses:What's your best guess at conference attendance numbers?I just came back from I/ITSEC and the estimate I got there was something around ~18,000 attendees. This number probably includes paying attendees, guests, and exhibitors but is still a darn healthy number. I've also heard that Game Developer's Conference draws about 18K but with fewer exhibitors (I can testify to that  - aside from E3 back in the day, I haven't seen an expo floor like IITSEC [but then I haven't been to CES]).My own thinking is that conferences in the learning/training field osciallate somewhere between 1,500 and 3,000. Just wondering if folks have any other guesses as to the attendance levels at learning/training conferences, gaming conferences [to include the Virtual Worlds events] (thx Kurt for the reminder that GLS is capped at 400), tech conferences like Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, etc...Thanks!Updates:One report is that Le Web has something like ~1700 folks

FeedVis..An Interactive Tag Cloud for Your Feeds A little while back, I posted about how Jason Priem had done a great job creating this exploratory tool but how he had also included the code for people to download and make use of. Well the code is still available but Jason has gone one better and set up a form that allows folks to just upload their own OPML file right there. This was cool but now I guess it would be ++good. 

....I put Google's Friend Connect on my front page and as of now I have 2 members! That is weak. Help a guy out. Stop by the site and sign up! C'mon! Spirit of the holidays and all that....

That's me, that's Tim O'Reilly and that's Mark Sylvester, CEO of introNetworks. Below, that me looking like I'm arguing with Tim O'Reilly...I wasn't I swear....(and huge thanks to Jay Cross for taking the shots!)

So back on December 5, Will Richardson posted about his thoughts on  Microsoft's School of the Future Summit. I was struck by Will's lament over how quickly he lost any sense that there was a coherent vision of the future of schools in any of the speakers' comments. This got me thinking back to what I still think is one of the most under-reported speeches on education - Bill Gates' address  (PDF link) to the National Governor's Association back in 2005. Don't remember it? That's the one where he made the little comment that "America's high schools are obsolete."Nice right? The richest man in the world and the head of the world's largest philanthropic endowment went on to say:"By obsolete, I don't just mean that our high schools are broken, flawed, and under-funded- though a case could be made for every one of those points.By obsolete, I mean that our high schools - even when they're working exactly asdesigned - cannot teach our kids what they need to know today.Training the workforce of tomorrow with the high schools of today is like trying to teachkids about today's computers on a 50-year-old mainframe. It's the wrong tool for thetimes"So how do these two things tie up? First its a bit ironic to hear Will's lament about a lack of a common vision from a Microsoft summit when 3 years earlier, the former CEO of that same corporation offered a pretty clear vision about how to start the re-design process he felt was needed to change the American educational system. Agree or disagree with his vision but it could've well served as a springboard for a coherent set of discussions at this 2008 Summit. Second, I think Gates' had it partially right when he said that the problem couldn't be solved by starting within the schools themselves but had to begin with having the political will to change. IMHO, with a problem this size, I think we have to get past the idea of incremental, evolutionary change. I think especially with problems of this magnitude - we need REVOLUTIONARY change. There are some many tendrils of the current education system that extend into so many areas, that it seems that incremental change is doomed to failure - piecemeal change efforts just can't seem to gain enough momentum before they are ground to a halt by the forces of the status quo. This, I think requires an effort on the scale being discussed regarding the upgrading and repair of America's physical infrastructure. We need to envision a similarly broad initiative aimed at re-designing  our national educational system.