Nardi and O’Day (Information Ecologies) use, as a case study, a MOO-like environment called “Pueblo” used in an elementary school for poor students.

It sounds like the kids are just MOOing, but there is much more at work than that. When the kids use the text-based role-playing, world-building game, they’re really writing, but in a much more rich and meaningful way than the traditional “write a paper, hand it in to the teacher” model:

When participants create descriptions like the one Starlight wrote for her palace, they add to the ambiance of the virtual world. Participants are motivated to write well because of the enjoyment they give to themselves and others – they can create experiences for others who visit their creations.
As Jo Talazus, Longview’s principal, says, “This is a far cry from `put your papers in the basket on the desks.'” It is vastly different from preparing an assignment for a teacher (an audience of one) who is expected to grade the work, rather than enjoy it.

Howard Rheingold also writes about Pueblo. with some statistics to back up the success of the methodology:

Elementary school students find college-level mentors in the virtual world who show them how to build their own worlds, and encourage them to read and write expressively and skillfully. Longview students learned social skills, and they learned that college is a possible future for them. Then some of the students, most of whom are from low-income families, can help their parents learn to read and write, using the same technology. The response was so overwhelming that the project had to add higher-speed access lines and more access points.

As for practical educational impact, according to the first study, Hughes and Walters report: “Students participating in the summer program made 1.06 years gain on a standardized reading test as compared to 0.58 for those not in the program. Students who were able to access the system for 360 minutes during the fall of 1994 averaged 2.4 years of gain from 1993 to 1994 on standardized reading tests.”

This supports the value of the sort of open-ended, text-based role playing games that Nora and her friends play. And it’s a fabulous demonstration of the sort of evolution that software and computational systems are capable of if you recognize that the groups of humans using the system, rather than just the computer itself or the computer and a single user.

American Military Operation Name Generating Device

(Thanks to Dan Gillmor.)

Tim Dowling

You may think the air of extreme witlessness impossible to mimic, but is the man on the podium the authentic Dubya, a trained stand-in or an animatronic lookalike?

Maciej Stachowiak has a powerful antidote in his March 22 blog to those who would use the word “fascist” to describe Bush’s policies in Iraq. Words matter, and the experience of Maciej’s family in Poland suggests that, whatever one feels about the Bush Administration’s policies in Iraq, one should be careful in the one’s choice of words:

I know all about dictatorship, and fascism, and totalitarianism and empire. My family and my country of birth have lived through them all.

I am going to give the benefit of the doubt to people who freely toss around these kind of words in reference to America or Bush. I’m going to assume they simply don’t know what they are talking about, or have not thought through it fully. I have no great love for Bush or his policies. I think the USA Patriot Act was a cheap and unconstitutional power grab, and I am not sure his course of action leading up to the war was the wisest.

But there is no way you can compare this to real dictatorship or real empire. Iraq is not going to disappear from the map, or become a vassal state. America isn’t going to turn into a land of bread-lines or secret police knocking on your door in the middle of the night. We are not going to commit genocide or leave a whole nation laid waste. No one is going to be liberating starving prisoners from American labor camps. In fact, our military is trying its best to kill as few people as possible and to destroy as little as possible.

(Thanks to the ubiquitous Dave Mason for pointing this out.)

The New York Times had a story Thursday about how kids use instant messaging that is relevant to my current reading about Information Ecologies. The chapter I’m now reading defines the complex way in which an information ecology takes place – the interplay between the technology itself and the people who use it. The authors make the important point that the technology alone is not determinative. The authors say:

We cannot overemphasize a key point here: only the participants of an information ecology can establish the identity and place of the technologies that are found there. Indeed, this is a responsibility, not just an opportunity.

This contrasts with the luddite view (my word, not theirs) that technology is beyond our control and bends us to its amoral will.

Which brings us to Joyce Cohen’s story in Thursday’s New York Times. It’s a delightful romp about the way kids’ IM away messages have become a fundamental tool for communicating with and entertaining one another:

Away messaging, a function of instant messaging, has become something of an obsession on college campuses, providing communication, entertainment, procrastination and social life all rolled into one. “Students go online just to read their friends’ away messages,” said David Jacobson, a professor of anthropology at Brandeis University, who has taught courses examining away messages. “It’s a whole new dynamic that’s really remarkable.”

The software engineers who created the “away message” had no idea it would be used this way. These kids have bent it to their will.