Software design

Today I went back to the very first episode of Leo Laporte and Tom Merritt's great Triangulations series. The opening episode was an interview with game industry legend Warren Spector. They never really leave the theme, but the first fifteen minutes or so capture a great conversation on games as an artistic medium. I love the eagerness to really think about new media as new, rather than simply a way to further existing publishing successes. In fact, it's not even eagerness but a sense of artistic integrity that seems to drive this view.

When designing educational software, I make sure to consider how it will fit with the learner's life. There are at least two orientations for this sort of exercise. I refer to them as the student's schedule and study life cycles. For canonical points in each, I then consider the educational intent, student-teacher ratio, and person-technology ratio. This helps me plan course components, select their platforms, and design their interaction types.

Social software is not simply "tweeting" or "liking" professionally developed content. Social computing is a mode of human-technology interaction, a use case. We can identify at least three factors that affect "social" in software: the human usage intent, the software features that facilitate it, and the hardware form factors that embody it. Let's work backwards, starting with three hardware form factors often used in education: the desktop computer, the interactive whiteboard, and the mobile phone.

I'd like to suggest three dimensions of analysis when categorizing mLearning edugames: content form, activity structure, and topic area.

Let's define "edugame" as a game that intends to increase your skills/knowledge as a result of play. It has common surface elements of games (like chance, movement on a board, players, levels of difficulty) but also has an informational topic focus and is intended to increase player knowledge or skill such that a learning effect is intended in pre-post game comparative measurement. It may be fun, but Angry Birds is not an edugame. You might learn from it, but a classic TOEFL test prep app is also not an edugame.

Today Apple unveiled iCloud, a "set of free new cloud services that work seamlessly... When anything changes on one of your devices, all of your devices are wirelessly updated almost instantly."

I'd be pretty fine with that, as an understatement. But not more than that, thank you.

A quick post: My 7-year old son loves games as much as I do. So I asked him, "What does a game need?"

Here's his list:

I get asked about "Search Engine Optimization" often. Sometimes it comes as the buzzword acronym "SEO", other times is comes as a genuine, "How can I get to the top of Google?" It's a fair question. Other good questions are variations of, "How can I know who's using the site?"

There are three things to consider: Discoverability, analytics, and promotion.

Recently I sat down with a professional photographer and discussed this topic for his portfolio site. Below are some notes.

Mobile task management supplies much of my oxygen. By 2006 I had fallen in love with Life Balance on various Palm Treos. But when I got my iPhone 3G in 2008, Life Balance wasn't available and I had to go with
OmniFocus.

Recently I discovered Life Balance is available for the iPhone. So I decided to give it a try. I've also used both OmniFocus and Life Balance in conjunction with their desktop clients.

Yesterday I received the best compliment in a while. I helped a company focus.

Recently I was asking for an XML API, preferably something simple like REST. This company is the electronic equivalent of a printing house and they have the contract for some of the best reference content available.

But the services delivered HTML. It was easily digested as whole content of course, everyone and -thing can do HTML rendering. But it was hard to process. HTML mixes presentation and data, as they say. That complicates processes which are interested in the data only.