ITU Climate Change Demo

Here’s a short 10-minute module on Climate Change, created by Kineo for the International Telecommunications Union (ITU):

http://www.kineo.com/demos/itu_final/itu_final/final_demo.html

Interactivity is simple (a few animations and multiple-choice questions), but Kineo claim to have developed this within 2 weeks.

What I like is the:

1. Intro movie – Nice, full screen images with simple and clear messages
2. Interface – This iTunes ‘Coverflow’ style functionality may not be appropriate for everything, but it’s certainly more innovative than the traditional Next/Back navigation

Neurons and How They Work

Jellyvision - Interactive Conversation

Jellyvision's well-executed interactive conversations encourage you to "feel" that a prerecorded host is talking, listening and intelligently responding to you.

Their guidelines for designing, writing and performing for an interactive conversation are as follows:

Maintain Pacing

Draw your visitor into the flow of conversation with the right choices.

1. Give the visitor only one task to accomplish at a time.
2. Limit the number of choices the visitor has at any given moment.
3. Give the visitor only meaningful choices.
4. Make sure the visitor knows what to do at every moment.
5. Focus the visitor's attention on the task at hand.
6. Use the most efficient manner of visitor input.
7. Make sure the visitor is aware that the program is waiting for a response.
8. Pause, quit or move on if input doesn't come soon enough.

Create the Illusion of Awareness

Respond with human intelligence and emotion to all of your visitor's actions.

1. Respond to a visitor's actions.
2. Respond to a visitor's inactions.
3. Remember a visitor's past actions.
4. Respond to a series of the visitor's actions.
5. Incorporate the actual time and space that the visitor is in.
6. Compare different visitors' situations and action.

Maintain the Illusion of Awareness

Avoid mistakes that remind your visitors that they are interacting with a machine.

1. Use text and dialogue that generate a sense of intimacy.
2. Make sure characters act appropriately while the visitor is interacting.
3. Use dialogue that never seems to repeat.
4. Be aware of the number of simultaneous visitors.
5. Be aware of the gender of the users.
6. Make sure that the dialogue performance is seamless.
7. Avoid character commentary when user input cannot be evaluated.

Sample conversations: http://www.jellyvision.com/examples.htm

Made to Stick

What is that makes urban myths so persistent but many everyday truths so forgettable?

How do newspapers set about ensuring that their headlines make you want to read on?

And why do we remember complicated stories but not complicated facts?

Made to Stick, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, applies the idea of 'stickiness' and identifies six steps to sticky messages:

1. Simplicity - strip ideas to their essentials, use analogies
2. Unexpectedness - surprise, get their attention
3. Concreteness - avoid buzzwords, use plenty of examples
4. Credibility - trusted authorities, testable, believable
5. Emotions - disgust, sympathy, resentment all work
6. Stories - tell a story

Games and e-Learning

Caspian Learning has produced a set of whitepapers looking at the use of learning based games in training and education.

Here are their 10 pedagogic reasons for games in learning:

1. Motivation
• Games typically involve good marketing, and level based design, keeping players interested through achievable goals, good feedback, and high quality production values. Motivation comes through good game play design and high levels of interaction.
2. Learner-centricity
• Games are massively interactive and rarely take control away from the learner, unlike traditional e-learning. Well designed games transform the learning process from a passive experience into an active learner-driven experience.
3. Personalisation
• The use of avatars and customisation is a strong form of personalisation. Games regard you as reaching certain states or goals, and allow users to earn rewards, which offer a user designed experience and a sense of personal progress.
4. Incremental learning
• Good games pull you onwards to the next task, upwards to the next level. Most games have an overarching goal along with levels and sub-goals. Players like to live on the edge of success and failure (regime of competence).
5. Contextualisation
• Games create a world in which learning takes place. This can be useful in terms of encoding and recall. Learning how to do something in the context in which it will actually be applied is good for transfer.
6. Rich media mix
• Games use 3D avatars, environments, objects and audio, which make their contextual worlds seem relevant. Games get the users to "do" something (challenges and tasks) rather than just watch it.
7. Safe failure
• Users learn by failing. Catastrophic failure (dying or getting thrown out of a level) is a strong feature of game design.
8. Immediate feedback
• Games are relentless on giving feedback in real-time: incremental feedback when progressing in a game, strong feedback for completion of a level, and overall progress couched in a league table and the ability of save progress, bookmark, and view your progress against others.
9. Lots of practice and reinforcement
• Games are played and replayed, which is rare for traditional training. Players learn how to overcome failure and get plenty of chances to reinforce the learning with a range of different challenges and tasks on the same subject, unlike traditional learning where the experience is often short term and we assume transfer of knowledge has been achieved (i.e. MCQ).
10. Lots of collaboration
• For those who see gamers as loners, it may come as a surprise to discover that their online communities are among the largest on the web. Game sites invariably have discussion groups, and gamers engage in dialogue about the games, and related strategies. Gamers genuinely seek to learn and teach other to reach their goals, which stimulates mutual support.

The psychology of motivation and learning tells us that these are the primary features of successful learning. If games can deliver these ten things then they're not an option in learning; they're a necessity. We'd be fools not to use their intrinsic strengths to strengthen, motivate, and accelerate learning.

3D Worlds, Simulations, and Games

Clive Shepherd clarifies his understanding of the difference between a 3D world, a simulation, and a game...

A 3D world is a graphic environment in which you can navigate. Think virtual reality. E.g. Second Life.

A simulation is an imitation of something real or a process. This does not have to be 3D. E.g. systems training.

A game is an activity with a goal and rules, in which the learner competes to better their own previous attainments. A game can involve a simulation (e.g. SimCity or other business games) and it can use 3D (e.g modern action video games), but it can take many other forms. E.g.  Quiz games, text or 2D adventures, board games, and mind games.

The difference between a game and a serious game is the amount of gaming elements (fun, engaging, and challenging) and pedagogical elements (effective learning) experienced by the learner.

Following on from this, Donald Clark gives his reasons for not using Second Life in learning. These include the lack of:

• A good story (anecdotes, characters, storylines)
• Support (what happened, what should have happened)
• Interfaces that map to real world actions
• Dynamic Artificial Intelligence (AI) characters with which learners can repeatedly try new behaviour to see how they react
• Levels, tasks, and milestones

For more information, see Clark Aldrich's Style Guide for Serious Games and Simulations: http://clarkaldrich.blogspot.com/

We Tell Stories

Penguin UK has challenged its top authors to create new forms of story - designed specifically for the Internet.

One of these stories is The 21 Steps, written by Charles Cumming (inspired by The 39 Steps, by John Buchanan).

Follow the story as it unfolds across a map of the world.

http://wetellstories.co.uk/stories/week1/

Ethicability - The Moral DNA Test

This test is not a test you can pass or fail. It is more like a mirror that reflects how we make difficult decisions in life and at work. The test only takes about 5 minutes to complete. When you have finished, you will receive a report that describes:

• Your “moral DNA” type
• How you prefer to make difficult ethical decisions, and
• How you can use these insights to learn how to make better decisions in every aspect of your life

The questionnaire is in three parts. In Part 1 you are asked a number of questions about yourself such as your age, gender and nationality. In Parts 2 and 3 you just need to click on the boxes that best describe yourself in relation to a series of adjectives.

Continue to the questionnaire

Designed by Roger Steare, Visiting Professor of Organizational Ethics at Cass Business School. Test “engine” designed, developed and validated by Pavlos Stamboulides, a Chartered Psychologist and Director of Psycholate, based in Athens.

Usability & User Interface Design Explained

The purpose of this document is to create a methodology to create an effective user interface.

Without attention to usability users are less productive, products take more time to develop, require more training and support, and are less attractive to customers.

A User-Centric Design Approach

"A well-designed user interface is based on principles and a development process that centres on users and their tasks." (Microsoft Corporation, 1995)

Only the users know what they need and what they want; and the only way to find out what the users need and want is to ask the users.

Human Factors Goals

Human Factors Engineering is based on 3 goals:

1. Provide an interface that is intuitive to the users - create an interface that users can readily understand
2. Provide the user with the easiest interaction possible - make it easy for the users to get their job done
3. Help the users complete their tasks - make it really easy

User Interface Design Principles

• Consistency
• Redundancy
• Using multiple cues increases the likelihood of retention. For example, when an error occurs, pop up a dialog and make the "beep" sound.
• Every menu item and button should be accessible by keyboard.
• Every mouse action should have a keyboard equivalent.
• Forgiveness
• Enabling buttons only when appropriate and prompting before committing actions provide reminders to users about the effects of their choices.
• Allow users to back out of or undo actions, especially those that are destructive.
• Feedback
• Every action that the user performs should provide some feedback immediately.
• Feedback can be visual, audio, or both.
• Double-check destructive actions before they are committed.
• Simplicity
• An easy way to make an interface intuitive is to keep it simple.
• Avoid distracting the users with unnecessary information.
• Interaction
• Allow the users to personalise the system. Where appropriate, lets the users customise settings such as defaults, colours, fonts, and options.
• Directness
• Allow users to directly manipulate the objects of the interface, providing actions such as drag-and-drop.

User Interface Design Methodology

• User Identification
• Task Analysis
• Understand 'what' users do and 'how' they do it
• Create User Interface Design Guide
• Project background - users, tasks, assumptions
• Design guidelines - sizes, colours, menus, widgets
• Appendices - questionnaire results, glossary
• Create User Interface Design
• Design, prototype, and test
• Usability Testing
• Can be as easy as a computer, a user, and an observer. Do they understand the interface? Can they perform their tasks easily? Do they keep making errors?

Excerpts taken from 'User Interface Design Explained', Douglyss Giuliana.