edushizzle

TK (via a wave) pointed me to this slashdot story on using Google Wave to play Dungeons and Dragons.

The commenters point out, rightly, that the same thing could happen with a combination of IRC and wiki, and that there are already "play by post" systems where people do this - basically a message board with built in character sheets and dice rollers.

Let's get this out there: Most (all?) things you can do with wave, one could right a web app to do the same thing. Here is why if I was to write a play by post style role playing system, I would use wave instead of implementing it on the web:

1) User management, authentication, authorization. My web-based system would require I implement user registration, and that all users register (create an account) with my system. Wave is a federated protocol. All existing wave users could easily be joined to a game. It doesn't matter if they are eduwave users or googlewave users, and eduwave users can interact freely with googlewave users.

2) Real Time interactions. Yes, a web app can handle realtime interactions (google's wave client is even implemented as a web app), but as a web developer I would have to design and implement a system for real-time interactions. Wave gives me a platform that handles this. I don't have to implement it over again. As a developer, I get it all for free.

3) Deploying the app. I do not even need to deploy any kind of persistent storage (in other words, a db). The wave server handles storing this data for me. The code all runs within the wave (it is a javascript). I just need a place to store the gadget (a static file). If I was doing something like having a robot listen to the wave and automatically decrement a user's hit points as they get attacked in combat, then I would need to deploy that somewhere.

I am happy to even further alienate all non-geeks by not only talking more about wave protocol, but also by using DnD as an example case.

Based on the recent Wave conversations I've seen at Cole's Blog and at CogDog (here and here), I revisited my google wave post from a few weeks ago. Man, it is a rambling wreck. So, I am going to rewrite my central idea from that post a little more succinctly:

Google wave is not a web-based application. Google wave is a basis for building and deploying applications that facilitate interactions among participants that are simultaneously synchronous and asynchronous as well as linear and non-linear.

Just as the web shook up old models of organization (hyperlinked instead of hierarchical, bottom-up instead of top-down), the wave aims to shake up models of interaction.

The jury is still out on if the human mind is capable of grokking this kind of interaction, or what the benefits and downsides are. I think it is an issue worth exploring.

Chris Long is hosting a dialogue between his students and students from Boston College over at his Digital Dialogue blog. In addition, Marina McCoy, philosophy professor from Boston College, is now guest posting on the blog. There has been talk of the power of blogs to extend (remove?) the boundaries of the classroom, and thanks to adventurous folks like Chris Long and Marina McCoy, we are actually seeing it here at PSU and BC.

What Chris Long is doing at Digital Dialogue is fascinating and I have been trying to get my head together to write about it here for quite some time. The Digital Dialogue is a place for Dr. Long, his undergraduate students, his graduate students, and now Dr. McCoy to, "co-author a living document". Comments are open to the world. Next time Dr. Long is teaching, his students will continue to build on that document. Perhaps students from this semester will continue to participate in the shaping this document in semesters to come. The posts and discussion on the blog shape the discussion in class. The class is really much more of a two way experience than it has been before the blog. The students are now writing for an audience other than just the professor. They are writing for the whole class, other philosophy students, and potentially the whole world. This has changed the character and quality of the student's work.

Dr. Long has an outstanding presentation on the pedagogy of blogging based on his experience using blogs in teaching to encourage community, ongoing critical reflection, writing for an audience, all the while blurring boundaries between "student and teacher, semester and lifetime, practice and theory, world and classroom."

I believe we are seeing an emergence of a new model for teaching and learning.

My knowledge of what is going on at Digital Dialogue is based on discussions I've had with Chris and seeing his presentation. Chris, if you are reading this, don't be afraid to correct me. I'd hate to be misrepresenting what you are doing.

One more thing, for the open educational resource crowd: With all this discussion and material being captured, and the world being enabled to not only view, but participate, the Digital Dialogue is an open educational resource. Not only is Marina McCoy and her class able to take advantage of this OER, but they are in turn adding to it and helping build it. This is not the typical OER model of a bunch of text book pages or multimedia assets. This is something different.

Links:

• Digital Dialogue
• Christopher Long: Welcome BC Students to our Digital Community
• Marina McCoy: Rhetoric and Soul Leading

We're still not entirely certain what Google Wave is for -- or even if humans are capable of comprehending it -- but we do know that we're super-intrigued by the idea of third-party extensions that hook into the fledging messaging platform, and it sounds like the folks in Mountain View are as well. Google's planning to launch both an extension gallery and extension store in the coming months, which would allow users to easily find, buy, and share apps for Wave. It's not clear how the sharing will work, or how much Google expects extensions to cost, but it's certainly an interesting way to capitalize on Wave's flexibility.

(via Stuff)

The Bubo comes standard with a hotshoe mount on top for LED lights, four tripod mounts and standard 37mm lens threading so that you can put your own lenses on it, in addition to the lens that the Bubo comes with.

It's been quite a journey since the first prototype of the Bubo -- Harold and Graham traveled to Yahoo!'s headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif. for iPhoneDevCamp 3, where they won the iFund "Most Promising Startup" award.

I can't decide if this is awesome or awesomely ridiculous. Ok fine, if you are into shooting some serious video, it is awesome.

(via Stuff)

On Facebook, status updates are placed on one's Wall. This allows anyone else (among those with permission) to comment on the update. This creates a conversational space as it is quite common for people to leave comments on updates. Conversely, on Twitter, to reply to someone's tweet, one produces an at-reply on their own stream. Sure, the interlocutor can read it in their stream of at-replies, but it doesn't actually get seen or produced on their own page. Thus, a person's Twitter page is truly the product of their self-representation, not the amalgamation of them and their cohort.

[...]

Different social media spaces have different norms. You may not be able to describe them, but you sure can feel them. Finding the space the clicks with you is often tricky, just as finding a voice in a new setting can be. This is not to say that one space is better than the other. I don't believe that at all. But I do believe that Facebook and Twitter are actually quite culturally distinct and that trying to create features to bridge them won't actually resolve the cultural differences. And boy is it fun to watch these spaces evolve.

(via Stuff)

(via Stuff)

Current fans of the band know that it's been working on a yearlong project known as Songs About Time. Rather than going through the standard rigamarole of recording an album in a secluded studio, then touring to support it (not to mention dealing with the apparently crazy record labels), Sharp and Co. came up with a different idea: how about, instead of one big album, which is so start-stop, we sprinkle a few EPs throughout the year, and document our days together for our fans in the form of short movies and frequent photographs?

 Or, in Matt's own words: The project is one year in photography, film, and music that's all coming, in real time, on our Web site. There's not a better word for it than a multimedia project, but we have one element of the site that deals with photography, one part that deals with film, and one part that deals with music. At times they intersect and feed off each other, and have a cyclical, creative rhythm.

That is, calling Songs About Time a multimedia project (which sounds like something you'd do in 6th grade) somewhat misses the point; it doesn't describe the spirit of its intentions. It's about using different forms of media to better involve fans with the creative process. It sure beats the old, "here's out album, now buy it and a t-shirt and we'll see you guys in three years" mentality.

(via Stuff)

I have had an account at the google wave developer sandbox for a while. Unfortunately, I have not been able to get in to the "real" wave yet. Google hasn't added me and the invites I have been sent have not arrived yet. I am looking forward to getting there and using wave to collaborate and communicate with more people. In the meantime, perhaps I can assuage my longing by doing a little writing about google wave to clear up what I see as a general misunderstanding of wave that is displayed in many conversations I have been having and in many posts I have been reading.

First off, Wave is not a service like facebook, twitter, gmail. It is what I am going to call a platform/protocol. It stands alongside things like the web, email, IM, gopher. Wave isn't an application with a certain set of features. Wave is a protocol/platform to develop realtime and asynchronous interactions. So, you can start using wave with a group of people to collaboratively edit a document. But what if you have some tabular data? You can paste that in, and assuming someone has written a robot to do so, and you have added it to your wave, and the data can be automatically turned into a graph. The others you are collaborating with on this wave can see the graph, add data, alter the visualization. Play chess on a wave? There is a gadget for that. Whiteboard app? There is a gadget for that. Administer a quiz to your students with a wave? I don't know if there is an extension for that, but there could be. Someone just has to write it.

Second, As a platform wave has potential for all kinds of functionality. Saying that wave is or is not an LMS replacement is like saying that the web is not a replacement for an LMS, or that a telephone is not a replacement for an LMS. Wave may, like the web, be a good platform to build an LMS on, or, like the telephone, it may not be. I am reserving judgment on that right now. This whole issue is confused because the only wave client the world has seen (as far as I know) is a web-based client. Many people use gmail or other webmail applications, this doesn't mean that email is a web-based application any more than wave is.

Third, waving doesn't have to mean saddling up with Google. Google is building the first wave server and wave client, but the wave protocol is open. Just as there are a variety of web server software, web browser software, SMTP servers, and imap clients, so it could be too with wave. Again, people just need to write it. There is no technical reason Penn State could have it's own wave server, with Penn State users using wave clients of their choice, to communicate with people both at Penn State or anywhere else in the world (just like PSU hosts its own email system now that sends email to and receives email using any other email system in the world). Whether or not Penn State should want to do that is another story.

I am not saying that wave will be as revolutionary as the web. I am not saying that wave won't become just as important or more so than email and web are today. I am just saying that I don't know, and much of the confusion I see from people on the wave concept comes from people evaluating it the same way they would a new web application like google docs, when this is not what wave is at all. Criticizing wave right now doesn't make sense. Lest we so easily forget, watch the video below to remember what the web was like in the 90's.

Today, Matt Meyers, Erin Long, and myself flooded the zone at the CIC CIO Tech Forum. I gave a broad overview of the Blog platform at Penn State, followed by Erin and Matt digging deep into the examples of English 202C design and the Bio 12 Open Courseware, respectively. The overall take away was that there are a lot of uses for a flexible, lightweight publishing platform that sits in the center of the University.