Edu Web v0.1 and other sprouting Ideas

Having taken a bit of break from the educational web idea recently, I decided to revisit it after watching the Neil Turok video on TED.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/neil_turok_makes_his_ted_prize_wish.html

What was most amazing was the clarity with which he saw the problem and how wanted to set about effecting long-term change through not just education but sustained innovation in sciences. His project, AIM, was a pan African college where world leaders in science would come and lecture. I’m not so clear of the ins and outs of how it is run but it seems to be scaleable and it’s hard not to be inspired by his goal: “For the next Einstein to come out of Africa”.

This got me to thinking that perhaps I had being setting about this project in the wrong way. I had intended to create a tool aimed at aiding teachers and helping them with lesson planning and access to new tools and techniques. Initial research suggested that there is a lot of good thing out there already (namely www.teachers.tv, which is nothing short of astounding) and that it will be difficult to get traction amongst teachers. You just simply can’t go in and tell them to do it another way because that’s just plain patronising.

So now I want to go back to the original form of the idea, providing an online study resource centred around the student. Rather than create a system for teachers to access, I imagine a “wikipedia” style site aim at school kids, containing a core syllabus suitable for all ages, agreggated by educators and constantly refined. In addition to text and practise questions, there will be space for embedding media content like videos and games that have been found to be useful for particular parts of a course. For the students it will primary serve to support their existing course material in the same way that study guides do, though will be robust enough to be a primary source for under resourced educators. The beauty of the web means we can present multiple approaches to a topic, creating more opportunities to learn. There is even the opporunity to link students and schools around the world via common projects.

My gut feeling is that by making this space aimed at students, tech savy educators have a greater incentive to contribute and other teachers are more likely to draw from this as a resource.

The ultimate aim is to create a web tool that allows any child with the desire to learn can receive a high quality education.

Any thoughts and comments are most welcome.

Other ideas on the brew:

Project Selma (http://projectselma.org/)

- This is an initiative spearheaded by my boss Andy Bell and his wife to provide better access to natal care in Morocco. He is looking for inspiration and suggestions as to how best to approach this. It’s not just a one of fundraiser, they’re aiming to create a sustainable solution.

My initial thoughts were around how best to providing education to rural midwives and bare foot doctors. What format would be the most effective way to disseminate information to them? What training and equipment would provide the most dramatic results in these areas and how best to condense this down given the environment?

http://www.cababstractsplus.org/abstracts/Abstract.aspx?AcNo=19861839268

This was an interesting abstract about how a training resources was produced for rural midwives by the CIIR in the 80s. Is there a way we can use modern technology to build on this?

Chat / Collaboration tool

How often has it been so easy to communicate an idea by simply getting out a big marker and drawing. If I could integrate a collaborative drawing app into you work flow like IM and Skype has, what funcitonality would it have? I’m imagining something primarily aimed at creative workers who often have to provide visual feedback on work. Could this be a revenue generating widget for Hemlock ?

Lack of Action

Time to make a renewed commitment to keeping this blog up to date.

Had a great chat with Joi Podgorny (http://joipodgorny.wordpress.com/) last week to pick up where we left off at SXSW regarding online tools for schools and students. Having someone to knock around ideas with reinvigorated the idea for me and I promised to track the project through this blog.

This morning had a long talk with Guillaume Drapier (http://www.guillaumedrapier.com/) to discuss his final year project. He is working with big industry to help them foster an environment of open innovation within the company by using social tools and tie this into crowdsourced innovation in general. As much as this is one of those hot areas now, I genuinely think he’s got some interesting ideas for an entirely bigger vision. His work is definitely one I will be keeping an eye on.

More to come later…

Meeting with Ellen Beldner UI Designer

Had a great chat with another one of Lana’s friend’s, Ellen today. She studied UI design at Carnegie Mellon under Randy Pausch and has worked at google. She now develops user experience for small business applications. I was able got some great feedback about how to structure user testing to get the best results and even a bit about designing for the elderly.

Designing Tests

What Are You Trying to Do? Determine what your application will solve is the hardest point in the design process. Once this is clear, creating tests to determine the positioning of icons, colours etc should largely write themselves.

Clear Metrics for Success: When testing it is important to have clearly defined measures of success that allow you to evaluate the strength of different approaches. These can be click throughs, number of games played or messages sent. Even better is if these can be automatically tracked by the software. Once you get more of this data you will develop a stronger intuition towards what the users respond to. Until then use solid data to inform your design choices.

Replicating Environment / Isolating Users: If real life users will be on their own when testing then try as best as possible to recreate this. This is especially important if you are trying to ellicit user to user interaction that would otherwise seem pointless when in close proximity.

Using Plants: To kick off certain behaviour or help out (e.g. taunting) plant and employee. This can be carried all the way into early beta testing until the user community establishes itself to perpetuate this behaviour.

Asking Questions

Thinking Aloud: Get users to think aloud during testing. To set this up give a solid example such as how you would do this whilst using a telephone. Get them comfortable with this.

Encourage Users: Let them be themselves. Don’t lead them through the process. Never blame them if it does not work- It’s ALWAYS the fault of the Interface.

Ask Open Ended Questions: “What’s going on here?”, “What do you want to do next?”, “What are you trying to do?”, “Why is that important to you?”. Everything they say is fascinating. Keep digging to get to the bottom of what’s going through their heads. This will seem unnatural but you must be willing to sound like a moron.

Top 3 / Worst 3: A question Randy Pausch used to use after a user test was to ask them to describe the 3 best aspects of the design and the 3 worst. By giving them 3 things to discuss they had to think harder about their experience, which lead to more interesting feedback.

Testing Taglines: Prior to introducing the product, it is a good opportunity to test different taglines to be used. Give the users a selection of short, one sentence descriptions and then get them to describe what they think each one is and how it will work. If in doubt, just say what it is. This applies for how to label buttons and site areas.

Finding Testers

Facebook for targeted selection: Good results can be had by using facebook to target specific demographics.

Public Testing for Breadth: Setting up in a public space will get you the most diverse mix of users and often, because they are the least invested, the most honest. If this is possible, testers can be sought out in the local area to be brought back to the office for testing.

Remote Testing: Go to meeting is an effective way to record user responses in their own environment. The audio and video stream can be recorded and testers who are otherwise put off by the time commitment can be convinced to part-take. Once the process is established it can be a power way to quickly gain large amounts of data.

Misc:

Broadly Fun = Broad Audience: Different modes of play allow users to define their own idea of what is fun. Limiting avenues of play will limit appeal (example is the success of skate games that appeal to a much wider than expected demographic due to multiple play options).

Men like puzzles + Women want to get on with it: Men see working out the controls as part of the fun in a game. Women see that as an obstacle to game play. Use accordingly

Designing for Elderly (Wisdom in a Tin)

Using Real World Metaphors: Letters, telephone, address books

Perception problems: Their perception of light can be quite diminished. Also be aware of reduced ability to manipulate the keyboard and mouse when designing the interface.

On the subject of Face to Face Conversations: For wisdom in a tin, to get participation of the elderly is there a way to humanise the people who pose the questions? E.g. have a video of them asking the question or a photo with audio. Then the responses seem more like a conversation as opposed to posting into the abyss. We want to create a back and forth just like in Youtube.

1% of users will provide the bulk of the content: Recent studies on user generated content show that it only requires a core contingent to sustain the community. Most people are consumers and that’s fine. With that in mind the key should be to find the characteristics of these 1% and get them onboard early on and design the upload features for them. Find internet active pensioners, sell this idea to them and your community will grow.

Initial Focus: Give the site an initial spin e.g. sex/health/career. This will help foster the community. Also plant questions, full audio and video so that there are as many hook points for the early contributors as possible. Consider going through existing programs aimed at the young such as Frank, Ask Alice (US Sex Ed).

Allow Old People to Set Their Own Topics: What is it they would like to pass on? Can we generate a discussion between the elderly users e.g. about what they think the key to a happy family life is.

Finding Testers: Go to their homes. Team up with charities to find out where they are.

Other Resources: ACM Association for usability studies (outlying groups are usually only catered for in the academic realm).

Meeting with Lisa Wong of Playstation R&D

I had the pleasure of spending an afternoon picking the brain of Lisa Wong, a designer at PS3 R&D, on the future of game and how to design fun. After nearly 3 hours in a great little tea shop off Van Ness (Leland Tea Company) I came away with a head full of random threads that I’m now going to try and summarise.

On game design and Interaction

Fun is Emotional: What are the emotional triggers of the intended user. Get inside their head. Enough said.

Player to Player Interaction = Emote: The strongest online interactions come from people able to project their “voice” and personality through the medium. Text alone is only effective if the person has a strong command of written prose. Often abstractions such a emotacons can bridge this gap and allow for the subtler nuiances to come through. Find ways to condense the key interactions into their simplest forms. Can it be made into a button press.

Take Existing Behaviour as Inspiration: Investigate how your target audience interact offline. Which are the strong themes and the hook points that people “gather” around? Once identified these can be abstracted within the online space to create a more natural experience. No need to reinvent the wheel, use existing strong interaction points to inform your game design. For example taunt features in multiplayer games.

Nerd-Elitism in Gaming: Traditionally gaming has been the realm of the committed fanatic, typically male 14-25, and who see clunky interface and steep learning threshold as the price for entry to the gaming experience. These people make up the current generation of game designers and producers, and often bring with them prejudice towards inclusive gaming for all. As a result most of the games on the market still come from this limiting mindset that games should be hard and the reserve of an elite. Designers must be aware that whilst they do what they do because they were the 1% that grew up drawing/coding/building in solitude, they are creating with the 99% that were outside playing in the sun. You’ve got to like the people you design for and not see them as inferiors whom you are helping.

You are Not Everybody: These two demographics have vastly different motivations. The introspective, technical and creative individuals are more driven to compete with themselves. They were the ones that grow up wanting to “fly aeroplanes”, non-competitive achievements that were an expression of personal competence. Those on the otherside of the coin are attracted to competition, beating others often manifested in team sports. Designers must be conscious that their definition of fun is often vastly different from the majority. They must design for them.

Limited Game Modes: Just as dramas fall into a limited number of categories, we find the same with gameplay. All games, even going back to ancient board games, revolve around the same elements of game play e.g. collecting, destroying controlling, building. Games can be a combination of these game modes, but when broken down will always be fun because they appeal to these elements (Lisa describes them as actions that appeal to OCD facets of our personality – Especially true for the “nerd gamers”). Role-play games for example are simply an extension of children playing with dolls (the amount of time people spend customising avatars is testiment to that).

Good UIs are Satisfying: Skillfully operating a complex machine like a plane has it’s own kind of satisfaction, but the most successful interfaces give the user a quick gratifying sense of statisfaction. The iPhone’s success if largely down to sheer fun of swiping, tilting and shaking. Feedback to reward these actions can also play an important part. Good UIs should have a sense if flow.

Other Random Thoughts

Social Networks Weaken Relationships: By introducing more chatter from those with whom we have little connection, we are drowning out and diminishing the value we place on our closest friends. Whereas before you would call to wish happy birthday, now we add a wall post along with the dozens of other acquintances and half friends. Can we build social networks that build better friendships.

Games bringing strangers together: Games are often seen as the reserve of the isolated. Is there a way of games such as Football 3’s, which have a strong established real-life social network, be used to bring people together in public. Perhaps there is a space for F3’s parties in the same vein as Guitar Hero Pub parties?

First of many…

What follows is a attempt to document my explorations into the realms of online communities and social interaction. This being my account of personal thoughts, the writing may at times be clunky, disjointed and often incomprehensible.

I will seek to rectify this and develop a stronger voice in time. In the meantime please comment and discuss.

K