New Posting . . . At Last

First, I apologize for not blogging for such a long while. Like everyone else involved in Croquet, I've been juggling full-time responsibilities at work with dedication to the Croquet cause. Okay, no excuses.

The Third International Conference on Creating, Connecting and Collaborating through Computing (C5 2005) conference in Kyoto, Japan was a great opportunity to make progress on the Wisconsin/Minnesota plan to build an international alliance of educational institutions around the Croquet Project. Much more on this in later postings.

While Mark and Julian demonstrated new interface elements geared towards making the Croquet experience as intuitive as possible for educators and their students, I presented on "Croquet and Higher Education." I spoke to a growing realization at the highest levels of the American academic technology community that commercial course management systems will never touch the heart of education -- teaching and scholarship -- in a transformative way. Our colleagues in Japan agreed.

After all, the CMS was never meant to support innovative teaching practice. It was intended as an administrative “container” or set of “containers” for course management (connoting efficiency and restraint). Regardless of the number of “improvements” grafted onto the CMS platform, the conceptual framework will always give primacy to administrative matters over pedagogical experimentation.

In point of fact, we have been far too easy to please until now, but as greater and greater numbers of faculty members commit themselves to using CMS’s, vendors are likely to be confronted with a considerably less pliable customer base. To put it bluntly, it’s about time we (e.g. universities, colleges, academic technologists and educators) learned to feed ourselves. After all, “give a man [sic] a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and you have fed him for a lifetime.”

One powerful organization that agrees with this argument is NLII, the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative of the Educause organization. In fact, NLII will soon be renamed to reflect a new strategic focus on the neo-millennial learner and how to address that learner's needs through emerging technologies. Croquet is going to be a large part of that focus, I'm sure.

So here's an ANNOUNCEMENT -- check out the upcoming March/April issue of Educause Review for my column "Standing on the Plateau," which introduces Croquet to univerity CIOs, Chancellors, Provosts, and the like. You'll also find a link to a longer version published online by NLII. The extended article will also be available for download on the Croquet Project site's "Whitepaper" page.

When you have a chance to read the article, we'd really appreciate your feedback. Post your comments to my blog. Thanks!

Deep play

Over thirty years ago, anthropologist Clifford Geertz posted a proto-blog on "deep play." Today, "Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight" could stand as the manifesto for www.seriousgames.org. It's certainly an inspiration for this blog.

So, what's deep play? For Geertz it was what happened when groups of people got really engrossed in the same dynamic activity. Relating to one another in terms of that activity flow, they got the chance to see what their culture was all about and comment on the underlying rules that controlled their lives.

Of course, Geertz came up with this notion while watching a cockfight. Like today's batch of videogame researchers, Geertz recognized in an "edge" activity the makings of an ideal learning situation.

A little background. Cockfighting was illegal in Bali, but it happened anyway. It was an ad hoc sort of event -- popping up on side streets and plazas, then shutting down and picking up again down the road. A fight would start up and a flashmob of gamblers would swarm around it. Geertz called it a "FOCUSED GATHERING."

So the sight of "one chicken mindlessly hacking another one to bits" was a kind of "strange attractor" that drew all these people to it. But Geertz thought the cockfight was more than a bloody entertainment.

The Balinese cockfight was "a SIMULATION of the entire social matrix . . . in which its devotees lived." The Bali caste system had rigid rules -- it was one very serious game. As a complex system, social caste affected every aspect of their everyday social relations and was too complicated to see in its entirety.

Geertz thought of the brutal cockfight as a way for the Balinese to LEARN what their culture looked like "when it was SPELLED OUT IN A COLLECTIVE TEXT." Here was the entire Balinese pecking order "raised to a level ... where it could be more exactly perceived."

Simulation as learning tool. For the Balinese, this cockfight-as-simulation was more than a chance to stand back and see the rules that controlled their collective lives. It was a chance for participants to REFLECT and COMMENT on the underlying rules of the game.

So what does this mean for education today?

Cockfights, like videogames, are an object lesson for academic -- as J.C. Herz points out in her terrific essay "Gaming the System." But not because universities need to get into the business of staging cockfights or making games.

What these forms of DEEP PLAY illustrate is what Herz calls "the learning potential of a network, and the social ecology that unlocks that potential."

But universities won't be able to harness that potential until they have easy, cost-effective tools for building online educational worlds that scale.

We need to use our network technologies to support the emergence of AD HOC collaboration communities where groups of learners can see and interact with one another, becoming engrossed in a common flow of activities, and having the tools ready-at-hand to reflect on what they're doing -- collaborative CRITICAL THINKING -- e.g. the basis of an effective liberal arts education.

My role in the Croquet Higher Education Collaborative is to take on an immediate challenge - bringing together as many researchers as possible to design breakthrough applications that show the value of Croquet in the educational domain.

This blog will talk about what it takes to build a multi-institutional open-source collaborative from the ground up.