Commonplace Pages

File under “games” and “advertisements.”

A 2012 report by the New Media Consortium identified “game-based learning” as one of the major trends affecting education in the next five years.

Game on! More reason to explore engagement mechanics in what we do.

Not that the story and interactive need any more tweets, but here’s a time when I need more than 140-characters to give Jon Huang a high-five for developing the appropriate level of engagement and interactivity to this story. Jon also properly gives credit to Rootof Creations who created the original Kick Ass game.

There was some nice write-ups on the story and interactive from Poynter as well as others including Betabeat who wrote:

… designed by Jon Huang, a multimedia producer at the Times and former IBM developer. As Poynter notes, he’s also a beekeeper, which is vaguely scary but also awesome.

and Nieman Lab quoted Jon with:

… multimedia features have become an integral part of the storytelling process at the Times, and as a result they’re often working with different departments, from the foreign desk to the dev team, at any given time.

Nice. For those keeping track, he also came out with this innovative feature after the death of Bin Laden: ”The Death of a Terrorist: A Turning Point?”

And the end, New York Observer got it right by quoting Jon as saying:

In this case it supports the experience of the article.

And, of course, there was the story from Sam Anderson which I also found fascinating.

… and before long I entered the danger zone. I was playing when I should have been doing dishes, bathing my children, conversing with relatives, reading the newspaper and especially (especially) writing. How time-wasting video games escaped the arcade, jumped into our pockets and took over our lives.

Only once did I go on a binge and that was with Metal Gear Solid on xBox. I still remember seeing distant lights in real life and thinking I should be shooting those out. Crazy.

I told her I was going to invent something called the iPaddle: a little screen-size wooden paddle that I would slide in front of her phone whenever she drifted away, on the back of which, upside-down so she could read them, would be inscribed humanist messages from the analog world: “I love you” or“‘Be here now.”

That would be my wife on me… not with games but with the iPhone in general.

There’s another thing that just might make G+ work besides the brilliant Circles function. The highly-visible notification on Gmail:

While, they’re at it, Google might as well take the next steps to:

• Integrate Circles with my Address Book
• Integrate my reading and marking of stories with Reader. Maybe they can make a game out of it?

Smaller self-imposed challenges can spark your creative drive in ways you don’t expect.

Great idea. Excellent exercise. Probably a part of the reason why I make Pocket Memories.

I’m also a big fan of meeting tokens (15-minute tokens that must be paid to attendees of a meeting for their time).

Awesome idea. I’d like to see this implemented… somehow.