• a completely new user experience (a Zune HD like experience)
• extensive integration with social networks, such as facebook
• video, music and photo aggregation/mashup like abilities
• office productivity tools
• integration with zune (videos & music) and xbox live (games)
• GPS, maps, search
• and many more features ……

Windows Phone 7 Series Demo

Behind the Desgin

We are only 2 months into 2010 and it seems that this year, Microsoft is going all outs in the Mobile and Gaming Markets, both of which will get hit by critical products during 2010 holiday season:

As a End User:  Make sure not be naughty this year. And if you are reading this blog post Santa, I promise to be a good developer (commenting my code)  and a good individual (helping others).

As a Developer: Make sure to stay connected to the latest and try to attend MIX10 Conference where they will release further details on not only ”Windows Phone 7 Series”, but also Microsoft’s broad web platform and tools that help bring together the clients, servers and cloud services needed for creating great rich web applications.

A very exciting year for both Users and Developers.

2010, the year of creating exceptional user experiences across all devices.

Our event emcees are Shonali Burke, Principal of Shonali Burke Consulting, and DC Hughes, Photojournalist/Multimedia Producer for Lemur News Images and Lemur News Audio.

Shonali Burke & DC Hughes

Beth Kanter

Our first speaker is Beth Kanter, Scholar in Residence, The Packard Foundation. Beth’s first foray into social media included her own blog, and the Cambodia4Kids.Org blog.

Throughout her time in the field, Beth noted four themes in Social media:

• Working in a networked way
• Art of Network Weaving
• Transparency
• Creating a social culture in the organization (behind the firewall)

My favorite of those is network weaving! What is Network-weaving? It is working through a network in a way that makes every node within that network stronger by way of each other node. A sort of Rhizomatic growth, that is, growth where every bud within the organism receives nourishment from the other buds.

Key takeaways from her talk:

• We need to work within our network so it can spread and grow.
• We need to learn and play within transparency.
• We need to work with our clients and our organizations as change agents within the firewall.
• Management should become comfortable with being uncomfortable.

Shel Israel

Next, it’s our keynote speaker: Shel Israel (@shelIsrael). Shel worked for years as a journalist at the Daily Reporter. When he ran into tougher times, he worked into Social Media and blogging. It was his way of doing what he loved, and to do it independently. When he decided to write a book, he was offered just $2,000 for 6 months. It wasn’t until he teamed up with Robert Scoble that he was able to finish Naked Conversations.

He reluctantly joined, then a new social network, Twitter. He was taken by its rapidness and effectiveness in connecting with people. It was finally the James Buck incident (of getting himself out of Egyptian jail using Twitter) that drew Shel to write his next book, Twitterville.

He’s pleased to see the growth of Twitter. Politicians are finally realizing that it is a two-way street. School systems are using it to alert students of closings and events.

“What Social Media allows any institution to do is listen and respond in ways that they could not previously do. And this hits the nerve that we all have. We don’t hate large institutions because they’re large institutions. We hate them because they’d rather spend 50 years [broadcasting and] reducing us to eyeballs…Twitter allows us to see that there are real people in government, in Microsoft…and they start listening and try to do better.”

“Social Media is just a bunch of tools. You could use a tool to build a house or to kill your spouse. It’s really up to you; but the guy who invented the hammer doesn’t have a say.”

“The newspaper industry was not clueless. They saw ‘this’ coming before we did.”

Shel on the future:

• We are entering the normalization phase of Social Media
• We are looking at a slower but steadier growth
• They said about the telephone that businesses would be crazy to let such a device in. But the truth is, “Whoever starts the stuff doesn’t have a lot of say on how the stuff is used.”

Natalia Luckyanova

Next up: Natalia Luckyanova (@nattylux), co-founder of Imangi Studios. Imangi Studios is a two-person operation that builds Mobile games (mainly for the iPhone). They use social media extensively to promote their brand, listen to their gamers, and interact with them.

Beyond just their own marketing, they get plenty of attention from other businesses who wish to create mobile apps for their brands. Being such a saturated market, it is imperative for mobile app developers (especially those associated with the iPhone and AppStore) to generate adequate buzz and excitement pre-launch, and early on. Mobile apps have very short shelf-lives.

Another change in the mobile app world is in the realm of mobile gaming: the realization (finally!) on behalf of game developers and their organizations that they should be marketing  more to women and girls. There are more women in the gaming audience as well as on the development side. One thing Natalia’s team has done is include a very large pool of women in their focus groups.

A great question posed was regarding mobile apps geared toward nonprofits. Beth Kanter pointed out a great resource on this subject: http://gamesforchange.org

Andy Carvin

A very welcome late edition to the speaker list is Andy Carvin (@acarvin), social media strategist at NPR.

Andy worked across the street of the FBI building in Oklahoma City when it was infamous bombing incident took place. He recalled asking the question: “What can the internet do?” And at the time, the answer was simply “Nothing.” There simply wasn’t enough traction, nor sufficient architecture in place. Several years later, in September of 2001, Andy was working in DC. The proximity, the incident, the desire to do something all culminated in Andy building a Yahoo group. This only grew from there. After Hurricane Katrina, Andy built Katrina Aftermath, which describes itself as “A public gallery of thoughts, images and sounds in response to Hurricane Katrina.”

As tools grew, Andy stepped up his efforts to grow and keep active with providing different communities the support they needed, whatever it may have been. His next endeavor came during the election: http://blog.twittervotereport.com/

When the terrorist attacks in Mumbai took place, Andy learned a valuable lesson. Twitter, as a tool for getting news out, was effective only for the first few minutes/hours. From then, the information reached saturation, and most of what was coming out was unreliable or downright wrong. His methods for combating the false information was to track down the only person he knew in Mumbai, and to see whom she was listening to and whom she was re-tweeting.

A similar issue happened in the aftermath of the recent election in Iran. Many people throughout the world changed their Twitter locations to Tehran, Iran, in a very “I’m Spartacus!” moment (his words) to protect the people in Iran posting news no Twitter from being tracked down. But that also threw off the geo-mapping information and accuracy.

“We’ve now reached what you may call in some ways a hashtag crisis.”

So, the key question here becomes: How do you triage trust?

Though he stopped short of answering this question in full, he offered this valuable tidbit. A new project called TrustMap, where people could go and list the names of those that they trust.

–Now, in the Q&A, a great conversation that has come about is the question of ethics in Citizen journalism. Is it ethical for us to broadcast events that are intimate to other people? Legally, what happens in public space can be considered public, but what ethical ramifications are we dealing with when we post information that becomes the means by which relatives may hear about a disaster? Do we want to be the ones breaking that news? Do we want to be the people photographing parents of a deceased child?

–Yet another discussion: How effective are we when we seek to help? Where do we draw the line between meaningful change and slacktivism? Does it make a real impact when we turn our avatar green and change our location setting? Beth Kanter mentioned a guest post she has on her blog the issue of slacktivism.

* * *

Here at BlogPotomac, we just got back from lunch. A quick note: Debbie Weil came on to offer BlogPotomac cofounder, Geoff Livingston some well-deserved recognition. As she pointed out, Geoff has shown an undying dedication to promoting women in the social media and tech space. In all the BlogPotomacs, much care and attention was payed to making sure women were well represented among the speakers lists. Geoff, kudos!!

* * *

Jane Quigley

We are now listening to Jane Quigley, (@jquig99), Vice President of Client Relations at Crayon. As Jane puts it, she’s “the only capitalist here.” She is talking to us about making money on the web.

And the main trend that has been taking over in this regard is the localization of the web. Sites like Group On and CitySource are making a big splash by focusing in on a localized, specific geographic niche.

She also discussed the future of localization, particularly as it relates to Google Wave. Her point was that right now, it’s so easy to get lost in the many “waves,” but what’s effective in this system is when smaller groups break out into collaborative spaces.

Another point of growth for businesses on the web is the creation of APIs. This is another twist on the principle of localization, not so much in a geographical sense in this case, but a topical sense.

Sean Gorman

Our next speaker is Sean Gorman, CEO of FortiusOne. His discussion is on location-based technologies and mapping on the web. Sean is a trained geographer and cartographer. Around 2005, with the simultaneous growth of Web 2.0 and web mapping (and applications such as Google Earth), Sean joined the action and became heavily involved with these emerging technologies.

FortiusOne has been aggregating geographic databases from all around the world. This includes information from where Tweeters are talking about a certain product, to best windsurfing spots, to visual displays of economic growth areas.

A very effective implementation of mapping that Sean was involved with recently was the recent Afghan election, where data coming in about votes were geo-tagged. So as they realized inconsistencies, such as votes being made in one area but the overall numbers that those votes would reflect decreasing, they could spot voter fraud in real time.

–From the Q&A:

Among of the issues location-based services are facing are security and privacy issues. One way some services are standing out and gaining favor is allowing users to customize the granularity of the information they wish to be shown (i.e. location down to city-level, neighborhood-level, or exact location).

Peter Slutsky

And, finally, our final speaker of the final BlogPotomac (I’ll stop redunding now) is Peter Slutsky, Director of Strategic Partnerships of Ning and Co-Founder and CEO of Double Speak Media.

Ning not only provides a platform for niche social communities, but also a way to monetize the platform, whether from ad revenue, or from custom gifts.

He makes a strong case for niche communities: “There’s a less than 50% overlap between people you know and your interests and passions.”

Note: Ning Apps (API) has been launched. They will be holding the Ning Appathon on November 5th, in Palo Alto, CA.

* * *

Well, the event is now officially over. I’m going to mingle and say my goodbyes, but do check back here later for my recap of the event!

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MetroStar Systems is pleased to announce that our X-Life Games project has now surpassed 2,000 registered gamers from all around the world!  Our registered gamers represent 99 different countries and many more different cultures.

Here’s a list of the Top 5 countries and gamers representing X-Life Games:

1. Egypt               438
2. Indonesia        323
3. USA                 214
4. Lebanon          131
5. Jordan             110

We are thrilled about the support from all of our fans from around the world after just 6 months. X-Life Games launched in March 2009 as a pilot project for the U.S. Department of State.  It is a free mobile phone game designed and developed by MetroStar Systems’ New Media Technology team and X-Life Games LLC.  The game features role-playing, trivia challenges, and adventures around the world.  Our mission is to encourage understanding between different cultures in a fun and engaging way.  Visit http://www.xlifegames.com for more info and to download the free mobile games.

You can also keep in touch with the X-Life Games community through our Facebook Fanpage (http://www.facebook.com/xlifegames.community) and follow us on Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/xlifegames).

Today, X-Life Games launches the “Who Am I?” Poetry Contest.  The contest encourages you to use poetry to describe yourself on a global level while sharing ideas of tolerance and respect for other cultures, societies, and environments around the world.

“X-Life Games has been such a fun and educational experience thus far for everybody involved, and we wanted to figure out a way to celebrate this success,” said Daniel Nguyen, Community Manager of X-Life Games. “By coordinating the Poetry Contest, we reward our fans with a challenge that yields fun and exciting prizes, as well as continues promoting cultural unification and understanding through the X-Life Games modules.”

Submissions for the contest will be accepted until midnight on Sunday October 4th.  The VIP Judging panel, featuring MetroStar Systems executives and two professors from Georgetown University, will select finalists.  Then there will be a public voting period beginning Tuesday, October 13 that will ultimately decide the winners.

Prizes:

• 1^st Prize:          Apple iTouch for 1^st place winner & $1,000.00 USD donated on behalf of the winner to a charity of the winner’s choice*

• 2^nd Prize:          Apple iPod Nano for 2^nd place winner & $500.00 USD donated on behalf of the winner to a charity of the winner’s choice*

• 3^rd Prize:          Apple iPod Shuffle for 3^rd place winner & $250.00 USD donated on behalf of the winner to a charity of the winner’s choice*

*MetroStar Systems will provide a list of acceptable charities that the winners can select from to have the respective prize donation donated on the winner’s behalf

The contest will use Wildfire App‘s Promotions application and will be hosted on the X-Life Games fanpage on Facebook.  Please visit http://www.facebook.com/xlifegames.community for complete details, rules, and to enter the contest.

We welcome your comments letting us know your thoughts on the article and the overall concept of the game.  You can also join in the conversation at our X-Life Games Facebook Fanpage.

Article Source: Smart Planet.com

More about Smart Planet:

CBS Interactive has unveiled a new website dedicated to people who realize the need to make our world a better place to live, for all of us, and for generations to come. At SmartPlanet.com, you will find thought-provoking progressive ideas on diverse topics that intersect with technology, business, and life, and matter to the world at large.

Try e-diplomacy out for yourself:

Download the free mobile game at the recently revamped X-Life Games.com website. To join the X-Life Games Community become a Fan on Facebook or follow us on Twitter @xlifegames.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=hE4Pyp2qaYc

X-Life went out to Washington D.C. to ask “What would you do with an X-tra Life?” People had some pretty creative and interesting answers!

Become Part of the X-Life Games Community and leave a comment or your thoughts on the Facebook fan page.

Follow @xlifegames on Twitter: http://twitter.com/xlifegames

Become a Fan of Xlife on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/xlifegames.community

You can also view the video here on YouTube: http://bit.ly/ysZwe

MetroStar Systems is pleased to announce that our X-Life Games project has surpassed 1,000 registered gamers from all around the world.  As of today, we have 1,112 gamers registered from 85 different countries!  Surprisingly, Egypt has the most X-Life gamers at 226.

Here’s a list of the top 5 countries representing X-Life Games:

1. Egypt                226
2. USA                  185
3. Indonesia          78
4. Saudi Arabia     73
5. Lebanon            49

X-Life Games launched in March 2009 as a pilot project for the U.S. Department of State.  It is a free mobile phone game designed and developed by MetroStar Systems’ New Media Technology team and X-Life Games LLC.  The game features role-playing, trivia challenges, and adventures around the world.  Our mission is to encourage understanding between different cultures and to provide an English language learning tool.  I know that sounds pretty deep for a mobile phone game, but we think it is a positive and fun way to engage with the youth around the world; plus it is FREE for anyone who wants to play.

Micah L. Sifry and Andrew Rasiej (both from the Personal Democracy Forum) wrote an article for Politico.com entitled “P2P2G: The rise of e-diplomacy” that features a blurb about X-Life Games as one example of the State Department’s diplomacy initiatives associated with Secretary of State Clinton’s “21st Century Statecraft” theme:

Total views of State Department content on YouTube are up more than 400 percent since Obama’s Inauguration. ExchangesConnect, a cultural exchange social networking site (built on the free Ning.com platform) that focuses on foreign exchange students, recently registered its 10,000th member. And State has even launched an English-language learning game called X-Life, for cell phone users, designed to give users a sense of American life and culture.

In other news, the Wall Street Journal’s Technology section recently published a special “All Things Digital” section.  William M. Bulkeley offered a quiz entitled “How Well Do You Know…The Wireless World” and X-Life Games was highlighted in Question #10:

10) The U.S. State Department spent $415,000 to develop a mobile game called X-Life to improve perceptions of the U.S. in what country or region?

A. Venezuela     B. The Middle East     C. Russia     D. France

ANSWER: B. MetroStar Systems Inc., a Reston, Va., company, created X-Life as a State Department pilot project to see whether e-diplomacy might spread cross-cultural understanding. The game has two role-playing choices: In one, the user’s avatar is a student studying abroad in the U.S.; in the other, the avatar is a musician in a rock band. (Grammy-winning band Ozomatli contributed a song for the game.)

Do you know the wireless world well? You can read the complete quiz here:  Wall Street Journal Quiz

For complete info, news, and free game downloads, please visit http://www.xlifegames.com

Thanks for joining us! Again, some info about the company:

Conference URL: http://www.elearndevcon.com/

Twitter handle: @elearningdevcon

Twitter hashtag: #devcon09

Conference Sponsor: http://www.rapidintake.com/

Today’s first session:

Panel: The Future of Mobile Learning

Moderated by Bob Sanregret

Bob served as CEO of HotLava Mobile, which has since merged with OutStart. He is now VP of Mobile at OutStart.

Panel Members: Jason Bickle of AMX, Nick Floro of SealWorks, and Art Paton of Motorola.

From Left: Jason Bickle, Nick Floro, Art Patton, Bob Sanregret

The key to mobile learning (mLearning): Just get something up. No need for flashy multimedia. Just do something.

• Key subsets of mLearning: Supplemental, Ad hoc.
• In some environments, students are not physically meeting with one another anymore for class assignments. They are meeting via mobile services.
• In 2003, for the first time in history, the number wireless subscribers passed the number of wired subscribers (then, 1 billion; up to 4.1 billion today).
• All learning (mobile included, of course) must be trackable. If you can’t track, you cannot justify the investment.
• Most successful mobile learning applications: Simple graphics, and Text.
• Format for apps: XHTML, and WAP. 95% of phones run Java (JAR) files, but not on iPhones out-of-the-box.
• There are over 375 mobile device configurations. Never launch without first launching a pilot program to discover issues.
• For any course that can be on both eLearning and mLearning platforms, simplify content delivery. It will greatly increase the reach.
• Revisiting content in mLearning: Storyboard standard content, and minimize it as much as possible. Then test it on different devices to find out what works, and what doesn’t.
  • The last few years taught us: Not all instructor-led training can be eLearning.
  • Now we learn: Not all instructor-led training or eLearning can be mLearning.
  • mLearning should enhance instructor led and e-Learning; not (necessarily) replace them.

On to the next session of the day:

Cognitive Learning

with Curtis Morley

Curtis handing graphics to his presenter

Learnability v. Usability – Nothing is usable, until it is learnable.

Curtis is presenting on concepts of learning that bring new interactive methods to teaching, powered by eCANDLE with support from facilitator Agilix. Emphasis is on using talking heads, but they talk out of the box. The talking head moves around the screen, interacts with the screen, captions, even physically places graphics onto the screen.

As the learning is delivered, the user is presented with options as to which path to take, which topic to learn and when. This engages the user and lets her appreciate the learning more–fueled by her ownership of the material and its delivery. The progression of the learning also makes use of machine-learning, as the system includes retention of what paths were taken, which topics already covered.

The impact? They took the content of a 3-hour conference presentation and wrapped it into this method. The material was shortened to fit into 10 minutes (including all different paths). The result of the 10-minute module was significantly better retention and comprehension than the 3-hour presentation.

Cognitive learning: Let your learners hear it, see it, do it.

As the learners were given the material, they were given assessments. In turn, these assessments interacted with the learning modules, to inform them which topics within the modules need to be repeated for the learners, and which do not.

Next session…

Emotional Foundation for Developing Higher Order Thinking in E-learning

with Peter Chan, Thad Scott, and Ryan Dean

Dr. Chan is the founder of the Instructional Design and Development program at Brigham Young University – Hawaii, “which trains students to apply instructional theories and advanced technology in designing effective and efficient instructions in various settings.” (from bio at eLearningDevCon)

From left: Thad Scott, Dr. Peter Chan, and Ryan Dean

Higher Order Thinking (H.O.T.) – Thinking that requires the higher cognitive abilities of the brain: Synthesis, Evaluation, Analysis. (see Blooms taxonomy here and here).

“The significant problems we have cannot be solved with the same level of thinking we were using when we created them.” -Albert Einstein

To start from the basics and work from the ground up: An instructional framework of H.O.T.:

• Emotional State has a direct impact on learning.
  • Primary emotions are our reactive emotions (fear, anger, etc) that we share with animals.
  • Secondary emotions (found in humans, not animals) are what regulate and control our primary emotions.

With these two points in mind, how can we facilitate a positive emotional state for the learner?…

Factors affecting learner emotions in an online environment:

1. Learner’s own psychological status
   1. How does learner feel about course? Do they feel it is relevant to them? Use stories, cases, allegories to establish relevancy.
   2. Do they know how to be successful in the course? State the course structure clearly, and provide study skills. Promote the learner’s metacognition.
2. Interpersonal connection
   1. Increased connectivity leads to positive emotions.
   2. Can the learners connect and share with other learners for support?
   3. Do they know the instructor/content creator?
3. Learning environment
   1. Can learners choose their environment?
   2. Is the instructional environment easy to use and stimulating?
4. Customizability
   1. How much control do the users have over the control of the content?
   2. Can they skip information they already know? Does the system provide a pre-assessment?
   3. Does the system remember the learner (their name, their settings, etc.)?
5. Support
   1. Academic support: does the system solicit feedback from the learner?
   2. Is there technical support provided?

Collectively, a Positive Affective environment can lead to Higher Order Thinking.

Case study: Peacebuilding innitiative headed by the Arbinger Institute and students & faculty at BYU-Hawaii: “A Single Idea that Changes Everything”

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Interactive Video

with Curtis Morley

Second session of the day with Curtis. In his first session (“Cognitive Learning,” above) he demoed videos with highly innovative interactivity.

To begin this session, Curtis is showing us a demo you as well can view at Direct Pointe Solution Overview, all designed in Adobe Flash.

The most important part about all interactive video is not the production, but the pre-production, mainly, the script.

Extensive scripting/storyboarding done in MS Excel

Interactive video window on top of its script/storyboard.

Most of the videos shot are brought in using Adobe Premiere, but for editing purposes, all video was brought into Adobe After Effects. Using After Effects, green screens were very easily removed. And After Effects was a better option than Final Cut Pro and the like, thanks to After Effect’s simplicity in setting cue-points, which can then be easily called by the Action Script code in Flash.

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Well, that brought our day to a wrap. I hope the post has been useful for you. Join in, share with us your thoughts, and leave a comment. Until tomorrow,

-Padawan