I <3 the Internet

Warning stream of consciousness ahead!

Well I guess it all really started from a magazine. Today at work we recieved our regular subscription to Museums magazine. It sounds really exciting, I know but in it was an article by an interesting woman who I sheepishly admit I thought was a man because it was about gaming. She wants to use gaming in all sorts of great ways, including saving the world and having a game designer win a Nobel Prize. In the article she talked about happiness and how video games are really great at producing happiness based on some basic principles happiness researchers (yup they exist) have found. This all connected to museums because she thought museums should be at the forefront of creating happiness and that they could use the principles of gaming to do so.

Sooooo I've been thinking lately about my degree topic (educational technology) and how the part I'm really interested in is individualized instruction. I really think that's where technology has a chance to shine instead of just being annoying and hard to work/incorporate into the classroom.

When I first heard about gaming and ed-tech I thought, 'eh'. I've seen Scott play and play and play and didn't really want to have much more involvement than that. But when my professor described the way games can become really great individualized instructors my interest was piqued.

Anyway, back to Jane McGonigal, who happens to be the lady I was talking about earlier. She's awesome. I found her blog and she has some great stuff there and great ideas in general. I am always a fan of the "make the world a better place" ideas. But doing that while having fun is even better. She talks about how people spend 20 hours a week on World of Warcraft and compares that to the amount of time it's taken to build Wikipedia to it's current state. Basically WOW players could have make Wikipedia in a few months. She also links to this site where you play a game of exchanging and building on ideas the Signtific Lab. Their name bugs me because I always want to pronounce the G. So that was interesting, so is her Top Secret Dance Off. You can browse her blog for yourself to find all these crazy things.

I don't know if this gets anyone else excited, but I can't wait for the future and to meet people like her and to create games to educate people well and change the world and GRRRR just DO something with my life.

p.s. I was going to make a super secret dance and post it, but I made the super secret dance video and decided that it should remain secret.

Everyday--from another view

Hehe Adrienne gives out these privileges too freely, you never know what Sarah, Scott and I could do!


So...I saw something unusual masquerading as the mundane, and it made me think of the blog post that I read just this morning. On a construction site was a gigantic bowl of flowers. Suspended on a crane type thing was a bowl made of peat with live flowers planted in the gaps. They were just breaking ground so this was in an essentially empty field but no one else driving by seemed to give it a second thought, whereas I made my mother pull the car over so I could take a picture for Adrienne's blog.


Adrienne was talking about seeing things as a child does. Now that I have a child I think I take more time to try and see the world through his eyes. What would it be like if EVERYTHING was new. Imagine never having seen your own hand, where each small movement is amazing and where each sensation is exciting. We walk around the house touching different things, a soft pashmina, the mosquito net over the bed, and we show him the beautiful baby in the mirror and hey! mommy is in the mirror too! I can only imagine how exciting each day must be because each day brings a new experience. As adults we have already seen and done these things so many times that they have lost their ability to thrill us. Someday Oliver won't laugh at me when I take my glasses off, or when I put his hand under warm running water. Someday he'll know that he is the boy in the mirror, and it's only use will be to brush his teeth or fix his hair. I am sad to know he'll loose that innocence but I'm happy to show him all the beautiful things in the world, and it helps me to see them all over again.

Well now I have contributed my thoughts, I promise not to hijack this blog too frequently since I technically have my own. I love you Adrienne! Good luck on Thursday!

Everyday

So I figured you all needed a peek into the small things in Adrienne's life. Things like strawberries strewn in the street. I think that's one of my favorite thing about the city, about any city really. I just like to go around noticing things that not everyone takes the time to notice. I once saw an episode of 60 Minutes or Dateline or some such show, and it was about a class at Harvard or Stanford or some such school. The point is that the show was about a class that a professor gave in noticing things. I think maybe it was supposed to be critical thinking skills. But it really emphasized noticing things, such as the arrow in the white space on the Fed Ex logo. Something that's always there, but until you take the time to look and or wonder, you never see it. Ever since I saw that show I've made it a point to walk around seeing things. I couldn't believe I'd never seen that stupid arrow. I figure if I walk around seeing things I might as well share. When I've got a camera around I tend to take pictures of these things and people of course give me strange looks, with good reason. It also makes them look at what I'm looking at, but I think it stays a mystery to them. It's like that time in the movie Blast From the Past, and Brendan Frasier is looking up and smiling, and the people ask him "What is it!?" He says "The Sky!" The adults just look at him funny and the kid says "I see it Mommy." It makes me laugh at apparently nothing a lot too. Maybe if I show you my world, you'll understand my Adrienne-ness.
I love kids. I love the way they see the world. It's so simple. Not simple in the Match.com "I'm a simple kind of guy" way or the simple like Forrest Gump way, just simple as in they title their claymations "The Wonderful Boat of Things." It makes me smile. Especially since their wonderful boat is a paper origami boat, and the wonderful things are cookie cutter shapes made out of clay. Nothing I'd label wonderful, but perhaps they were being more smooth and recognized that they were in the Sony Wonder Technology Lab.
I have a bad habit of laughing at things that seem quirky to me. Thing like three people sitting in a row. Nothing so funny about that, but along with all the cluttered space filled with things like old ribbons from presents past, a museum exhibit chair filled with Elmo DVDs, half a dozen speakers scattered about, some dish washing soap, you get the picture, literally :)
Enough with the philosophizing. The real reason I carried my camera to work was to take pictures of softball. Not only did I not manage to get a single softball picture, but the last two games were so depressing that they wouldn't be worth posting/mentioning if I did. Let's all just hope for a nice fat win for our last game this Thursday.

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this blog will never be the same now that i have co-post privileges...

--Sarah

My Everyday Details Pictures, most of which are not really details but funny things I saw and decided to take pictures of:

How does one get into this line of work? Can you get a degree in it? Vocational school training? We owned a turtle once. It was a gift for my dad's birthday, and he named it Speed Bump. He was constantly shedding and smelled awful, but was sort of endearing in a pathetic way. One day my mom got tired of cleaning his cage and decided to release him at Potter's Marsh. In Alaska.





I ordered lemonbutter crepes at IHOP. Apparently they are incredibly literal in their definition, because I got lemon on one half, and butter on the other. Still yummy though.




I love skywriting. I saw this in Australia and it cracked me up. One time in Arizona my office noticed that something was being written above Tempe Town Lake, but we could only make out part of it. So I played super sleuth and called a friend who worked in the direction of the part we couldn't see, and voila! We had a complete skywriting message. This story would be a lot more entertaining if I could remember the message, but all I know is that it was a happy birthday to Muhammad Ali.





Old people are awesome. Especially when they fall asleep in funny places, like at Goodwill. I hope I'm that cool when I'm his age.







p.s. Go Adrienne's softball team!!!