Exploring the Design Space of Credibility Tools

Ringmaster Shaun Kane led us in a explorative (and lively) discussion about how to design tools that can help us judge quality and credibility over the Web.

First, he

Fully Mobile City Government

Welcome back to a new year!

This week, Hans Scholl, Raya Fidel, Monica Liu, Kristene Unsworth and Kari Holland initiated a conversation surrounding their project on the mobile city government. “mCity” is about understanding how mobile technology can improve field operations and vice versa. Cases included wildly successful deployment of mobile technology to certain sub-organizations as well as more troubled deployment (for reasons still being explored).

Beyond self-monitoring: Designing systems to support sustained behavior change

Presenter: Pedja Klasnja

People try to change their behavioral patterns, but they often face difficult decisions based on conflicting desires. For example, a person on a diet has decided that he wants to change his eating habits. However, he encounters a dilemma at 7pm at night. He is standing before a fridge and has to decide between the gratification of a slice of pizza and the delayed gratification of being healthy. This dilemma applies to areas such as drug-program compliance, dieting, or recovering from addictions.

There exist strategies to help this person. Among the possibilities, can we help this person be more explicit about their choices or be more conscious about their decisions? This, so that they might better assess the implications of their decisions in the future. Perhaps ubiquitous technologies can provide a solution because they can be by the person’s side when such dilemmas arise and because they could sense the physical context of these dilemmas.

Serious Games

speaker: Ruth Fruland

Introductory Link: http://www.seriousgames.org/index2.html

Excerpt: Games have the potential to teach complex system rules such as chemistry or physics in a more compelling style than the traditional classroom. This is possible because games, by their nature, facilitate deep engagement with a set of rules and boundaries by the player. As the player masters a game, he will master the rules. Examples of this are other games such as Peacemaker [video].

Games also can teach social skills. Game worlds are populated by hundreds of thousands to millions [WOW], [Second Life],  [EQ], etc…. They are places where people are learning social skills through their in-game interactions. Some are learning about new perspectives and roles by using different avatars.

Questions:

We have said that serious games should be developed by teachers and everyone. How does this change the division between producer and consumer (of knowledge?)?

There is a debate about how games can teach violence. Some argue that games do not teach violence. Does this contradict the position of serious games initiatives?

Creating (Library) Value in the age of the Amazoogles

Stu Weibel presented his thoughts on how to better share the value in libraries with the world.

• This is motivated by the business model of libraries:
  • To make our services look free to the end-users.
  • We need a return on investment (Make sure our consitituents are aware of our value)
  • And a return of Patrons
• What is valuable in a library?
  • Societal
    • Long term authoritative curation of the cultral technical and scientific assets of a society
    • Information Neutrality
    • Public Trust (People trust librarians)
  • Technical
    • Systems

Short Summary: To push value out and to achieve a return on investment and patrons, we should follow the lessons of Web 2.0 to compete with Amazon and etc… We need to weave libraries into the Web by providing services such as Recommendations, Reviews, and other Social Software. LibraryThing.com is a significant example of a Web 2.0 library site that has become very prominent.

Book reviews ought to be first-class objects: Harvestable, Attributable, Linked, Persistently identified and Curated.

We need to be sensitive to the Page-ranked economy and adopt strategies that will place our websites higher than Amazon.com in the result list.

In sum, libraries must compare favorably with related information experiences that our patrons expect.

There were some discussion points …