Serious Games for Serious Business

December 10, 2008 By

This is a guest post by Marigo Raftapoulus

Gaming technology, interactive media, digital entertainment and knowledge industries are converging to create new forms of learning. Learning 2.0, in the form of ‘serious games,’ allows people to learn new skills and experiment with different strategies in ‘safe-fail’ environments. Serious games build in safe-fail experimentation based on the premise that through failure we learn more about the problem that we want to solve through adaptive learning. In contrast, ‘fail-safe’ environments tend to stifle experimentation and innovation through an ensuing ‘fear of failure’ culture that tends to develop in such environments.

So what does a serious game look like? Check out this demo for a game designed to train emergency response paramedics in case of a terrorist attack (warning! Scenes are bloody).

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Brain Rules by John Medina

December 3, 2008 By

If you read only two books about the brain, Medina’s Brain Rules should probably be your second one (thanks Kapsio, for the recommendation), after Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat. If you’ve been reading this blog for more than a few months, you might remember a post I did nearly a year ago called The Broken Brain Books. Let me repeat the quote from Steven Johnson’s Mind Wide Open that I used to start that post:

…while it is interesting to find out [the] exact addresses [of brain functions], that information is ultimately unsatisfying. Call it the “neuromap fallacy.” If neuroscience turns out to be mostly good at telling us the location of the “food craving center” or the “jealousy” center,” then it will be of limited relevance to ordinary people seeking a new kind of self-awareness — because learning where jealousy lives in your head doesn’t make you understand the emotion any more clearly. Those neuromaps will be of great interest to scientists of course, and doctors. But to the layperson, they will be little more than trivia.

By this critique (which I wholeheartedly agree with), most ‘brain’ books are a big waste of trees. Medina, thankfully, avoids this trap, and doesn’t even mention fMRIs till fairly late into the book, and when he does, he steps away lightly from pointless fMRI-pornography. That leaves us with 12 brain rules, each of which gets a chapter. The chapter on short-term memory for instance, is titled “repeat to remember.” Well Duh! you might say. Fortunately, there are deeper insights buried within. Despite appearances, the book isn’t an exercise in providing unnecessary proofs for folk-tautologies.

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Future-of-Work Mini-X-Prizes at Cloudworker.org

December 1, 2008 By

The easiest way to predict the future, as Alan Kay said, is to invent it. Some friends of mine, over at a stealth design/innovation startup called WilsonCoLab, decided to start a site dedicated exclusively to this task at www.cloudworker.org, which beta-launched today with a neat contest (seriously flattering to have a word you coined taken this seriously!). Cool logo, eh?

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The Ideology of the Organization Man

November 23, 2008 By

Recap: Last time I introduced William Whyte’s 1956 classic, The Organization Man within a modern context, and we got as far as Chapter 1. We saw that Whyte set himself the project of describing, carefully if unsympathetically, the collectivist, anti-individualist ‘social ethic’ that provided the foundations for modern corporations. In this post, I will cover Chapters 2-5 (Part 1 of the 7-part, 29-chapter book).

Here’s a short version of the argument in Part 1, titled the Ideology of the Organization Man. Intellectual culture and practical concerns conspired, between 1940-1960, to create a pseudo-scientific socialist culture within the capitalist corporation. What began as an instrument to co-opt unionism ultimately swallowed middle management, and the organization man was born. Where the previous century, 1840-1940 had been dominated by colorful figures from the top and bottom — robber barons and fiery unionists — post WW II American culture was defined and dominated by the middle layers. Whyte argues that this layer managed to suck the soul out of leadership and grassroots passion alike. Like the labor union culture, and unlike the robber-baron culture, it was group-oriented. Unlike the labor unions though, it was not primarily about unity against oppression or about worker rights. It was primarily about a corporate deification of the values of community: belongingness and togetherness. A belief in cooperation and consensus for their own sake.

Let’s do the longer version, and as we do so, keep this deja vu question in mind: are ‘social’ media falling victim to the same collectivist dangers today?

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The Organization Man by William Whyte: Introduction

November 18, 2008 By

William Whyte‘s 1956 classic, The Organization Man is far too embedded culturally to be ‘reviewed’ today, even as a classic. The book can only be read within its context, and reconstructed for 2008. It is also much too dense and nuanced to dispose off in a single post, like I do most books. So I am going to start my first-ever multi-part series devoted to a single book; the book that began the study of worker archetypes, 52 years ago. If you want to follow along, make sure you buy the 2002 reissue edition, with a great foreword by Fortune Magazine executive editor, Joseph Nocera. Since I have to do a bit of setup, in this first part, I’ll only get as far as Chapter 1. In future parts, I’ll try to do 3-4 chapters at once.

Let’s start by reviewing the cultural impact of the original. The best-known artifact of course, is Apple’s famous 1984 commercial (YouTube video here), which owes as much to Whyte as to Orwell for its arresting imagery.

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Spanning Silos by David Aaker

November 14, 2008 By

The full title of this book, Spanning Silos: The New CMO Imperative, might lead you to believe that it is a very narrow take on a particular organizational issue (silos) within one enterprise function (marketing). You’d be wrong. This is a wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing book; a book about foundational issues in organization theory masquerading as a specialist read for marketers. I have previously written about silos (see The Silo Reconsidered), so this was definitely not a blank-slate subject for me. I was prepared to be underwhelmed, but to my pleasant surprise, I thoroughly enjoyed the book. It is a quick and easy read, but surprisingly substantial.

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Is There a Cloudworker Culture?

November 9, 2008 By

When one of my regular readers IM’ed me, “I hope you write about cloudworker culture next,” I almost panicked. All I had in my head at the time was a dark three-word post: “there isn’t one,” accompanying a sort of desperately humorous image: Alberto Giacometti’s famous sculpture Chariot, holding a Starbucks coffee cup and a Blackberry at her hip. The original sculpture suggests a sort of sombre existential loneliness. Add Starbucks and the Blackberry, and the gravitas of the original degenerates to an anxious farce. A tragic farce, because the figure is still lonely. My modest photoshop skills turned out to be up to the task, so here is the mashed-up image I started with, in my head.

Mashup elements courtesy MOMA, Starbucks and RIM

Cloudworker by Rao (2008); Mashup elements courtesy MOMA, Starbucks and RIM

Immersed in the farcical post-existential loneliness of the Cloud, the cloudworker’s cultural life just might be no more than an impoverished buzz of emoticons. The highlights of his cultural life might be fleeting, unsatisfying encounters with co-cloudworker strangers whose gaze he holds for a second longer than necessary at Starbucks, but does not engage. A condition worse than that of Chuck Palahniuk’s hero in Fight Club, who at least found connection and community by beating other men to a pulp.

If the Giacometti sculpture is too high-brow for you, consider a more popular literary image: Mark Twain’s unforgettable King and Duke characters in Huckleberry Finn, drifting down the Mississippi. Rulers of a Micro-Balkan virtual kingdom on a raft. Farce once again.

But then I figured I was being too dark, and did come up with a bunch of ideas that suggest that a cloudworker culture is emerging. I figured I’d let you ponder the question for yourself before sharing my answer.

So what do you think? Is there a cloudworker culture, or are all us cloudworkers doomed to the socially and culturally empty life suggested by my art mashup?

The Cloud President, Obama

November 5, 2008 By

If Truman was the Nuclear President, Kennedy the Space President, and Eisenhower the Interstate President, Obama will be the Cloud President. Ever since the United States assumed the mantle of global technology leader at the end of World War II, each administration has become associated with a significant technology that radically altered the world. The relationships between presidents and the technologies historically associated with their administrations have been varied. Presidents have caused, benefited from, or been out of touch with contemporaneous technology-driven socio-economic shifts. Presidents who managed to manifest the ethos of the technologies that matured on their watch have been perceived as with-it. Those who failed have had problematic presidencies. Before tackling Obama, cloud culture, green thinking and energy, let’s consult the list of post WW-II presidents for reference.

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The Corporate College and Other Election 3.0 Ideas

November 3, 2008 By

I rarely react to the news on ribbonfarm, since I prefer to focus on relatively long-term stuff. But tomorrow’s election is historic in too many ways to not comment on.  This is definitely an Election 2.0; everything from the public user-generated (and Tina Fey generated) construction of Sarah Palin’s persona, to Obama’s use of mobile phones, says that something fundamental is changing in the age-old social technology of the election. So much so, that the structural revolutions are almost overshadowing the cultural ones (a black candidate and two prominent women in the race). But 2008 is the beginning of a long-term period of evolution in the infrastructure of participatory governance, not an end point. In search of some new thoughts on elections, I came up with the following set of (possibly hare-brained) ideas on how elections can, and should, change, from the Election 2.0 model of today, to the Election 3.0 model of the future.

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My First Book, A Board Game and ‘Cloudworker’ on the NYT

October 31, 2008 By

It’s been a busy week here at ribbonfarm, and it’s ending with a bang. Two news items — my first book project, and a board game — that should interest you, if you’ve been following the evolution of the site. Both were mentioned today in a piece about ribbonfarm by Marci Alboher, in the NY Times Shifting Careers blog. Marci also mentioned my concept of cloudworker, which still needs your votes to displace ‘telecommuter’ in the Plantronics contest. Please go vote for ‘cloudworker’ (once a day until Nov 7), but first read about my book and board game projects.

And to NY Times readers coming to ribbonfarm.com for the first time, welcome! Since Marci writes about work-life issues, I assume that theme interests you. So check out my work-life category, which has plenty of juicy articles on the topic. I hope you like what you read, and decide to subscribe to my RSS feed.

Let’s start with the book.

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