My esteemed colleague. Steve Song, has written a blog post about an Annotate-ipedia, a shared mechanism to annotate content on the web. It is only an idea at this stage, but a damn good one. We first discussed this concept last year when considering submitting a paper to Innovate journal’s forthcoming special edition on the Future of the Textbook.
Over the holidays I read Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. My copy has an introduction and notes by Richard Maxwell. While the book is brilliant, the notes really made reading it a richer, more enjoyable experience. They set the context, explained links to real people (the novel is historically factual), framed the theme within Dickens’ own personal struggles, etc.
But how much better if I could read notes from others? From school teachers, historians, Dickens’ fans and teens? How cool would it not be if I could ask a question about a particular historical point and have it answered right there, alongside the text? Then the book could become a resource for History students learning about the French Revolution as well as English language learners.
Bring on the Annotate-ipedia!
Note: The only thing that I’ve seen that is related to this is Trailfire, although it’s not exactly what is needed because it let’s users add notes to whole pages only, not to words or paragraphs within pages. (Still, it’s a nice way to create a web trail across different sites that you like, e.g. your 5 favourite blog postings about twitter.)
Published on
January 23, 2009.
Tags: ARG, gaming.
Last week I held a brainstorm at the Shuttleworth Foundation to generate ideas for an educational alternate reality game (ARG) for youth in South Africa (SA).
In the world of learning games, as ARG is a good fit for SA because players don’t need sophisticated equipment, e.g. XBox or PlayStation, to play. Reading the newspaper or being able to receive and send an SMS can be enough to get involved.
As far as I know this will be the first educational ARG in Africa. Attendees included Vincent Maher (who heads up social media at Vodacom), Alixe Lowenherz (education, curriculum and e-learning expert), Danny Day and Marc Luck (game developers), Barry and Patrick Kayton (of Bright Sparks) and Graeme Comrie (advisor to Hip2b2).
While the ARG idea is top secret right now (:-) I can tell you that it’ll involve mobile phones (which cross-media experience in SA wouldn’t). Watch this space in the coming months!
I’m exploring the expanded definition of literacy, which includes not only being able to read and write in print, but also read and write across different media. Living in a networked public — like many of us do — also affects how we think about literacy. This quote from the mission statement of the Institute for the Future of the Book is very interesting:
One major consequence of the shift to digital is the addition of graphical, audio, and video elements to the written word. More profound, however, is the book’s reinvention in a networked environment. Unlike the printed book, the networked book is not bound by time or space. It is an evolving entity within an ecology of readers, authors and texts. Unlike the printed book, the networked book is never finished: it is always a work in progress.
My best read of 2008 was Little Brother by Cory Doctorow, sci-fi writer, co-editor of Boing Boing and general good guy.
San Francisco is hit by a major terrorist attack and the US Department of Homeland Security go bezerk. In the war on terror all basic human rights are hung out to dry and no-one is safe (sound familiar?). The story’s protagonist, seventeen year old Marcus, a.k.a “w1n5t0n,” is not going to take it lying down and unwittingly leads a techno-geek rebellion against this injustice. The novel is action-packed with teenage passion and righteous nerdism and, as Jane McGonical points out, holds “a bold argument: hackers and gamers might just be our country’s best hope for the future.” Alternate reality gaming — which is my “hot thing” for 2009 — is also covered, albeit obliquely, in the book.
The New York Times listed Little Brother as one of the eight notable children’s books of 2008, but don’t be fooled, it’s totally cool for adults too.
(Thank you Mark Surman for leaving a copy in the office, and Steve Song for recommending I read it 
