Saturday, March 15, 2008

certified 2.0 genius

Got my certificate, button, MP3 player. But stopping now would invalidate the learning, right? Let me recommend Halting State by Charles Stross. Set about 10 years into the future, it is a mashup of IT security risks, infowar espionage, and ARGs. Imagine that people participating in a sort of role-playing game are being used unwittingly as tools by a foreign government.

The book got me thinking about other possible uses of ARGs, so I did some surfing and found World Without Oil. Don't know how I missed this last year. But maybe before Learning 2.0 I wouldn't have appreciated it? Anyway, it integrates many of the tools from L2 to create a simulation of a social policy crisis and invites everyone to play along. It calls this wisdom of crowds but I think it is closer to civic engagement. I think the wisdom of crowds is simply Adam Smith's invisible hand - the cumulative effect of the self-interest of many. World Without Oil, however, invites imaginative participation with no advantage to self interest - in other words, what's good for the community. I am thinking this may be a better model for civic engagement in the future than sitting around in deliberation groups, National Issues Forum style. It seems like there ought to be some sort of game that would cultivate information skeptics as well.

2 comments:

Diane Wetterlin said...

Congrats on being a genius!!

WriTerGuy said...

You may be right about the wisdom of crowds. I tend to blur it with "crowdsourcing" but they're not the same thing. What's important is the additive effect: in World Without Oil, it was the emerging and interactive nature of the narrative. People saw and responded to other people's stories, with the aim to build something. This turns out to be way different than a debate about possibilities, even though the narrative is fictional.