Robert Semper
Welcome to this session on "Innovation – New Media and Platforms. " The goal of the session is to explore the opportunities that new media provide to close the gap between science and society. To do that we have invited four speakers to deliver 15 minute presentations each. We then will start a discussion with them and the audience about this question of the potential and the power of new media and new platforms, to meet this goal. At the beginning, I wanted to give a brief introduction, kind of setting the stage for the question, and then I’ll introduce our panelists one by one, as we go through the presentation.
I want to start the session with an acknowledgement that actually we’re a new media but we come out of a strand of old media. Here’s a number of the projects that certainly had an influence on my life in different ways, everything from Mr. Wizard up here (Don Herbert), to the films we saw in high school (Our Mr. Sun of Frank Baxter, the Bell Labs films), to reading Scientific American, to watching The Wonderful World of Disney, which did wonderful programs in the fifties and sixties on the IGY (you may remember), to reading fantastic books (like Steven Hawking’s A Brief History of Time), Science magazine, Nature, Science Times. I also have to leave a slide here for Faraday, probably one of the best popularizers of science, with his famous Christmas lectures in England.
The reason I put the traditional medium up is that I think we need to remember that while we’re going to talk about new media today, it’s actually true that a lot of the forms, a lot of the juice that gives our new media the excitement that it has, are based on the same paradigms and the same work, the same social activities that are actually part of these media as well. This is not a complete change. It’s actually an evolution, I would say. Some might say it’s a revolution. My panelists may disagree. But I would argue, from the way it impacts people, I would say it’s actually evolutionary.
So we’re talking about innovation. One of the things that’s important about innovation is actually the step of beginning to learn. And new media is quite new, and that means our learning curve is quite steep. I always like to start talks with this next slide, because it shows the years to attain market share—25 percent market share in this country of a lot of things. So over here is the airplane: 54 years to get 25 percent market share. Household electricity. We get to the telephone: 35 years to get 25% percent market share. VCR, 34 years. Television, 26. Radio, 22. Personal computers, 15. Cell phones, 13. Internet, 7. That means in 7 years we reached 25% percent market share. This of course is long past. But the rapidity of this introduction of technology means that we’re still actually learning how to use it. And in fact the whole notion of going to Web 2.0 is an example to me of just beginning to see how this new medium is going to play out. We’ve already gone through one revolution in the medium in a matter of five or six years, which is pretty extraordinary.
So as part of the learning curve that we went through at the Exploratorium, we commissioned the Pew Internet & American Life Project to do a study of the Internet as a resource for news and information about science. And I want to spend a few minutes giving you some of the highlights of the study. You can see the URL down there ( HYPERLINK "http://www.pewinternet.org" www.pewinternet.org).
This is a national survey study, a telephone survey (in other words, the data is correct for the entire national population of adults), about the use of the Internet for science news. And I have five slides to show a little bit of the highlights. I’m not going to read all of them. You can read them. But I want to give you some sense of what their findings were.
When asked where they get most of their news and information about science, 20% percent of all Americans say they turn to the Internet for most of the news. That’s 40 million adults. That’s second only to television, to which 41 percent go for their news. And newspapers are only 12-14 percent. So the Internet is now far and away the second most used communication channel to get information.
But it’s more interesting than that. It turns out Internet users with high-speed Internet connection are equally likely to cite the Internet as TV, as the medium from which they get their news about science. And actually for young adults, it’s the most popular by far, compared to television. So it’s a medium now that has caught up, and for young adults, surpassed television, which up until now has been the prime medium for news-gathering about science.
It’s also true that the Internet turns out to be the place that people turn to first if they want specific information about science. Sixty-seven percent said that if they were going to get answers to questions about stem cells they would use the Internet. And you can see the other data: 59 percent for climate change, 42 percent for the origins of life on earth. These are people who would go first to the Internet to get their science news. It’s the medium of choice.
And here’s just a list of the kinds of things people have done on the Internet, with large percentages of the Internet online users (which is 128 million adults). Seventy percent look up the meaning of a scientific term; 68 percent answer a question about a scientific concept or theory; 65 percent learn more about a science story they’ve been thinking about by going online; 55 percent complete assignments for school, whether it’s for themselves or for their children; 52 percent check the accuracy of a scientific fact; 43 percent download data from the Internet; 37 percent compare opposing scientific theories. It’s really being used as a prime medium for people to learn about science.
This is the most interesting fact in the study, from my point of view, which is a discovery that actually happenstance plays a significant role in the use of the Internet for science. Two-thirds of Internet users say they came across news about science when they were looking for something else. Of course, the nature of the medium is, it’s all linked, so you find something else when you’re looking for something. But this really turns on its head a sense that we have that science programming, for example, is only driven by particular science interest or by a need to look at something particularly about science. This really talks about how a medium can be quite different in terms of the way people use it.
At the Exploratorium, since about 1988, we’ve been exploring with our museum to understand a little bit how this new medium, the first guises of the new medium, can be used to talk about science and to bridge the gap between science and society. And I thought in the remaining few minutes of my opening remarks, I would actually show you some of the things that I think I’ve begun to learn through some of our experiments. I’m not going to talk very much about the experiments. I want to give you a framework, so as we hear the other talks today, we might think about whether some of these framework pieces make sense.
So there are three things I want to talk about briefly. One is the fact that this new medium really helps us access reality. It can really be about real science, not school science. It’s an opportunity to get connected to the world of science directly. Second, that it is a medium that helps us create presence. It shows that science can be a human activity. It’s an opportunity to see that people are doing science every day. And the thing I’m going to talk briefly about is supporting dialogue, that science can be about science in society, not science and society, which is the title of our talk. So I’m going to give you a few examples from each of these, just to give you a sense of what I’m talking about.
Accessing reality. Most of you know that the Web, of course, was invented not as a device to sell products or books, or to rent movies, or any of that. It was invented to share data, live data, from this accelerator in CERN in Geneva, the particle accelerator, in particular the ALEPH experiment that was built there. For all of the researchers from all over the world doing the research, and for all the data that was coming online live, they needed a system to share that data. And Tim Berners-Lee worked on developing that system, and that’s the origin of the Web. So the Web actually came from a point connecting with real science. It actually was a tool of doing science, at its origin.
So one of the things that’s interesting is that you can actually use the Internet to access real data. These are projects where there are real pictures of the sun, real curves of the water temperature. Real data lives online because scientists do science online, and therefore there’s an authenticity of a connection to science that’s possible.
You can also participate in real discovery. The pictures from the Mars Rover were posted within minutes of their being signaled to the Earth from Mars. That’s an extraordinary opportunity to see real data, real discovery, to participate in a major discovery event of our time.
And there are real meetings. This is a project where a correspondent was at an El Niño meeting (it was in the Galapagos) and actually posted commentary for the public about the work that was happening in an authentic science meeting. Again, it’s part of authentic science: authentic data, authentic discovery, authentic meeting or conversation. People could participate in that.
Creating presence. In this picture, that circle is actually the lab where Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin. When you stand in that lab and watch and spend time around the devices that he used to discover it, you get an amazing experience of presence. This is actually where it happened. And the new medium can help us develop presence through a number of different techniques. For example, you can actually create field trips or virtual tours of places. In this case, it’s part of an Origins Project where the team went to a field site in Belize and actually Webcast from the location where scientists were doing research. It gave a place-ness, a presence to this process of science. It wasn’t just reading about the outcomes or the facts.
Or you can have a real event, like a solar eclipse, where you can actually broadcast to the world an event of scientific interest happening somewhere in the world (in this case, Zambia in the middle of Africa). People around the world can see and participate in this event.
Or a real laboratory. This is a picture of a program Webcast from SLAC, where they’re actually scanning a palimpsest—a text that was written by Archimedes and then covered over in later times. They’re scanning for the actual script that he wrote, to decipher it using the accelerator at SLAC, and in real time they were uncovering the data so that other people could participate in that discovery.
And finally, supporting dialogue. This is a quote from Daniel Yankelovich, who is probably the brightest person I know who talks about presenting science to the public, because he’s actually in marketing, not in science. You may know of him from his firm, Public Agenda. His quote says, "In today’s public domain, scientists are not nearly as influential as they should be. The point is to better engage the public. Scientists should shift the goal from science literacy to the goal of reaching sound public judgment of scientific issues, and using specialized forms of dialogue to advance this goal. " The reason I put this in is, I notice a lot of our conversation tends to be about: if people know more, they’ll be better at doing these discussions. It’s actually probably not the case. And I would argue that new media can actually help us support these kinds of dialogues, whether you can have real discussions in a public setting, in a Webcast environment where other people can participate, or if you can have a real experience.
In this case, this is a Web site that was built in 1995, around the anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki, which was one of the first experiences that I had of seeing people start to dialogue, and of having people write in saying, "My father was a navigator on the plane, and this is what it meant to me, " or other people responding in this active way. It really showed the power of stuff we all know very well now, of course, which is dialogue on the Web.
Or real life. There’s an opera that was just written about the making of the atomic bomb, called Dr. Atomic. And we were able to annotate the synopsis of the opera with scientific facts. And the reason I put this slide in is to talk about how science is part of a social life. Real science is part of real society and real life. And again, the medium can help us do that.
We’re going to now move on to our four presentations. We’re going to hear from different people talking about the convergence of media, how Web and television, new media and old media can come together. We’re going to hear about making personal connections through the world of blogging. We’re going to hear about how new media present science in a more traditional museum setting, and we’re going to talk about the potential of gaming and the relationship of that to science. And I think all of these are going forward now, from the platform where we are now, moving into looking at the new potential for the new media.
Audience
I’m Bill Snyder from Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and I do a research magazine. My question to you is, based on Yankelovich’s quote, how can you form sound public judgments without scientific literacy?
Robert Semper
I have a story to tell. Maybe people know that the Exploratorium was started by Frank Oppenheimer. Frank Oppenheimer was J. Robert Oppenheimer’s brother, and worked on the Manhattan Project with his brother. Frank told a story about being in Congress, getting ready to testify for NSF funding, when the Public Understanding of Science funding was coming up. He was with a colleague, Joel Bloom from the Franklin Institute. And Joel said, "I’m going to talk about how it’s important to have scientific knowledge to make good public judgment. " And Frank, some of you may know, was always a contrarian. And he said, "My brother and Edward Teller knew more about the hydrogen bomb than anybody in the country, and they completely disagreed on what to do about it. " So I think the point that I was trying to make there is that even if it’s probably not possible, as scientists (I’m a science educator-scientist) I’d like people to understand. It’s probably not possible for them to understand enough to actually get to the level where I might think I’d like them to be to dialogue. And it turns out it’s probably not so important, because people make decisions, public-policy decisions and everything else, probably more on a heuristic basis, on a common-sense basis, than they do on a factual basis. Usually the facts align, actually, but it’s not exactly knowledge that is the key thing. And I think that’s what that quote means to me, anyway.
I now want to introduce our first speaker, who is Lauren Aguirre, who is the executive editor for NOVA’s award-winning Web site, which was launched in 1996. So it’s actually ten years old, which is great.
Lauren Aguirre
My first slide is titled NOVA "New " Media, "new " in quotation marks because in my curmudgeonly fashion, it annoys me that we say "new media " but most of the time, or a lot of the time, it’s old media that’s being distributed in new ways. But it is true that that new form of distribution opens up new opportunities for people to engage with the audience. It creates new expectations about what they can do with the content.
Just to back up a little, NOVA has been on the air for 34 years now. Back in 1995, we said, "Hey, I think this Internet thing is going to be kind of big, so we should have a site. We should have a page. " And then we realized, well, maybe it should be more than a page. I was a science editor at the time, and because I had gone to MIT, the executive producer said, "Why don’t you do that? " The truth is, I had never programmed and I still have never programmed. But really we felt like it was going to fulfill the promise of—We’ve always hoped that when people watch a show, they’re engaged and they want to know more. And the Web site offered an opportunity for people to know more kind of directly, not to have to go to a library, although that’s still great when people do that. But that we could really have material that was directly related, and go into stories and areas where the film couldn’t go for whatever reason.
We produce 23 shows a year, and 23 companion Web sites to go with them. And we think of three different audiences. The pre-broadcast audience—and our hope is that that Web site is going to make them say, "Gee, I’d really like to watch this show. " Then there is the immediate broadcast audience, the people who watched it and want to know more about an interview, or want to go more in-depth into a topic that clearly the show had to kind of hand-wave, because it was too complicated for TV. And then the biggest audience is really the "whenever " and also increasingly the "wherever " audience. And so we have to make sure that our site works for people who’ve never watched the show.
There’s another way of looking at our audience, which is the type of people that they are. We have a lot of people who want to know more about how the towers fell. So they’ll go online. We have a lot of accidental learners. They’ll type in "pyramids " because they’re planning a trip to Giza, and actually if you type in "pyramids " on Google, the number one result is our Web site, particularly because it’s good, but partly because it’s old. It’s been there for ten years, so we have lots of links to it. We have people who are curious but they really don’t have any kind of strong science background. And then we have people who really know what they’re talking about. We have Nobel Prize-winners who will write in and say, "You know, that feature was good but it was kind of boring. "
So how do we serve all those audiences? Well, fortunately, on a Web site you can have a lot of discrete features, so we can have a variety of formats. People learn in different ways. We can have text, images, audio, video. We have a variety of levels. Some of our pieces are geekier than others, and we’ll try to signal that in the way we headline them and title them. And then a variety of tone: sometimes it will be light, and sometimes not.
Here’s an example of what I think is a truly interactive piece which really uses the Web well in terms of engaging someone who’s intensely interested in a topic. We call them interactive polls. This one is on stem cells. Internally we call them interactive provocations, because we ask a simple question, that’s actually not simple when you look at it more deeply, and then we ask people to vote. Should people study therapeutic stem-cell research? If you answer yes, you get a reason why that wouldn’t be good. And if you answer no, you get the reason why it would be good. And so we cycle through these questions, usually about seven. And at the very end, you’re presented with all the questions and all the pro and con arguments, and then you vote. So we’ve done about four or five of these, and we learn as we go. We’ve been tweaking it.
One thing we learned is, when you’re doing a topic that is important to the public, they’ll try to change the results. We had a poll on genetically modified foods that had been sort of humming along for a year or two, and suddenly we got a call from—I think it was Earth Watch. And they said, "You know what? Your results have changed, and they shouldn’t have. " And so we went and looked at the logs, and people were hacking in and voting multiple times. So we had to go in and reprogram it, and have the kind of thing when you’re buying tickets online, with the character recognition. So we learn as we go.
This is an example of old media but on a new platform. We streamed our first full program in 1999, about "Dying to be Thin. " And what we’ve learned there is, we have a lot of new audiences. We have a lot of people who don’t own a TV, who just don’t remember that NOVA is on at 8:00, or can’t watch NOVA at 8:00. And so now what we’re learning is, the TV broadcast is really the beginning, not the end of the project, and it has a life for many, many years afterwards. And whenever we stream a show, that Web site really becomes far more popular than your typical companion Web site.
Streaming the show also fulfills that promise of allowing someone to delve deeper into a topic, but much more seamlessly, because we have these so-called Web markers, which are actually embedded into the video. So if you’re watching, you can click on that "Behind the Scenes " link if you’re interested. It will pause the video, take you directly to that Web feature, and then you can go back. Of course producers hate this, because they’ve carefully constructed this narrative that’s on a roll. But it’s the way other people want to interact with our content. So we now have, I think, 22 programs online, and a lot of people come and watch them, even when they’ve been up for years and years and years.
I’m calling this the "accidental podcast, " because I think we wouldn’t have predicted pretty much anything that’s happened on the Web, except that it would be important. And this podcast actually started out as a Web feature. We were thinking, for "e=mc2, " a program we did a couple years ago, it’s a tough topic, and we wanted to get at it in a number of different ways. We thought, Wouldn’t it be fun if you were at a cocktail party and you could talk to the ten best people in physics who could explain it to you in two minutes? So we kind of laughed about it, and then we said, "Well, why don’t we do that? " And we went out to people. We didn’t say, "You have two minutes, " but we said really one to three minutes. And they all gave us really great but really different little two-minute explanations of the equation. And then we said, "Hey, that could be a podcast. " Now, there were people who said, "That’s not a podcast. That won’t be successful. " But we’re really in a mode of: well, let’s try it and see. There’s really no great cost to having a podcast, once you’ve got the material.
[podcast played]
We never in our wildest dreams would have expected that this would be as popular as it became. It actually rose to the number two position overall on iTunes. Like who would know? Ten physicists talking about e=mc2. And we also launched another podcast—NOVAscienceNOW, which is a miniseries with NOVA—that went to number one. We definitely had the advantage of being in early, before there was much good material. So I think that made a difference, and that’s a lesson in terms of getting in early, when you can do it without a lot of money spent.
We also started experimenting with video podcasts, and there are a number of pretty cost-effective ways that you can do that. Our producers often come back and they’ve shot a scene that they can’t use, or they’ve actually edited the scene that they can’t use. And with enough clever setup, you can make that work as a video podcast. And in cases where the rights aren’t a problem, you can actually just make a quick piece from a show, a video podcast. I’m just going to play this for you, because I know it’s late in the afternoon and maybe it will help us wake up. [podcast played]
We just loved that so much that we wanted to share it with as many people as possible, which is why we also made it a video podcast in addition to its being part of our broadcast. And that’s another thing that we’re really struggling with. In a very crowded market, with people now having 500 channels to choose from, how do you make a difference, and how do you get noticed? Because not that our content is perfect, it could definitely be better sometimes, but what we’re hearing is that people like it once they know about it. They just don’t always know about it, especially younger people. So we have to try to go out and be where they are, and hopefully put out little crumbs there and bring them back to our site, or bring them back to our broadcast. So that’s why we have a couple of social-networking pages. We have a MySpace page and a Facebook page.
I’m going to quickly turn the corner now and say that in addition to putting our stuff out there, we’ve always been interested in hearing back from our audience and engaging more with them. And this started actually ten years ago, where we used to have online adventures and the producer would be out there in the field, reporting—it was in some ways an early blog—reporting daily on their producing. And we would hear back from the audience via email, and it would help them make a better film.
So we actually launched a site in November for a program that’s in production, where we put the script up, the draft script, and we said, "Here’s who we’re going to interview. Here’s when. Send us your questions. If you could interview Amory Lovins, what would you ask him? " We’re getting great questions. We have a discussion board. But they’re kind of like, "Well, here are our questions; but even more, here’s our video. Can you use our video? " So we’re kind of struggling with all the material that we’re getting, and how we can incorporate it. We obviously can’t use it all in the show, but it will also help make, I think, a better Web site. So there’s some of the stuff we’re getting. And we’re hoping, if we get the funding, that in the end, after we’ve made the finished show, we can also make some of the materials (extended interviews, animations, scenics) available as open content under a Creative Commons license, for people to remix and make their own presentations with.
We really have no idea what’s next. We just know that the audience expects more. And so we’re just trying to be strategic about where we try things, and just keep experimenting because you never know what’s going to be successful.
Audience
Mine is not necessarily a comment, but my name is Lauren. I’m from Mass. Maritime. Hi, everyone. I’m having a really good time at this conference, and this is just for Lauren. I actually am on Facebook and I’m in your group of NOVA, and I love the messaging because I’ve watched a couple things from NOVA just from getting that input. It really shows me how it really does help with that gap in society. You are reaching out to the college-level students and getting them interested in something I would never have watched before, but because I got that message, just say, "Hey, go look at this at 8 o’clock, " I actually turned on my television and watched it. So I just wanted to let you know that it’s working.
Audience
Lauren, I’m a fan too. Every single example that she used is one that I myself have seen. And so you reach into all kinds of neat places, including the museum professional world.
Robert Semper
So our next speaker is Mike Zyda, who is at GamePipe Laboratory at USC, director of the Viterbi School of Engineer’s GamePipe Laboratory, professor of engineering practice in the USC Department of Computer Science. He’s going to talk about gaming and the future of gaming for science and society.
Michael Zyda
I just thought I would show you a picture of our lab. It at times gets very crowded. We grew from no students a year ago to 120 students this semester, in our new degree program. So just a tweak of history. I’ve only been at USC since January 2005. Before that, I was at a school in Monterey called the Naval Postgraduate School. And I was there 21 years. I founded this thing called the MOVES Institute, which is the Modeling Virtual Environments and Simulation Institute. I grew it from no faculty to 70 faculty and staff and $20 million in research funding in four years. And the two-star admiral head of the school said he didn’t like games, and I couldn’t continue to do research in games. So I quit on my 50th birthday, and went off to somewhere else. I moved closer to the gym, is what I did.
I’ve served a lot on the National Research Council on various studies and committees, and you’ll notice all of the different commissions at NRC keep dragging me in: Behavioral and Social Sciences Commission, Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board, the Naval Studies Board, the Mathematics and Application Board. It means I’ve written lots of national research agenda reports.
And I built a hit game. So America’s Army, I built inside of the Naval Postgraduate School, and I directed this project for four years. I don’t think anyone else in the whole world has built a hit game from inside of a university and operated it from inside the university—I think we broke all of the research office into millions of pieces. But the game now has 8 million registered players. It’s very successful. The Army always said, "Well, America’s Army is for strategic communication, to try and get young Americans to consider potential careers in the Army. " They always call it a first-person mission experience, which is, I think, slightly different than perhaps what young children would say the game is.
What happened when I got to the end of the postgraduate school is, I really, really wanted to do something different. I wanted to create a science of games. It’s this new medium and it’s being deployed, and no one really knows very well how to deploy it. And I wanted to create a degree program for the formation of that science. If you have a flow of students and they’re all thinking about it as a medium, and they’re all able to build games, then I thought this would be really great, this would be great fun.
So why a science of games? Well, games are really, I think, our first high-bandwidth, two-way communication medium. We need to know how to deploy games for societal good, and the game industry is just not going to do this research and development. So when America’s Army came out, immediately the Army started saying, "How can we make all of our future training systems look like video games? " And the number of meetings and groups that I ended up getting dragged to, where they wanted to build the next generation training system as a game, because young soldiers are 18 years old, and they’re coming into the Army and they know how to operate game consoles. And they don’t really want to take nine months to learn how to build something built by defense contractor X, at exorbitant cost, that has an interface that looks like it came out of the 1970s. The Army has this real training issue, and this became very big for them.
I also had another thing happening to me as I built the game and started giving interviews and talks. I had a lot of mothers come up to me and say, "My son is playing America’s Army 6-7 hours a day, 7 days a week. What’s going to become of him? " And I would say, "Well, the Army knows that when he turns 18, that he’s twice as likely to consider a career in the Army as some kid who does not play this game. " Of course, no mother in the current climate wants to hear that. They always would come back and say, "Well, wouldn’t it be nice if we could do something more societally redeeming with games? " There was always this sense that, you know, first-person shooters are great, but maybe what else could they learn?
And it’s kind of funny because in the game—I will play this clip. [clip played] This is in the game. This is a classroom, and you get to take combat-medic lifesaving. These are PowerPoint lectures in a video game. You don’t even want to see PowerPoint lectures in the classroom, let alone in a video game. Four and a half million kids did these three lectures, and they took the test at the end, which is the same test you take in the real world on basic-combat lifesaving. And they passed. And then they get to act as combat medic in the game. So we taught 4 million kids how to do basic combat lifesaving, just in case there’s a terrorist incident somewhere. You can see them playing with the pencils, and it’s a multiple-choice test. It really is instructive. If you’re doing this, you go, "Oh yeah, this makes sense. We should do games. "
So in fact, this is the grand challenge that I always say. How do we place all K through 12 science and math education into highly immersive, highly addictive games, such that we can replace teachers? I know, first of all, there might be a few teachers out there. And let me tell you, actually we have the potential to do it in the next four to five years. And what I really want to do is provide individually directed, human-state aware, measurable learning with games, and turn teachers into tutors for the difficult things that you can’t turn into games, instead of the primary education-delivery mechanism. And a lot of the thought is, if I spend enough money (I’ll define what enough money is in a little bit) that we could do a fantastic job, and put out some games where kids really learn math and science education, and we do this for the nation, then what happens is we get to a better and smarter place. So to get there, I really have to do this science-of-games initiative.
A couple numbers that I think are really important for this audience. America’s Army has 8 million registered players, and some 20,000 years of game play has occurred in this game. This is a lot of time. And it cost about $22 million over four years to build this game.
But let’s talk about World of Warcraft, because World of Warcraft has 8 million registered players also. An average player spends some 12 hours per week in the game, and holds his subscription for 6 months. This is 288 hours in the game. And 260,869 years of game play have occurred. This is back before recorded history, right? And it cost about $100 million to develop. So you think about this.
What are some other metrics? I was thinking about the Los Angeles Unified School System, of which I am actually a graduate from a long time ago. There are about 710,000 kids in that school system. I guess 10 times the number that are playing World of Warcraft, and each of them spends 288 hours on World of Warcraft. Well, if you’re an LA school-system kid and you have a 180-day school year and you get 45 minutes of math and 45 minutes of science every day, for 180 days it’s 270 hours, about how much time you spend on World of Warcraft. That is, in six months you did World of Warcraft; as compared to nine months for the school year. So your kids are spending that much time on World of Warcraft. What if it was a math and science game? They could have fun and learn, right? So this is the point.
So this is the grand challenge. And what we really want to do in replacing teachers with games, and again (I know, they’re laughing) we want to build World of Warcraft-like quality, successful games with World of Warcraft budgets (that’s a $100 million budget per game) so that we can compete for mindshare and our kids’ time.
And so you go back. What do we learn in America’s Army? Well, the kids learn how to become infantrymen, and then special-forces soldiers. And in World of Warcraft, do you know what they learn? Command and control. If you don’t look at that game and find that your kids are learning command and control, then you’re not looking at it right. So they’re both part of the No Child Left a Civilian program. (He told me not to be too provocative, so this is a toned-down Mike talk.)
So you want to build this. What’s the cost of math and science games for K through 12? Remember, these are games that are going to get 288 hours of play. So I would need to build one for K, I need to build one for first grade and second grade, all the way up to 12th grade. And that’s $100 million for each game, I’m going to spend. It’s only $1.3 billion for development. Now, of course there are operations, maintenance, and R&D to know how to do this. And so let’s go to the cost of the Iraq War. It’s pushing $1 trillion. What is that? $250 billion a year, which I think is about $685 million a day. And so I look at this and say: Well, give me two days of expenditures for the war, for development, and two days for operations and maintenance, and one day for the R&D, and let’s call it the Give America Five Program. So put my name on the ballot; I’ll run against Hillary. I’ll run with Hillary. So what am I going to do to make this happen? You can get these grand ideas, say, "I got to quit my job and change the world and change my gym. "
So I built this thing called the GamePipe Lab at USC, and it has this mission of research, development, and education on technologies and design for the future of interactive games and their application, from developing the supporting technologies to developing serious and entertainment games for government and corporate clients. To do this, you have to have a degree program. So what I did is, I took the Computer Science Department and I built a bachelor’s in computer science, specializing in games, and a master’s in computer science, specializing in games. They are cross-disciplinary. I take kids who are going to engineering school to get a degree in computer science, and I put them in the School of Cinema’s game design workshop classes. I put them in the School of Fine Arts to learn some fine arts and teach them how to do animation and modeling. And we’ll see how many survive. But I think I’m going to get different kids out the back end. And I also made one special requirement. They all have to learn how to build serious games. So we’re going to chip away, one person at a time. So there are 300 applicants to the computer-science undergraduate degree program for fall; 150 said they want to be in this degree program. We’re going to change the world.
So we built a couple of serious games. For those of you who don’t know, a game is story, art, and software. And a serious game has got this extra stuff on the side, which is pedagogy and subject-matter experts to work with the design team to go and figure out how to build games intelligently so that learning objectives are obtained. But they’re fun games first and then collateral learning second. That’s the term for America’s Army.
So we built this game Immune Attack, which is two levels of this. We had a very small pot of funds, jointly with the Federation of American Scientists. I’m not going to demo that game today. It teaches high school immunology education.
We also built a game for the Scripps Institute of Oceanography called FishQuest, which works at the Digital Fish Library at Scripps and tries to educate kids how to do MRI scans with the Fish Library, and they have to try and identify: what kind of fish did we find? It’s kind of fun.
We also have a research agenda. There’s a big research agenda on games: infrastructure, cognition in games, immersion, serious games, and game design. And they’re detailed. That’s a long talk.
One of the things I am pushing towards, though, is this final slide here. I want to create this thing called the Center for Emotion-Cognizant Games. This is a term I have invented. It probably doesn’t spell-check anywhere. And it turns out, there are no fewer than three companies right now that are making $25 hybrid EEG devices that read human emotional state. They stuff them into headbands. And they’ve done a lot of interesting work on filters, so that you can know if the kid is learning or not learning, and what difficult level they’re having, and are they a visual learner or auditory learner or tactile/kinesthetic learner. And if they are, you can do adaptive game play to make it suit them. And there’s some very interesting continued research here. Actually, for openness, I am 1% owner of one of these companies, and the company is growing very, very fast. It’s hiring like five people every week. So if you take these sensors, you can actually build games that can provide individually directed, human-state-informed, measurable learning. Actually my favorite thing is, if the kid’s doing a multiple-choice question and he’s going to choose C and he’s guessing, the sensor knows he’s guessing and can grade him down, or help him right then, as opposed to post-test. And that’s what you want to get to. And that’s what I think is important about games.
I’m not going to share the DVD of student-built games. I’m just going to put my thing up there, and probably should hand it off to the other people at this point. The DVD of student-built games is on the web here: HYPERLINK "http://gamepipe.usc.edu/~zyda/GamePipe/Fall2006-GamePipe-AllGames-VIDEO_TS.zip" http://gamepipe.usc.edu/~zyda/GamePipe/Fall2006-GamePipe-AllGames-VIDEO_TS.zip.
Audio of the talks is here:
HYPERLINK "http://gamepipe.usc.edu/~zyda/presentations/20Jan2007-Zyda-ScienceAndSociety.mp3" http://gamepipe.usc.edu/~zyda/presentations/20Jan2007-Zyda-ScienceAndSociety.mp3.
Robert Semper
Our next speaker is Matthew Nisbet. He’s assistant professor in the School of Communication, American University, and he studies the nature and impact of strategic communication. But in this case he’s going to talk about blogs and the use of blogs in science and the public.
Matthew Nisbet
I study political communication and political science, and I look at the emerging controversies over science and technology in society, and the role that the media plays in shaping public opinion and public behavior, and how strategists take advantage of different forms of the media, including the Internet, including blogs, to try to shape opinion-formation and mobilize citizens, and ultimately the impact of all that on different types of policy outcomes.
So I’ve looked at a number of different controversies, including things like stem-cell research, global warming, plant biotechnology, intelligent design, hurricanes. But besides also being a researcher, I’ve discovered this very interesting tool that I’m going to talk about today, which is blogs.
This is the blog that I maintain. It’s called Framing Science. For some of you, you may be familiar with this term "framing. " It’s a concept and theory from the social sciences now that’s spilled over into public discourse. But on this blog I track how different science and technology issues are being defined by the media and various strategists, and also try to update the blog using public-opinion data, etcetera. And this blog is part of a community of blogs, or a portal of blogs, that’s sponsored by Seed magazine, which is kind of an edgy and new kind of science magazine that many of you have probably at least checked out. And they created this portal as a way to generate traffic to their site, generate a community for readers, and also generate buzz for the magazine.
So it’s very interesting to maintain this site, because there’s a "Talk About " area for scientists, for researchers, for organizations, for media organizations. Blogs can perform a very strategic role in engaging the public. And maintaining it is also a form of participant observation on my part, in terms of studying this new media form as a participant, as it develops.
First, I’m going to try to put into context what exactly it means to have science content on the Internet, and then specifically blogs. What kind of impact and what kind of use can we expect by so-called mass audiences, the very diverse, general public? Who’s using science online, and who’s most likely to log on to a science-related blog? And then after moving from what we know from data and from research in this area, to other types of publics, including how scientists are using blogs to communicate amongst themselves, especially during controversies in science, how media organizations are using blogs strategically and also to invent or participate in this new form of journalism. And then, finally, how institutions and organizations can use blogs as a strategic-communication tool in policy debates, but also as a tool to engage specific publics.
If you think about the so-called mass public or the general public—which is actually a very diverse body of people—and its interaction with the nature of the media system, the paradox is that at no other time in history has more scientific information been available to the public. You have 500 cable channels, you have what seems like an infinite number of Web sites, and you have growing access to the Internet among the general public. And this just charts Pew trends over time with access to the Internet. But the interesting paradox is, despite the availability of scientific content and despite the availability of public-affairs information, public knowledge of science and of public affairs remains relatively stable and also relatively low, even as people have greater access to information and as the mean level of education increases.
Why is this? What explains this? Well, what you have is this media system where you have a high-choice media environment. You have a very fragmented media system, which is very different from what used to be the "tradition " media system, where you had three major news networks and you had local or major newspapers, and then radio news as well. But now, under high-choice conditions, people can segment themselves very narrowly into content which they prefer, with which they agree. And what you have is these preference gaps then forming with different types of niche audiences around niche media. And as a result, even among the college educated (and I’ll show you some data supporting this), those that take advantage of science content online, or among the 500 cable channels that are out there, will be the already interested, the already informed, and generally the science enthusiasts. So great choice as an average trend across society—and choices are increasing—means that the information-rich and motivated will seek out science content, while the non-enthusiast will seek out other content, mostly entertainment.
This is just an example looking at public affairs or political content. This is again from Pew data, and I’ll show you some more data from this most recent poll seeking out scientific information online. But you can see, if you ask people whether they are actually seeking out political content on a regular basis (Did you go online yesterday to find information related to politics or the campaign?), very few people do. About 16 percent or 19 percent close to the latest election. The other interesting thing about this graph is that you see it fluctuate. It moves up and down. It’s a general increase slightly over time, but it also fluctuates around campaign season, which is another indication that if people seek out information, it’s because of some type of motivation. But again there’s a small "issue public " or informed public that’s likely to take advantage of all this public-affairs content online, and engage in it on a regular basis.
If you think about the diffusion of blogs now, what I find interesting (again this is from Pew data), they did a representative sample, a national survey of American adults 18 years and older. And you can see that blog reading is on the increase. But again, they just ask people, "Have you ever read a blog online? " So 39 percent of Internet users say that they’ve actually read a blog. About 8 percent of Internet users are blog creators, any type of blog. And this skews heavily young, between the 18- to 30-year-old segment. So blog reading is less frequent than you actually might think it is among all Internet users. And again, this is any type of blog, not just science blogs or political blogs.
What’s also interesting about whether or not people are encountering scientific information online is that even among the college educated, you have these preference gaps. So in the Pew report that was talked about earlier (and this relationship stands up under logistic regression, controlling for a number of different variables), those people who are more positive in their views about science generally and the role of science in society are more likely to seek out information online. For those individuals that agree with the statement, "The U.S. must be competitive in science, " those who are college educated, are more likely to get science info online. Same thing across these other questions that tap generally into attitudes about the role of science in society. So those that are more positive and enthusiastic about science in society are also the people most likely to seek out information. So the science enthusiasts are the science seekers. There’s another part of that report that also shows a very similar relationship, but even stronger, for those people who already feel well informed about science and who also are very interested in science.
So you have this problem of choice. With many choices online, you have this problem of who’s actually going to go out and seek it. And in the Pew report what they find is, the strongest predictor of whether or not people report having looked at science content online is if they came across it incidentally or accidentally. So they actually weren’t purposely seeking science information, but through some other type of search or engaging with some other type of media, they ran across it. So in this case, you can see the number of people reporting accidentally coming across scientific information online.
So this is an interesting way then that blogs can be used. The people who are going to log on to use science blogs and read science blogs are for the most part going to be a highly selected audience of science enthusiasts and knowledgeable people about science. At the same time then, other types of blogs, nontraditional blogs, can be a way to engage these non-interested publics and direct them back to rich science content online.
What’s interesting about bloggers is that they share very strong characteristics of what you might call an opinion leader. This is a concept that goes back about 60 years in public-opinion research. These are people that are more interested in a specific topic. They have a stronger strength of personality so they’re more willing to give recommendations about any type of issue that they might be an opinion leader in (it could be science, it could be movies, it could be about what restaurant to eat at). So across different issues, you have different constellations of opinion leaders. And people listen to them. And when you do surveys of bloggers and you look at the personality traits, they fit very closely to what we know about opinion leaders in general, in terms of interpersonal conversation. The other thing that you see is that citizens are also tuning out advertising messages. They’re paying less and less attention to the news, and they’re less trustful of advertisers in the news. They’re reporting across sectors in society that they trust their friends and family over experts, media sources, and advertising.
So bloggers then become very important because they move online this traditional kind of interpersonal form of opinion leader. And if you can then target non-science bloggers with science-related information, then you can capture incidentally this public that may not be seeking out science purposely.
So just an example. If you’re working on an issue such as the debate over evolutionary science, the teaching of evolutionary science in schools, one way to strategically target specific segments or publics is to target bloggers within this segment. So you can start blogs that might be about nature or the environment or agriculture or fishing or hunting or the outdoors, that might deal with an issue that connected to the value of evolutionary science. You can target these bloggers and cultivate them with information related to that debate, directing them back to more information-rich content.
You can also take entertainment. There’s a ton of entertainment-related blogs. In fact, when they do surveys of bloggers and they ask them, "What are you most likely to blog about? " it’s personal issues and entertainment-related issues. And you can take what has grown up in the publishing industry, the "science of " (so the science of Star Trek, the science of The X Files, etcetera) sites and you can start targeting these very popular entertainment sites with science-related information that these bloggers can blog about, and then redirect them back to the information-rich science content on a science-related site.
And other examples. For example, you can target foodie or cooking blogs with information about agricultural biotechnology. You can sit back and think about the universe of blogs that are out there, and think where your science-related content might fit, and then how you can redirect users of these blogs back to your site, with very strong social recommendations from those bloggers. But again, it’s about building relationships with those bloggers to get them to include that in the content.
Outside of the mass public, you can also think about blogs in terms of their impact on specialized publics. The first thing is, you may not think that blogs might be impacting scientists, but they definitely are. Scientists are using blogs strategically to influence their peers. And this is kind of a model that was suggested before the advent of blogs, for thinking about other types of media forms by a sociologist at Cornell, Steve Hilgartner. He calls this the model of popularization. He talks about different communication channels in science. He describes upstream communication channels (this is how science is talked about in the lab, in peer-reviewed publications and papers), and he talks about downstream channels (these are the common popular channels: the press, media coverage, conferences). And each one of these different communication channels has different strategic purposes for the scientist. The interesting thing about blogs is that they operate both at the upstream level and at the downstream level. So I’ll give you a couple examples.
A lot of blogs that are maintained by scientists or are focused on science have become ways to trade information outside of the peer-review process when controversies in science happen. And again, this is not historically unique. Before there were blogs, scientists were doing this with fax machines and Internet discussion groups. This is a paper that was published by one of my graduate advisors at Cornell, Bruce Lewenstein, where he looked at the cold-fusion debate. When the cold-fusion debate happened, scientists were caught in a vacuum of information, because the cold-fusion claims were not published in a peer-reviewed journal. So scientists were trading discussion on Internet discussion groups, they were faxing back and forth information, they were asking journalists who were at the press conference or who had interviewed the scientist to give them information, all so that they could replicate these astounding results.
And the same thing is happening now. When there are controversies that emerge, or big, big discoveries in science, there’s this explosion of information, and a lot of it is captured or appears on blogs. So when the Korean cloning scandal occurred, blogs (both bioethics blogs and science blogs) were being used by scientists and journalists and others as a way to sort out exactly what was going on over in Korea, related to this revelation.
The same thing happened with the studies that appeared in Science and Nature just before Hurricane Katrina hit and just afterwards, this connection, this alleged connection, between global warming and hurricanes. Again, there were two papers that were published, then there was a period of six months to a year where there was not a lot of other peer-reviewed information. And scientists were turning to Web sites and blogs as a way to sort out what was going on at the conferences and elsewhere.
The other way that blogs are being used by scientists is to promote their research to those in other disciplines who may or may not find out about that research and its relevancy, because they’re not reading the discipline-specific journals. And this is another way that scientists can position themselves, increase their impacts and their citation-impact factor, and also their policy impact across disciplines.
And then, finally, the other way that blogs can be used (and this is kind of a novel way, so far) is that outside of blogs about international news or national news, there are so-called micro blogs or place blogs popping up in communities across the country. So in Washington, D.C., for example, there’s a Dupont Circle blog, there’s a Logan Circle blog, there’s a Cleveland Park blog. And it’s a way to create community. So research labs and university towns or a museum can start place blogs about the connection between what’s going on at that museum or institution and the community events that are going on. It’s a place that people can meet and discuss these events, and build these community ties.
Then there’s the downstream communication part, how scientists are using blogs. So not only are they promoting research to other colleagues and other disciplines, but they’re also promoting research to the media. This helps scientists gain research grants and also persuades other people that they’re right, especially in an emerging area of science.
But on the other hand, there’s the growth of think-tank science, ranging from the Discovery Institute to the American Enterprise Institute to the Heritage Foundation. In areas of so-called controversial science, like evolution or global warming, blogs are playing a very important role in promoting an alternative to the peer-reviewed literature and the peer-reviewed science, especially affecting so-called opinion leaders in policy circles, such as journalists and decision-makers.
And then, finally, my friend Chris Mooney, who wrote this book The Republican War on Science (some of you may know him) in the book he covers how think-tank science is growing and how blogs about science have an echo-chamber effect, much like political talk radio. It’s a way to keep an issue alive. So if you catch something that an opponent in a policy debate is doing, the mainstream news media may not pick up on it right away, but it’s definitely there on the blogs, and it becomes part of the buzz. And eventually it may become part of the agenda-setting function that goes on there in terms of getting a broader audience for a claim or an issue.
Journalists are also using blogs strategically as well. For the most part, journalists are including blogs in the news-organization sites now, as a way to attract eyeballs. So the big race now is to try to figure out an advertising role for news organizations. So blogs are one way to increase traffic to news organizations and media organizations. But they’re also a way to create buzz for different articles or article series that might be out there. So I’ve been contacted by reporters from different news organizations about their series, to see whether I would put it on my blog to generate traffic back to their site and generate an online buzz and more eyeballs for their stories.
They’re also a way to engage younger readers about science content or public-affairs content, again because younger readers are growing up as bloggers themselves. They’re familiar with the different type of media form. Blogs are a way for them to find things at news-organization sites that they’re familiar with and that they like.
And then blogs are also being used by sites like The New York Times to re-engage audiences and to build reader trust. So when journalists maintain blogs, or post on blogs hosted by the news organization, they’re increasing the transparency of the news-production process, and the public has a better insight into how a story was actually produced.
And I use this example of Senator James Inhofe’s critique of the mainstream media in terms of so-called global-warming hype; and then how Andrew Revkin went on blogs after he was singled out by James Inhofe, along with other journalists, defending himself. Again, so he can get out on blogs and start defending himself against these claims that are already out there on the Drudge Report and elsewhere. And so journalists are starting to use blogs as a way to respond to their critics, and participate in this message framing and agenda setting.
And then, finally, there are a lot of different ways (and maybe we can talk more about this in the Q&A) that different types of institutions and not-for-profits can use blogs. One way you can use the blog medium now is at Technorati. You can track, for example, the buzz that’s going on on blogs about your organization. So I just did a keyword search here at Technorati on the National Academy of Sciences over the last 90 days, and it charts out by day the number of posts about the National Academy of Sciences on these blogs. So it’s one way you can get a metric or a measure, when the Academy releases a report, exactly what’s being said about the report out there across different types of blogs.
And then, finally, if an organization—again there are some things to work out in this, in terms of the perception of neutrality and not wanting to appear too opinionated with the blog—but an organization can use blogs as another kind of information subsidy with journalists and opinion leaders. So instead of posting white papers or reports online, now the blog is updated daily and you can respond to news events, you can call attention to news events, or you can get your own material out there. It’s now becoming a new form of press release. So thank you. I look forward to your questions and comments.
Robert Semper
Our last speaker is David Rabkin, who is vice-president of technologies at Boston Museum of Science. I notice in his bio he says he bears responsibility for facilitating the museum’s efforts to develop an approach to technology education. I hope it’s not too much of a burden to bear.
David Rabkin
Thanks. It’s not. The burden seems to be getting oxygen into our brains right now, so I would encourage you all to take a couple of deep breaths and recognize the fact that outside these walls there is probably a gorgeous sunset happening right now, and there’s that peach color in the west. There are not a lot of clouds, so not that spectacular stuff. But then right overhead, we’ve probably got that deep, deep blue just starting to form in the sky. So just hold onto that for a sec, take a couple breaths, get some oxygen in your brains, and hang in there for me, your last speaker.
I’m going to take you one other place before we get going. And that is, I’m going to take you back to last night. We had some great speakers. And then there was a little reception afterwards, got to hobnob with wonderful, wonderful people. But then I zipped back to the Museum of Science, because I wanted to be there for a presentation by a man named Howard Spivak. Howard is a pediatrician, he’s a community-health expert, he heads Tufts New England Medical Center’s Community Health Program, and he was talking about violence as a public-health problem. He was looking at youth violence as an epidemiologist might look at it. And he spoke without notes, and he leaned on the podium like this, and he made eye contact with an audience that was about 100 of us. About 40 of that audience were high school students, and about three-quarters of them were kids of color. And he basically said to us, "Guys, we are killing our children. And let me use science to tell you how we’re doing it. And let me show that we are not using that science to guide our decisions today. We are telling false stories, and it’s guiding our policy decisions. "
Why am I telling you this? Couple reasons. I come from a museum. It’s a place. Deep down at its roots, it’s not about media. It’s about real people communicating with each other, interacting with stuff, with scientists, with engineers, with each other, having experiences. And so we are grounded in the physical. And yet, new communications methods, new technologies, new media (as we call it) are incredibly important to us. Our world is changing. And so I come to you as someone who is very committed to the reality of face-to-face communication, of touching real stuff, and yet acknowledging the importance of the topics that we’re talking about here, because they are part of the future of my institution.
So I’m not going to start with the technologies. I’m going to start with the real problems that we face as a museum, that we look to technology in part to help us answer. So I’ll start with some of the nightmares that keep us awake at night, and these are the four themes for what I’m going to talk to you about today. How do we keep current? Science and technology are changing so fast, blah-blah-blah. How do we keep up with that in a museum setting? Well, we use people a lot, but maybe we can do other things. Personalization. We have an incredibly diverse audience that comes to our museum. And they come to us with different preferences for how they learn, different levels of understanding, speaking different languages, and with different interests. We can help them with technology as well. Finally, we can use technology to leverage what we already do, in ways that reach more people and that reach outside of our museum. And finally, a big theme that’s running through this conference: we can create deeper, different kinds of conversations than what historically we’ve done. And we do that programmatically, but our programs are labor-intensive. They touch small numbers of people. If we believe in what we’re doing there, are there ways we can use technology to touch more people and to somewhat bottle up pieces of that experience and reach more people? So that’s what I’m talking about today.
Let me start with keeping current. This is one of the class of problems that we’ve been facing since really the late 1990s in our institution—and many others have faced this problem too. And I’ve grabbed online stuff from two different institutions. We use touch screens in our museums as a way of presenting content that we may have presented verbally before in presentation form. We limit what the producer of this content can do. If you were to come to our museum and interact with one of those touch-screen stories in the upper right, or use our Web site, what you’d find is that it’s really a very limited medium. We have a pretty simple database that lives underneath it, and so I as a content creator can only do a couple of things. But that also simplifies my task, and it means that I can put together content very fast, get it onto the floor; I can get it out onto the Web, and that gives me the ability to change content in the museum in a way that can touch lots of people.
The American Museum of Natural History has taken a different tack. They actually create video content, and it’s pretty much straight video. There are short segments, and they blast them out through their Web site (it’s a great Web site). They’re also trying to share that with other museums. And we’ve been a site where some of their videos have been used. There are other great examples. If you go into the Science Museum of Minnesota right now, they have made a whole bunch of really intelligent decisions about limiting what they can do in terms of the nature of the interaction and the medium that they use, boxing their people in methodologically so that they can produce content faster, keep it more up to date.
And we’re all trying to keep current but at the same time manage production costs, because some of the stuff that we’ve seen is terribly, terribly expensive to do. And whether it’s in a tremendously capable organization like Lauren’s, or in some organizations like ours that are more resource-constrained, we all face the same basic question, which is: how do you create that new content and get it out to your visitors or viewers, and yet somehow manage the economics of this whole thing?
One of the dreams for us, and for others, is that we can actually share the production task. And so that it wouldn’t be just the Museum of Science Boston that’s creating the content that appears there, or it’s not just the American Museum of Natural History that’s creating the video content, but others in our community are creating that content. And it can be distributed by all of us, shared by all of us. And that becomes a way to help manage those costs. But of course it raises questions about our own editorial preferences, our content presentation styles. It’s difficult to do when many of us view ourselves as educational artists of sorts. And yet the reality that we face, and the societal need, and the opportunity that we face may cause us to really need to shift some of our methods a little bit.
I think that the spicy meatball in this soup for us is: How do you make a really top-notch visitor experience because the description of what was going on with Howard Spivak at the museum was compelling enough that those kids didn’t leave afterwards. They wanted to talk to him. Well, that’s not something that often happens at our presentations. But because he was so genuine, and that experience was so intimate and powerful, they were drawn to him. They knew he cared. They knew he could talk to them because he was doing it. Can we, through media, create an experience that’s as compelling? Well, maybe Mike’s got a possibility for us. But it’s something that we all need to struggle with.
Next, personalization. We got all kinds of people coming into our museum. Our museum is, for those of you who’ve been to it, it’s actually got this deep, elegant pedagogy to it. But most people don’t recognize that. Most people see it as a bit of a hodgepodge. And that’s great, for some of us. But some people want some structure. How do you create that structure? How do you layer structure on top of what can be a hodgepodge?
Well, for us, one approach is to use an audio tour. It gives us a couple advantages. We can change the content of audio tours. We can draw upon the community around us. So there’s a lot of health-related content that could be presented in the museum and could guide you, the person who wanted to understand more about diabetes, say, or obesity, through the museum in a way that the museum hadn’t been designed. But it becomes a way by which you can inquire into the topic of interest, and by the way, develop some sense of who some of the people are in Boston right now working on this topic. So we can bring the voice of our partners to the visitor. We can facilitate a direct relationship between them, using media. And by the way, we can keep current, and we can personalize according to people’s interests. So that’s just one approach that we’re starting to work with.
And you could imagine doing it with just audio. We’ve used devices that have audio and video on them. The Exploratorium has done some studies of the challenges of doing that, though. And in a hands-on institution where you want to work with your hands, having to interact with this thing hanging around your neck is actually a problem. But nonetheless it can work for certain kinds of people under certain circumstances.
We’re also asking questions: What can you do with a cell phone? We’ve been experimenting recently with taking cell phones out into the community and having people stumble upon signs that say: Hey, this is the oldest green building in the United States. What does that really mean? Well, let’s talk to some of the people who were involved in it. This building was renovated. It no longer has a heating system, in the conventional sense. It does all these things. And if you wander around just a little bit, you can see what’s going on with this building. You can appreciate it a little bit. So we’re using media there. We’re experiencing. We’re learning. Does it work great? No, not yet. But it will, ultimately.
And on this slide you’ll see on the left MOMA’s Web site. They’ve got tours. But one of the interesting things that I first heard about happening in New York was visitor-created MP3 tours of museums, which raises a question that many of us have asked before, which I’ve heard in this conference: Do we need to moderate this? Well, boys and girls, we can’t. People are creating this stuff out there, and other people are using it because it has value to them. What would be the value to parents, say, of an iPod, not tour, but a guide, of great questions that you could ask your five-year-old in the museum, that have been successful for other parents in terms of engaging their kids, getting them to really inquire and mess with what’s going on in a museum, and by the way, that lead to conversations afterwards and help build your relationship with your child? Well, that’s sort of a dream for us as museum educators, but boy, we could use some help from parents on that. And the kinds of things that we’ve been talking about, the kinds of interaction and user-supplied content, could really allow us to step to a new plane. But it raises all kinds of questions for us, just as some of the citizen-science efforts have raised questions in the science community. Can gathering data about our environment from everyday citizens really produce scientifically useful data? Well, the fact is, it can. But boy, it’s a hard sell for some people.
So I think that we can use media very powerfully in our physical environment to add layers of content, to give people choices. And yet for those people who just want to be there and interact with the stuff, we don’t have to clog it up with all this other stuff. It’s powerful, it’s useful, we’re experimenting with it, and others are too. And you’ll see more of it in the future.
I’ll just tell one story about this. We were approached by a company recently that developed sort of a critical-thinking scavenger hunt in our museum for a corporate event. These people develop corporate events, all those big-theme colossal things with lights and videos. And they thought, for this thing that was going to be at the Museum of Science, they would create one of these things that you could do on a really high-tech cell phone-like thing. And there it is out there, and they did a darn good job at it, which kind of blew our minds. We thought we had to do all this stuff, and yet they had done it for us. And they’d done a pretty good job.
On the lower left is a picture of Barry Starr. He’s a geneticist at Stanford and also the Tech Museum of Innovation. And he talks with people. But he can only talk with so many people. So they have a Web site called "Ask a Geneticist. " It has a major new exhibit on relatively new genomics, and Barry is part of that. But they get several hundred questions a month coming in through their Web site, and many tens of thousands of hits reading what’s going on there. And so they’re leveraging this real guy, who’s wonderful face-to-face in the museum, and yeah, something is lost by lots of other people not having that face-to-face interaction with him, and yet he’s touching probably hundreds of thousands of people, in a maybe watered-down way, but still, I would argue, a powerful way.
For us, we do a ton of presentations in our museum. We are fortunate enough to be physically located within Boston, a mind-blowingly good place to be if you’re comfortable bringing people in from the outside world, helping them interact with a diverse general audience (as we do), coaching them, telling them that it’s important to be coached (which is a challenge for us in the museum world). But we do a lot of that. But the question is, we made all this effort to make the connection, to get the person to the museum, to coach them, to have them put together a presentation that is not the one that they do at a scientific meeting, but is one that they’ve really thought about and developed for a lay audience. There’s a lot of effort that goes into that. They talk to an audience of 50 people and then it’s gone. Wow. That’s a loss.
So then we got smart. We started videotaping this stuff. And if you go to the WGBH Forum Network, you’ll see lots of stuff coming out of our museum that is videotaped. And I’ve got a pretty good attention span, and I made it through all of your stuff, but I’ll tell you, I made it through none of our stuff, because lectures and videotapes delivered on the Web pretty much stink.
But we’ve developed a technique by which some of our people are good enough that they can listen to a presentation, think about it, pull that person into our studio, interview that person on the spot, do a 10-minute interview that takes us (the listeners) through their argument, what their research is all about, asks many of the questions that we wished we could have asked if we were only clever enough to have thought them up before it was too late, and put it out in our podcasts. And that happens all the time. We have a weekly podcast from the Museum of Science that usually features two interviews with people from the outside or our own staff on some kind of hot topic. And so we are leveraging that real content, but there’s a translation process that has to happen. It can’t be just directly transformed into digital media. There’s a translation process that has to take place, and we have to learn that.
The right-hand slide is another translation process. If you go to the Tech and you go through some of their activities in their genomics exhibit, you can do a lab. But you won’t get your lab results, because you’re mixing stuff together and you’re doing stuff with genes and you’ve got fluorescing stuff and it’s great. The only way to find out whether it actually works is to go back to the Web site, type in your ID number, and you can find your lab results. It usually takes 24 hours, but you can find your lab results. Interesting way of extending that experience of the museum and drawing people into a virtual world, because surrounding those lab results, of course, is a whole Web site with media like I’ve described, with great educational content on it.
And of course, we also take our speakers, and after they’ve done a 20-minute presentation with a Q&A to an audience in the museum, we may very well do a 3-minute TV news spot with them as well—another way to leverage that reality that we have in the museum, and create an experience that is maybe not quite as compelling and yet reaches so many more people.
Final topic: new, deeper conversations. The lower left is sort of a failed experiment. We wanted people to talk about wind power, because wind is a hot topic here in New England, what with the Cape Wind project. And we wanted people to record their ideas about wind power. We asked them a bunch of questions. There was a video camera there, they could record their ideas, and then you could browse through what other people said about these questions. And about 20% of what we got was terrific: insightful, thoughtful, revealing of the public mind opening up new ideas for us—things that I didn’t even know were part of the equation for some people. Great! Oh my God, it’s terrific. And then the other 80 percent of it was what you would expect when you take people who want to play, give them a bunch of buttons, and let them play. We got a lot of nonsense. Raises the moderation question, but also got us to ask: "Okay, where are we trying to go? "
We’ve done a lot of work in our museum that is programmatically based. Lower middle photograph was about a seven-hour program on the topic of energy. We had people working in groups, and we asked them to act as a citizen-advisory panel to the city council of a fictitious midwestern American city that was going to, in the next five years, lose two of its power plants because they were going to go offline. And even with conservation efforts, they were going to have to build two power plants and more, because their city is growing. And what was the policy that they would recommend? Are you going to build coal power plants, oil, gas, nuclear? Are you going to use renewable techniques? What are you going to do, guys? You’ve got to make a recommendation. You can’t fart around because those power plants are going offline.
And what happened in that conversation was very interesting. By the way, it was lay people. Our lay audience also consists of scientists and energy experts. We also had brought in a pretty diverse bunch of stakeholders who could serve as resources to this group. So we had your energy expert and we had your regulators and we had people from the oil and nuclear industry. But they weren’t there to lecture. They were there to provide five minutes of a few key points, and then just to act as resources, to talk with people.
What happened was, every single group came up with a mixed solution that evolved over time. And I’m no personal advocate for the use of coal-fired power plants, but I am an advocate for open-mindedness. And what was really interesting was, in the presentations that the spokespeople for those groups made, they said, "You know, I’m kind of a leftie, green, renewable-energy kind of person. And if you’d asked me this morning if I would have recommended a policy that called for building a coal-fired power plant or a nuclear power plant or a whatever, I would have told you, you were out of your frigging mind. And yet here I am making that recommendation. Because when I worked with this group of people on a real problem, I had to cope with reality. " That kind of interaction is powerful.
How can we go beyond the incredibly labor-intensive process of putting those programs together and reaching 75 people (which is great, high impact, wonderful), how can we reach thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people? How can we do it? And so I’ll give you just two little snippets.
Upper right-hand corner, something from the Tech Museum of Innovation that was a use of media that drew me in, in a way that I’d never been drawn into anything before. Five faces (actually there’s a sixth one that’s not in that photograph) on videotapes of discussions about genetics. And they filmed it in such a way that when one person spoke, the others would look at that person. They appear on separate framed monitors there, but the body language is there. And for me, as the person standing in that little exhibit hall, experiencing that media, it was completely different than if I had seen the conversation taking place on one monitor. Because the body language was right, I was drawn in. I was there. It was much more immediate.
So I think there are innovative ways in which we can use media that take advantage of the psychology that’s been put in our brains by millions of years of evolution, probably some of the stuff that’s coming out in those games. We can take advantage of that stuff, and we can use it to present digital media over and over again.
Final thing. In the middle is the auditorium from the Infinite Mind studios; NPR’s Infinite Mind shows virtual world in second life. And that’s actually me standing there. And I came down the auditorium and I sort of flew a little bit up onto stage (because you can fly around in this world), and then I turned around, and I thought, Wow, this is actually different. This is actually really different. And the person I was with (from NPR) said, "Actually, my wife kind of gets stage fright in this world. " And again, this is a very creative, interesting place that we can use to create some real emotional impact that really connects to our brains.
In closing I’ll just say, let’s also not forget spectacle in fun, because of course most of what happens for us as a museum, in terms of the impact, takes place outside of the museum. It takes place in people’s lives. We sparked something, and so whether it’s the Hall of Ideas at the Mary Baker Eddy Library here in Boston, which is a beautiful, contemplative place that uses technology in a very powerful and wonderful way, and I’d recommend that you all go there; to the Nobel Museum (lower right) in Oslo; to some of the immersive environments that are being created (that one was one that I saw at the Wired NextFest in New York); to this x-ray vision thing (they’re projecting stuff onto cars in the upper right). There’s something just about pure, visceral engagement and the power of experience that makes science learning memorable and stick with us for a long time. Thanks very much.
Robert Semper
The presentations have raised big questions, I think, about new media and the whole relationship of science and society and this real tension between individuals and institutions. I heard it in terms of when producers don’t like their material to be cut up and moved around. I heard it in a question of whether we need teachers or not in institutions, or who’s telling the story in the museum with an iPod; or the personal blogs that come from institutional levels. And we even talked at lunch about government blogs, whether they’d ever exist.
And so I’d like maybe each of you to address, if you have some thoughts (you can pass if you want to) about this real issue about individualization and institutionalization, particularly around this topic. We’re talking about science and society. And the reason I bring it up is, science is of course both an individual enterprise and an institution. It has rules. Things have to be right. And there’s a big fear sometimes with the individualization that it won’t be correct, or someone else is going to take over the discussion or dialogue. So I don’t know if you have some thoughts or comments.
Lauren Aguirre
I’ll start with our Car of the Future project. We sort of see that open content is coming, and people are asking for our content, and producers are concerned with talent: people who trust us and will let us interview them, how are they going to feel if their little snippet gets taken out of context and used in the wrong way? So that’s why we’ve taken this baby step with the topic of alternative energy for cars. And in a way, I feel like our approach is going to be to make the entire interview available. And it will be with attribution. So I think in many ways that protects the talent, because even if someone did take it out of context, it’s going to throw back to the full source. And we also will stream our entire program, so our editorial viewpoint on the topic will be there for everyone to see. So I feel like that offers some protection in terms of giving people content that they can play with, but also protecting both the interviewees and the producer’s voice.
Matthew Nisbet
Late in December, when Time magazine came out with its Person of the Year, I updated my CV, because of course Time named all of us the person of the year because of the individualized nature of the new media. When you talk to researchers about the impact of the Internet and new media, they group themselves into different camps. There are reinforcement theorists who think that the new media will simply strengthen existing patterns of interaction in society and knowledge. So as I showed you in some of the data, really the knowledge-rich get richer in terms of taking advantage of the Internet and all this availability, whereas other people kind of select themselves into their own preferences, which might be entertainment content and other things, at a systematic kind of level.
But the other thing is, when blogs first emerged, for example, people thought that this was a real serious challenge to journalism. But then news organizations figured out, well, we’ll just buy out the most popular bloggers and we’ll host them at our site, and we’ll just generate traffic to our site. MySpace was kind of a thing. It was an independent community that grew up, a social networking community, then News Corp bought it, and now YouTube was bought by Google, and now they’re thinking about who’s going to buy Facebook. So, in fact, in the new-media environment, institutions and then those individuals—those segments of the public who are already knowledgeable and enthusiastic about science—are really differentially advantaged. And I don’t necessarily buy into the revolutionary quality of the Internet.
Just one last point about that. YouTube is another example. It can be used strategically, but if you look at the content of YouTube (and I haven’t seen any studies of this, but I’m willing to predict this as a hypothesis), if you did a content analysis of the clips on YouTube, most of the stuff that’s posted on YouTube and the most frequently watched stuff is just ripped off of the mainstream media. And so in fact what YouTube is doing is, it’s strengthening viewers’ ties to the mainstream media content, as an average tendency. And there are other ways to use it strategically, in terms of getting across and over these things. But on an average basis, this is probably what’s going on.
David Rabkin
I think it does raise really deep questions for us as an institution. We historically are about our voice. We went out and brought the world in, in a sense, and we crafted the story very, very carefully. And so it was our story—informed by people outside, informed by distinguished advisors, but it was our story. And so when we let visitors create the story, when we don’t control it, it really does raise fundamental questions for our role as educators as we’ve understood it since 1830, for goodness sake.
So yes, there’s deep questioning going on in our institution, and I think that for many of us, comfort will only come through experience, learning what works, what doesn’t work, and finding out if our visitors truly do understand when it’s the museum speaking in some institutional way, or whether it’s us creating a marketplace for ideas, and those ideas aren’t necessarily ours. So yes, it’s definitely a struggle that we wrestle with and are experiencing and exploring.
Michael Zyda
I think individualization in the game realm is clearly there, and I think it’s going to grow larger. If you go and talk to people who play World of Warcraft or America’s Army, they will tell you their honest score, or they will tell you whether they’re level 60 or level 70. They’ll tell you exactly how they identify themselves with respect to that particular game. And the technology that’s coming now with respect to game-based education is just leading us towards an individual tailored experience with education. You already have some of that with the Internet. You go out and you find a story, and then there are some links down there that take you to some other places, and you kind of wander around, and you get your story, and no one else goes that same pathway. And this is also true in games. This is actually the way education should be. I think some of the problems that we have are when a teacher can teach in one style, and that’s good for 20% of the class, and the rest of the class doesn’t think in that way or work in that way. And we lose children that way. I think if we can build individually tailored education with technology, then we will be a lot better off as a country.
Robert Semper
I have another question, but I’ll hold that and see if there are some questions in the audience. Please identify yourself and use the microphone.
Audience
I’m Richard Hudson from Twin Cities Public Television. We make TV but we have Web sites too, and stream media. Lauren mentioned Creative Commons, and I wonder if each of the panelists, and Rob, if you would as well, tell us how you’re managing the rights related to user-generated content. And if you are implementing Creative Commons, how do you make that work? How does it work?
Lauren Aguirre
Well, it doesn’t work yet because we haven’t made the Car of the Future material available. But that is our intention. And in terms of user-generated content, what we’re getting from our audience, we have them sign a materials release saying that we can post it. But since we’re currently filming that show, we are getting the talent. They have the option of signing our regular release or the release that would make it open content. And it’s explained to them what the difference is, and then they have a choice. So we’re only going to make available that material that has been cleared.
Matthew Nisbet
Obviously, copyright is a big problem or issue with blogs. The two areas that are probably the biggest issues are when blogs repost pictures from news sites or elsewhere. And usually the norm is that they do a form of deep linking, where if you click on the picture, you’re taken right to where the original picture was. And then the second part is, now you can embed code from YouTube into your blog, and you can watch the clip that’s stored on YouTube directly in the pane of your blog post. So once YouTube solves its copyright problem, it will be interesting to see how blogs now use that. And again with blogs there is this echo chamber effect. If a politician makes a mistake, or an advocate says something really stupid, that can echo across the blogosphere now because it’s captured on YouTube, and then different blogs are then hosting it within their windowpanes—that news clip that’s been stored there on YouTube.
David Rabkin
We essentially use explicit releases. Like in that video comment thing, after you had done your 30-second video, you could view it, but then you actually had to select: "I want this saved to the database, and the museum can use it for whatever they want. " So we had sort of an explicit release on that. Certainly when we take photographs of our events, if we videotape anything, any kind of program that goes on at the museum, we ask for releases and we always make sure that there are safe places where people who don’t want to be photographed or videotaped will be able to fully participate in the program. And there’s a whole bunch of cool stuff that I didn’t tell you about—programmable stuff. On the Web you could program an environment in the museum, program an experience that you or others could come to the museum and experience. You can imagine a high-tech gallery with lights and sound and computer graphics and stuff like that. And visitors could develop things on the Web, the results could be simulated, they could upload them to the museum, they could see them when they come to the museum. But again, in that kind of situation we would basically say, "We own it. We can use it for anything that we want to use it for. " We’re just explicit and transparent about it.
Robert Semper
We haven’t done much with uploaded content from visitors that we’ve incorporated into our own work. We are, I would say, struggling with what to do if our stuff appears someplace else, and whether to care about it or not. And actually, do we really go to YouTube and take down stuff that we’ve posted somewhere, like our clips? We did a clips video that’s posted there periodically. And it’s an interesting tradeoff. In some respects, it’s not clear that financially it’s worth our doing that, and it becomes open source. We are actually trying to understand what it means to be an open-source institution, and to figure out where the value proposition of the economics is (so I’m talking now about when our own material appears elsewhere). And we’re also trying to decide where is the tradeoff in terms of material getting out, and getting identity, and the trading that’s going on in blogs, compared to a traditional IP notion where you figure, well, I have to protect and hold onto this as much as possible. But it’s an amazing, changing world, and I really think it comes back to this earlier question: giving up control is very hard. And I think that’s the thing we’re working through institutionally for our own produced stuff.
Audience
I’m Kay VanValkenburgh with Integrated Media Environments. I’ve been doing permanent installations since about 1999. And it seems that the Holy Grail for corporations, museums, historical societies, would be to take all of the related stuff that’s being produced in all of these different places, and be able to use it in their exhibit. That would be the thing that everybody would want, because I think there’s such a rich bit of information out there (videos and all kinds of things). And the impression that I get (David, I thought your comment about translating was particularly appropriate), the question that I would have to follow on the question before would be: How much are you finding you can actually use of the stuff that you’re getting from other sources, whether they be other institutions or blogs that you’re reading or things like that? And what are the challenges? How are you overcoming the challenges of actually using that, if you’re finding that possible?
David Rabkin
I think the challenge is creating the infrastructure for a tremendous experience for people. I think the translation probably is significant, but I think it can be overcome. We’ve got some great examples of doing it. We didn’t know we could go to this very quickly, straight from stage to studio approach to doing podcasts. But we can. We can do very, very good interviews. And you can develop production techniques, to some extent.
But the nut that we haven’t cracked is: What do you do with this media in the museum that can’t be reproduced at home, that doesn’t put you in a race with industry, and that is worth coming to the museum for? Should we put our money into building that, versus some amazing physical thing that you would never see anywhere else? The flexibility is in fact the Holy Grail. The ability to leverage what other institutions are doing really is a Holy Grail. And I think the reason that we’re not all converging around it is that we can’t describe the experience yet. And if we could, I think that a bunch of us would say, "You know what? It may not be my particular design, it may not be quite my style, but I can use it. " We’re just not there yet. I don’t know.
Audience
My name is Coleen Weiss-Magasic. I’m one of those teachers that you’re trying to get rid of. I’ll let you know when I think that should happen, based on my retirement plan. But in the meantime, the trend in education recently has been to involve kids in group-type activities to teach them to not think as individuals, but to think as part of a team, to share responsibility. Yet you’re describing a very individualized education, which of course there are pros and cons for. So I was wondering if you could speak to socialization of students and where you would envision that happening in your plan for an individualized education.
Michael Zyda
I think socialization of students happens on the playground, and happens in homes, and happens all over. I don’t necessarily think it happens in school. I think most socialization comes from parents in the first place. But I think individually tailored education is something that we kind of have to get to, because some of the topics are complicated. I think the problem is that society doesn’t value teaching. And so it hasn’t kept the salaries up to where they should be, to keep the good people from escaping to other professions. And so the idea I have is really that we try to recoup some of that by providing games that the kids are going to go into and really get sucked into and really immersed into, that replace some of that education because they’re not getting it. And that’s the mission. It’s not to just lay massive numbers of people off. Clearly I said that we still need teachers for tutoring in various hard cases. And so I think that’s where I’m trying to get.
Audience
Sort of following up from the question that was just asked, what can’t these new media do? You’ve described, you’re going to replace schools, and sort of replace science museums, in a way, because most of the content that you get at a science museum could be gotten online. We’re replacing television: things like the NOVA series can be gotten online. So what do you think the aspects of your science-museum institutions or other teaching institutions are, that can’t be gotten with what we have right now, in these new media?
Matthew Nisbet
I think with the introduction of any type of new information technology across history, there’s always been this swell of incredible optimism about how the technology is going to revolutionize society. For example, when they introduced radio, people thought that radio was going to be used as two-way communication; it was going to bring citizens from across the country together. And it ended up being a one-way communication device.
There are serious questions about whether the Internet is as good a conveyor of complex information or facilitates as much learning as, say, news in print. So there are interesting studies comparing, in experimental settings, reading the same article in print versus online. And what they find is that people actually recall less and remember less from the article online than in print. And some of the reasoning is that actually when people are online, there’s still a lot of orientation that goes on, that takes up some cognitive load. So part of what they would otherwise be focusing on—the details of the article—is taken up by this orientation. And in some studies on survey data that I’ve published with a colleague of mine at University of Wisconsin, looking again at learning about politics online versus in print, after all controls and regression models, reading news online is not significantly predictive of learning about politics; whereas newspapers still remain the main vehicle for learning about politics. And again, it’s difficult to get a causality and really piece all these out, but there’s some evidence to be kind of pessimistic about whether online content is as good as magazines and newspapers for conveying complex information.
Audience
Was that same study done for television?
Matthew Nisbet
Well, yes. Actually, the initial comparison was always newspaper to television, and they do the same type of comparison now. TV is the worst conveyor of complex information. What TV is good for is (1) it serves a surveillance function. So you see something on the news, you’re alerted to it, and then if you’re motivated to find out more information, you read the newspaper the next day, or you look up information online. And then there’s a greater level of presence and motivation. So it can be a socializing thing, it can build interest, it can socialize viewers into an appreciation of science, etcetera. But again, when you look at the actual learning that occurs from television news or documentary film versus print material, it’s not nearly as great.
But there is one interesting finding. Among younger cohorts, because they’re growing up online, they’re socialized into this online world, and so it’s not as difficult for them to orient to the material online, and therefore they’re not taking up some of their cognitive load in trying to orient to the space, whereas older generations are not used to it. So as kids grow up online, that disparity between print news and online information might diminish.
Robert Semper
So we’re going to be obsolete. Is that what you’re saying?
Matthew Nisbet
Well, I would leave you this one other finding. Harvard did a survey of 18- to 25-year-olds on where they get their news on a regular basis. Roughly 6 percent of 18- to 25-year-olds said that they read the newspaper in print on a regular basis; and 11 percent said they read the newspaper online on a regular basis; and 16 percent said they watched The Daily Show on a regular basis.
Lauren Aguirre
We don’t do smell, taste, or touch online yet, as far as I know. So there’s no substitute for the real world.
David Rabkin
I also think that some of the generational effects that may be present—may be sort of artifacts right now around print versus online media—don’t exist for stuff like just physical proximity to other human beings. Until we are raised virtually, there is something about being physically connected to another person: line of sight, the vibe is there. And when I was telling you about Howard before, it was because that guy was so, so powerful. And I think until we’re raised online, being with real people is going to matter, and it’s going to be powerful.
Michael Zyda
I think the younger generation is being raised online. My children have never lived in a home without a computer, but we never had a television. And so I get to watch my son, starting at about age 13 or so, he would be online, with five chat windows open, doing his homework, listening to techno music, and talking to someone on a headphone telephone. And I would go, "How is he getting his homework done in this mode? " Because if it was me, it’d be like, "Turn the radio off; I got to look at this one thing. " And the kid of course did phenomenally well in school. So he can do this. And I go through my lab at USC, and these kids are listening to their iPod, and they’ve got five or six chat windows open, and they’re doing their homework, in a lab where a class is being taught. This is a different species of humans than you and I.
This is true in the game realm. If you go to Electronic Arts and you ask them where is the line of demarcation for people who play games and people who don’t, it’s about 37 years old. So people 37 and under have grown up playing games, and people above that have not. So I go and give talks on games, and people go, "I don’t play games. " Of course you don’t. You’re like my age. I’ve always had this "what is it " interact thing going on, because that’s been my whole life. But we are growing a different group of folks. And I don’t know if you can measure it in some of the studies right now, unless you go to the under 24 set to get some of the blog and other impacts on people. But I think these are different folks, and I think the answers will be different. And I think actually if you did fMRI studies and comparisons of brains, you’ll see differences.
Robert Semper
My take on this is that underneath the new media, the social activities are actually quite constant and are actually the same, and I would argue, have been the same for hundreds and hundreds of years; and that what you just see is one medium replacing—sometimes with efficiency, sometimes maybe enlarging the circle of people you can do it with. But word-of-mouth activities about what to buy or sell have been part of human culture. The notion of forming groups around particular small topics is highly part of our culture. So it’s important to separate what the new-new is in the medium, and not confuse it with activities where you just may see more, or where the geographic distance is farther, or stuff like that. I actually think it’s not that there’s so much new here, in terms of what’s going on. That’s my sense of it.
Audience
My name is Jay Labov. I’m from the National Research Council. Thank you very much for your service at the NRC. My question is primarily directed to you, but others could answer. And that is, I’m still intrigued by your notion of teachers and teaching, and what the future holds. It’s a rather extreme view that teachers will become irrelevant. The other view that you’re talking about is that the role of teaching will evolve in ways that will become very, very different than they are now. That’s very possible. But the point that I’m really worried about is that for the most part, the gap between what kids are doing and what teachers know and understand about the technology is becoming ever wider. We’re not doing anything, for the most part, in our schools of education, for example, to help new teachers deal with this sort of thing. We’re not dealing in any real effective way, as far as I can see, from where I sit, in helping teachers through in-service, really help them understand what gaming is about, for example, and what the potential is there for helping them to learn. It’s not clear to me that the people who are developing games and developing other kinds of technology are thinking specifically about what they can do to help enhance the roles of teachers through professional development, through pre-service education, providing games, for example, that would help teachers who are now under-prepared in science and math (and we know that that’s the case in many parts of the country, particularly in inner cities, particularly in rural areas, and particularly in the middle grades) to develop the ability to think much more deeply about their craft, and what they do and how they interact with kids. And I really worry that this is going to become out of hand unless we can begin to think about how teachers become engaged in all this, and how we help them do that.
Michael Zyda
I think the problem is, society doesn’t value teaching. And we’ve seen that for quite a long time. It doesn’t pay enough to keep fantastic people in there. It doesn’t provide the resources for the schools. They don’t have the computers. There are a whole lot of political decisions that we as a country have made with respect to teaching. And I think that is some of what is fundamental.
But let me answer the question from the game industry perspective, with respect to educational games. In May of 2005, at the request of Governor Mark Warner of Virginia, I was asked if I would organize a session at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, where I could bring in game industry executives so Mark Warner could tell them, "Yes, you all have to get into the educational games business. " And it was my job to go ask executives from the industry to please come. And I got quite a few to attend. But I got to Electronic Arts, which is the largest game publisher in the whole world. And I asked the chief creative officer (Bing Gordon), I asked Steve Seabolt, I asked, I think, five or six of the top executives of Electronic Arts, and I got dead silence. I finally got the answer back, they had to go talk to their legal department. And the legal department’s answer was, if they showed up to this event with Governor Warner, that they might be perceived as thinking about getting into the educational games business, and therefore it would hurt shareholder value and they would be eligible for shareholder lawsuits. All right? So is the game industry going to get you games for education? The answer is no. It’s going to be gotten in a different way. And I think it’s really very important that we get there. There’s a lot to talk about there.
Fixing schools is hard. I’ll give you my experience. I grew up in Los Angeles and I went to LA City schools. And then when my children were growing up, they actually grew up in Carmel by the Sea. Carmel by the Sea is this beautiful, idyllic, rich people’s town, which had absolutely abysmal public schools because of Proposition 13 and the more recent court decisions on school financing basically making it so every school gets the same amount of money per kid. So what everyone does there is, they pull their children out if they have money ($17,000, $18,000, $20,000 a year) and put them into a private school. And the private schools, when I look at them, have fewer numbers of kids in the classroom, but they basically look like the schools that I went to in Los Angeles City when I was there. They don’t look a whole lot different, but the teachers are paid better and they’ve got really nice computer labs, they’ve got nice theater stuff, and the buildings don’t lack for paint and water and heat and all these things. But they’re collecting $17,000–$18,000 a year per student, and what is it in California? It’s going back. It’s something like $7,000 or $8,000 per student? So there’s a $10,000–$11,000 per student gap back to the public schoolhouses. And unless you fix that, and then wait the 20 or 30 years to replace the teachers with the people who really go into it because of the great salaries, I think we have a huge structural problem.
Robert Semper
I’m going to make one other comment about schools. It’s interesting to me that we spend a lot of money putting computers into classrooms, and we spend a lot of money wiring classrooms, but we didn’t actually do something like give computers to teachers and wire their homes to broadband, which would have probably had a much bigger impact for a lot less cost. The picture isn’t looked at correctly. It’s not looked at systemically. And I think I completely agree that one of the biggest issues is that teachers and teaching is not thought of in a serious way, as a serious profession that needs investment to create it and maintain it on the part of the individuals doing the work.
Audience
My name is Carolyn Collins Petersen, and I create digital planetarium programs and content for science museums. I just wanted to make a comment. I was at the American Astronomical Society meeting last week in Seattle, and a couple of people had set up a little planetarium dome and were showing shows. And a guy crawls in the door and says, "Well, you know, I have a planetarium on Second Life. " And he just did it as a test, just to do a little graphic thing. And it’s a really crappy little dome. He said himself, "They’re really crappy little graphics, but people line up for 30 minutes before each show on Second Life, " just to see his show. So there’s a little social thing going on there that I have yet to quite figure out what’s going on with it.
Mathew Nisbet
Second Life is an interesting development because obviously there’s a ton of hype about Second Life. In fact, actually the number of users of Second Life is a lot less than Second Life claims. There’s been a lot of buzz lately in the news about that.
But the thing about Second Life is just like the advent of the Internet, this tremendous promise or ideals for using Second Life to enhance learning, science collaboration, etcetera. But then there’s also human nature and human tendencies. And Second Life is mostly being used for things like Second Life dating, Second Life marriages, cocktail parties; and companies are getting into Second Life as a way to build brand loyalty by going to a Nike Island or another product island where you can buy your avatars, you can outfit them in Nike, etcetera.
Audience
I’m Donna Rae Warren. I’m a documentarian, a consultant, and a teacher. A couple of quick things. I just wanted to say first of all that I do know many, many kids who operate in the fashion that you’re talking about, and maybe that’s just the way it is, and maybe it’s fine. But I also think that technology exists in society, and that if society ceases to find something useful, or ultimately finds that something needs to be moderated or mediated, that that will eventually happen. And I for one have concerns about the idea of just going along with the idea that it’s okay for kids not to give their full attention to another human being. And that’s actually not just kids, that’s adults. I can name several.
David Rabkin
Think about BlackBerries, having a conversation while using a BlackBerry.
Audience
Oh, I agree. I agree. It’s one of the whole panoply here. But the other thing I just wanted to ask, kind of along the same lines: Does anyone know about research and work that’s being done to focus on groups, particularly age-related groups, who are kind of being left behind, in some respects feeling very small? And I think of my mother, who I literally had to convince that she could not blow up the computer, literally, in order for her to get on and learn email. I’m wondering if there’s any research being done about that.
Robert Semper
Anybody know on our panel? In the audience? It’s a bad sign.
Audience
I’m Mary Nykoruk. I’ve been a media specialist for over 20 years. I’m basically a focus group, and have been an activist for over 100 SIGs, which stands for Special Interest Groups in the Boston area alone. They span professional and also new user-group range. BSC (Boston Computer Society) was the biggest user-group collection for 17 years. But then there are continuing and new ones. To answer that question about the age, actually it’s surprising to many people, but the retiree population is the largest growing new Internet use, because of the email specifically. They want to connect with their family, with the pictures. So that’s a short answer to that. I did want to also add, though, that there is some functionality that would help both the attention span problem (focus attention) but also the wider range of value-added propositions, and what this involves is that there is now enough development with "micro payments " to allow some things to happen now that couldn’t have happened three years ago. One of the things is a slightly different topic, functionality. When we ten years ago went home and we looked at our phone message machine, and it had 7 on it, we go, "Oh no. This is going to be two or three minutes. " To be polite, people would socialize, "Hi, how are you, " and then they’d get to their 1- or 2-sentence bullet line. So the industry had an easy fix. They had a "half the speed "—to slow down to put your phone number, the relevant fact, and twice as fast so that you could get through the sort of social interaction. That was just a default. We do not have that easily available now. So when we are commuting, walking, in our car, biking, this functionality (because I am also coming from a video background) is in audio scrubbing, and you can hear, and you can understand. And Apple and Stanford put together a study that had an articulate speaker talk five times faster than the average conversation. And most of us know the context of the news, but what we were waiting for is the 5-10% that we don’t know. So we can speed through, we hear that keyword, and on the fly, listen to that particular little piece, and get through three or four podcasts, whatever the media is.
So my title, media specialist, actually (to wrap it up) is an oxymoron. It just is. You’re not a specialist. You need to be a generalist.
The one practical thing that I can give you as a market advantage, including the micro payments but in the institutionalized situation with the gaming—because I helped start the virtual-reality group in Boston 15-20 years ago. Anyway, the sensor game of Christmas, one of the winners was where it’s not just about the hand; it’s about sensors around you so that you could actually be doing the dancing and/or the sports. That was a game. It could sense different joints, for example. And in this case, I’m talking about a market advantage and a health advantage in rehab, because I’m also asked to be a cognitive technology advisor for Spaulding Rehab Hospitals. So pain is there, but boy, if it’s a game and you can actually be doing that exercise in a game, that’s a big plus. And there’s a market there.
Audience
David Durlach from TechnoFrolics. I have a question that I don’t really have an opinion about, but it interests me listening to people. And that’s the question of how long the path is from where you are to where you’re trying to get to, meaning democracy and the sort of personalization and possibly even monitoring EEG signals to allow people to very, very quickly go the way they want, or alternatively the way someone else wants them to go.
And the comment that often when people are looking on the blogs, they find something of interest on the way to the thing that they were working for (the comment was made earlier), if you look at casinos and shopping centers, they work very hard at not allowing you to get where you want to go quickly, so you have to walk through very tortured places that are not well designed for getting around, so you’ll see things you want to buy.
Now, I guess my question is—and it’s not just a specific question—but suppose you could make all of the searches on Google and everything else perfectly tailored, so the path from where you are to where you think you want to go is zero, and you pass nothing along the way at all; and contrasting that with taking a physical walk where you may want to go to the store but you’re forced to walk past some other people, or some scene you didn’t expect. How does one balance the speed of getting to where you want to go, with not seeing things along the way that might be interesting that you didn’t expect? It’s sort of a broad question.
Lauren Aguirre
I think accidents are good. I’m not sure whether you’re saying it would be better if we could make it faster for people to get where they want to go. I think people can get where they want to go pretty fast, and I think it’s a good thing that if you’re walking, you might meet someone you wouldn’t otherwise meet. And it’s a good thing that if you’re looking for information about your trip to Egypt, that you might stumble across some science about the pyramids. So I actually think it’s not a bad thing that people have detours.
Audience
I think it’s a good thing too, but since a lot of the work is being on making it less and less that way (meaning making the search engines better and better, and the experience more and more tailored, possibly before you’re even made conscious what it is you want to do, I’m curious: Is the goal to make it as fast as possible, or to have to take an interesting path?
Matthew Nisbet
I think the one example I used on blogs, to give you an example, is that you’re actually getting into spaces online with science-related content, where people don’t expect it. So to give you an example, now with evangelicals forming a coalition on global warming, there are a lot of religion-related blogs. When people go to a religion-related blog—in fact, actually in many cases the audience group for religion-related blogs is probably less likely tha