2020ED : Gamification, Pointification

Kinderen op school worden beoordeeld, krijgen stempels, stickers, punten. Er is een ranking, sommige kinderen halen hier hun motivatie uit om een 10 te halen, anderen om te zorgen dat ze net overgaan naar het volgende jaar.

Gamification is een trend die niet te stoppen lijkt; de ‘echte wereld’ krijgt steeds meer spel elementen. Nu is het vooral marketing, maar zoals video/televisie ook vanuit marketing begon in de jaren 60, zal gamification ook verder reiken dan commercie. Pointification is de eerste ‘makkelijke’ link tussen spel, beloning en echte wereld; gewenst gedrag wordt beloond. Hier een aardige samenvatting van de trend.

Docenten belonen kinderen met gewenst gedrag. En onderwijsinspecties net zo goed, met punten, rankings op nationaal en internationaal niveau. Spelend leren wordt gezien als leren vanuit zelfmotivatie. Hoe kan een academische pabo of educatieve dienstverlener bijdragen aan de ontwikkeling van een gewenst ‘score’ systeem die docenten en ouders ondersteunen bij de opvoeding van het kind?

One little man, 100 big innovations, getting personal with The Blue Economy

The environmentalists do good work, everybody knows the planet is in trouble.
The Agents of Fear you have been listening to because we just Love terror stories.
The Agents of Love, they are out there, but we Fear them like elephants fear mice.

Thought leaders say it; the books are written, the data is out there. Now what?

Children need good fables as Gunther Pauli says and writes.
Companies need help, 100 innovations The Blue Economy is putting forward.

We have 8 years to create the rest of the 100 million jobs. (Keeping track?)

Now what can I do? One little man?
Buckminster Fuller wondered in despair what he could do. Probably G.P. also.

…

So I have a go, a question, a quest;

If G.P. says 10 years, 100 innovations, 100 million jobs….

Can I say:

1 man,

10 cities,

100 innovations,

1000 jobs ?

With a believable smile on my face? More jobs? Other innovations as wel?

When the body freezes, vital parts are saved.

What is happening now is collaborations running our society, even in the Netherlands (companies, funds, ngo’s) are in panic mode. Their muscles froze. Their bodies froze. They tremble on their seats, afraid to stand up; AND it is their good right! The most important thing for a body(team) and the brain (board of directors) is to make sure the entity survives. Keeping jobs, keeping the blood flow.

Our own bodies and brains are wired to do the same, vital parts are taken care off to get through a bad situation.

Saving vital parts of the body (family) is more important than arms and legs (neighbors and strangers). In the end your own DNA is all that matters to you. Fear is getting the best off us, and more and more we start to realize why civil or world war, ‘leaders’ can get away with genocides; the public is exhausted, every day survival has become our only thought, the rest… is ‘whatever’.

Governments are now holding on to the vital parts of society, the big industries, the big employers. Because if they go, the whole society goes down they say. Will governments be able to realize on time you can’t just pump blood to vital parts for long, toes will turn black, the ecosystem will start to fall ill and possibly the body can die.

And maybe even more important; will we realize the freezing body is just a metaphor, society itself is part of nature, new sprouts on old bodies is maybe even the healthiest way forward.

Starting a magazine 2: WHY

I have the feeling everything in society became one lump of English words with meanings and hyperlinks where it is more important to express culture than impress nature. Like how with little effort (no effort!) your headphone cable becomes a ball of spaghetti in your bag and how much energy it takes to pull it apart again. Society is this ball, we made it fast and easy. We need to find a way to pull it apart a bit, stretch it to see how the cables are innertwined. With a bit of good looking, you can organize it. Without looking well, you just have to take the beginning or end and push it through all the hoops.

Nature used to look complex, but we figured out it runs on pretty basic laws. We can predict today almost everything in nature.

Culture we think about it as something extremely subjective and complex, while actually the basic laws are pretty straight forward.

I don’t know how the magazine will look or function in this multichannel connected universe. I only know I need something interesting to read, something back to basic, a universal basic story.  And I think I am not alone in this. I imagine in a few years this magazine has many ‘owners’, many contributors, many readers who today have the same challenge; boredom in storyland.

Nobody told the Kids

Watching Thomas Friedman powerful talk at MIT on his adventure discovering the world became flat while we were sleeping…

The phrase still arousing me, Thomas whispering in the microphone; “… and nobody told the kids“. (That the economic playing field is levelled and we better get used to it fast.)  So…Who is currently telling the kids about The REAL World?

Here a throw : Kids, reality is, factories took over routine physical labor, computers routine mental labor and many of our jobs are global. Many of todays jobs won’t be around by the time you turn 20 or so. The messenger has hope for you; There will always be jobs, everybody has the tools to work and the regions with most imagination will flourish.

So the duties to fulfil; Regions give access to tools and help the next generation (AO) to be imaginative. Check.

Starting a magazine 1: IDEA

As if I have nothing else to do to ensure my daily sandwich, survive… I start a magazine today.  This is why.

I was in a magazine kiosk the other day and of the 300 magazines, there was not one I could buy with confidence I would read most of it inside. Sure some screaming headlines caught my attention as I fit in a targetgroup, though magazines as a whole didn’t arouse me.

Online, articles are at the moment mostly blown out of proportion or headlines telling the news in the opposite way, just to get attention. What mental illness is that?!

I enjoy reading Ode, but I guess I read too many. Stories feel like in repeat mode, probably for a younger generation than me today discovering the Ode. Can Ode grow with me also?

I am on some mailing lists, and basically there are some personal diary letters informing me best. An expert in a field giving anonymously his unsalted opinion (read frustration) with the status quo in his domain. A great way to let it out, a good way for me to read between the lines somewhere.

I was/am a forum poster on societal topics. The problem there is, after 6 months on a forum/community or so, topics are starting to repeat itself, though new people have no idea a book was written a few months ago on it already.

Everything I would like to read is fragmented, specialized. Problem is I am more of a generalist, looking for the whole rather than the detail. We want to understand the whole in abstract as a specialist can understand a subject in detail.

What is Survival?

What is Survival?

Eating, drinking, having a warm bed. Basically that is survival. When little we take this for granted. It is arranged for us by our parents, our glocal community.

We go to school, having weekend jobs, life is affordable when graduating. We take a job somewhere or start a firm. Everything is fit and flexible in life.

In 2002 I started a multimedia design company. Basically me finding projects and working in (virtual) global teams together. I lived in those early days in various European countries. Just hopping around where projects took me. I did this for 10 years, currently most of my time in Romania with my wife and son. The world is really flat.

This is all great, fortunate I am, grateful to be born in the Netherlands for that matter.

Though for some years now, projects are getting from the ground slower. The crisis is also hitting me, and me rambling about survival becomes personal; Finding money to pay for bills is not a given any longer.

So my concern we don’t have a global grip on survival of 9 billion people, is shown also to me that I also don’t have a grip on my own survival.

Now I don’t need/want pitty, I can always go and work in a factory or something. The point is, why did I write, draw, calculate the last decade so much if nobody will ever have any use for it.

So We=ME : What is global survival… What is my survival…

My App told me what to do next in My Life.

It is early, like 4 a.m. in the morning, my iphone 8 wakes me up.

It’s Pete, the mini-me I send on a quest the other day to find the purpose of my life.

“I found it!” he says with a rotten voice as if my digital assistent was in a bar all night.  ”The best thing for you, Paul, to do next in life is go to the countryside 25 miles out of the city and start a little farm!”.

Pete his calculations are emotionless logic. Hard-hard facts, numbers are crunched on my potential, potential on all the people in the region and the potential of the region related to the planet. How cool is that?

“With all the logic in the world you come up with that?” I reply. Now I get into a virtual verbal barfight with grumpy Smurf, it seems I ruined his day…

I wonder if this will be the case. (Smurfs on phones outsmarting us). Yet, wouldn’t it be great some things surrounding us would start to make sense again?  Some primary logic which makes us, our surrounding, the world tick? An App telling us what the next best (individual) step is to go collaboratively for a ‘better picture’?

Looking at the massive succes of The Smurfs village App.. who knows …

Focus focus focus!

I wish you all Health, Happiness and Hunger! The only challenge with staying hungry is there is so much to eat. When Steve Jobs read the line on the back off the whole earth catalogue (stay hungry, stay foolish), there was not so much information available. Today, no matter what your specialized interest is, you can find gatherings around all themes and subjects on the internet.

I remember 11 years ago looking for the meaning of ‘Noema’ by Husserl. I could find one reference to a scholar who quotes the paragraph online stating the meaning according to him. Today this is a complete different story, a lot can be found. (Actually it became a paradox to me; the discussion what Husserl meant with pure thought has become a lot of reasoning among which the pure thought on pure thought is missing.)

Rebooting my brain

Now… I started this blog in order just to drop my thoughts, ‘what is going on in my brain’ online. I didn’t do it for 228 days I see today. Lot’s went on in my brain, but somehow in my mind I didn’t practice what I preach.

What is my essence of thought? Pure?

What is my focus to stick with to ramble about?  Who cares?

I guess it is ‘SURVIVAL’.

I use the term in projects, blogposts, TED conversations, OPENideo dialogues, but it stays in the realm of wonder. Just words, ideas.

SURVIVAL, this term and idea fascinates me. I don’t understand it. The funny thing is nobody does really. Survival is pure in many ways. I think it can drive me forward, finding out what it is all about. If I follow it, it is useful for me, and others maybe also.

Hungry for a simple, pure answer ; What IS Survival ?

School means Creative Leisure

Somebody told me the word School means in greek and latin ‘creative leisure’… This was the last drop I guess for me; how could we end up from creative leisure to what we send our children to now? The last real music lessons are currently being kicked out in Dutch primary school system… So School actually can’t be called school anymore.. It is a lie to be sued upon. I hear stories from parents their children are so bored they get all nervous sitting the whole day in there. I can imagine spasm is a frequent sight in classrooms.

It is such a mess. And the state is not able to solve it for various reasons. There are very bright individuals in the Ministry of Education though the system surrounding their desk is so vast and segmented, the blood doesn’t flow well. To proof before hand a new method will work is impossible to do. At the same time we see children learning extremelly fast basic skills on the iPad. Also new methods, not tested before. Natural selection takes place in the App Store; good experiments are scaled up, the weak fall off. We can learn from this a lot.

On the bright side!

Maxima Zorreguieta has developed a plan in the light of the right for every child to make music. So maybe we just have to wait until her husband becomes our king, parlement runs out of money so we want the royal house to have more power, than Maxima can create some lasting change in education the way it should be.

Or can’t we wait?