It’s a long presentation, but it’s a piece that really encapsulates powerful trends in social networking, game design, and human behaviors.

In this presentation, he highlights some of the most unexpected trends in social media and games over the past few years: Guitar Hero, Facebook, Webkins, and Mafia Wars. More importantly, he looks at the psychological twist (or hook) embedded within each game.

In  the world of digital game design, we’re seeing a huge shift in the psychology of games from single-person experiences to massively multiplayer experiences that reward you when you blend real-life and game-world. If you’ve been on Facebook, you’ve probably seen Farmville’s “lost cows” wandering through the stream of your friend’s status updates.

Yes, you can leave a note on your friend’s facebook wall, or if you both play a Facebook game together, you can give them a gift which allows them to advance in the game. This constant gift giving makes a viral game, and it also pings on the psychological principle of reciprocity. If you give something, then you can expect that the recipient will feel a social pressure to give something in return.

These seemingly innocuous Facebook games took the videogame industry by surprise, but they also have impact far beyond gaming. I’d propose that they present a new way of generating collaborative learning within simulations.

Next generation learning solutions cannot just push content to learners and expect they will learn like passive sponges. In the old days, instructional design followed a clear linear path (“ADDIE“) from analysis through design, development, and implementation. Now, we’re in a world where we have to design massively multi-learner collaborative learning environments.

This video offers a lot of key insights for serious games (simulation training as well as social learning). In fact, if I were teaching a course on next-gen instructional design, I’d put it on the syllabus.

(Port-au-Prince, Haiti)  On January 20, 2010, staff from the Maison des Enfants de Dieu (Children of the House of God) orphanage accompanied by representatives from the U.S. ministry, For His Glory Adoption Outreach (FHG), attempted to obtain humanitarian parole from the U.S. Embassy Port-au-Prince for 133 orphans.  The orphanage staff and FHG representatives were turned away because of confusion about photo requirements for each child.  Additionally, they were informed that humanitarian parole would only apply to approximately 111 of the 132 children from the Maison des Enfants de Dieu orphanage.  These are the orphans who have a “United States qualified referral” dated prior to the earthquake on January 12, 2010.

In accordance with specific instructions received today, orphanage staff and FHG representatives will depart for U.S. Embassy Port-au-Prince in the early morning of January 21, 2010, with the 109 children eligible for humanitarian parole.  We anticipate they will receive authority to depart Haiti via air by the early afternoon and will provide further information on the actual schedule as soon as we have it.  Three of the remaining 24 children are being adopted by parents in Argentina and Canada and are waiting for those countries to announce their evacuation procedures.  The remaining 18 children at Maison des Enfants de Dieu orphanage will remain in Haiti since they have not yet been referred for international adoption.  The orphanage receives request each day to accept new orphans, however their ability to accept children orphaned since the earthquake is very limited.  Orphanage staff today reported they were out of diapers, low on food and they remained concerned about security at the orphanage.

During the day, another orphanage successfully got their children out to safety. Governor Rendell went to Haiti and airlifted 53 Haitian orphans out.

However, the 135 children at the Maison des Enfants des Dieu are still facing dehydration and starvation because of potentially lethal red-tape. According to my sources at the “For His Glory” charity which runs the orphanage the situation is becoming critical.

Why not leave the orphans in Haiti?

The State Department says that they want to set up a safe area to complete the adoption process. However, there’s no details on when this “safe area” may be created. These children are facing dehydration and malnutrition. The children need to be made safe first, and then process the adoption paperwork. It’s a case where hours matter. Waiting a week or two for a safe area may very well be too late for many of these children.

Were these children orphaned because of the earthquake?

No. These children were all in the adoption process prior to the earthquake. An adoption from Haiti can take years. These children have adopted parents who have been waiting months or years for them.

What can you do?

Please contact your congresspeople (senators and representatives) to help cut through this red tape.

Here’s a link you can use to locate the phone #s for the offices of your senators and congresspeople. Please call today.

P.S. Some congresspeople have asked for contacts with the U.S. charity. If that happens, please contact me, and I can provide phone and e-mail contacts.

The wireless manufacturer was growing rapidly. As a result, they were hiring software and hardware engineers at an incredible pace. The organization’s formal learning programs could hardly keep up with the rapid development of technology. New engineers typically had two questions:

• Who within the organization was the expert on topic X or Y?
• What information do these experts know which might answer my question?

In the old days, these questions would be answered by a formal Knowledge Management system and application. This top-down approach was tried in the 1990s, but it often failed spectacularly because few people invested the time necessary to actually create resource information. In many cases the Knowledge Management system sat empty because people saw it as a detriment to getting “actual work” done. There was an organizational misalignment between the goals of the organization and the goals of the individual.

Now, let’s return to the example of the telecommunications company. Engineers, working in different parts of the company, recognized learning gaps within the organization. They didn’t look for an executive champion to launch a Knowledge Management system. Instead, these engineers went open-source and created wikis around the knowledge gaps.

Wiki pages are simple to set-up and create content (as evidenced by wikipedia). Soon, wiki pages were appearing in various departments throughout the entire organization. These wiki pages represented a bottom-up social learning solution designed by engineers for their peers.

However, these wiki pages also presented a number of challenges:

• Dispersed: There was no central repository for these wiki pages. They were hosted in different areas, so you had to know about them to find them.
• Standards and Structure: varied from department to department.
• Alignment: There may be gaps between the wiki’s content and the organization’s goals.
• Validation: The content on the wiki page may not have been vetted by organization’s top subject-matter expert in the area.

When Corinne learned about these projects, she encouraged them to come within a common platform and framework. The wiki solution needed to be able to scale to a much larger scale. As a result, people needed to take responsibility for making key decisions about the wiki’s organizations and structure. The bottom-up process evolved into a managed process that still retained many of its peer-to-peer characteristics. However, rules-making and process also slows down the development of social learning content.

Based on her experience, Corrine shares the following wisdom: “Social learning is unavoidable and enables agile knowledge transfer within organizations. But to be most effective, all levels of management must promote, enable and sustain the social learning systems.”

Sometimes an organization needs a top-down social learning solution; however, grassroots social learning solutions will naturally fill gaps when authorized solutions cannot  be (or have not been) developed. A savvy social learning strategy allows for four different models:

• Rollout of authorized top-down solutions (mentor programs, centralized social learning tools)
• Creation of grassroots social learning solutions (vibrant ecosystem)
• Roadmap to transition grassroots social learning solutions into managed processes with structure and accountability
• Roadmap to transition top-down social learning solutions into community-managed projects with distributed structure and accountability

No single solution will match every organizational need. Therefore, learning managers must manage all four social learning processes.

These training programs often form the backbone of an organization. Some of them are developed internally while others are purchased off-the-shelf.

Yet, good instructional design takes time to design, develop, and test. The ADDIE model of instructional design, which has been an industry standard for years, shows strain when it’s applied to concepts of social learning.

We can no longer think of learning events as single classroom or e-learning events. We have to ask questions about how the learning program integrates into the organization’s social learning culture.

These questions challenge fundamental assumptions in the traditional instructional design process. Organizations have to cede some control to their learners to direct the creation of the learning experience.

In the next few posts, I will share examples of how social learning either accelerates (or conflicts) with traditional learning practices.

Eventually, we’re heading to a world where bound-journals sitting on musty library shelves will become an experience of the past. After all, you can access (and use) information more easily when it’s in a digital medium.

However, there’s a preservation of knowledge issue that remains unexplored. The Libary of Alexandria provided a wonderful concentration of knowledge–collected from across the Mediterranean world and beyond. However, concentration of knowledge (in any repository) makes it vulnerable. At some point in the ancient world, the Library of Alexandria was burnt down–perhaps more than once. So, we don’t even know what books were there. There’s not even a surviving catalog or index. We have lost access to the human knowledge once accreted in the library.

If all academic articles (and new research) moves online, then we run a similar accretion risk. Databases can become corrupt and replicate an error over and over again–such as a missing negative sign in a correlation matrix. But more importantly, a computer virus, hardware/software failures, or even an electro-magnetic pulse can erase data (and knowledge). We run risk of piling tinder around our own digital Libraries of Alexandria.

While I’m a huge fan of digital archives, I’m reminded of the comments that literary scholars have made about contemporary authors. Previously, it was possible to collect an major authors letters (sent and received) to put them in a library’s special collection. Now, many authors (like most people) write e-mails instead of sending physical letters. People routinely discard and delete these e-mails, without thought.

While we’re making data more accessible, we’re also changing the risk factors when there aren’t musty tomes and physical letter sitting somewhere.

I’m not a Luddite. I revel in the digital world, but I’m also not Miranda crying “O Brave New World!” Whenever we put information solely online, we should presume that at some point, much of that information will become lost.

Sic transit gloria mundi

Marie is not wealthy. She owns her own home, but she lives paycheck-to-paycheck, slightly above the poverty line. She’s the sort of person who lives frugally and manages her account to the penny. A few months ago, she purchased a used four-year-old laptop. It was a big investment for her, but she decided that she needed to improve her computer skills so she can get a better job.

The break-in happened during the afternoon, while Marie was away at work. The thief kicked in the garage door, emptied the contents of every drawer, and tossed furniture and bedding around. Most importantly, the person took Marie’s laptop.

After leaving Marie’s home, the thief next went to a neighbor’s house, but the neighbor was home and she called the police. Marie learned about the break-in when the police called her. There wasn’t a formal neighborhood watch program in the community, but neighbors cared for neighbors. They looked out for each other.

Marie put out a call to her friends asking her to help her reorganize her home. Several people came over, and within a couple of hours we tamed the “whirlwind” of strewn possessions.

Next, she turned her attention to the door between the garage and the house. The door frame was destroyed, and it needed to be replaced. She called her friend who works as a locksmith. They’ve known each other for over 10 years, and they live within 5 minutes of each other. He was out-of-town for a week, but he said, “hang on, let me call a buddy for you. He’ll take care of you.”

When the locksmith arrived, he said, “My buddy said to take care of you. So, let’s take my truck to Home Depot. You buy the door. I won’t do any markup, and then I’ll install it for you at 40% my usual rate.” She blinked with surprise and gratitude.

The story doesn’t end there. Her coworkers had heard of the break-in. The employees are a mix of full-time and part-time. Yesterday, one of her coworkers asked her to step aside with her. The coworker said, “I know you lost your laptop. I’d like you to get another one.” She then handed Marie a check and said “if it costs more, let me know.” Marie was thrilled, but she deeply wondered “why?” As the conversation progressed, she heard her coworker explain.

The coworker (in her sixties) had gone through a rough divorce and then spent time mustering courage to rejoin the dating pool. Marie had sat with her for many days in lunchroom–listening to her frustrations and encouraging her to get back out and meet people.

It all came down to this: “You were there when I needed support. I want to be there for you.”

That night, Marie reached out to one of her tech friends and asked for suggestions on purchasing a laptop. So, within a week, she’d found help that will get her back on track.

What can Marie’s story tell us about social capital?

1. It’s not the number of contacts in your network, it’s how willing people will be able to act on your behalf: the neighbor who called the police; the locksmith and his friend; the coworker; and the tech friend.
2. A heterogeneous network allows you to mobilize different types of knowledge, skills, and resources. Marie could reach into her network to find someone to fix her door and an IT person to help her choose a laptop.
3. Investments of time and care made into others will sometimes yield unexpected returns.

Yesterday, LinkedIn created an opportunity for me to solve a challenge for a good friend of mine. Here’s the story.

In May 2008, LinkedIn added a “status update” feature. On your LinkedIn page, there’s a question that asks “What are you working on.” When you answer this question, it appears on your friends’ homepage. It also gets picked up in the e-mail blast.

Typically, the e-mail blasts are snoozers. They over-emphasize “who connected with whom” and they provide interesting (but really useless) status updates.

• Ravi connected with Maria
• Ted connected with Walter
• Anna is enjoying Saturday
• Andrew will be traveling to NYC soon.

Yesterday, buried within this laundry-list, I saw the following gem from my go friend Patti Hill; she’s the CEO and Founder of  Blabbermouth PR which provides executive-level service to each of its clients. Here’s what Patti wrote:

Patti Hill is interested in interviewing PC gamers. Know anyone?

Wow! Patti’s request is clear and direct. Most importantly, it contains a genuine call-to-action. There was a genuine request for help cutting through the noise. I knew instantly what to do.

Moved to Action

I’m a PC gamer myself, but even more than that, I’m well-connected with a lot of avid PC gamers. So, I reached out to Patti and asked how I could help.

She told me she was looking for high-end gaming enthusiasts. Within 10 minutes, I sent out an e-mail to key folks in my network, and asked them if they’d be willing to help Patti. They’re gaming geeks who work in the tech field and chat gaming and tech daily. I knew they’d be willing to help.

Then, as the answers started rolling in, I forwarded the responsed to Patti.

Online social networking tools represent a way to locate and mobilize hidden social capital within your network. Patti had no idea that I was a PC gamer, but since she has a large network, there was a good chance that someone could help her.

Savvier Ways to Ask for Help

Generic status updates are nice to share with your social network, but they remain low-value activities. If you want help, you have to ask–clearly and specifically.

Here are a couple of learned-lessons on ways to fine-tune your use of LinkedIn’s status-update feature:

• Share your tough challenges with people;
• Remain humble and genuine; and
• Create a call to action (ask for help).

As always, you have to be known as someone who will be willing to give help (rather than just ask for it).

I wish that more people used their social networking status-updates this way. Facebook offers a similar tool.

Ideally, LinkedIn would let me customize the e-mail alerts. I’d prefer to know more about my network’s needs/projects and less about “who-connected-with whom.”

According to 1up.com, EA Games just announced the latest stats on its Spore Creature Creator at the annual E3 show. Keep in mind that the creature-creator is a pre-release for a game that will be launched this fall. With the creature creator, people can only create creatures for the game. There is no game yet. There won’t be a game until September.

• Over 1.8 million creatures have been created in one month (since release on 6.17.2008);
• That’s 300,000 more species than have been classified on Earth.
• EA initially hoped that 100,000 creatures would be created between June and the game’s launch in September.
• In June, over 100,000 creatures were created in the first 24 hours after release.

Robert Scoble reports a similar trend that happened with applications for the new iPhone this weekend. Here’s he’s talking about Tapulous, the makers of a game called Tap Tap Revenge.

In the first six weeks that ICQ was out there they had 65,000 downloads. Tapulous saw that many downloads in less than a day.

Part of the acceleration comes through the adoption rates of the Internet. There are whole lot more people comfortable with downloads today than there were in 1996. However, it also reflects get drawn in to a good product’s story-telling (rather than story-yelling or story-selling).

Good products and savvy marketing will attract people quickly, while poor marketing will drive people away from a potentially good product.

Related Past Articles:

Marketing and Storytelling

Engagement Marketing: Spore Creature Creator

Smith presented the concept of the Pin Factory in his Wealth of Nations. He argued that the division of labor increases productivity. A team of pin-makers, each specialized on a single task could outproduce a single pin-maker.

Specialization creates a closed system and relies on trust. You rely on the person before you to do their job. And the person after you trusts that you will do your job correctly.

So, then how do we reconcile Smith’s praise of the Pin Factory with this quote that variety expands the mind? We cannot be both specialists and dilettantes, can we?

Let us consider the entreprenuer “the one who takes between” as the observer within the pin factory. The entrepreneur is not the long-term specialist. The entrepreneur gains value by taking ideas from one sphere of commerce and transplanting them to a new area.

Entrepreneurs are the ones who “walk the floor” of Smith’s worldwide pin-factory.