 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event. Yes, we are a webinar. You can call us that. We won't be offended. We're going to own that top word. Where we cover anything that may be of interest to librarians across the country. The show is free and open to anyone to watch, both our live show and our recordings. We do the sessions live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time. But if you are unable to join us on Wednesdays, all of our previous shows going back to the very beginning, which was January 2009, are all available on our website as well. So you can go there and watch all of those too. We do a mixture of things here, presentations, interviews, many book reviews. Basically anything that would be, as I said, of interest to anyone in the library world, we want to share it on our show. And we sometimes have Nebraska Library Commission staff come on and do presentations, and we sometimes have guest speakers. And today we have a mixture of that. Today is our regular monthly tech talk with Michael Sowers. Michael, sitting next to me. Good morning. He is our Technology Innovation Librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission. And he comes on once a month to do a more techy focused thing and give us the tech news of the month that's been going on. And generally brings on guest speakers. I think almost every single time you come on, you bring on someone. And you can see the slides up there already. I like to distribute the work. So I'm just going to hand over to you, Michael, to do your thing and introduce and tell us who you've gotten for us this morning. Great, Krista. Thank you. And as she said, I'm Michael Sowers in the Technology Innovation Library here at the Nebraska Library Commission. And in tech talk, I like to find people that are doing interesting things. And we keep the loose definition of tech. Some are we've had programmers on. We've had people are just creating some interesting things and trying to use tech in a different way. And one of the things we used to talk about a lot and haven't talked about much lately anyways is gaming. And so I was thinking about that the other day, gone are kind of the heydays of the, you know, why you should video game in the library and things like that. But it is still an important topic and it's still around. And when I think gaming, I think Liz Lolly, someone who I have met and heard speak over the last several years. She is a professor in the School of Interactive Games and Media at the Rochester Institute of Technology, my hometown. She's also the director of the Lab for Social Computing at the RIT Magic Center. She is the only person I've ever seen give a conference keynote in full World of Warcraft Regalia. And she's probably glad I couldn't dig up any photos of that. Well, I may exist, but I ran out of time. And as of the other day, she is a Fulbright scholar for 2015, which I think is taking. Yes, congratulations. And I think it's taking up a little of her mental processing at the moment. So Liz, why don't you go ahead and walk us through your presentation here. And then I'm sure we'll have plenty of questions and some discussion to have when you're done. All right. So this is like a Frankenstein presentation in that I have glued together pieces from a couple of different presentations. I'm crossing my fingers that I put them in the right order and that everything plays the way it should. But if it's wrong, I will fix them tonight and all of the slides will go online tomorrow on SlideShare.net. So if anybody wants these for reference purposes, they will be available. And thanks for the lovely introduction. I'm going to start with this because we're not really talking about games these days anymore in presentations. Everybody wants to know about gamification and how can we gamify our library or gamify our classroom or gamify this unpleasant task that we want people to do or this consumption that we want them to engage in. And when I saw this cartoon last year, I totally fell in love with it. We're not making social networks anymore. We're making gamified augmented reality mobile stuff. And I've become really reluctant to use the word gamification because it's got so much buzzword and negative connotation associated with it. So in this project I'm going to be talking about just press play. People tend to say, oh, so you've gamified the student experience. And in fact, no, that is not what we did. Yes, there are aspects of what gamification is and what we did. And so this is a definition that was put together by a colleague of mine, Sebastian Dieterding, who's a visiting scholar here at RIT this year about what gamification is. This is perhaps the more commercialized version of it, integrating game dynamics in order to drive participation. A more academic definition might be implementing elements of games into non-game environments. But this idea of essentially adding points and badges and leaderboards, because then it will all be better, is a lot of what underlies people's talking about gamification. And it's actually not what we did, and it's not what I think anybody else should be doing. I think it's flawed in a lot of ways. There's actually a great piece by Ian Begost called gamification is bullshit that I highly recommend in reading on this. And I'm actually going to let Sebastian cut in here, because Sebastian gives wonderful talks on gameful design, and playful design, and gamification. And there are a couple of slides that he uses that I really like. And I could either adapt them and make them look like mine, or I could be entirely honest and say, this is Sebastian stepping in just momentarily to share some of his thoughts on the topic. And this is his academic definition. In fact, if you look for a definition of gamification, this definition from a workshop given at CHI in 2011 is the one that you will see most often referenced. This is sort of the canonical one, but it doesn't tell you a whole lot. The use of game design elements in non-game contexts doesn't mean a lot to everybody. So he's created a sort of nice set of axes to think about what this really means. And one axis is the axis between games versus play. Games are more structured. Games tend to have rules and objectives and win conditions, whereas play tends to be more open-ended, more unstructured. So we've got that axis to start with. And then we've also got the axis of systems versus elements. A game system is all of the pieces together, the entire game with all of its components, as opposed to what we often see in gamification, which is just the elements. Let's just add a leaderboard. Let's just add points. Let's put in artificial levels, but let's not really structure that within the larger context of a system. And when you put those two things together, you end up with this really nice taxonomy of game-related applications, where on the game side, you have gamification and serious games, health-related games, games for change, military games. All of those are actual games, not open-ended play. Serious games end up on the system side. They are entire systems. They are structured uses of the components, whereas gamification lives on just the elements side of it. And then down on the bottom, as we move away from games and towards play, we get some other things. We get playful design, and we get serious toys. And I'm going to show some examples of each of these and then come back to what we did, which I would say really lives more in the playful design space than in any of the other three quadrants. I find gamification to be not very interesting in general, because gamification is using not enough of what makes something a game to make it an interesting system. So my interest tends to lie in the top left and bottom right quadrants of this, and I'll talk about what we've done. I'll give you a couple of examples of each of these. There are serious games, some of you may have heard of Fold It, which is essentially a casual game that engages thousands of people in the process of protein folding. But the outcome is significant work done in biological research and protein folding. Darfur is dying is another game that is intended to send a significant and serious message to make people more aware of a significant international crisis. Serious toys, which are another part of this quadrant, are structured and designed to engage people in play, but in a system that actually has learning and progress associated with it. So this particular slide I chose because the last time I gave this talk, I was actually in Quito, Ecuador, so I wanted to pick something that had Spanish associated with it, which tells you about how strong my Spanish language skills are. And we're not really going to talk about serious toys, I just wanted to show you an example that fits into that quadrant. Playful design is one that actually becomes quite interesting, and I am going to cross my fingers and hope that this works and that Michael or Christo will intervene if for any reason this isn't playing properly for you. But I'm going to show you two quick examples of playful design. These are not games, these are play, but they're play with purpose. I love that, and there are a whole bunch of interesting videos like that up on the funtheory.com site that Volkswagen runs. Another company who's been doing a lot with playful design is Coca-Cola, and although I don't have any videos for that right now, the students that I was presenting to in Ecuador pulled up a bunch of fabulous examples of what Coca-Cola has been doing. And then here's another one, and then that's the end of my little videos, but I want you seeing some of the ways that playful design can encourage different kinds of behavior. Don't worry, you don't need to be able to read Russian to understand this. There's some really interesting things that are happening there, right, in that people are choosing to do this. If you turn this around and said, you have to do 30 squats in order to get a subway ticket, I don't think people would be quite so joyful about it, right? And that's really important, and that's going to come up in some of the core motivation concepts that I'm going to be talking about. But let me, before I get into that, talk a little bit about what Just Press Play is and why we did it, and then how some of what we know about playful design and game design and these kinds of concepts factored into what we did. And we sort of started out by saying, you know, look, we already know students are playful, right? I mean, I have lots of pictures of students being playful. This is in the middle of the night at a global game jam about three years ago. I have no idea what prompted this particular piling on, but this is a moment our students will remember, right? These moments of play, these moments of silliness. This is actually something that came out of the game, and I'll talk in a little bit about, or out of the system that we created. I'll talk a little bit about it, but we know that our students want to do things that are fun and things that they can remember. So we wanted to think about how can we create a system that will use play and help people remember playful moments in a way that connects back to the most positive educational experience that they can have. So Just Press Play is a system that we developed here at RIT, and we started this project three years ago with a really generous gift from Microsoft Research. And when we went to Microsoft Research, we went to them with this line, that our students should get achievements for being awesome. And that came out of a conversation that one of my colleagues had had with students in the lab late one night where the students said, we should get achievements for being awesome. And she said, you know, you're right. And of course, we needed to get a little more specific in that regard. But, you know, you can see the, and I'm actually going to take you to the play.rit.edu site, at least I thought I was. I'll do that in a minute. So our idea was these achievements should be for things that they've done that we know will be valuable to them. Things that when we reverse engineer what a successful student looks like, you know, what does that student look like? What are the kinds of behaviors that they engage in, the kinds of activities that they engage in, that they will remember, that they will care about, that they will want to have be part of their sort of growth as a student. And, you know, this is a t-shirt that you can buy from ThinkGeek, but this was the kind of achievement we were talking about, right, of socializing, of engaging, of being playful. We know that students have a hard time, especially students in a high pressure technical program. There wasn't really a sign like this underneath the lab sign, but our idea was how do we address issues of the stress of the student experience and the really significant attrition issues that we have that are often due to students really struggling, not just academically, but also emotionally. One of the things that happens when a student gets to university is that, you know, they have this hero's journey-like moment at the beginning where they know they've been tasked with killing the dragon and obtaining the pot of gold, right, where, you know, the killing the dragon is graduating and the pot of gold is the great job that they're going to have when they graduate, and between here and there are all of these obstacles that feel like they are arbitrary obstacles. Why are you making me take a philosophy class? Why are you making me take discrete math? Yeah, this is not what I want to do. This is not what I'm interested in. But we also know that games do a great job in this regard of making it clear to students that these obstacles along the way are actually giving them the tools that they need to be successful moving forward. I took the slide out that I wanted. So we wanted to, you know, essentially expose the map for them a little bit and also help them connect the dots about what the things are that they could be doing and how that would link back to what they were doing in classes but not be part of the classes per se. And we took, you know, we looked at what other systems did in terms of what elements from games could we incorporate or what elements from persuasive applications could we add? So on the left here are badges of mine from Foursquare. And those linked into one of the things we wanted to do with our system, which was the idea of having students be able to remember and reflect on things that they had done to essentially build a collection of things that they were happy about and proud of and actually be able to share those as well. So the badges are great for sharing that. Like I can say to somebody, you know, I have this accomplishment or I can look at my collection of them. On the right is a screenshot from Time Hop, which is an application that every day sends me a little note saying, hey, here's what you did a year ago today. And it can be very fun to get these little time capsules to say, oh, that's right. You know, last year, you know, I actually got my butt out of bed and made it to the gym at 8 in the morning. And maybe I should be doing that again, right? I'm going back. I'm reliving a year ago. I'm thinking about it. You know, I'm thinking and I'm connecting with stuff that I've done in the past. So we wanted to incorporate some of what works about these systems. A colleague of mine at Rutgers, Aaron Simmerich, I had a piece got interviewed in the New York Times about Time Pop actually. And I loved this quote because this idea of understanding what we look like to the world around us through this collection of items in our digital identity I think is really important. So if I collect a bunch of stuff and then I look at it and say, what do I look like on Facebook to somebody else? What do I look like on Foursquare to somebody else? We wanted our system to provide some of that sense of reflection and understanding of your own skills and your own identity within a social context. So I'm going to apologize for this next slide because one of the things I tell my students in every single class where they have to give presentations is, do not give me slides filled with words and filled with bullet points because this is never an effective way to communicate. So there you go. This is me breaking my own rule, but I wanted to provide the actual text of what we said we were going to do here, which was managing the stress and growth associated with, and that should actually say of undergraduate education is missing a word. But the things that I just talked about, right, which is letting students have a better sense of what they've done and what kinds of things they've done, make them more aware of activities that they could engage in, be able to share and maintain a record of their activities, and also to make it playful, to make it whimsical, to give it a sense that this is more than just a list of stuff that you should do because the last thing our overwhelmed students need is something that feels like a required checklist. Now, there are all kinds of risks associated in building the kind of system that we were talking about building. And when we presented this to Microsoft, we started with this slide. We started with the Big Danger slide. And we said there are a lot of things that can go wrong. We'd start with we'd done something like this before. I ran a big citywide game called Picture the Impossible, which was something that we did with the local newspaper here in Rochester that was about exploring the city and becoming familiar with its history. And it turns out this is really, really hard to do. You think, oh, you know, what's just a website with stuff on it, right? And websites are easy. We've mastered the website thing. But, you know, it turns out these projects are much, much harder to do well than anybody believes when you're first starting out with your great idea. So that was the first thing is we had made the mistake before of doing this and thinking it was going to be easy. And this time we knew that if we were going to do it, we needed to dedicate significant resources to doing it well. More of a concern for us was the issue of motivation and the issue of ensuring that we were not doing more damage to our students' motivation than we were positive stuff to it. And one of the key theories that we worked with is something called self-determination theory. If you haven't read Daniel Pink's book Drive, it's a wonderful book. It is, as all of these sort of airport business books are, a simplification of underlying theory where the key underlying theory is self-determination theory. But one of the important things that self-determination theory tells us is that it's autonomy. It's one of the three most important things. And I'm going to scoot through here real quick just to see if I have the slides that I wanted. No, I did not move the slides in here. So I will make this work anyways. So there are three key things, only two of which are on this slide. Actually, you know what? Through the magic of technology, I can add things to this slide while I'm talking because that's just how I roll. So I am going to add the other stuff that we need to talk about. Smaller. In fact, while Liz is doing that, I'm going to jump in with a little story that I have watched Liz work on her presentation during the session immediately preceding her presentation at conferences. And it's quite kind of, I mean, I was peeking over her shoulder, but it was quite fun to watch her thought process. So you guys are getting a little peek here. Yep. Well, in effect, you know, I've given a lot of talks at Internet Librarian and Jane Dysart has given up asking me for my topic or my slides before I give the talk because it's always different by the time I actually get up there. All right, so here's the three things that self-determination theory says are critical to motivating people. Autonomy, relatedness, and competence. And these are things that are really critical. And it turns out if you undermine these things, you can actually do more damage to motivation than good. In Drive, they talk about, he gives the example of some experiments that were done. One was with kindergarteners. And if you set kindergarteners in a room with crayons and paper, they draw things. That's what they do. But here's the interesting thing. If you divide them into two groups and with the first group, after they draw something, you give them gold stars and say, that was really good work. And the second group, you don't do that. And then you give them crayons and paper again the next day. Both groups will draw again at about the same amount. But then don't give anybody stars. And on the third day, the students that you gave the stars to on the first day will be much less likely to do any drawing because the second time, they didn't get a star. If they're not going to get rewarded, why should they keep drawing? You've actually damaged their intrinsic motivation to draw by giving them an external reward. And this is something that we do really, really wrong over and over and over again in education, is that we stick external rewards onto things and then we damage internal motivation to do it. And this is a big part of what they talk about in self-determination theory, is this issue of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and that these are directly related to autonomy, relatedness, and competence. And Sebastian actually got involved in a really interesting debate over gamification when O'Reilly released a book on gamification that he and many other scholars in the field felt missed the point on a lot of this, that just adding points to something doesn't make it more fun. There is actually a website that has a button and every time you press the button, you get 10,000 points. If it was really about the points, that would be the most fun game in the world. You could just keep pressing the button and getting 10,000 points forever, except that's not actually fun. And so Sebastian uses the example of Scrabble, where if you get a 50-point word, it's not that the points don't matter, but that the pleasure, the reward of those points comes primarily from the experience of competence that it represents, that you've got those 50 points because of something that was difficult to do, something that was a challenge and something that you feel good about. The 50 points is just a representation of that thing that already feels good and that was a core piece for us in thinking about Just Press Play. So these are the three big questions that were brought to all of the content in what we created, which was what behaviors do we want to reward and encourage, what feelings of competence can we engender, and what did we want students to remember and reflect on. And so this is an example from the first version of Just Press Play. We're in the process of building version 3 right now, but this is the first version. The thing on the left shows our original axis for what individual achievements in the system looked like. And they were on an axis from exploration to mastery, so exploration was sort of doing something for the first time, mastery was doing it over and over again and getting good at it, but also on an axis from doing it by yourself on the right to doing it with other people on the left. We threw this model away after the first version, but I'm showing you this and you can see how we sort of iterated. And this was an example of one of the achievements that we had in the first version, the Enter the Dungeon achievement, which was simply to go to a professor's office hours, get their little collectible card, and then submit the code that was on the card. And the idea behind this was simply it's really, really hard to get freshmen and sophomores to come to faculty's office hours unless they're already in crisis. This actually ended up not being one of our most effective achievements because it wasn't really fun, right? It was just a check-off. And so it really kind of didn't pass the fun test. This one, however, totally passed the fun test. This is an achievement from one of my colleagues, who's now our department chair, Tona Henderson, and hers was called the Meritorious Order of Pi. And to get her little collectible card, you had to bring her a picture of yourself eating pie. And you had to physically bring the printed picture to her office. So you still get that effect of getting somebody in the office door, but for a reason. You had a point and she had a wall of pie on her wall and your picture would get added to the wall of pie. And this is actually the development team eating pie the night before we launched at about four o'clock in the morning, which is why we all look both sleepy and a little bit goofy. But we were the first piece of pie picture that went up on her wall. And this was much more effective as an approach. This is another achievement that was surprisingly and very gratifyingly effective. This was the Undying series. And we know that our freshmen in the introductory programming class tended to have about an 85% pass rate in the first hardcore programming class. Now that's actually really good by CS1 standpoints. But it wasn't as good as it could be still. There was room for improvement. So just for fun, we stuck this achievement in the game. And the achievement says if 90% of the students in the class pass the course, all the players playing the game get the achievement. And what happened was our upperclassmen came to us in the middle of the fall quarter and said, you know, we just realized that we're not going to get this achievement if the freshmen don't pass. So can we have permission to run a peer tutoring session in the lab this weekend? Which was perhaps the best question that any student has ever asked me. It was just amazing. And I said, trying to keep it cool? Yeah, I think so. We can probably make a lab available to you. And they ran a session. They had 40 freshmen show up for it, which is better than we've ever had for a tutoring session. And a couple of really wonderful things came out of this. We had a 92% pass rate in the class. Now, I can't prove causation, obviously, but we do know that peer tutoring is highly correlated with better success in classes. So I can hypothesize with a fairly high degree of confidence that this played a role in that increased pass rate. But even more importantly, the upperclassmen came back to us after this was over and said, you know, we really had fun running that tutoring session. Can we do that every semester? That was what we were looking for. That was the, they didn't do it just for the achievement. The achievement may have nudged them in the direction, but because the activity was genuinely enjoyable in its own right and because it was something that they chose to do, it actually changed behavior in a really valuable and wonderful way. So that was one of the wins. Overall, I would love to tell you that everything was a win, that it was all a work that, of course, the very first thing that we tried was a success. End of story, write the paper, ship the software, and we're done. But that's not actually what happened. And in fact, I presented a paper at Games Learning in Society last summer that was entitled You Know You're Going to Fail, right? Lessons learned from Just Press Play. And that comes from a conversation that we had with Constance Steinkeuler at Wisconsin when we first came up with the idea where she said, this is wonderful, it's so exciting, you know, this groundbreaking work, you know, you're going to fail, right? And it's one thing to know that it's unlikely the first version of something will be successful. It's another thing to live with the failures to see stuff go terribly wrong and to realize you've made a mistake. The good news for us is that Microsoft had given us a large enough gift that we could iterate and that we could learn from the things that were failures. So there was good stuff, there was not so good stuff. I love talking about the good stuff. These are all pictures of students accomplishing things. There's a flash mob. This is the last supper achievement where you had to organize a dinner at a restaurant with at least 12 other people. This is an achievement where you had to take a picture of yourself playing an old-school arcade game. This was all really good. And we shared lots and lots of positive stuff. There's our 94% pass rate in the second game programming class, which was wonderful. But there was stuff that failed. There was stuff that we did wrong. There was a keychain which never actually worked. It was a great idea but it didn't function. We could never get it to work properly with the website. A bigger problem of something that seemed like a great idea but really wasn't was these alphanumeric codes on the back of the collectible card. My achievement was called For the Laws. You have to make me laugh out loud. It's a great achievement because students made ridiculous fools of themselves in ways that weren't trying to get me to laugh. But then when they got the card, they had to go back to the website and enter in this code. It turns out nobody enters in the code. If you're doing the achievement well and the achievement is in and of itself rewarding, they actually don't care enough to enter the code. And even if they do, it's such a hassle to enter those codes that many people never bothered, which meant we had terrible metrics telling us really who had accomplished something and who hadn't. So we also, we did really well at the beginning. All these new people registered and then registration and also making it to the second level dropped off pretty significantly. So we had real issues with sustaining engagement. So we rebooted it. We rebooted it technically. We rebooted it from a visual. We rethought what our achievements looked like. The currently what achievements look like is they each have four points associated with them and those four points are distributed across four categories. Create, learn, explore and socialize. And we changed the way they could submit their achievements. What we did is we give each player a unique QR code that they can print out or that they can display on a phone. Faculty members and staff members have an app that runs on their phone that allows them to scan in the play pass. So if a student makes me laugh, I say, show me your play pass. I scan it in. They instantly get the achievement and so there's no work on their part having to install something, enter something, log into something. So this was actually very effective in changing the workflow for assigning achievements. Last year we did collectible cards again, but we did collectible cards that were also a kind of playing card. We are dropping that this year because that became a real bottleneck in terms of ordering and distributing the cards. The functionality is still in the system and we might go back to it, but that was something that was just too hard to sustain. And then we did a lot more event-oriented things. This was a scavenger hunt that had a president of RIT has one of the largest banjo collections in the world. And so we put these posters up with a very subtle clue which is this banjo shape here on the winter is coming poster and when students got to the end of the scavenger hunt, they found RIT's president dressed in Game of Thrones regalia holding a banjo in our department chair's office and they got a photo off that they could have and this was the everybody who did this ended up sharing this photo. It was a big deal for them. Everybody said RIT is the coolest place ever. It's a moment that they'll remember. It connected in a meaningful way. So you can see this is my achievement. It's changed. So now it's got two for create. You have to come up with a joke that there's a creative element in making me laugh and two points in socializing because you have to interact with me in order to get there. This is now to show you how somebody got that achievement. This is the woman who ran our student services, Jen Hinton. This is the guy who's our undergraduate coordinator. That is Dave Schwartz. One of my colleagues merged them together into this image and put it on Facebook which made me laugh so hard that I spit stuff onto my keyboard. And the new system actually allows people to tell the story of how they got an achievement and upload an image so that you can share that. I'm actually going to shift us over to a different presentation so that because I apparently accidentally deleted a bunch of slides that should have been at the end of this. So I'm going to get us back over there we go. So the old system and actually it easier to go up here. The old system which is at play.rit.edu if I log in and goodness I don't want notifications. There we go. Here's my profile which is loading much more slowly than I'd like. There we go. You can see no one who knows me would be surprised to know that most of my points are in socialized and this is actually a really important piece here because it gives people a nice visual representation of how their achievement points have been disseminated and I'm going to go to here's the achievement itself. I can see which of my friends have gotten this achievement and if they uploaded a story and an image. So this is the current system. There's still a lot of problems with it. It's much better than it was. We made a lot of things better but it's still not as good as it could be. So I'm going to give you a sneak peek at the newest version which is currently running and there's still some visual tweaks to be changed here but let me log myself in on this system as well and this is the system that we are going to be making available as open source software sometime within the next month and it's we've done a lot of things to simplify the interface but also to make it more visual. So for example, when I did run the Gauntlet and there was a picture associated with it I want a way to be able to share this so we'll be adding a bunch of share links on all of this. I will be able to add comments to things in a way that we haven't been able to do before. See if I can go to the main page here. So now if somebody has a beautiful picture associated with their achievement I can say I agree this is gorgeous and so we've created more interaction around the site. Still really easy to find your play paths and print it out. You still have the ability in your profile to see this visual representation see the achievements that you've received, see your friends and find other people but a lot more simpler from things like being able to edit your profile change things about it add more functionality I know I'm going to run out of time I'm looking at my time right now so I'm going to slide back over here really quickly. Liz no need to rush we can go along so take your time I'm going to show you this this is actually currently a private repository this is where all of our current code is going to build the version that you can see here currently running on an Azure website in Microsoft's cloud based environment. There are a couple of things that are going to happen over the next several months. The first is we will be flipping the switch on the github repository and making that software publicly available before the end of this semester which for us is before Memorial Day essentially and for people who have the technical skills to be able to implement something in a Microsoft SQL server and IIS environment that software will be there you can install it you can play with it. We've done a lot of things to improve the administrative interface now so that if you want to create an achievement you can say it should have one create point and three learn points and it should have this icon associated with it and it is an achievement that requires your play pass to be scanned and only Liz Lolly can assign it. So all of this is going to be built into a web based interface. So I said the software for doing this code, all the graphics the ability to change what the tagline is, what your core graphic is and customize it for your environment is all going to be made available before the end of May. The other thing that we hope to be launching in the fall is the ability for us to for a fee implement this for you on Azure. So basically give you a one click install instead of you having to run the server on your own site and have the internal technical skills to be able to set up a server, you know, make it available, maintain it, do software updates, all of that. We simply give you your own custom URL on an Azure server and then you don't have to worry about things like updating the software and being everything working and running up to date. So and that's going to take a little more work on our part because we really want to make this as clean and easy from a business standpoint as possible. You know, it's because this is not a trivial task for us to basically go into the business of supporting other people's implementations, we need to figure out what's realistic, you know, how many people we need to allot to it, you know, we don't want to make a profit on it, but we want to make enough money to be able to pay the students who are actually going to be running it. So that's all stuff that we're going to be thinking about trying to implement over the summer through the through RIT's new magic lab or magic center. Magic stands for media arts, games, interaction and creativity and it's a new university-wide center here at RIT that actually has two parts. One is a research lab, which is where my lab for social computing is now based, but the other is an actual LLC studio, the magic spell studios, which allows us to work as a commercial entity and it's likely that magic spell studios will be the business entity that manages any, you know, hosted services that we decide to make available through this project. So that's the compressed version of what we did, why we did it, what's working and what wasn't working and a sneak peek which very few people have seen at this point of what version three of Just Press Play really looks like and I think what I'm going to do at this point is see if you guys have questions for me and I'm happy to show stuff, you know, to discuss what we did, you know, whatever works for you. Great, thanks Liz. I think I saw an earlier version of this, maybe like version one and I like where it's going. I'm quite impressed and back when you did Picture of the Impossible, I remember my parents kind of participating in that, wishing I was back in Rochester to play that game. Folks who are listening, if you have any questions, you've got two ways to submit them. We have one coming in, we'll get to it in a second. You can type them into the Q&A area of your go-to-webinar interface and or type in, if you have a microphone, we'll happily turn that on for you. We have everybody muted, just tell Krista that you'd like your mic turned on. The one quick question we've gotten in which the question was, is this running on SharePoint? I think you said it's running on Azure and could you just for people who may not be familiar with what Azure is, could you just give us an answer? Azure is simply a cloud-based service that runs servers so that you don't have to have the physical box locally. Like Amazon Web Services or and why am I drawing a blank on the others. There are a bunch of cloud-based services that basically say, we run the server so that you don't have to. I don't have to have a box sitting in the lab where if the power goes out or somebody trips or we forget to run an update or any of that, the server goes down. It's all running in a cloud-based environment. In terms of the actual software underlying it, it's running on an IIS web server with Microsoft SQL server database. The code is all being done in .NET, .NET code that's running all of this. I have on the front end it is a fairly customized set of jQuery based but tweaked for our purposes front-end code. Everything that we will be making available will be released under an open source license but it is not running in a lamp environment. It's running in IIS and SQL server. In fact, a lot of people think that we're doing that because Microsoft backed it and required us to do that. That is in fact not the case. The primary reason for it is that our students who are our major coding resource are learning C-Sharp as their primary language in their freshman and sophomore year and are very familiar with the Microsoft coding environment. It turned out that .NET was actually a very powerful back-end environment for us to be able to build what we wanted to. That's the technical piece of it. Great. Thanks. Thank you for clarifying that before I made a crack about who was funding this. We have a follow-up here. Didn't catch time of the year that you anticipate the GitHub repository for the platform will become available. It will become available before Memorial Day. Hopefully sooner than that, but I am losing my dev team at graduation, which means they have to have it done before they all go off for the summer to their full-time jobs or co-ops. I'm not entirely losing them. Most of them will be back in the fall, but they know that this has to be ready for public consumption before they leave at the end of this academic year. That means probably mid to late May. Direct follow-up on that and then a related question. Do you anticipate that assuming you had somebody who knew what they were doing, that they could get it up and running over the summer for the fall? All right. That's not a guarantee, I'm assuming. I know we have some public librarians on the line and from various other places. My question, I keep coming back to scale, but I'm not sure scale is the right word. Do you see this being easily adaptable to other non-campus, slightly less controlled or constricted environments, I guess what I'm asking. Oh yeah, absolutely. Because there's a distinction here between our content, which is very context specific and very situated in our students' experience and the platform, which is entirely adaptable. What we have is achievements, which for us are very specific to our environment, but which could be adapted to any environment, and then quests. And quests are not yet working in the, this is what happens when you show people a beta version pull up one that quests are collections of achievements, essentially. And there's no reason that this couldn't be used in any number of environments, but when I say that so let me pull up one of these. So got to catch them all, requires you to get at least nine individual faculty achievements. And so I have gotten, you know, nine different people's individual achievements and so therefore I have gotten this quest. The thing is, building the back end is really hard, and we put a huge amount of work into building a clean modular efficient back end along with all of that, you know, juicy pretty front end stuff, but that's only half of it. And we can give you the code to do this, but what we can't give you is the content that makes sense for your environment. And that was a huge separate effort on our part because that's that process of sitting down and saying, what are we really trying to reward? If you go back to that slide see if I can find it a long presentation but developing content that matched this, right? Every single organization that wants to do something like this is going to have different answers to these questions and it's these questions that are going to drive your actual content. So you're not going to be able to just take our implementation and poof, have it ready to go. You're going to have to engage in a fairly extensive discussion of what does what does behavior for and let me, you know, for creation, for learning, for exploration, for socialization what does that look like in our environment? And for each achievement that we want to put into the system, you know, does it pass those tests of making people feel like this is autonomous and that it makes them feel competent and that it makes them feel connected to other people. It's really easy to put bad achievements in. You know, so our enter the dungeon achievement was not a good achievement. We had our advisors wanted to add an achievement for if you got to the end of the newsletter that they send out that there would be a code and you could enter the code and get an achievement and I said absolutely not. Because nobody's going to have that fiero moment, that fist in the air moment that says, yes, I read to the end of the newsletter, right? And it's tempting as it is to use this kind of carrot to get people to do stuff that they don't want to do, that doesn't end well. If they feel like this is just a way to get them to do stuff that they don't want to do, if this is just what, you know, some of the educators I know in games and learning called chocolate covered broccoli, right? That doesn't end well. It may look like it's going to be delicious, but nobody feels good about having tried it. And so that process of creating your own content and making it genuinely playful and engaging is non-trivial and you have to make sure that you have people committed to really thinking about and testing out that content, not just the technology. Yeah, it's good. When I used to teach HTML and CSS it was kind of like, I can teach you this, but you still have to write content. And that's almost sometimes the harder part of it. We did have a comment from a public librarian. Yeah, we have a comment from a person who's at a public library says we've issued digital badges and achievements during summer reading programs before via WordPress. And this looks like an even better platform for something like that. So seeing how this could be modified for a library use. Absolutely. And in fact, very often when I give talks about playful design and gameful design, you know, what I end up, I show them examples of library summer reading programs and say, you know, libraries have been doing stuff like this. Educators have been doing stuff like this for a long time. And the reason summer reading programs work is that it turns out, once you start reading a book, it's actually an intrinsically rewarding activity. And summer reading programs wouldn't work if reading was a terrible, boring, unpleasant activity. But it works on the same principle which is if you nudge them, if you give them some external motivation engaging in the activity will then keep it going because they actually enjoyed the activity itself. Great. Okay, so what was my question? Oh, yeah, okay. I do write things down on this. How, what was the experience in getting the rest of the faculty involved in this project? Did you just start calling the people who you thought would be interested in saying we want to build this around you and, you know, I want to be made to laugh. What do you want to be? Did you get negative reactions? How was that experience in getting people to participate from the back end? Well, it helps a lot that we're a game design and development degree, right? So we were less likely to get negativity from faculty. Although I point out to be a lot of people who have said to us, you know, well, you know, of course this works with your people because you know, because you're game people. Yeah, so, well, you know, it turns out everybody is a game person if you dig deep enough, you know, and all of the people who say to me, oh, I don't play games, I say really ever played Solitaire, ever gone bowling, ever picked up a pool cue, right? Like people, people say I'm not a gamer because they're thinking only of console games, but in fact, all of us engage in playful and game behavior in different ways. It's actually in some ways harder to build a system like this for game design students because they're much too informed as consumers, right? You, it's like having teachers as your students, right? Or having doctors as your patients. If you have game designers as your players, they're really hard to please. But what we did with the faculty and the staff is we said this is absolutely not required, right? This goes back to those motivation things. It has to be autonomous, but what we said to them is this, you know, this could be a way for you to get to know more students and to get to know them on you know, on a happy footing, on a playful footing. So you're welcome to engage, but you don't have to. And some of the stuff we got was really lovely. So my colleague David Simpkins, this is his. It doesn't seem to be, there we go. There's loading. He hide, when we were doing this with collectable cards, he hid five cards in his office every day. And the way you got his achievement was by finding the card. Now at the time he was a new faculty member who was only teaching graduate students and he wasn't really getting a chance to meet any undergraduate students. So this led to undergraduate students walking into his office and looking through his bookshelf and picking things up on his desk. It turns out it's really hard to do that without also having a conversation. And it was a lovely kind of playful interaction with him. And then in the process they're seeing what kinds of stuff he has on his desk and what kinds of books he has on his bookshelf. And so we used these as examples when we talked to the faculty and faculty meetings and said, you know, here are some of the things that people have done that have been really fun. And, you know, if you want to do this, just come talk to us and we'll be happy to work with you to create an achievement that is both playful and connected in some way to things that you do. And a lot of them are really simple. Like Shamila is our front desk staff person. And we just wanted people to go meet her and see where she was. And she said all I want them to do is say please. And so this got them all going in, meeting Shamila and saying please. But not every faculty and staff member participated and that was fine. And we also had an achievement. Let's see if I can find a that not everybody participated in, but that was let me find my version of it. It was actually a really fun little thing to include, which was an in the wild series of achievements. And this was to find a faculty member or staff member off campus and have them scan your play pass. And you can see there are fewer people who wanted this. Not everybody wants students to approach them when they're not on campus. And we get that. I found this to be really delightful. I had one day when I was in a very, very crowded restaurant waiting for a table. And I saw a sophomore student who had been playing the game across the way. It's not one that I knew well, but I recognized him. And he met my eyes and he kind of smiled and he looked away. And if it hadn't been for this achievement, that would have been the end of it. But what happened was really lovely, which is he looked away and then I actually saw him double take and he looked at me again and he looked down at his key chain on which he had his play pass and he looked up at me and he held up the play pass and he looked at me kind of quizzically and I nodded my head and he made his way across the crowded room so that I could scan in his play pass and then we had a little conversation about it. And there's no way that this student would have worked up the nerve. Let's see if I can find him on here. This guy. The fact that he made his way across the restaurant to do this was totally made my day. Those are the kinds of social interactions. And by telling these stories, we get more people interested in engaging because they start to see what the benefit to them would be. For everybody it's always, what's in this for me? How is this going to help me? And if you want to build stronger relationships, stronger connections with your students or with your patrons, then this is really a lovely way to do it in a lightweight and playful way. So, are you playing? And this might have been a confusion on my part. Is this campus-wide or is this with students and faculty in your program? We started this only with students in our program. Keeping in mind that we have over 900 students in our program. Well, okay. So this is not a small-scale implementation and we felt that 900 students was plenty for a first go-round on things. Also, we really wanted our content to be specific to the kinds of things that students in our program would be interested in. So there's a lot of stuff. So there's the non-trivial pursuit. We run game nights. Take a risk. Live your life. Avoid getting in trouble. So these were specific to our culture. Specific to our activities. Specific to the creative things that our students engage in. It would be possible to build things that could be done on a cross-campus basis. It's a little harder. The more generic you get, the harder it is to make it feel sort of personal and connected. So we didn't run it this year because even after two years of running it, we knew we needed to totally revamp the system to have it work in a sustained way. But we will be launching it again in the fall with our students. We're also currently working with the University in Norway. We've set up a testbed for them and they are also going to be launching it in the fall with their students and with content customized to their environment so that we'll be able to see this running in two different places and how it works. Great. So last question that came in from the attendees. We'll wrap this up. Basically it's, okay, so I'm interested and I'm going to want to get the code. Where do I need to be watching for, hey, it's available and here's how to get it? The best place to be looking would be the Just Press Play Facebook page where we will be announcing, I did say we really hope that it would be coming this year, but let me actually put an update here right now. Yeah, and well we've been, just for everybody who's listening, we've been, Krista has been at the keyboard here and putting all these links into the show notes. So if you missed a URL or something, we will be doing it there. I'll also say thank you for mentioning Daniel Pink's drive for those of you in Nebraska. That is going to be the book thing for, that you can read and write a review of for CE credit for next month, for May of 2014. So this is the second time in a couple of months drive has come up in our online sessions. I should have done this as Just Press Play. Let's try that again. The voice of Facebook. I will fix that. But anyways, we do have a page and I will be updating that. I believe we have also let's see. That's not it. There it is, RIT play. It will get, when we have any announcements, they will go on to there as well. So those would be the two best ways. If you're not a Facebook user, then you could keep an eye on this very low bandwidth Twitter account. It will get widely announced at the point where we do release it. So you can expect to be seeing announcements on the Just Press Play website or on Twitter, on Facebook and probably news releases coming out as well. Great. Well, Liz, I got to say, thank you so much for doing this for us. I love getting updates and seeing what you're working on. I wish I was back in Rochester sometimes. I see what you're doing out there. It's just amazing stuff. Next time you're here, we need to have coffee together and we can actually check in on Foursquare at the same time. Hey, I will happily meet you at a Tim Hortons. There's a family reunion coming up. We'll see what we can do this summer. Liz, thank you. No other questions from the audience, Christa? This was a fantastic webinar. Great. If anybody in Nebraska wants to try to get one of these up and run in, I guess I'll just say that I'm interested in helping if I can because I'd love to be involved in something like this. I'm almost thinking that you maybe scale it down to a conference or something, but we'll see how that goes. Liz, thank you very much again. That was wonderful. We're going to take back control just for a couple of minutes. I've got a few pieces of news that we want to take care of. I am actually going to scoot on out of here because I have a 1230 appointment. All right. Again, thanks a lot. We appreciate it. The last couple of things I just want to talk about and mention to those of you on the line, the news wise, and because we've gone kind of long here, I'll just leave these links up here and they will be in the show notes. One, support for Windows XP updated or updated has ended for this last month. You will not be getting updates anymore. If you are still running Windows XP machines, I'm not saying you have to immediately upgrade them, but the longer you have them, the less secure they're going to be, so just something you should be aware of. If you are running Windows now 8.1, the Windows 8.1 update 1 came out just a couple of weeks ago also. I have linked to an article there about the kind of the 8 newest features that you may want to be aware of with that. I will say that a lot of the complaints people have been having about Windows 8 are being addressed and maybe you won't have those complaints anymore. Just something to think about. Heartbleed, if you have not heard about Heartbleed, it was the big monster open SSL security problem that's been around for two years that people finally noticed. Probably if you have missed this news you haven't been reading the news. I just posted a Q&A, a good article from the New York Times about that. Basically at this point, change all your passwords and this is a topic that could be its own session to which I also then recommend and those of you who are familiar with LastPass, LastPass is a great way for you to create good passwords and track them and not have to actually know what your passwords are. The software will learn it for you. It's called the password vault and those of you may have noticed Liz is using that so it's not just me recommending it, it looks like she uses it also. So those are my news items. I encourage you to check out those four articles that I've linked to and will be in the show notes and that's it for Tech Talk this month. Thank you Michael and Liz, who I know are already gone. So that will wrap it up for this week's Tech Talk. I hope you join us next week when our topic is smart investing, reference strategies and resources. This is part of a grant that we've received here at the Nebraska Library Commission to do train librarians to help their community figure out investing in financial type things, which I know I'm not that great at. So this is the first webinar we have going on about that. If you want to learn more about that you can join us for this next week and there'll be more coming for the libraries that are involved in it as well in the coming months. And Facebook Encompass Live is on Facebook, so if you are a Facebook user, definitely like us there. We have our page and we post when new sessions are coming up, when recordings are available. Like I said here, I had a reminder this morning. Don't forget. Join us right now. Well, this is for this week's webinar. That you can log into the show. So if you're a big on Facebook, definitely like us there. Other than that, thank you very much for attending and we will see you next time on Encompass Live. Bye. Bye.