The first of these services is Shortmail. Some time ago, I wrote about my approach for keeping up with an inbox zero strategy. The key element is to deal with all email requests that can be handled in two minutes or less immediately. Only requests that take a longer time to process are filed and taken care of whenever there is enough time. Unfortunately, there rarely is “enough time”. So why not force people to send only emails requests that can actually be dealt with in two minutes or less?

Shortmail does exactly that by restricting emails to 500 characters in length. If you send an email containing more than 500 characters to a Shortmail address, you will get an automated response with a web link that allows you to edit the email down to the required length. If this is ignored, the email gets delivered to a quarantine folder in Shortmail that, as an added bonus, therefore also gobbles up all spam email.

I find the service extremely well implemented. They have a nice Web Interface as well as an iOS App and – in case you are using a Mac – are fully integrated into the excellent Sparrow email client. Unfortunately, the service is not transparent when using it through a regular email client. Using Shortmail’s SMTP server for sending out email is a bit of a guessing game whether you have already reached your 500 character limit or not.

The second social media service that caught my attention is Cowbird. Cowbird is a social network site optimized for storytelling. It sort of serves as a personal journal for keeping track of things you find remarkable but somehow require wording too complex for a tweet on Twitter, too meaningful to be wasted on a status update on Facebook and not involved enough for a full grown blog entry. The service has some similarities with mircoblogging sites such as Tumblr but feels a lot more consistent in terms of its dedication to storytelling.

What I like most about Cowbird is that you can really feel that a lot of TLC went into the design of the site. It focuses on visual representation rather than text, which I consider a well-received departure from traditional social media sites. In contrast to Shortmail, I have actually started using Cowbird by posting an observation I recently had when I visited the Austrian Ministry of Education. I am planning on continuing to use the service for little stories like that.

So, if you have the time and interest, give these sites a try. You might find them charmingly fresh and simply useful.

This rather simple idea has a couple of far reaching consequences. First and foremost, it shows that game based learning is highly individualized learning since Eigenvalues have a highly non-linier behavior and exhibit what is commonly referred to as the butterfly effect. Even the smallest changes in the learning setup, the motivation of the learners or the way the game is used didactically can have dramatic consequences for the outcome. Second, if you do not line up game and real life experiences related to the learning objectives, it is very unlikely that there even is a significant learning effect. As strange as it sounds, learning Math inside a game does not necessarily mean that you are learning Math outside the game as well.

Ludwig is different to almost any other learning game because we created a game that can enable learning in this ludic constructivist sense. We did this by following three simple rules:

1. Game objective = learning objective. (Or as Gee recently put it: “You have to marry the game mechanics with the learning.”). As simple as this sounds, this is extremely difficult to achieve. But it is necessary in order to make sure that the recursion of knowledge creation can converge towards pre set learning goals.
2. Create opportunities for real world spillover. (This is in line with Gee’s “Big G game” concept.) It is necessary that any learning activity within the game must be tied to real world experiences. A learning game can therefore never be just a digital game. It always needs a close connection to the real world in order to create opportunities for reflection and transfer.
3. Iterative didactic design. The whole game development process needs to take into account that there is an inherent butterfly effect in game based learning that makes it impossible to plan for everything in advance. The only possibility to deal with this instability is to use development processes that utilize heuristic approaches based on user centered design methodologies. In other words, you need a lot of didactic play-testing.

In has to be noted that there are two additional characteristics in which Ludwig differs from other learning games. First we tried to create something that as AAA-appeal. While this is certainly not a requirement for a learning game to work, it seemed necessary as a door opener in terms of getting everybody interested in Ludwig. Second, Ludwig is 100% curriculum based and ready to be used in schools as a officially approved teaching aid.

What can be done about this? There are some rather extreme measures. A couple of years ago declaring “email bankruptcy” became popular. At the same time, some of my friends started using services such as spam arrest to automatically filter out everything they did not explicitly approve beforehand. Other people decided to opt out of email entirely. (Btw, remember the – above depicted – classic Seinfeld episode “The Junk Mail” in which Kramer decides to opt out of mail?) These are all interesting options that make great blog posts, but unfortunately not at all possible for regular people with regular jobs (try telling you boss that you have decided to stop reading email…).

Nevertheless, if we like it or not, sooner or later we all have to accept the fact that the technical possibility to receive an email in an inbox does not necessarily mean that we can actually read it, let alone respond to it. The best we can do is to set up a system in which we try to deal with the ever-growing email influx in the most efficient way possible accepting the possibility that we might annoy some people that take a more conservative approach to email communication.

In the following I would like to briefly explain the way I deal with my email. This is a system that works very well for me mainly because it somehow evolved naturally over the years (I never read any of the “Getting Things Done” or “GTD” literature but I understand I stumbled upon pretty much the exact same principles). Maybe this is of help for some people out there, especially for those who need to communicate with me through email.

In lifehacker-speek I follow a strict Inbox Zero strategy meaning that whenever I attend to my email account, I do not stop unless all of my email has been dealt with and removed from my inbox. The second key principle is that I never file emails in folders. Once an email is dealt with it gets either deleted or archived, nothing else. In the era of intelligent search algorithms, email folders are no longer needed and should therefore be a thing of the past. The rest is actually a straightforward GTD strategy:

1. If an email is unimportant, it gets either deleted or archived.
2. If an email is cc’ed to me, it gets archived.
3. If an email can be delegated, it gets delegated and archived.
4. If an email takes less than 2 minutes to respond to, it gets dealt with immediately and archived.
5. If an email takes more than 2 minutes to respond to, it gets deferred. I now do this by forwarding it into my Evernote account where it ends up in a “To Do” notebook and gets dealt with in the order of importance whenever I find the time for it. The email itself gets archived.

There is only one catch to such a GTD system. Emails that get deferred can end up on the bottom of the “To Do” pile for quite a while. Some time ago in a related email tip, Internet guru Kevin Rose suggested setting up a reply system that automatically asks senders after two weeks if the original email is still relevant. While this is an interesting idea, I have chosen a much simpler approach by asking people to remind me in case they are waiting for my response to an email. So far this is working reasonably well as long as people are at least to some extent aware of how I handle my email.

If Google starts a new service it is always a good idea to take a closer look even though the history of Google startups is a lot more mixed than most people will admit. (Anybody still remembers the once hyped Google Wave?) But the enormous market power of Google will make anything that has some sort of mass appeal instantly successful on a very large scale. Any Google activity therefore justifies close observation by anybody interested in any topic related to any form of media.

The first thing a Google+ novice learns is that Google+ organizes the world in circles. If you know somebody (or not) you can add him or her in one of your circles for following his or her activities in a more or less neatly organized manner. These circles are not public but if you want, you can allow public access to a list of all people you have in your circles. If you are new to Google+ you will most likely sort through some of these lists in search of people you might know. At least that is what I did.

What I found interesting is that whatever circled people list I sorted through, I frequently came across the same people scattered around in many circles. It was almost as if the Google+ world consisted of a rather limited amount of people connected by a rather large amount of circles. On second thought, this was not particularly surprising since the user invitation process within the test phase is somehow expected to result in such a selection.

People currently on Google+ (like myself) joined for the purpose of joining. They use Google+ for the purpose of talking about Google+. It is the group of people that tend to post for the purpose of posting and more or less frequently comment for the purpose of commenting. It is also the group of people that is believed to know exactly what people want in a social network. Nothing could be further from the truth, though (no offence, I include myself in that list).

The success of Facebook does not come from the participation of social media experts neither was it planned by social media experts. It results from the emergent use by average users that are not really interested in the social media platform itself but rather by what you can do with it. So I decided to ask two experts in this non-scientific everyday social media usage – my kids – about what they think about Google+. They took about 30 seconds and came back with a very clear evaluation: “No games – no good!”

It seems that Google+ started with the wrong test group and the wrong set of features (a much needed API does not yet exist but is said to be in development) for optimizing mass market appeal in an iterative product development process. Looking back, this points to a problem that many recent Google products had. A very closed test group of social media experts created a hype that the actual product was not able to live up to because average users could not care less about expert opinions. At the moment I see no reason why this should be any different with Google+.

If you are doing work in gamification, stop doing it! Or at least do not tell anybody that you are doing it.

The world is not a game and does not need to be turned into one. Or as Zimmerman put it: “We all love books, but we would never try to bookify the world”. Gee went one step further and made a statement that will probably be discussed for quite a while: “Jane McGonigal’s book ‘Reality is Broken’ disturbs me deeply.”

If you are doing work on “little g” games for learning, you are wasting your time! Start working on “big G” games.

According to Gee, a “little g” game is essentially the game by itself. If you want to promote learning with games you need to turn your emphasis on the passionate affinity spaces that form around “little g” games. These “big G” game spaces are the spaces where the actual learning takes place. (Which, btw, is the main point I made at my keynote at the Clash of Realities conference in Cologne last year. It is also one of the core principles in the development of Ludwig.)

Standardized testing is an ill-conceived and stupid idea! Schools are highly complex systems that do not respond well to standardization.

Zimmerman: “Standardized testing brought the American education system back into the 19th century.” And according to Katie Salen, who talked about her “Quest to Learn” approach to education in her keynote, standardized test scores are considered “not important measurements” in Quest to Learn schools.

This one leaves me with some headache. The Austrian school system is currently undergoing a significant standardization effort, both in terms of standardizing tests as well as standardizing learning objectives. Even though I have myself been openly critical about this development, I have to accept that everything around me is pushing in this direction. I am certain, however, that in about 10-15 years, we will arrive at the very same conclusion and will thus be required to reverse at least some of our current efforts.