Mike Edwards

The Local No. 12 crew had a blast running our game, Backchatter, at GDC 2010! As we mentioned in our blog post, the game code is now open-sourced! You can find it in our project on SourceForge.net.

Great panel session at SXSW! I presented "Playing with 140 Characters" alongside my Local No. 12 colleagues Colleen Macklin, John Sharp, and Eric Zimmerman. We had a very positive reception on the session's twitterfall, which is always gratifying. A really nice end to a busy week up in the air.

So, the Android Market had a Drupal app for updating sites like this. Since I'm doing a lot of work these days on connecting sites to other entry points, I thought I'd give this a whirl.

Just finished the first seminar for the Jetpack for Learning competition. I was inspired to try out a quick-and-dirty take on our "notebook" idea from the original concept. If you have Jetpack installed, drop this in the Develop editor window and try it out.

jetpack.future.import('selection');
jetpack.future.import('slideBar');
jetpack.selection.onSelection(function(){
  var html = jetpack.selection.html;
  jetpack.slideBar.append({
    html:html,
    width:300
    });
});

The internet is a potentially powerful tool for enhancing learning environments. However, the unstructured nature of it can present a challenge to both students and teachers. For example, students may lack the ability to pursue a learning goal strategically and therefore find themselves overwhelmed by the amount of information at their fingertips and wandering aimlessly. Teachers, on the other hand, may be at a loss of how to assess students' learning in such a setting and unable to understand the connections that students' are making.

Reflecting Pool Mockup Screenshot

Reflecting Pool (see attached interactive PDF) aims to improve internet-based activities for students by increasing metacognitive awareness (i.e., planning, monitoring, and control of thinking) and for teachers by giving them greater access to the thought processes of their students. Furthermore, it offers a unique opportunity for all to understand and explore the collective knowledge of the class.

Here's another pass at some more of the 9/11 Pager data that was released by Wikileaks this week. I did some work earlier that explains most of what I'm doing. This time, I tried to improve the visualization. I'm also using a directed graph of domain names that appear in the messages as they relate to the unique pager numbers.

I spent Thanskgiving and the day after relaxing in my own peculiar way--by mining the Wikileaks 9/11 pager data.

Here are some early results:

I started by pulling out all the email addresses from the pages and storing them in their own table, with keys to their original page. I also pulled the unique pager numbers from the pages. What I got was a bipartite directed graph with one side being emails and the other being pagers, with messages functioning as edges. Using Django, Graphviz, Cinelerra and a bunch of other tools, I was able to make a video of the graph as it lights up on each relevant page.

Finally coming up for air and getting a little time to blog about some interesting stuff I've been a part of. Just to get started, I wanted to show off a video my colleague Claudio Midolo shot of our fraction game in SMALLab, which we've provisionally dubbed "FracAttack".

I've put together a .csv (comma-separated file) with the results I pulled off of Twitter for the first 48 hours of the Iranian election events. Be aware--it's about 20MB. Hopefully, many of you will find this useful in your own research. The columns are tweet id, date and time, text, profile image path, twitter username, twitter user id, and twitter user id of the immediate "reply to" (note that, in my graph analysis, I keep track of all @'s in the message, not just the first one as Twitter does. Only that first id is listed in the data file.)

In the NYC Learning Network projects, we've been doing a lot recently with using a webapp on an iPhone (here's our first stab at a search engine using Eric Sanderson's brilliant Mannahatta data). There's all kinds of ways to do this (we're most excited by PhoneGap). For me, as a Ubuntu Linux user, this is pretty great--I can help develop large pieces of the application without dealing with Apple and its locked-down way of doing things. There's just one problem--I really need to see how it works with WebKit, the engine behind Safari and other browsers.