888: The desire to watch TV, no matter what’s on it.

Philip K. Dick, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”, 1968

“Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” is a sci-fi novel by Philip K. Dick from 1968 and the source for the Bladerunner movie. It is eerily relevant in this age of algorithms and generative AI.

The setting in the novel is a post-nuclear war world, covered in radioactive dust. Anyone who can, has left for the space colonies. People living on Earth are struggling to survive. Beyond the drudgery of work, there aren’t many amenities left:

1. The Mercer empathy device is used feel connected to other people and share emotions.
2. Caring for a live animal is another way to exercise empathy. It’s also very expensive, since most animals are extinct.
3. There’s TV, with Buster Friendly being the 24h comedy chat show that everyone tunes to.
4. And there’s the Penfield Mood Organ that people use to routinely change their emotional state.

With the Mood device, one just types in the mood they want to have, and zapp!, that’s how they are feeling. It’s a relatively dystopian idea at first, to use a brain-altering device to artificially change one’s mood. But on second thought, aren’t all life events, media, and food also affecting our moods, often intentionally chosen by us? Playing a game or watching a movie provides emotional stimuli. What’s wrong with the “fast food” version of just dialing and getting the mood you need?

The novel does not provide the full list of emotions available on the device, but here are the ones it mentions:

• 481: Awareness of the manifold possibilities open to me in the future.
• 594: Pleased acknowledgment of husband’s superior wisdom in all matters.
• 888: The desire to watch TV, no matter what’s on it.
• 003: (Urge to make a selection on the Mood Organ)
• 104: (Something positive, mentioned in chapter 1)
• 382: (Emotional numbness)
• (unknown). (Professional conduct.)
• (unknown). (Despair, feeling hopeless about everything. Hidden setting.)

Thoughts on social media

Continuing on the idea of a “fast food emotional stimulus”, let’s consider social media: the platforms that connect us to other people, allow us to chat, share emojis and images and stories, and be influenced by others.

Except there’s no way to change the setting on social media, as there is in the fictional Penfield Mood Organ.

Social media platforms use their internal, secret algorithms to learn from user behaviour, build a detailed profile, and then use that information to affect the users’ behaviour. Mostly social media platforms just want you to stay on the platform for as long as possible, to show you promoted content and advertising. Setting: 888.

Of course, other users have their own agendas, and they are gaming the algorithms to spread their messages. More nefarious consequences of the 888 setting are eg. opinion polarisation, hate speech, election rigging, propaganda, false news, destabilisation of societies, plain old scams, and so on. One just needs to package one’s message in a way that keeps people engaged, and the platform’s 888 will boost your message even further.

To feel or not to feel

After reading Philip K. Dick’s novel, I started thinking that having emotional settings on social media would actually be quite useful.

If I feel a bit stressed after work, I could choose to have content to help me wind down. If I’m feeling sad, something cheerful. Or I could wallow in grief for, say, 30 minutes, and then follow it with another mood setting. On my way to work or an event, perhaps I’d like to get suitably attuned to what the day is bringing – whether it’s calmness or excitement.

On social media platforms, we have just one profile. Once the system has learned how you tick, it’s quite hard to reprogram it. Searching for certain content will have the algorithm provide more similar content for a short while, but usually the stream of content veers off on a tangent and back to 888, trying to keep me on the platform based on my basic profile.

Settings are coming

European Digital Services Act will be in force from February 17 2024 onwards. It requires that online platforms, if they have alternative settings on their recommendation algorithms, must make those settings visible and usable for the user.

Also, very large platforms (such as Meta, YouTube, X, TikTok) must provide an option to turn off the recommendation algorithm altogether! I imagine people would spend a lot less time on a platform if they only saw their contacts’ updates in chronological order, and not the usual addictive cocktail of content.

In which situations would you turn off the recommended feed? Or suggest it to someone in your family?

Course (noun): a series of lectures or lessons in a particular subject, leading to an examination or qualification

Examinations

If we’re to look at modern educational research, we see that examinations are not very beneficial in learning. They encourage cramming, which clearly has no long-term benefits. Granted, they are an easy method of administering a (partially invalid and simplified) check on learner achievement, but that seems to be their only benefit: they are easy to administer. The disadvantages outweigh the advantages: they steer learning efforts towards surface learning, memorization, and the specific topics that the exam will cover.
More involved methods of assuring student attainment are peer and group evaluations, portfolios and project work (possibly with real customers). They take more effort, and may be less systematic, but do provide a richer insight into what the learners have in fact mastered.
I’m not the only one thinking like this. Read the section on the disadvantages and criticism on standardized test on Wikipedia.

Subjects

A topic is quite handy have so you know the knowledge or skills you’re going to get from the learning opportunity. But by limiting the range of inquiry during a learning session to a single subject area, we’re forced to consider the subject as a mandatory piece of information that everything needs to be labeled under. Indeed, if the goal is to allow learners to truly understand something and to be able to apply what they’ve learned across disciplines, it behooves us to offer multiple viewpoints to a theme. Approaches like phenomenon-based pedagogy try to lift these strict boundaries and allow learners to look at a phenomenon from all angles, irrespective of the course’s subject area.

Example: One could study migratory bird routes in biology class. Or one could look at the phenomena of climate change, and study how it affects migratory birds, different biota, global agricultural patterns, future economics, and so on. One can easily argue that the latter approach will give more insights and background understanding about animal migrations (and even human migrations) that just learning about migratory bird routes in isolation.

From the teachers’ point-of-view, thinking along the lines of subject areas is also damaging. Most western primary education follows a strikingly similar selection of subject areas; things like mathematics, geography, arts, language, physics, and so on. Ever think about where that list comes from? And what it’s based on? And how it affects education?
The main problem is that thinking along the lines of subject areas will create artificial walled gardens. “Only physics teachers may discuss how to teach physics.” It is obvious that most modern pedagogical approaches are subject-area agnostic, yet the communities of teaching professional cling to these fabricated divisions between subject areas in all of education, from primary school to higher education.
Meanwhile in Finland, schools are moving from subject areas to phenomenon-based learning topics.

Lessons

Ah yes, what better way to impart knowledge than to gather all the learners into the same room, and have someone with expert knowledge orate his knowledge? Well, possibly in the dark Middle Ages when information was near-impossible to transfer in any other format than speech.
Lessons have evolved, of course. Lessons of good teachers are interactive, individualized, and engaging. But still, having 45 minute or 75 minute (or whatever) length segments where you concentrate on a single subject area, and then switch to something completely different, seems quite alien from workplaces. Well, possibly workplace meetings are quite similar, but we all know how adults behave in pointless meetings. There’s no reason to expect teenagers to behave any better in situations where it’s hard to see the point of spending time on something just because it’s in the schedule.

Projects get rid of exams, subjects, and lessons

Project-based learning is nothing new, of course. Teachers and schools have been implementing such practices for all of history. Think of apprenticeships in the middle ages: projects, small and large. Theory and routine drills come into play when they are needed. Look at university level medical studies in most countries: problem-based learning with projects.
While it’s of course hard to exactly ensure that all students get the decreed amount of math and arts and all that into their personal curricula when it’s filled with projects, I’d argue that that is irrelevant. It is obvious that even young students will focus on some topics more, and mainly ignore others. Specialization happens at an early age. Why force-feed everyone with the same amount of all subject areas, when clearly their interests differ?
Project-based learning will ensure that students will be exposed to all subject areas (and can become interested and delve deeper if they wish to), have meaningful goals for their work, and learn skills that actually matter in the work life. Hmm… let’s qualify that with “good project-based learning”. There are good and bad projects, and we need well run projects that enable, not hinder.
Now, teachers are by no means obsolete. Their even more crucial tasks are to follow each learners’ individual study plans and the path they take towards mastery (of something). It’s called coaching, not lecturing. It can be called teaching as well. Certainly it’s education.

Some thoughts on freedom and engagement

Freedom and control are of course key concepts in managing a group of students. And there’s no simple answer to this. The balance between freedom and control will shift as the students become more responsible for their own learning. This increases with age, but also varies based on motivation and engagement.
Motivation is the tension between subject and object. How to help create that tension between a student and a topic of inquiry? Extrinsic motivators are things like mandatory attendance, dictating tasks to students, monitoring their compliance, and punishing violations. Extrinsic motivators could also be rewards for outstanding performance, social praise, and peer pressure. The problem with all extrinsic motivation is that the topic of inquiry itself is not a motivator. This steers the focus of the student from the topic to the motivational structures.
Intrinsic motivation happens when the student wants to work on the topic without any external reasons. The road from full extrinsic motivation to full intrinsic motivation goes through stages. And of course, if you start with eager first-graders, they’re already intrinsically motivated. Just make sure not to squish that motivation! But if you start with amotivated students, these are the stages:

1. External regulation and external motivation
2. Introjection, where the student projects values and views from other people to themselves
3. Identification, where the student gains ownership of the motivator and starts valuing it
4. Integration, where the student’s internal goals are aligned with the extrinsic motivator

These steps seem a bit abstract. But there are many practical common-sense tips on getting students self-motivated. Take into account their existing interests and embed them into the activities. Show that their work has meaning beyond short-term. Give them a suitable challenge, not too much and not too little. Give them frequent feedback. Allow and encourage experimentation and failure. And so on. These are actually just simple guidelines from the realm of engagement design (also known as gamification).
Now, if your students are really not motivated, giving them a project and free reigns to decide how they’ll proceed may not lead to a good outcome. Building in external motivational elements makes sense. The exact level and strictness needed depends on the case, but if they start limiting the freedoms very much, the project work turns into an extended series of exercises.
In the realm of online education, we can name the opposites. A Learning Management System (LMS) is often the strict, controlled environment, where each step of the students is monitored and evaluated. On the other end of the spectrum, is the Personal Learning Environment (PLE), which is basically just the ever-changing collection of tools, materials, people, and other elements that an individual student uses in their learning.
An xMOOC is somewhere in between an LMS and a PLE, although closer to an LMS. A cMOOC would typically be closer to a PLE.

MOOP

So, let’s take projects and turn them massive, open and online. What could they be? One MOOP comes to mind immediately: Wikipedia. It’s massive, open, online, and a project (although a never-ending one). In Finland I’ve seen several phenomenon-based learning projects involving several schools across the country. Flat Connections (previously the Flat Classroom Project) has been doing this for years in global scale.

Will engagement design work in a business setting?

Before you start your design, analyze these four questions properly.

1. Motivation: Will the new or altered behavior derive value?
2. Meaningful choices: Are the activities interesting?
3. Structure: Can you algorithmize the behavior of participants?
4. Potential conflicts: Avoid tension with other motivational structures.

The design framework

If you decide to go forward with your engagement design, this is the overall framework you should take a look at and adapt to your needs.

1. Define the business objectives. List and rank them. Consider only final objectives, not means to ends. Justify the objectives.
2. Delineate target behaviors. What should participants do specifically? How do you measure those activities? What analytics or measurement tools will to bring to bear?
3. Describe your players. Include the normal demographics as well as psychometrics (see below, section “Different people”).
4. Devise activity loops. Engagement loops start with motivating to perform an action, then giving feedback that encourages for another action, improved from the previous attempt. Engagement loops should be short; feedback should be given as soon as possible. Progression loops describe how the process through the story arc happens. It can be a linear path, many parallel paths, rhytmic loops, or any combinations of these.
5. Don’t forget the fun. Fun needs to be understood widely as being in the flow (à Csíkszentmihályi), being engaged, enjoying oneself. Not just laughter.
6. Deploy the appropriate tools. What’s important is that this is the last step. If you start by selecting a tool, you’re climbing the tree backwards. The tool needs to be chosen to best serve all that has been designed previously. In reality, this is often not possible, but it’s good to be aware of the limitations the tool will enforce and which will make the implementation of your design inferior.

Elements of gamification

Here are some often used elements in various gamification attempts. The bold ones are the PBL (points, badged, leaderboards), which are the easiest to implement and add, and which usually produce only minimal results. Good engagement design will take a broader look at what kinds of people it accommodates.

• Achievements
• Avatars
• Badges
• Boss fights
• Collections
• Combat
• Content Unlocking
• Gifting
• Leaderboards
• Levels
• Points
• Quests
• Social Graph
• Teams
• Virtual goods

Different people, different ways of fun

Well designed engagement mechanics would tentatively present various elements to participants, see if they respond positively, and emphasize them more in the future. For example, an online course could offer the possibility to compare one’s scores to others, and for the participant tries that and explores those scores further, more competitive and challenge oriented mechanics could be added. Accordingly, if the participant passes the opportunity and instead joins a discussion forum to share tips, making collaboration and peer help more visible and prominent will probably engage that participant more.

Some general design principles

Engagement design (or gamification) is design, meaning good design practices are useful. Good design is often multidisciplinary, it is participatory, and it is iterative. And it takes time. Having a good designer or external facilitator will help achieve better results, when designing your next product, be it an online course, a game, a productivity tool, or something else.
I myself have worked extensively with teachers, and developed Edukata, a model for teachers to arrange participatory design workshops successfully.

The magic circle

And no matter the analysis methods and elements you employ, at the end of the day, there is only one thing that determines whether what you’ve designed is engaging or not: the participant’s experience. The magic circle is a useful concept here. It refers to the feeling of being in a different place, where normal rules of everyday life don’t apply. In the magic circle, you can play, you can experiment, you can act differently. Because it’s not severe, it’s not fatal. Because, in the magic circle (or indeed, in any game), it’s make-believe. If you win or not, or succeed or fail, only matters to you and others who are in the magic circle. Not the outside world.
This is not to say that a designed product can’t be serious or have real consequences. But the participant experience has to lift that seriousness away, and allow them to experiment, take risks, make choices, see the consequences, adapt their behavior, and retry. Failures can’t end the interaction, but rather lead to renewed, improved attempts.

1. Add tags and categories to posts.
2. Modify post listings to include pages when they would normally only list posts.

The plugin has been carefully crafted so it does not interfere with normal management views, nor with other plugins that may create new content types. Find the plugin here: http://wordpress.org/plugins/pages-are-posts/

I wake up. I don’t know where I am. This has happened every day for a very long time. But I don’t remember. Until I look at my phone. It says: “Tarmo, you have no short-term memory.”

Welcome to the demented future.

After the initial shock of being told I’ve lost my memory, I understand that I must fully rely on my phone. My previous memories may be from two decades ago. People may have died, and I’m in a different setting. So I consult my phone to find out the date (“Ooh, I’m 23 years into the future! How exciting!”), check if I have any friends left (Google+ or Facebook or whatever people use then), look at my calendar and allow the device to navigate me to the breakfast table, then to various errands around the city. In the evening I return to my place of residence. The phone reminds me to record a 60 second video reflection of my day. I do that. Tomorrow will be a new day, and I will be a new person. This reflection will be waiting for that new person in the morning.

Depending on the severity of the dementia, using a device as memory backup and task management can prolong my productive working life. I may still be useful in drawing on my vast experiences to help others, even if my day-to-day memories are a bit fuzzy. As long as I mark things down into the device, it will continue to guide me to be productive.
If as some point I degrade even further, someone close to me, or a nurse, could be given access to the data I have. So when I wake up, I will have today’s calendar, filled by someone else, and I will happily follow that and keep out of trouble. If nothing else, I can play Angry Birds or listen to excellent podcasts for most of the day.
Of course, when this scenario is taken to the extreme, I might not be needed at all. After death, all the data collected about me can power a simulation of me. Whether purely virtual or with some robotic body doesn’t really matter. Most people online might not notice the difference between a person’s tweets and his simulated tweets.
A new category of spam: posthumous status updates.

• completing something: You need to follow the rules of the badge provider, and once you’re done, the badge is yours. In P2PU’s case, this entails accepting a challenge and completing the required tasks. The system could theoretically do a lot of verification, including administering an online exam to test you, but in this case, it’s just a matter of checking boxes saying you’ve done the tasks. Although it’s good to remember that the badge provider can cancel out your badges if they later learn you’ve not followed the requirements.
• getting it from someone else: Others in same platform can decide to award you a badge if they think you’re worth it. Such badges could indicate that you helped others with their problems, or provided other additional value to others.
• applying for it: If you think you’ve earned something, you can apply for it. You give out your reasoning and wait for others to review your claim. The reviewers will also rate your application based on the criteria specified in the badge.

All in all, the functionality seems quite understandable. While P2PU still sufferent from a few UI snafus, the technology seems to be working and can certainly be represented in human-understandable terms to end-users, which is a critical requirement if this is to become mainstream in some distant future.