An ecotone — literally, a place where ecologies are in tension — is a transitional area between different biomes, such as the boundary between grassland and forest or between different kinds of forests. Such places are sites for evolutionary dynamism, conflict, and experimentation. Ann Pendleton-Jullian, Director of the Knowlton School of Architecture at Ohio State University, draws on the ecotone as analogy and inspiration in her provocative essay regarding the future of design education and other institutional systems, Innovation Ecotones (.pdf).

Here, Pendleton-Jullian outlines the continuum between linear (“twentieth century”) and elastic/non-hierarchical (“twenty-first century”) learning and innovation models:

The left side of this continuum corresponds to models, methods, and mechanisms associated with twentieth century learning and the right side corresponds to how we are beginning to conceive of knowledge construction for the twenty-first century. A twentieth-century approach to education holds fast to the notion of teaching as a systematic delivery of knowledge—knowledge that is vetted and sanctioned and delivered in discipline-based packages from expert teachers to students. It is education in which one learns about specific stuff and how to do specific things.

In contrast, twenty-first century learning environments are about learning that extends far beyond the classroom (it scales), which in turn promotes elasticity and agency. The assumption is that we need to prepare for futures in which the specific things we will be doing, and specific stuff we will need to know, do not yet exist. Implicated in an education for the twenty-first century are all sorts of new mechanisms—cultural, social, and intellectual mechanisms—that are either directly or indirectly affiliated with the digital age as a global phenomenon.

Intuitively, we understand that a twenty-first century approach to learning is radically different from education that focuses on the accumulation of information and the simplistic transfer of culture and ideas associated with this information. But what is it more precisely? I would suggest that it begins with an epistemological shift in which learning how to learn and act (learning to be), in a highly situated manner, replaces learning about something. And then it is about how this scales, so as to create elasticity and agency.

Agency is the key word here. In the staid and siloed ecologies of traditional education, everyone has their place. Agency is reduced to choosing which silo you’re going to set yourself into — a choice which can drastically scale back your exposure to what’s going on in other silos. As a result, your world — your learning ecology — becomes smaller and less diverse over time. And the less diverse a given ecology becomes, the slower its pace of evolution and innovation.

In an “ecotone culture,” what once was siloed begins to collide, mix, and cross-pollinate, opening new vectors for discovery and collaboration. The results are unpredictable, but rich:

Because the students of the ecotone culture share the space and their work with others unlike themselves – with diverse species – there will be those cases in which one enters as one thing and evolves into something else: an architect, for instance, evolves into a musician/architect; or an astronomer evolves into an astronomer/environmentalist. Like the Greenbul [a bird whose song pitch and aeronautical capabilities adapt in response to its environment], though, it is not a change of song but a new tonality that honors both the song structure and the new context. This means that this new talent will acquire the ability to contribute in more than one field and maintain a key presence in multiple camps.

The ecotone analogy is extensive and highly productive. Diversity of species, new species development, keystone species as engineers, distribution of nutrients, corridors for transfer of creatures and stuff—even the idea of microhabitats (smaller habitats within larger habitats, like a tidal pool)—are all intensely relevant in terms of conceiving, designing, and implementing organizational structures and mechanisms for this innovation ecology model. Each component might independently have an impact and add value to the system, but the fact that the ecotone is a system, rather than a collection of components, means that their collective impact scale.

It should be noted that establishing an innovation ecotone in an institutional setting does not mean that one must completely change the entire system overnight. As I've observed over the past few months, a lightweight and entirely opt-in pervasive game geared around peer discovery and collaborative production can have transformative effects on an otherwise siloed educational environment. Once the channels for agency and disciplinary elasticity have been opened, it’s hard to close them again. After all, young media artists, theorists, and designers (among many others) are eager to find their niche in the world, to discover their identities, and to make a contribution — and in diversity, there is opportunity.

Download the complete text: Innovation Ecotones (.pdf)

First off, I noticed your dissertation, “Follow the Pixel Rabbit,” on your website. Even though I can’t read German, I found it interesting to flip through the pages. Speaking generally, what’s your dissertation about — and what does the Alice reference in the title mean?

I wrote my dissertation on storytelling in video games around 2002/2003. At that time game studies was still a pretty new thing at universities in Switzerland (and games not really accepted as a serious academic subject). With the reference to Alice in Wonderland I wanted to make the statement that digital games offer a magic, bizarre and wonderful world for the one who dares to enter. My dissertation is about different ways of storytelling and player engagement of video games, hyperfiction and interactive movies – latter being a genre that failed remarkably in its beginnings – just watch/play I’m Your Man!

Mela Kocher Lennstroem

Obviously you are engaged with a lot of different fields of inquiry, from game design to narratology to aesthetics. How did you end up deciding to study/make this kind of stuff? What path did you take to becoming a theorist-practitioner?

Besides frenetically playing Games & Watch as a child, I lead a pretty video game-free life until my roommate in college got me into Myst and Riven. I studied German literature at that point and was curious to test the traditional literary theory frameset on games – and luckily my professor was encouraging that. Writing a dissertation on the topic was a pretty natural step (since it was fun, challenging and exciting), and during that time I played lots of games and taught many game workshops for teachers and librarians. In the past years I’ve been getting more and more intrigued by ARGs and their vast potential for storytelling and blurring the lines between fiction and reality – so I was more than happy to have gotten a research grant to study, play and now even make ARGs in the USA for two years.

You recently appeared on a panel at the Digital Media and Learning conference entitled, “Storytellers, Storymakers and Learning by ARG.” As a part of the panel, you and your co-panelist, game designer Ken Eklund (World Without Oil), designed and ran a mini-ARG. What was the purpose of this game, and how did it work?

The conference theme was “Diversifying Participation”, and our team wanted to discuss ARGs & participatory learning. Since it would probably take an hour to explain what ARGs are (and people still wouldn’t get it!), it seemed more effective (and way more fun!) to have the audience engage in one first hand. The game plot went like this: One of the speakers (which ended up being me) got lost on campus and was not be able to show up for the session in time. While Ken explained this to the waiting conference attendees, he had a “stress-induced narcoleptic attack of 20 minutes” so the audience was completely left to themselves (while our other two team members, PJ Rusnak and Stephen Petrina, stayed incognito in the room for possible trouble shooting).

I wish I had been there. How many people ended up participating?

You should have! There were around 40 people in a quite tiny room so it was packed. It was amazing which strategies the participants came up with – they started a Facebook search, tried to sneak Ken’s phone from his sleeping hand, they tweeted me, tried to call and text me and physically went out on campus to search for me – unfortunately for them, in my fictional world my phone was malfunctioning and I could only send them pictures from my location via tweet to ping.fm. That constraint gave way to lots of creativity, though (as our PM team had hoped for), and the participants truly engaged in their storymaking efforts.

Screen capture of Twitter activity from the mini-ARG, Feb 19, 2010

What kind of feedback did you get? How was the notion of “learning by ARG” understood by the assembled educators?

There was definitely excitement in the room during the game (I watched the video later on). Most of them immediately understood that it was a game, and got into play mode. My favorite reaction was the (failed) gamejack attempt of one man who offered to hold his own speech while they were waiting for the scheduled speaker. Another person doubted that I was truly lost but suggested that I might just need a bit of comforting to take up my role as speaker. Lovely!

Even from this short ARG performance, people saw the great potential ARGs bear for learning – via features like creativity, collaboration, common goals, instant player feedback, immersion, role play, problem-solving… Most attendants thought of the ARG as an inspiring experience during an academic conference stuffed with formal one-to-many presentations.

The players eventually

On a more meta level, how do participatory game constructs like storymaking ARGs complicate or extend your thinking on narrative in digital games? Are the categories of “story” and “game” collapsing into one another, or do the traditional boundaries still hold?

ARGs have a potential for storytelling and storymaking that video games do not have, because of the possibility for real time interaction with the puppet masters and the actual chance for the player (or the more believable illusion!) to influence the course of the game. Narrative adventure video games are in comparison to that so limited and often incoherent due to their closed programming. Of course, more open structured video games like GTA offer completely different ways of experiencing and creating a story as well which also extends beyond the realm of the screen, but ARGs just take this idea much further. But new options bear new problems, and ARGs rely on the puppet masters’ coherent and instant feedback and their fair choices – and on the collaboration of the fellow players.

To your second question: I’d rather keep the concepts of “story” and “game” apart for analytical reasons, even though they tend to overlap [in the case of] ARGs: [that is,] I can play by being part of the story or by trying to crack a code. I would say that ARGs make story playable, but they are more story than game – but then this also depends on what the player is looking for. I myself love to ‘stalk’ a character and get into the game through character interaction while others love to solve puzzles etc. – the more traditional game-aspects of an ARG.

What’s next for ARGs — and for your research in general?

I’m curious to see if ARGs will develop towards shorter, replayable and even payable game formats for wider audiences (and therefore blend with features of video games).

I myself got very intrigued by having experienced a challenging setting like the academic conference as a playground, and I hope to investigate further in that direction. I’m not a fan of serious games per se, but I do believe that “play” in general provides at its core some of the most valuable experiences for living and learning.

Thanks, Mela!

Know of something that should be listed here? Please get in touch with me via the comments and I will update the resource.

Museums

Games

• Ghosts of a Chance (Smithsonian, 2008-2010) “We live in a world in which information and entertainment are customizable and immediately available. The Internet has become a larger part of everyday life, and so too have networked games, as people seek community, activity, a sense of achievement, and the chance to be part of something bigger . . . Museums can reach out to their audiences in more ways, using blogs, podcasts, video, and social media, but can they meaningfully engage visitors using games? In the fall of 2008, the Smithsonian American Art Museum hosted an Alternate Reality Game titled “Ghosts of a Chance.” We did this with three goals in mind: to broaden our audience, to do a bit of self-promotion, and, most importantly, to encourage discovery around our collections in a new, very interactive way. This paper will discuss the challenges that the museum faced, evaluate the successes and failures of each part of the game, and make recommendations for other museums interested in trying something similar.” (Archimuse)

• More on Ghosts of a Chance: Georgina Goodlander’s paper, Nina Simon’s blog writeup, Anika Gupta’s piece on Smithsonian.com and goSmithsonian, Washington Post coverage, and NPR’s coverage.
• PHEON (Multiple institutions, 2010) “For the past couple of months CityMystery has been building a new game, called PHEON. (A pheon is an ancient Greek arrowhead that has come to symbolize nimbleness of wit.) The purpose of our game is to celebrate (and reinforce) the American impulse to innovate. An economist friend of mine recently said that we have to “invent” our way out of our current mess. With PHEON I am promoting the idea that Americans understand innovation as a reoccurring utility of our democracy, one that matches our ability to adapt and succeed. PHEON’s subtext has to do with how ideas are passed along: how one person articulates a wish that another fulfills.” (“Sneak Preview of a New Museum Game“)
• More on PHEON: see Pass on the PHEON!.
• Many museums are also developing location-specific games and storytelling activities (like this or this) that don’t fit comfortably into the definition of an ARG. For some starting points for looking into these kinds of projects, see my locative media and ambient storytelling resources, and visit Nancy Proctor’s site, Museum Mobile.

Articles and discussions

• Reshaping the art museum June 2009 article from ArtNews: “Confronted with urgent demographic realities, art-museum directors are drawing on game theory, interactive technology, and a host of other new strategies to help people feel welcome, engaged, and emotionally fulfilled.”
• Smithsonian 2.0 “The two-day Smithsonian 2.0 gathering explores how to make SI collections, educational resources, and staff more accessible, engaging, and useful to younger generations (teenage through college students) who will largely experience them digitally. Over 30 creative people from the web and new media world will meet with 30 Smithsonian staff members to generate a vision of what a digital Smithsonian might be like in the years ahead.”

Libraries and Library Systems

Games

• Find Chesia (Carroll County MD Public Library, 2009) “Carroll County Public Library simply defined their ARG as a game played online and in the real world, where players solve puzzles, collect clues and objects, and ultimately find out about the mysterious Chesia. The library’s definition focused on the interactive story element and the promotion of technology literacy. Lynn Wheeler, Director of Carroll County Public Library, expressed pride in the project and the volunteers and staff who ‘have worked tirelessly to create delightful opportunities for teens to learn about and in turn use Web 2.0 technologies to create fun learning activities.’” (School Library Journal)

• Blood on the Stacks (Trinity University, 2006-2007) “Blood on the Stacks began in the spring of 2006, with a charge from Library Director Diane Graves to invent an orientation to follow in the footsteps of the hugely successful Harry Potter-themed orientations created by science librarian Barbara MacAlpine. Librarians Jeremy Donald, Clint Chamberlain and Jason Hardin created a mixed-media, digital/analog experience that treated the library as both a cyberspace and a bricks-and-mortar campus hotspot. Communication professor Aaron Delwiche supplied the idea of making the library orientation an ‘alternate reality game,’ where a fictional online narrative combines with real-world people, places, and events to create a game that blurs the boundary between the real and the imagined, the online environment and physical reality.” (lib.trinity.edu)

Universities, Colleges and K-12

Games

• Reality (University of Southern California, 2011-) Collaborative production game driven by digitally-connected collectible cards, designed to accelerate creative serendipity and peer discovery. More info: here. See also, Wired article and henryjenkins.org.
• AFTRS/LAMP induction and orientation ARGs (Australian Film Television and Radio School, 2005-2009) “Mini Alternate Reality Games (mARGs), collaborative play and quests as part of LAMP residentials or AFTRS inductions.” Includes games designed by Gary Hayes and Christy Dena.

• ARGOSI (Manchester Metropolitan University/University of Bolton, 2008-2009) “Alternate Reality Games for Orientation, Socialisation and Induction (ARGOSI) was a JISC-funded project that ran from April 2008 to March 2009. It designed and piloted an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) to support the student induction process. This small-scale pilot project was . . . aimed to provide an engaging and purposeful alternative to traditional methods of introducing students to university life.”
• WOW! A Song for Skatz (UK K-12, 2009) Nikki Pugh, lead artist for this project, describes this ARG-like school activity as: “Immersive – you’re in it, it takes over; Challenging – you will be outside your comfort zone. You will step up; you will learn; you will grow; Awesome – it will be beyond your expectations. It will give you things that could not have been planned; Inspiring – there will be spaces left for you to fill in in imagination technicolour; Pervasive – it will seep out of the classroom and reach beyond lesson times; Malleable – it will mean different things to different people; also, you will need to plan and contingency plan… and then adjust those plans on the fly in response to what is presented to you.” Check out Nikki’s fantastic project documentation here.
• Skeleton Chase (Indiana University, 2008) “In late May [of 2008], Indiana University announced that it received a $185,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to explore how interactive digital games can be designed to improve players’ health. . . The [alternate reality game produced with this grant] was a collaboration between professors Anne Massey (Kelley School of Business), Jeanne Johnston (Kinesiology Department), and Lee Sheldon (Telecommunications Department).” (ARGNet)

Articles and Discussions

• Alternate reality games for developing student autonomy and peer learning Nicola Whitton’s case study of the ARGOSI project at Manchester Metropolitan University: “This paper discusses the educational potential of alternate reality games (ARGs), a relatively new game format that takes place both online and in the real world over a number of weeks, and combines narrative and puzzles to develop a collaborative community. In this paper, first the concept of ARGs are described, including their history and composition, and their potential pedagogic benefits are discussed in relation to constructivism, student autonomy and peer learning.” (lick2008.wikispaces.com)
• See also: Nicola Whitton’s ARGOSI PowerPoint presentation from the 2008 Let’s Change the Game Conference.
• MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Competition: ARG proposals Play without Borders and Earthrise are two recent DML competition proposals for school-based ARGs.
• Peer Puppeteers: Alternate Reality Gaming in Primary Schools “In this paper I will be reporting on a crosscurricular multi-media literacy project undertaken in a large South London Primary School over two years, which represents one element of my ongoing research into the potential of Alternate Reality Gaming in Primary Education.” (Angela Colvert)

Government, meta-institutional, and more

Not all educational or public-minded ARGs are necessarily tied down to a single institution or system. Here are a few notable games that have been produced outside of museums, libraries, and schools while still serving a larger learning or public service purpose:

Games

• ARGuing (European Commission Lifelong Learning Programme, 2010) “The ARGuing project helps teachers use the Internet (see Web 2.0 ) within language education. The project is funded by the European Union within the Comenius Lifelong Learning Programme. The project has developed and piloted a massive and very successful Alternate Reality Game (see Alternate Reality Games ) called the ‘Tower of Babel’ to ‘Engage’, ‘Motivate’ and ‘Excite’ students to learn languages using the new possibilities that the Internet age offers us (see more). ARGuing will build an educational methodology and teacher training guides and courses that can be used by teachers and teacher trainers to learn and understand how they can use the Internet, in a similar way to how their students are already using technology.”
• EVOKE (World Bank Institute, 2010) “When we evoke, we look for creative solutions. We use whatever resources we have. We get as many people involved as possible. We take risks. We come up with ideas that have never been tried before. An evoke is an urgent call to innovation. Evoking first started in Africa, but it can happen anywhere. And if you found this message, then it is your destiny to join us.”

• More on EVOKE: McGonigal describes the game on CNN
• Routes (Channel 4 Education/The Wellcome Trust, 2009) “Routes is an eight week game from Channel 4 Education in association with the Wellcome Trust that takes players into a world of genetics, evolution and the human genome.”
• World Without Oil (Corporation for Public Broadcasting, 2007) “WORLD WITHOUT OIL is a serious game for the public good. WWO invited people from all walks of life to contribute ‘collective imagination’ to confront a real-world issue: the risk our unbridled thirst for oil poses to our economy, climate and quality of life. It’s a milestone in the quest to use games as democratic, collaborative platforms for exploring possible futures and sparking future-changing action. WWO set the model for using a hot net-native storytelling method (‘alternate reality’) to meet civic and educational goals. Best of all, it was compellingly fun.”

Articles and Discussions

• Federal multi-agency Alternative Reality Game “The general idea of a multi-agency ARG would be to use game play as a way of engaging citizens in an exploration of democratic ideals. It would also be a way to discover new connections between Federal agencies, and new ways of connecting citizens to their government.” (Smithsonian 2.0)

Designers, observers, and policy-makers

• ARGLE Angela Colvert’s research into the potential of alternate reality gaming in education.
• Center for the Future of Museums “Musings on the future of museums and society from Elizabeth Merritt, founding director of the Center for the Future of Museums, an initiative of the american association of museums”
• Georgina Goodlander Manager of the Luce Foundation Center (visible storage) at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
• Jane McGonigal Director of Games Research & Development at the Institute for the Future.
• John Maccabbee Game designer/producer/writer; involved in Ghosts of a Chance and PHEON.
• Ken Eklund author and game designer.
• MOERG “Alex Moseley is an Educational Designer at the University of Leicester. He is a learning and teaching practitioner, and conducts research into skills and subject teaching and support using paradigms from online games and social networks.”
• Museum Mobile Nancy Proctor‘s MuseumMobile “is a forum for conversations about mobile interpretation – media & technology – for museums and cultural sites.” MuseumMobile also has a public wiki, which is an outgrowth of the Tate Modern’s Handheld Conference Wiki.
• Nicola Whitton “I feel that the combination of gaming characteristics and lo-fi environment in ARGs are ideally suited to learning.”
• Nikki Pugh “I work in the grey areas between and across Art, Science and Technology, instigating enquiry-led processes that are often highly participatory in nature.”
• Nina Simon “[works] with museums to design exhibitions, programs, and online experiences that engage visitors as co-creators and community members, not just consumers.” Her design consultancy, Museum 2.0 is “focused on creating participatory, dynamic, audience-centered museum spaces.”
• NITLE “The National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE) is a community-based, non-profit initiative that helps liberal arts colleges and universities explore and implement digital technologies.”
• Playtime Anti-Boredom Society Creators of SF0 and many other exciting projects; involved in production of Ghosts of a Chance.

See also: ARGology.org: ARGs in Education & Training, IGDA ARG SIG Whitepaper 2006, IGDA ARG SIG wiki: Educators and ARGs, Google keyword search [1] [2] [3], Twitter hashtag #mtogo

• Gunther Kress, Literacy in the New Media Age (New York: Routledge), Chapter 4 “Literacy and Multimodality: A Theoretical Framework“
• Mimi Ito, “Technologies of the Childhood Imagination: Yugioh, Media Mixes, and Everyday Cultural Production”
• David Buckingham and Julian Sefton-Green, “Structure, Agency and Pedagogy in Children’s Media Culture,” in Joseph Tobin (ed.), Pikachu’s Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokemon (Durham: Duke University press, 2004)

Ito’s succinct article makes the case most directly: “technologies of the imagination populate even the most mundane corners of our lives,” (34) and, contrary to the fears of those who worry that new media threatens to compartmentalize and disembody, the media mix is in practice productive of a culture that is “extroverted and hypersocial, sociality augmented by a dense set of technologies, signifiers, and systems of exchange.” (32) Buckingham and Sefton-Green hammer the point home: skeptics ought to consider examples like the “striking contrast between the high levels of [multimodal reading, sociality and production] activity that characterize the Pokemon phenomenon and the passivity that increasingly suffuses our children’s schooling” (30); and who could disagree that banning such phenomena from the school yard would do anything other than increase their “forbidden appeal” and “prevent schools from building on the enthusiasms children possess”? (31)

Of course, we have a long way to go before these kinds of messages can establish a critical mass in institutional and creative practice. Last week, I attended an experimental literature conference and found that while many of the assembled authors and scholars were keen on experimenting with new media, few if any of them were open to a wholesale redefinition of what literature is/can be. (( …and here I’m thinking not in either/or terms but in both/and: the novel will always be around and will always be the best at doing those things that novels do best. But there are other kinds of literature lurking in the shadows, and that’s what I’m interested in here. )) The works presented would inevitably employ language — spoken or written — as their core expressive resource (unsurprising for a conference largely run and constituted by poets and English professors), which they would then back up with video, flash animations, sound effects, etc. The effect of this was to reduce any image, sound, interactive or procedural elements present in the works to subordinate “supporting” status, lending credence to the commonly-expressed concern that the use of new media “in” literature amounts to little more than gimmickry. As Kress argues, we need to not only shift our definition of text to include “any instance of communication in any mode or in any combination of modes, whether recorded or not,” (48), but also our concept of the role design plays in both reading and writing. “Design does not ask, ‘what was done before, how, for whom, with what?” Kress writes. Rather, Design asks, “What is needed now, in this one situation, with this configuration of purposes, aims, audience, and with these resources, and given my interests in this situation?” (49)

The easy analogy here is that of the early cinema, wherein fiction films were shot using the conventions of the proscenium drawn from the theatre. It was only after a thorough interrogation of the affordances of the camera and the film splicer that the cinema began to reveal itself as a space for artistic endeavor. That is, once filmmakers let go of the notion that the cinema should attempt to create the same experiences as earlier forms of narrative art, they found themselves liberated to discover the unique way of “speaking” that film affords. What complicates this analogy is that we now confront a dynamic multiplicity of media modes. Like Gardner’s multiply-intelligent children, not all authors are going to be able to work well across all media. But in an age of expanding definitions of words like “text,” “author,” and “reading,” creators of literature, as educators and thought leaders, need to ask themselves the questions Kress’s personified Design asks: “What is needed now…with these resources, and given my interests?” Intelligently using new media is not about adding bells and whistles or referencing the Web — rather, it’s about selecting the right mode (or modes) to express what it is you have to say.

The school is set up on ten tabletops with different learning stations, with the corn seeds learning through audio speakers as well as by the use of electric fans behind a row of books, which carry knowledge through the air like pollen. In this program of accelerated learning, the individual kernel is not expected to learn everything — the species as a whole will absorb the knowledge collectively. The variety of knowledge bases is hoped to heighten the corn’s wisdom, especially since despite their enormous acquisition of knowledge, humans have acquired so little wisdom. (WMMNA)