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My experience in creating podcasts came through much nobler endeavors. It began with a research project in the working-class neighborhoods of North Belfast and a frustrated conversation over pints in a pub. I was on a research high after an interview with two women of very different political backgrounds. They were friends, brought together by the work of a local nonprofit, and their mutual admiration shone from the lightning-fast banter that they tossed back and forth throughout the interview. It was clear to me that they were a perfect example of a friendship from different sides of the political divide. But my friend at the pub just couldn't get it. He suggested that their friendship might be contrived, a mere show for my benefit, or that if real, it didn't mean as much as I thought. Exasperated, I pulled out my recorder and played the conversation back to him. As their Belfast accents filled up our corner booth, I could see his posture slacken and the battle turn my way. In that moment, I decided that only a podcast could finish telling my story. Over the next months, armed with just an MP3 player and some freeware suggested by a friend, I worked to piece together the story of North Belfast through interviews, conversations, and the sounds of the streets. The result was crude, elementary, and slightly difficult to listen to. But I was hooked.

Student Use (and Misuse) of Podcast Technology

In fact, the iPod topped the list of the most "in" things on campus in 2006, according to Student Monitor's Lifestyle & Media Study.

“We all become our own news wire service, breaking stories and events instantly. Did [tweets from inside Wat Pathum] prevent a massacre? Maybe they did. Who knows?” wrote Andrew Spooner, a London-based journalist who waded deep into the Thailand story from afar, tweeting about events from a decidedly pro-Red Shirt perspective.

That partisanship was the ugly side of Twitter’s role in the Thai crisis. While the social networking site did perhaps save lives in a few specific instances, Twitter – and the opportunity it gives to instantly broadcast whatever is on your mind, often from behind a cloak of near-anonymity – also gave Thais and foreigners living here the chance to broadcast vitriolic, often hateful, thoughts to the world, raising the temperature inside this already volatile country and arguably helping nudge the situation toward its violent end.

“More people will die inside Wat Patum unless we get ceasefire to get to hospital across the road,” I added a few minutes later, as my desperation grew. Within minutes, my pleas had indeed been retweeted hundreds, maybe thousands of times, in English, Thai and other languages. They were posted on the websites of Britain’s The Guardian newspaper and other international media. People I knew only through Twitter started calling me to check on our situation. More helpfully, others started calling embassies, hospitals and the Thai government. Eighty minutes later, I was carrying stretchers out to a row of waiting ambulances. “Twitter may just have done this,” was my next update.

Game designers say that as a narrative tool, ARIS is especially primed for helping educators create structures that allow students to go out into new environments, collect information, and then to aggregate, find patterns, and make meaning of that information.

Alice Leung, a teacher at Merrylands High School in Sydney, Australia, recently used ARIS with a group of students to design a tour of the school’s main landmarks for student orientation day.

“The rich area for kids is really designing,” he says. “Being part of community, play testing, learning about content, science, civics, social studies. It’s a really rich space where people move from players to designers and back. People are rallying around them and commenting on each other’s work.”

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