InsightNG

Gamification, the use of gameplay mechanics for non-game applications, is transforming online news into an engaging, social and fun activity. It's quickly becoming the next frontier in web and mobile technology.

We now live in a world where information is potentially unlimited. Information is cheap, but meaning is expensive. Where is the meaning? Only human beings can tell you where it is. We're extracting meaning from our minds and our own lives."

I wrote a post about Gamification last week and this week, I want to dive into more detail about how to apply gamification and game mechanics to a community site.  It is interesting to see gamification now being applied in a marketing/website/community context, because many marketers and community managers have already been using these techniques to build engagement for several years.  But I am more than willing to jump on the gamification bandwagon if it helps push the boundaries for other marketers and community managers.

Social methods and technologies mesh much better with independent learning, where the student is at the center of the learning experience (learning on their own as opposed to be being taught). They leverage a ring of social, academic, and motivational influences on their way to the goal of knowledge acquisition.

A great deal has changed since the term eLearning first entered the vocabulary in 1999 and since web-based courses and modules started appearing in volume in the early 2000s. We need to rethink eLearning in light of these changes and other changes (like Social Learning) that are only now starting to impact the world of work. I'm sure most of us are aware that the major challenge for learning is no longer about 'content' or 'knowledge' (if it ever were).

Artificial Intelligence is not yet HAL from the 2001: The Space Odyssey…but we are getting awfully close. Sure enough, one day it could be as similar to the sci-fi potboilers being churned out by Hollywood. If that's your idea of what artificial intelligence is all about, then you aren't far off the mark. In layman's terms, artificial intelligence is about creating intelligent machines through the use of intelligent computer programs. Most, if not all of artificial intelligence (AI) tries to mimic human behavior. The scale of ambition is different, but artificial intelligence programming is a full-fledged field in the cutting edge of science today. If you have some interest in the world of tomorrow, check out these websites to grasp what artificial intelligence is all about.

In the hyperlinked  write up, the author pointed out three "items" which appear to make clear a topic I find quite unclear. My reaction was that these items do not capture search either of the moment or some "to be" world where content management experts, governance specialists, and "real" journalists look for information. The items described a future that underscores a conceptual problems in thinking about information retrieval.

27% of US smartphone users will use the device during in-store holiday shopping: A new Deloitte survey (Oct 26) of 5,000 U.S. consumers says of the 42% of consumers who own a smartphone, 27% will use the device while shopping for the holidays. 67% of these shoppers will use the devices to find store locations, 59% to compare prices, 46% to check product availability, 45% to shop at online stores, and 40% will scan bar codes.

 Tim Berners Lee recognized the problematics of the messy web early on and proposed the Semantic Web to overcome messiness and apply a semantic structure to bring order (read: computer logic) in the chaos (read: human expression). Pierre Levy, French philosopher and leading expert on collective intelligence, is on a similar mission. While driven by, arguably, a similar set of goals, his approach takes a step further. The problem with Berners Lee semantic structure is that implies a universal ontology, which might prove out to be the Achilles heel of the protocol. Levy's approach overcomes these problems. Levy is currently working on a research program, called IEML (Information Economy Meta Language). IEML is a metalanguage and proposes itself as the language of collective intelligence. 

At its core, gamification is about one thing: fun. In today's competitive battle for mindshare, games are the most effective tool for leveraging technology, rising above marketing noise and engaging the socially networked consumer.

The lesson here is that fun is contextual.

For some time now, Structured Dynamics (SD) has been touting the unique advantages of ODapps, or ontology-driven applications [1]. ODapps are modular, generic software applications designed to operate in accordance with the specifications contained in one or more ontologies. The relationships and structure of the information driving these applications are based on the standard functions and roles of ontologies (namely as domain ontologies), as supplemented by UI and instruction sets and validations and rules. When these supplements are added to standard ontology functions, we collectively term them adaptive ontologies [2].

From cancer to cosmology, researchers could race ahead by working together-online and in the open