Tag: gamification

Posted on

Talking censorship and more on ABC Download This Show

This week saw my third appearance on Marc Fennell’s program Download This Show on ABC Radio National. Great fun.

Cleaning up the web: Nearly three years since announcing the proposed mandatory internet filtering system Cleenfeed, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy’s scheme is dead. But what have they replaced it with and were we better off with Conroy’s old system? Meanwhile, we peek into the secret UN meeting that could radically change the way the net is governed, and take time out to ask whether games can truly change our minds and society.

The internet “filtering” stuff of course relates to the Interpol blacklist that I’ve written about for Crikey once or twice, and which was also the subject of this week’s Patch Monday podcast.

My fellow guest was digital arts evangelist Fee Plumley. The audio below is linked directly from the ABC’s website.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (13.1MB)

The audio is ©2012 Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

[Photo: Waiting in ABC Studio 291, Coffs Harbour, the location from which I joined the program.]

Posted on

Weekly Wrap 54

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. It was a short week, thanks to the Queen’s Birthday public holiday and a severe toothache. Those events are unrelated. Mostly.

Podcasts

Articles

None. Not a single one. I know it was a short week thanks to the public holiday, and I know I had a toothache, but this will come back to haunt me.

Media Appearances

Corporate Largesse

None.

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: Tea Tree Cottage, one of the Bunjaree Cottages in the Blue Mountains where I’ve been living of late. I took this photo only this afternoon, when I discovered that the fire was still going from the punters last night.]

Posted on

The 9pm Edict #13

The 9pm EdictWestpac forgets that banks are meant to be about trust, and just bullshits us during a major outage. Sony too. Snake-oil salesfolk tell us gamification will solve all our needs. Bugger the morals. And idiots imagine that Twitter is like CNN, somehow.

Yes The 9pm Edict podcast has returned after an hiatus of nine months. Just like pregnancy. But let’s not go there. Where I do go is gamification, and I refer to the video Gamifying Education and my op-ed at Technology Spectator.

You can listen below. But if you want all of the episodes, now and in the future, subscribe to the podcast feed, or even subscribe automatically in iTunes.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 12:38 — 4.3MB)

If you’d like to comment on this episode, please add your comment below, or Skype to stilgherrian or phone Sydney +61 2 8011 3733.

[Credits: The 9pm Edict theme by mansardian, Edict fanfare by neonaeon, all from The Freesound Project. Photograph of Stilgherrian taken 29 March 2009 by misswired, used by permission.]

Posted on

Weekly Wrap 48

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. This week was very much a calm — sort of — before the storm.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 86, “Apple: Big Brother or just misunderstood?”. When news broke that Apple’s iOS-based devices were logging location-based information, the media went wild. I speak with information security engineer Alex Levinson from Katana Forensics and Professor Roger Clarke, chair of the Australian Privacy Foundation.

Articles

  • APF urges criminal penalties for smartphone privacy breaches, for ZDNet Australia, based on Professor Clarke’s comments on Patch Monday.
  • Gamification: Hot, new, unethical? for the new site Technology Spectator. I’ll say it straight up: the mindset behind the gamification trend disgusts me. And, despite what the first two commenters on that op-ed imagine, it’s not because I haven’t heard or read enough about it. The more I hear and read from gamification’s buzzword-addled cheer squad the more disgusted I become.

Media Appearances

  • On Monday I spoke with Perth radio RTRfm about the Sony PlayStation Network hack.
  • On Friday I spoke with Kate O’Toole on ABC 105.7 Darwin about the surge of spam and malware following the killing of Osama bin Laden.

I haven’t posted the audio files of those radio interviews, even though I have them. Should I? Part of me says I should do so, because it helps create a proper archive of what I do. But another part of me reckons that radio in particular is ephemeral, and that my conversations about these issues really haven’t added much new to the vast global pool of media on these subjects. What do you think?

Corporate Largesse

None. But that will seriously change next week. Stand by.

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: Victory is mine! The view from the dining table at Wattle Cottage, one of the Bunjaree Cottages where I’ve been living off and on for the last three months. The title is because this was the last in a sequence of photos documenting my battle with the forces of natural gas. I guess you had to be there…]