Online Games as eLearning Strategy

January 26, 2010 By 1 Comment

Anyone who has an account on Facebook knows about the games: FarmVille, Farm Town, Cafe World, MafiaWars, FishVille, YoVille, and so on. The opinions about the games are quite polarized, ranging from “I hate those stupid announcements. Ban the games.” to “I love those stupid announcements cause I get free prizes”. Of course, all interaction is virtual, all prizes are virtual. The only thing not virtual is the money some people spend to feed their ever-growing habit. Zynga capitalizes on a very basic fact. People really like to give and receive gifts. And just as someone buys a ticket at the fair to throw balls at rigged bowling pins in order to win a stuffed toy that falls apart in a few months, people buy food, land, animals, equipment, and guns that are all virtual.


I started playing games with my sisters so I could have contact with them on an almost daily basis. When they sends me gifts and notes I know they are ok for that day. A funny thing happened. Through gaming I discovered cousins that I hadn’t seen or spoken with for over 20 years. I discovered cousins that I didn’t know I had. And I really like that. Social Media at its best. Then I found old friends on the same games. It recreates the gaming atmosphere of my teens when we would sit for hours playing whist and bridge.  “It’s ok not to have a lot to say. Let’s play.”

Many management courses that I’ve participated in use the game model to get the point across. Whether it is trust, conflict management, accountability, there is a game to play. Granted, these were usually done offsite, all employees of a particular group or division, similar ranking within the company. I don’t know if offsite training happens as regularly as it used to. I suspect not. It is too costly. Training now takes place online.

eLearning and its counterpart, mLearning (mobile), open up training avenues that are cost effective, easy to manage, and easy to coordinate. The individual takes a course online, tests online, and has his/her scores stored online. Management gets instant, unbiased feedback, and instant progression scores. Great. Except the community aspect of training is gone. Synergy is gone.

My question to research this year is how can we take the goodness of gaming (look at Second Life as a prime candidate) and the goodness of offsite training, mash it all together and come out with effective eLearning and mLearning systems? Is there a way to create a learning environment that lives and learns as the employee “goes up in levels”? And is there a way to instill boundaries in those games so that gaming does not become the primary focus of the employee?

Filed Under: From Shoshana, online learning, online training, Social Media Tagged With: , , , ,

Threes, the Third, at Bennington College

January 25, 2010 By 3 Comments

From the Diary of Joseph Kaufman.

It was at Bennington College, formerly an all-woman’s school gone co-ed seven years previous–450 women and 150 men at the time of my attendance–that I met my third great writing teacher, Nick Delbanco, and my third great friend, Marc Falcone. Bennington dorms were two-story, white New England clapboard houses abutting a baseball-large field on three sides. The fourth side had a middle distance view of the White Mountains and which ended at a small rock wall the students labeled “The End of the World”. The school resembled a Vermont village ala Grandma Moses and an atmospheric cross between a David Bowie concert, the Grateful Dead, and a 50′s beatnik hangout in the Village. It had a Black Music department, an extensive modern dance facility, no grades and no exams. Affairs were encouraged between faculty and students. Drugs, drinking, sex, various other forms of exotica, and remarkable hard work were all de rigueur.

Born in Pittsfield, one hour due south on Route 7, I was the only local at the school. The majority of the student body was from New York and Los Angeles, a smattering from Boston and Washington, a pittance from overseas. I was the country mouse to their town mice: I’d never attended private schools as they had, nor traveled, nor dressed, nor read the books nor seen the movies they’d seen. I didn’t even know what a cappuccino was. Yes, a country mouse filled with inchoate aspirations and no real sense of his own talent or predilections, a wildly desirous junior who searched for both transcendence and degradation all at once, a crazy, lusty mix of Henry Miller and the hallucinogenic and warrior ideas of Carlos Casteneda–remember him?

I wanted to live Siddhartha, Ken Kesey, Jack Kerouac, Camus, Stendhal’s Frederick Morel all at once. Dig that. The vitality, the great force which sent me to Israel then through Greece and Spain, which kept me up late at night listening to Coltrane and woke me early to my Corona electric typewriter and my first taste of extended hard artistic work–I wrote two short novels, I wrote a book of short stories–this overwrought, wild life, this angst which visited me nightly, like a centuries-wandering dybbuk which finally found its best place to rest–this gorgeous untamed energy which I only ever found one other time in my life when I was first married and found my way to yeshiva, this energy enlivened me, brightened me, the hard work enlightened me, and I had much to speak about with Nick Delbanco who turned me on to Malcolm Lowry’s “Under The Volcano”, and much to speak about with Marc Falcone, who turned me on to Charles Ives.

He was great, Delbanco, with his corduroy pants, bald pate with the long strands pasted cross-wise over it, handsome Sephardi nose, coal black eyes, and a cool and sinuous manner and way of speaking that reminded me of confidence men in grade B movies. He was patient, patient, patient with foolishness–and just how did he do that, I wonder, as I look back. And he always returned papers on time, never late, and always with more remarks and comments and good cheer than even the best of them deserved.

And then there was Falcone, whose brother, Vinny was Frank Sinatra’s band leader. Marc would do an imitation of Sinatra, where he’d pinch my cheek and spit out in this Brooklyn twang, “Love ya, kid, now get outta here.” He was swarthy, moustached, handsome, talented, my first friend who had real taste. We lived together my second year at Bennington, in Helen Frankenthaler’s old studio. He got after me to wash the dishes; he got after me to read Joyce; he did wonderful imitations of golf announcers on television; he let me bum cigarettes; he loved me like a one-year younger brother; and I just sent him my book and I still love him madly back.

Filed Under: author platform, Joseph Kaufman, new author Tagged With: , , , ,

Growing Beyond, From the Diary of Joseph Kaufman

January 14, 2010 By 3 Comments

After Mr. Benson, my 9th grade Marine writing teacher, I had no writing teacher for the rest of high school—there simply were no creative writing classes at Pittsfield High School from 1970-1973. Rather, in English class, we read Dickens and Twain and Hawthorne and wrote ten page papers about their significance—I don’t even think I knew what adultery was when I read the “Scarlet Letter“. At any rate, as I was lectured, I tried to deconstruct symbolism, foreshadowing, characterization, plot structure, point-of-view, my crude sense of archetype, my unformed sense of character-is-destiny, but the effort felt flimsy and wrong-headed, where a nascent critic but not a novelist might begin. And yet I would have been unable to write an essay on what a book truly and personally meant to me since as yet I didn’t have enough core of self to express meaning.

Growing up without much ‘life friction’ in Pittsfield, Massachusetts gave me an attenuated sense of self. I was, truth be told, a bundle of unexpressed and conflicted desires, an amalgam of yearning for degradation and transcendence all at once. And so my freshman and sophomore years at the University of Vermont were experience-seeking years, a restless quest for the fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil, years of trying to figure out how to think, how to read, how to enjoy, the limits and delineations of my mind, personality, an attempt to create stability and yet excitement, a search for how to live, the greater quest for self. Which included hours and hours of ping pong playing with Ellis Burwick (believe it or not, I was eventually the Vermont state ping pong champion), wandering cafes in Burlington, shooting pool, chasing girls, reading Hemingway and Fitzgerald again and again, listening to John Coltrane, Miles Davis, even Sun Ra, growing my hair, hitchhiking up and down Route 7, constantly rearranging the furniture in my small dormitory room.

And then amidst this chaos of a life, I met a writing teacher and a friend who was a girl. David Huddle was a southern gentleman, tall and good-looking, with a charming drawl and a gorgeous swirl of auburn hair. He’d been an intelligence officer in Viet Nam and then gotten an MFA at Columbia. He’d written with Peter Taylor, among others, and he would read Flannery O’Connor and Edna O’Brian out loud in class. He liked my writing and spent time talking books with me in his office. Wendy P. was from Concord, just outside Boston, and she had attended private schools. She was blond and pretty and well-educated and despite having a boyfriend, spent many hours educating me about college life, city life, art and art history, the pleasures of perfume, tea, dressing well, eating out, how relationships worked, even lectured me about what women want. We spent a lot of time together, her boyfriend didn’t seem to mind, and she pushed me to write and to read. She was an art history major with ambition and she applied to transfer to Vassar and was accepted.

This was a bombshell to me, losing this good friend, and it gave me the eerie feeling of being left behind, as if Nazis were chasing me and Wendy was racing away in the escape car while I was left on foot. This certainty of becoming once more friendless by losing my sole contact with what felt like higher life, of being consigned once again to what seemed a faceless lower middle class of northern Vermont, kindled within me the urgency to change, grow, escape, to have real ambition for once in my life. It was an urgency which made me imagine writing as something which could be sustaining, as a means for constituting self.

And so I reached further than I ever had, what felt like the edge of risk for me, and I decided that I would try and write for Bernard Malamud. To transfer to Bennington College was then my first real act of will, a first real act of individuation and I applied and, thankfully, was accepted. And it was at Bennington that I began to read and write seriously, to work really hard, where I first asked myself honestly what I thought about things. And it was where I met my future brother-in-law who would make my match with my wife, and where I began to to see through the fog of my too-benevolent upbringing and successive aimless existence to a certain heart of conflict, difficulty, disappointment, and possibility for joy, where I first glimpsed my way into life.

Filed Under: author platform, Joseph Kaufman, new author Tagged With: , , , , ,

Future of Publishing

January 11, 2010 By 4 Comments

Mark Coker of Smashwords got me thinking about the future of publishing. Many people have written about the end of the year, end of the decade, predictions for the future, but Mark’s prediction kindled a flame of thought. I try to hold on to these moments because my work schedule has become so crazy I don’t always know if I’ve captured same thought. In the middle of a very tight schedule I had to think about what he said. You can read all five of his points on his blog. I’ll just repeat the last two:

“4. Most authors will be indie authors”
“5. Successful publishing companies will be those that put the most total profit in the author’s pocket. No, not the highest per-unit royalty percentage.”

It’s no new thought that the United States influences other cultures. Americans have been doing that since they settled in the foreign wilderness to take their chances with Native Americans and Nature rather than submit to an “un-G-dly” power. Rebellion is always fueled by the knowledge that an entire country was founded out of rebellion against its colonizing parent country. Horatio Alger wannabees, astronauts, freedom riders, strikers, protesters of all kinds take strength from knowing that the Independent spirit lives on, a whole nation of independents.

So when Mark predicts “most authors will be indie authors”, he’s got good solid footing for that statement. Traditional publishing depends on large teams of people from previewing, reading the manuscript through the production, distribution, and sales. Today that team is not needed. It is possible for an author to hire every single person on that chain, topnotch professional editors, readers, book designers, book cover designers, printers, distributors, and salespeople. The author can get these services for a fraction of the cost of a traditional publisher, there is no infrastructure overhead to account for. At this time authors already have to hire publicists to sell their books. What’s keeping them from hiring the whole team?

Imagine, I, Ms Author, write a book. I can’t get an advance from a publisher because no publisher has any money. So I support myself for the months it takes to write. Then I hire a great editor. Maybe even an editor from a well-known publisher. Why can I do that? Because the editor just found him/herself out of a job because the publishing company went under. Then I hire a designer for the interior and cover of the book. Granted, I’m footing the bill here myself. It means I need a nest egg of about $500. At this point I run out of money, so I use Print on Demand technology to print and distribute the book. I only pay the setup fees and shipping cost of that first book. Once the book is available I get out into the Social Media scene and I start to market my book.

A writer must be in the Business of writing today, just to survive. Tomorrow it will be so “rule of thumb” that I’ll do it because I get the greatest return on my investment by doing it myself, braving nature myself, pulling myself up by my own bootstraps.

And that’s what makes number 5 a reality. I learn that I can produce my own works, get them out there, and pocket the majority of the proceeds.

Filed Under: From Shoshana, Print On Demand, Social Media, social media marketing, Uncategorized, Understanding publishing Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Memories of Mr. Benson

January 10, 2010 By 1 Comment

My first writing teacher was Mr. Benson, a former Marine, at Theodore Herbert Middle School in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Mr. Benson had a high forehead and crew-cut hair, plus a good selection of striped, club ties. He wore starched, button-down shirts of various yuppie shades, West Point-creased trousers, and wing-tip shoes. He was linebacker wide and what I would call halfway tall, was a scratch golfer, and wore a clunky class ring. He resembled not so much an English teacher of white, middle class teenagers as a drill instructor forced to dress up for an unwanted business presentation. He read us Hemingway, made us read Hemingway, assigned us to write a one-paragraph pastiche of Hemingway’s style, then made us rewrite that paragraph and rewrite it again before moving on to read and mimic other writers and, eventually, write a short story. A stickler for grammar, a stickler for spelling, a stickler for handing things in on time, he wrote his comments in the margins in feathery, almost unreadably light pencil. He was spare in his criticisms—”Too many adjectives”—and spare in his praise. If you wrote a truly wonderful paragraph, he wrote, “You made your point.” He was demanding, fair, once in a while funny in a corny, parental way The incongruence of a Marine teaching creative writing was not lost on us and added to an allure founded on a legend that he’d once decked a kid who talked back to him. In one of my braver moments, after I’d written a decent paragraph, I asked if the story was true. Mr. Benson sat on the corner of his desk, folded his arms over that well-starched shirt and still-firm chest, gave me one of those macho man looks, how a toreador might regard a bull he didn’t respect, and nodded slightly, that slightness meaning to convey that he’d do it again if he needed to, even to pretty Gina Campoli if she deserved it, a manner which reminded me of what Ahab once said to the crew of the Pequod, “Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”

I left middle school for high school and never ran into a good writing teacher again until my second year in college—and maybe I’ll write about David Huddle next week. But many years later, many many in fact, after I graduated from Bennington College, enlisted in the Peace Corps, did my stint in yeshiva, in my father’s Kay-Bee business, after I was already married, had a couple of kids, and moved to Israel, I was lucky enough to get my first novel published—-and how can you call getting published anything but some name of Providence?—by Walker Company, now a division of Random House. And when that summer following the publication, my parents threw a signing party at the local book store in Lenox, Massachusetts, I looked up Mr. Benson’s number in the Pittsfield phone book. I called him up and invited him to the party. He showed up in golfing cap and clothes, Scottish-looking, like he’d just strode in from the links at St. Andrews. He was trimmer than I remembered him, with a cherubic pink on his cheeks. I autographed a copy of A Good, Protected Life and showed him in the Acknowledgments where I mentioned his name. He shook my hand enthusiastically as I said thanks for the great teaching those many years ago. And I heard from my mother via a friend of hers who was a guidance counselor at the middle school and witnessed this, that Mr. Benson took the book to the teacher’s room and held it up to everyone and said, “Sometimes it’s worth it.”

Filed Under: author platform, Joseph Kaufman, new author Tagged With: , , ,

Collaboration in Fiction and Fact

January 7, 2010 By 2 Comments

I’m quite the ostrich with my head in the sand at times. And so when I began hearing about writing circles, post World Wide Web, I thought it was a new phenomena centered around new technology.  Writing circles are no newer than any group of people getting together to further a common cause – in this case a story. The difference in technology is the twist. Letter writing, essay composing, even story telling, requires some contemplation time. There is a balance between thought and the act of writing, sometimes more thought than writing. I only have to look at poetry to see the amount of work behind each carefully placed word. Since my college career was in computers and mathematics I never had the opportunity to participate in a writers group. I had plenty of opportunity for collaborative writing, centering around the computer topic at hand. Creative writing was not encouraged. Only the facts, ma’am.

Technology has changed this the way it has changed all communication. Everything is instant – instant messaging, instant answers, instant stand on one foot contemplation (an oxymoron if ever I heard one).  To collaborate on a writing piece today is a fast affair. For good or better, stories can be composed quickly, reviewed quickly, and published quickly.

One of my employees recently told me about a writing circle that she belongs to. The people rarely see each other, and that’s only because they were friends before marriage and kids sucked up all their times. Now they chat and work together online. The writing circle they formed was for a short duration. Its purpose was to create a story, each participant writing a chapter. They finished the book. But now what? It needs a deep edit. The foremost question, though, is the edit to consolidate and give the piece one voice? Or is the edit to refine each individual voice to harmonize with its companions? And then what do they do with the story?

05_library_of_congress pictureUnlimited hosting is a great boon. I said, why not host the groups on the French Creek Press site? A writer’s club can make matches between authors and provide a forum for this kind of collaboration. Each group forms around a story, book, theme, whatever the group decides. The groups sets the schedule and out comes a product at the other end. French Creek Press then steps in and creates a free eBook, free for download. Writers maintain their “byline” so to speak and are acknowledged in the front of the book. Instant publishing.

Look for more on this as I develop this idea with up and coming writers. Once the mechanism is in place French Creek Press will open it to all who aspire to write and need a forum.

Watch this space for the Writer’s Circle. And sharpen your pencils to write.

Filed Under: author platform, Book Model, From Shoshana, new author, Print On Demand Tagged With: