Gamification of Toastmasters

May 19, 2011 1 Comment

As you know, I’m a Toastmaster.  Today, I gave a presentation on club awards – awards that Toastmasters Clubs can achieve for completing certain goals.  However, it came with a twist.

I’ve written about Gamification before.  Gamification is the application of the fun aspects of gaming to non-game activities, like work or school.  Or, in this case, Toastmasters.

Jane McGonigal, gaming expert, listed four aspects of gaming that, essentially, make us want to play games.

  1. Satisfying Work.  Gamers sit down and attack a project, get positive feedback, and feel like they’ve accomplished something.
  2. Urgent Optimism.  In games, something important needs to be done, and the gamer is person who needs to get it done.
  3. Social Connectivity.  When we play a game with someone, we like them better.
  4. Heroic Purpose.  Also called “epic meaning.”  Gamers are given an important, meaningful task that they need to accomplish.

Coincidentally these are also the four components of fulfilling lives.

Effectively, Toastmasters is Gamifying the creation of strong, effective clubs, by encouraging them to complete activities like gaining new members, or complete officer training.  Toastmasters International bestows awards on clubs that meet or exceed these goals.

Want to see how close we are to these achievements?  Check out the presentation: Gamification of Toastmasters

Note: if someone can figure out how to embed the pdf as a slideshow in WordPress, I’d be eternally grateful.  Or at least grateful for a few minutes.

Filed under Opinion Tagged with , , , ,

The Spectrum of Free Will

January 28, 2011 3 Comments

Ratha Grimes is a fellow Googler, and a founding member of our new Toastmasters Group on the Google campus, the Chatterbox.  Yesterday she gave her third speech, which focused on the concept of free will.  Do we have free will, or is everything pre-determined?  Using some excellent examples and research, she comes to her own conclusion.

I wanted to include her talk on the blog because of the relevance of the “free will” discussion to the fields of behavioral economics and game theory.  Both of those fields are based on how people make decisions.  Figuring out how we make decisions – and even if we make decisions at all – is paramount to understanding the foundations of these fields.

—

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
- Invictus by William Ernest Henley

The broad appeal of this famous poem illustrates the importance of free will and self-determination to most people. In our culture, we take an all-or-nothing attitude toward this subject. In our legal system, for example, a person is considered to be in full control of his faculties and to bear full responsibility for his actions, or else is considered to be psychologically broken (“insane”) and completely without fault.

It would seem that we look at things this way because we prefer to believe that we are in control of our own lives. The philosopher Robert Nozick illustrated the desire to look at things this way with a thought experiment called “The Experience Machine.” In the future, advanced neuropsychologists have figured out a way to stimulate a our brains to induce any experiences we desire. We would not be able to tell that the experiences aren’t real. We could plan out any type of life we wish to lead, and then jack in to the machine. If offered that choice, would we do it? When asked this, most people say no. A main reason that people would choose not to use the machine, according to Nozick, is that “we want to do certain things, and not just have the experience of doing them.”

Yet it is also true that we have been significantly influenced by our backgrounds and environments. Parents instinctively understand this when they criticize the friends their teenage children have chosen to hang out with. I recently was reminded of this effect when I was shopping in the grocery store and they advertised pears over the PA system. A soothing female voice described pears with lunch, pears for a snack, crunchy sliced pears in a salad… and I had to go buy a pear. (It was delicious.) Read more of this post

Filed under guest post Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Some Other Beginning’s End

October 22, 2010 3 Comments

This post is adapted from a speech I gave at HP Northside Toastmasters yesterday.

Lisa’s first burn, from a week ago.


Poi is one of the traditional performing arts of the Māori people of New Zealand.  It’s developed many forms over the years, and is used worldwide as a hobby, exercise, or performance art alongside activities like juggling.

I started a week ago.  I’m by no means very good at this particular activity.  It’s a difficult art to master.  While adding in fire makes it more exciting, it certainly doesn’t make it easier; I’ve definitely burnt off some hair in the past week.

Something that’s helped me improve is the copious amount of social dancing that I’ve done.  Social dancing has been invaluable in terms of understanding body control, flow, and motion.

I stopped social dancing about a month ago.  That’s when I found time for poi.

When I was younger, my dad told me, “You can do anything you want, but you can’t do everything you want.” I didn’t really understand that at the time.  I do now. Read more of this post

Filed under Opinion Tagged with ,

Rage Against PPT

June 25, 2010 1 Comment

In the business world, we’re often subjected to uninspired PowerPoint presentations.  Generally, they’re long.  The slides are cluttered.  The graphics are overbearing and unclear.

Over the past few years, experts and amateurs alike have proposed a number of PowerPoint presentation techniques.  The goal is to improve the viewers’ information retention and maintain their interest.  Guy Kawasaki proposed the 10/20/30 rule.  Kawasaki’s suggestion is simple.  Presentations should be ten slides, no more than twenty minutes total, and contain no font smaller than 30pt.

Bianca, who is pursuing a Masters in Education Media Design and Technology, put together the below video as part of a class assignment.  The assignment was to ‘write and perform an educational song.’  After  reading “Presentation Zen” by Garr Reynolds and “Slide:ology” by Nancy Duarte, she decided to do a song about good PowerPoint slide design – “Rage Against the Slideument.”

So, next time you’re creating a presentation, keep it simple.  It doesn’t matter whose ideology you choose — there are many out there — the message is the same.  Keep it short.  Get rid of the clutter.  The PowerPoint should augment your presentation, not dominate it.

Filed under video Tagged with , , , , ,

5.93 Million Years of Manpower

April 2, 2010 Leave a comment

The world is plagued with problems.  Starvation, disease, over-population — anyone who reads a newspaper is familiar with these issues.

Have we solved any since yesterday?  What about since last week?  Which of these problems have we solved since last year?  Since one hundred years ago? One thousand?  What about six million?

If we had six million years of manpower, don’t you think you could solve almost any problem?

World of Warcraft is an incredibly popular online game.  It’s based in a fantasy world — over 40 million players work together on quests and challenges to save the world.  How does this relate?  Collectively, as a civilization, we have spent 5.93 million years playing World of Warcraft.

If we could take those 40 million people with their almost six million years of World of Warcraft experience and redirect their energies toward working on social problems, we would have a force to be reckoned with.  We would have a lot of solutions.

Jane McGonigal, director of R&D for the Institute for the Future, has figured out a way to harness the power of geeks.  She worked with the World Bank Institute, the learning and knowledge arm of the World Bank Group, to create a compelling, free, online game aimed at solving social problems.  She’s trying to transform the world of gaming.

The name of the game is Evoke.  It’s billed as a “ten-week crash course in changing the world.”  The goal of the game, according to the website, “is to help empower young people all over the world … to come up with creative solutions to our most urgent social problems.”

Just like players of World of Warcraft and other massively popular online games, Evoke players have ‘important’ work, potential collaborators, quick learning opportunities, and, importantly, instant rewards.

Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers, semi-famously postulated that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at anything.  We have expert gamers who have logged far more than 10,000 hours playing these games.  Collectively, we’ve logged 5.93 million years.  Imagine what problems we could solve with 5.93 million years.

Filed under book, Opinion, review, TED Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,

← Older posts

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 408 other followers