SPECIFICATIONS for Small Education Delivery Systems (SEDS)

Recreational Education¹

A Need for Recreation

In 1907, the Chair of the newly-created Wharton School of Economics, Simon Patten, wrote a polemical essay entitled The New Basis of Civilization in which he prophesied a post-restructuring of industrial growth around an economy of the industrial workers.² He predicted a financial economy based upon new methods of providing credit (which maintained traditional village economies and national aristocracies) as well as the rapid expansion of industries of recreation — with the necessary growth of whole sectors devoted to emotional catharsis through theater (to become film) and sports.

We have, of course, witnessed a world of credit cards as well as the massive growth of the leisure economy. Both help sustain the social economies of the developed nations, and are rapidly coming to dominate the cultures of the poorer developing nations.

An Expanded Role for Education

The role of education is ostensibly to provide the basic skills for navigating and participating in one’s culture. With the coming of internet-based technologies, much of the navigation is taken care of by ‘APPS,’ and the most important skill to learn is facility with the technology itself. The traditional role of education is being side-stepped. A generation is being raised without the facility for hand-writing, or the need for memory, or learning basic geographic coordinates –since maps, road-numbers or street-names are no longer needed to navigate territory.

Of even more concern is the fact that, while all the necessary knowledge for one’s personal navigation through physical and social space is easily accessible “in the cloud,” there is a progressively “manufactured” social reality growing, almost on its own, throughout the web. ³

What we are witnessing is a new need for education to teach the necessary skills for navigating the world of the web. Sam Wineburg and Mike Caulfield have provided suggestions on what might constitute these skills in their recent book, Verified (2023)⁴, which Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Maria Ressa⁵ describes as offering “clear advice on how to navigate a world of spin, trolls, and lies.”

The unfortunate reality of Caulfield’s and Wineburg’s analysis is that the techniques of information verification are not only laborious, but they require extremely subtle intellectual multi-tasking, which is a developed skill of the historian, philosopher, and practitioner of experimental sciences. Indeed, they provide us job-aids (loose protocols) in the form of two acronyms — CRAAP and SIFT, but should these ever become second-nature, we should all be at the level of Paul Ricouer’s new hermeneutical scientific method, or capable of the critical analysis of Gille Deleuze’s Rhizomatics. which has been a key feature behind A.I. research.

SEDS Games –Levelling the Field

One pictures a Small Educational Delivery System (SEDS) in terms of what is now a traditional interactive museum exhibit, with multiple screen displays providing informational narratives, videos, and graphics on a particular subject. On the surface, for the casual visitor, the SEDS would be nothing more than that, except the compulsive reader would soon notice the navigation dial and revolving 3-D geodesic in upper corner, indicating a rather vast information territory to traverse beneath the surface.

Any online gamer however, would quickly realize that the geodesic could be twisted and colored as one clicked on links to new screens, and thus goad them into the challenge of exploration. The gamer, in fact, would have already been invited to scan the opening QR-code to establish a Wifi connection to their phone, such that they could choose to sit down and walk through the screens anywhere within WiFi range, or even download the SEDS to their phone as an APP to continue play off-line.⁶ When the gamer first established the connection to the SEDS, they would create a User-ID which included their “avatar,” which they would retain whenever and wherever they entered and played at another SEDS, for their avatar retains a history, and collects points, or tokens.

The SEDS game is constructed around the heuristics (rules of thumb and cognitive skills) required in the real world of information verification (ftnote 4, below), such that the skilled SEDS player is now becoming educated to the new skills required of responsible citizenship. In time, when SEDS games exist for many different worlds of knowledge, individuals could collect enough tokens to achieve different ‘belts,’ rather like in the martial arts. The ‘master’ in the world of SEDS would be similar to the polymath of previous centuries – having developed the capacity to move freely between many worlds of knowledge. But just as now, one’s usefulness in the real world would be based on an ability to find and/or generate useful and appropriate connections between various universes of discourse. The hoped-for impacts of creating a fad for connected knowledge is, first of all, an major increase in the ability to evaluate information for its coherence with a broader and capacity of a polymath to experience more life than the next person, or become more or less useful to society

GAME COMPONENTS & LEVELS

The following represents user requirements for a tentative game structure – “user requirements” describing various sets of motivations for ‘players’ who would otherwise be disinterested in the topics presented in what would otherwise be no more than glitsy high-tech presentation of educational exhibits.

Game components:

• Bundle. Associated universes of discourse brought together (tied) with a common thread. For example, an SEDS bundle to educate someone on all facets of understanding the stained glass window would include several discrete fields of expertise: art of design – structure and color; mineral chemistry behind the making of colored glass;; history of stained glass in Europe and the US; physics of large panel design; famous studios; history of the physics of color from Newton to Goethe to Max Planck (rainbows and quantum theory). Bundles are unique to a SEDS, but different SEDS may overlap or share the same facet.
• D-Topic. (Declension) or Topical Dimension, also known as a ‘Universe of Discourse’. Backstories, background knowledge and assumptions shared by experts in a field. Very often, a D-Topic is a self-contained profession which would never consider relationships with fields or facets outside of their own.
• Facet. A delineated section of a D-Topic (Dimension or ‘Universe of Discourse’). A facet may be a descriptive screen or screens containing a single topic or narrative. A facet, however may contain seeds of other facts, including entire narratives/descriptions, as in text boxes or advertisements on a magazine page.
• Gate node – internal links between facets are governed by gates for players using the SEDS APP. Gate nodes provide multiple choice options which the player must evaluate for the type of relationship the linkage represents. All gate nodes provide the same list of possible relations, parallel to the tropes (Figures of Speech), only some of which will allow the player to pass through, where token multipliers can be accumulated for ‘better’ or worse ‘correct’ guesses. A player can, if they wish, back-track to a node to try to find the tropic relation with the highest multiplier (thus learning to better evaluate associative relations).
• Level Zero Certificate. After having touched all facets of a SEDS, the player obtains a Travel Path Narrative (TPN). Having obtained a certificate, all the player’s accumulated points and multipliers (including Level 2 multipliers, see below) are earned. A player can choose to go back to the SEDS to Level 1, 2 and 3 play to continue to earn tokens.
• Player – a player is anyone who has signed into the SEDS APP through an independent portal, obtaining a UID or avatar capable of collecting their path-history as well as capable of collecting tokens.
• “touching” a facet is minimally accomplished by leaving it, e.g. finding a link to another facet.

Level Zero. Tokens are accumulated without value until all facets have been ‘touched’ or ‘read’ by a player, after which each facet counts for one token.

Links moving one outside a facet may be to another facet through a Gateway Node or may go directly out to the internet. Extra ‘exploratory’ tokens can be earned by creating a linked path outside of the SEDS which returns to the SEDS knowledge bundle through a key (word or concept) found in a different facet.

Level One. Level One play is carried out by analyzing the Travel Path Narrative and trying to find rules, or biases as to why one link might have been chosen over another. The purpose of Level One is to find and assign a ‘personality’ to one’s avatar by evaluating the types of tropic relations one chose, or quickly recognized. ⁷ Several possible SEDS Personality profiles (having no relationship to psychological profiles) can be arrived at with algorithms provided by the APP. To verify them, however, a player must reach out to find other players in the SEDS platform who have similar profiles…. that is, who have travelled much the same path through the SEDS. As SEDS’ paths will have logarithmic permutations, the chances of discovering other players with similar paths is narrowed down.

A player who completes Level One will double the tokens earned in a particular SEDS, but in order to complete Level One, one must run a comparison test against another player. Players are motivated to ‘hook up’ and run such a test, because if the comparison tests as valid, both players earn multipliers (if neither has completed Level One) or a player who has completed Level One will obtain an agreed-upon bundle of tokens, paid in part by the players earning the Level One Certificate.

Level Two. Level Two multipliers are obtained by playing the SEDS in-person, by allowing others to control movement between facets. All Level Two multipliers are obtained, however, after the Level Zero Certificate is obtained, as part of the Level One exercise of path analysis. Any appropriate guess at the tropic relationship will earn the maximum multiplier of 2x, motivating players to allow others to control the facets during play. Again, naive players who have no interest in learning anything about a facet of knowledge will have little chance of earning tokens in Level One play.