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Via PSFK: Gaming meets Chopin with Playground Sessions, a downloadable software that teaches piano through its breakthrough “Play to Learn” approach. Riffing on the strumming-to-scoring simulation of Guitar Hero, Playground Sessions enables users to practice “in an interactive environment with real-time feedback,” backed by an interconnected keyboard and hit music library.

Created by brand invention firm, ZAG, Playground Sessions is a “Choose-Your-Own-Adventure” method of self-driven learning motivated by the gaming allure of rewards and level ups. Drawn to their research and design expertise, Managing Director Chris Vance turned to Jan Plass and Bruce Homer, founding partners of NYU’s Consortium for Research and Evaluation of Advanced Technologies in Education (CREATE) “to fine tune specific learning-related design elements,” says Vance. Aiming to “identify design patterns for effective educational games,” CREATE’s joint initiative with Microsoft Research, Games for Learning Institute (G4LI), aligned with Playground Sessions’ innovative design requirements.

Playground Sessions uses a split interface that simultaneously highlights keyboard hand placement, musical notation and video instruction led by the self-taught pianist and YouTube sensation David Sides. “The pedagogy behind Playground Sessions taps into three powerful mechanism for learning—the motivational power of games, the ability of games to engage the learner in meaningful activities that are effective for learning, and the ability to provide detailed performance feedback to players,” explains Dr. Plass.

Organized by level—beginner to advanced—and subject—rhythm, ear training and more—Playground Sessions’ “Bootcamp” lessons appeal to learners of varying styles and preferences. Playground Sessions also allows users to share their scores via Twitter and Facebook or high-kick their skills into action with a collective competition amongst friends. Playground Sessions bolsters confidence through effective and encouraging steps, evidenced by the above video, “Days to Play,” a heartwarming story illustrating the software’s success.

“Games have a number of benefits that make them powerful learning environments with the potential to impact learning. They involve learners in the kind of activities that allow them to develop skills essential for success,” states Dr. Plass. Indeed, it’s with this gaming mentality that Playground Sessions seems to mix a winning formula for a new generation of hyper-stimulated kids and adults burnt out on traditional piano lessons.

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1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
3. There is no editing stage.
4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
7. Once you’re done you can throw it away.
8. Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
11. Destruction is a variant of done.
12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
13. Done is the engine of more.

link to cult of done manifesto

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In The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind James Boyle introduces readers to the idea of the public domain and describes how it is being tragically eroded by our current copyright, patent, and trademark laws.

In a series of fascinating case studies, Boyle explains why gene sequences, basic business ideas and pairs of musical notes are now owned, why jazz might be illegal if it were invented today, why most of 20th century culture is legally unavailable to us, and why today’s policies would probably have smothered the World Wide Web at its inception.

Appropriately given its theme, the book will be sold commercially but also made available online for free under a Creative Commons license.

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The best measure of a blog is not how many people it reaches, it’s how much it changes what you do. Changes your posture, your writing, your transparency, your humility. What blogging has done for me is made me think. I get to think about how the outside world will understand something I’m trying to do, for example.
Seth Godin

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Vogue Paris had a very interesting editorial featuring a series of photographs of the 20-years-old model  Eniko Mihalik portrayed in the age of 10, 20, … 50, 60 respectively. It’s quite amazing how the overall look can be so malleable, achieved (perhaps not so) simply with tricks of the trade like hairdo, facial expression, make-up, photography angles, etc.

At 10, a certain wide-eyed innocence with a strong suggestion on bare-chestedness, half-exposed teeth (make them seem smaller and less full-grown), very light make-up, looking almost fresh out of a swimming pool or something.

At 20, a rather typical high-school/college girl first getting acquainted with mascara and lip-gloss; expressions of youth with straight hair, painted finger nails and fun accessories (ring); there is a sense of eagerness and anticipation in the expression.

At 30, she looks like she’s been through some really bad relationships, on the roads, and maybe have her life mortgated to drugs and alcohol, doused generally with a sense of cynicism towards the world.

At 40, life reins in as she matures and develops into a more assured woman; the wild sides has not been eliminated totally but tamed to a more nuanced portrayal;

At 50, back to a very classic and enduring look showing a sense of refined sophistication after living through the many decades; tastes have been distilled and generally looks more classy.

Finally at 60, the beauty grows inwards as the outer appearance are toned down in favor of more subtle expression (cropped hairdo, plain top), with a sense that the inner wisdom is now far more distinguishing than the outer appearance.

Two things come to mind: First, media can turn and distort “reality” by modifying how it is presented. Second, our time (to create) is limited. Use it wisely. Go out there. Do something! Take good care of yourself. Enjoy life!

Credit: Thank you for the great observation by Designer  Gems Sty and for the pictures by  Miss at la Playa.

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Last Saturday, I was invited to a business conference in Düsseldorf. Among nine exceptional presenters – including Bill Clinton – one clearly stood out: Bertrand Piccard. He is one of the century’s last great adventurers. After failing two times, he realized the Jules Verne fantasy of flying around the world in a balloon, the Breitling Orbiter 3 in March 1999. His next adventure will be an attempt to circumvent the earth in a solar plane.

I am aware that it is likely that you are not preparing for a balloon trip right now. So what can you learn from his experiences? And how can you apply them to your private and professional lives? Above all, Bertrand Piccard is fascinated by the symbolic importance of the adventure. He believes that two centuries of scientific development have resulted in enormous progress, but most inventions have been aimed at controlling the forces of nature. In a balloon on the other hand, pilots have to submit to the elements and accept being swept along with the air currents. A balloon can only fly at the same speed and in the same direction as the wind. The sophisticated technology that had to be developed was aimed solely at better understanding our atmosphere in order to use nature as an ally.

Much of life’s sorrows arise from man’s basic instinct to be in control. It’s difficult to accept that life will take us in a direction that’s not of our choosing. A balloon flight forces us to recognise that our own will counts for little in the face of the wind. Some control is necessary, but it is limited to what is in our power to control. In fact, a balloonist’s freedom is restricted to changing the flight level to find alternative wind directions. It’s the same in life, where free will only means the ability to change our altitude to a higher psychological and philosophical level, and to make the best of our inner resources to adapt to the uncertainty of life.

Embrace uncertainty! Let it be. Enjoy the ride.

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Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, recently visited a slum in India and reported that he “met this young man on the street who told me that he had used Wikipedia to pass his 11th grade exams.” Wikipedia is an open source project that has fundamentally changed how we access information.

How could we apply this open source idea to our education system? Fred Wilson, a VC in New York, explores this idea in his brilliant article hacking education. Here’s the core idea:

An open source approach to education gives power to the people.

All of the leading education institutions in a country could contribute their curriculum to an open source system. And of course, all institutions could get curriculum from such a system. Ideally, the physical manifestation of the curriculum (dead-tree version) would be individually put together for each student to match their specific learning style (right brain, left brain). You can commoditize curriculum but you cannot do that to teachers. A few educators are outstanding, but have limited reach. Thus, we could increase the number of students that superstar educators can reach and teach every day by making them available online, via web video, to millions of people. They should not be stuck in a lecture hall teaching less than a hundred kids at a time.

Access to knowledge is becoming less and less of an issue. It is instantaneously available and relatively reliable on the web. Consequently, an educated person is no longer the one who has exclusive knowledge, but rather the one who makes the most use of the knowledge everyone has access to. What is not available and cannot be assumed is that kids have the skills to make the knowledge meaningful and useful. As a result schools should shift from “teaching content” to setting up experiences and opportunities for kids to learn and practice skills such as analysis, evaluation, communication of ideas, decision-making, etc. Consequently, education institutions for young children should focus on skills and character and let content be the by-product.

What do you think? How would you fix our broken education system?

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There’s an outstanding interview with Vinod Khosla on PBS’s web site. Vinod Khosla is an influential venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. He was a cofounder of Sun Microsystems and later a partner at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, which helped fund Google and Amazon. In 2004 he started his own company, Khosla Ventures.

Here are some of the highlights of the interview. Thank you to Venture Hacks for this summary.

On the real big opportunities:

“The real big opportunities are changing the infrastructure of society. We are talking about things like the $200 billion engines market for automobiles and trucks, things like lighting, billions of dollars spent on lighting. We can completely change that. Cement. Huge multi-hundred billion dollar market that needs to change. Glass. Then there’s replacing all of the oil in the world. Hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars worth of fuel that needs to be replaced. And there’s gasoline, there’s diesel, there’s jet fuel.

“There’s no doubt in my mind over the next 25 years how we drive, how we build our houses, how we fly, how we build our buildings, will all change. And that’s essentially, like I said, the infrastructure of society…”

On stock prices:

“… we have too large a tendency to look at the symptom of stock prices which is almost irrelevant to the basic businesses we are trying to build.

On Khosla Ventures:

“We want to invest in the technologies that are high risk, so it’s okay to fail, but when we succeed it’d better be worth succeeding. We’d better have very large dislocations with these technologies.

“We like to say at Khosla Ventures, and this is one of the reasons to do what we do, we’ll take technical risks that nobody else will.

“We take the larger risks, real science experiments, and that’s been one of the founding pieces in our company.”

On venture capital:

“95 percent of people in the venture business think it’s a financial business, it’s about investing. It’s not. It’s about building companies, which is a different thing than investing. It’s about taking large risks in science and technology. That’s what we do.

“We are an investor that tries to build companies. We make money by building entities over the long term. We’re not in the business of transacting or doing deals. We don’t even allow that word here. It’s not buying and selling, that’s a transaction. You don’t invest in something and say I can sell it tomorrow or next year. We take a five year, ten year view and say we can build a company that can significantly change the landscape. Now if you happen to do that, you build companies of lasting value, make a large impact and if you do, you’re going to have a valuable company that you can make money on. So it’s a long term versus short term perspective.”

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