All of the Above: Design, Code, and Learning

Episode 015: Games

We explore what it takes to make educational games enjoyable and beneficial, how the digital and physical worlds are colliding, and what role single player games have in a multi-player world.

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The Motion of Falling Objects

A–Z Modern Office Jargon

Overcast is our podcast player of choice

Candy Crush Saga

Gamification

Gamification of Learning

Chex Quest

Chex Quest port for Mac

DuoLingo

Operation Neptune

Math Blaster

The ADDIE Model

Join the anytime, anywhere real-world adventure.

Anki DRIVE

Apple WWDC 2013 Keynote — Anki DRIVE

Golem Arcana

Heroclix

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater

Goldfinger — Hang-Ups

Board game parlour

Rockwell — Somebody’s Watching Me

The Edward Snowden Film

The Top 100 European Games

10 Funny VHS Board Game Videos

Stuck in 2009

Getting your Sega Dreamcast online — in 2015

LAN Parties

Dogwood

South Korean man dies after a marathon game session

Titan fall is pretty much just a multiplayer game

Stop looking at my screens

Watching people play video games. Online.

League of Legends

Scholarships for League of Legends players

“They make visually beautiful games” — Sam Bantner

Monument Valley

Plants vs. Zombies

Monument Valley gets a boost from House of Cards

Bryan and Sam will hike this.

Oregon Trail

How did you enjoy this episode? We hope it was great, but we'd love to know what you thought—both the good and the bad.

Episode 014: Email

Bryan, Sam, and Sean spend some time discussing email and how it’s one of the more annoying forms of communication. They take a  look at when, if ever, email is the best form of communication, how its purpose has changed over time, and whether it can be viewed as a disposable service.

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Columbus to Nashville

Inbox Zero

#8: Work-Life Tetris

#11: That Thank You Has Expired

Too Many Cooks

Importance of Documenting Verbal Conversations

Your Email Signature — 101 Do’s and Don’ts

+K for Email Expertise

Etiquette is important

Homepage

The driving force behind the sandwich

Sandwich Video for TrueCar (not CarMax)

Sandwich Video for Coin

Sandwich Video for 1Password

Sandwich Video for Slack

Email in China

Electronic Mail Address

The fastest email on the net

Justin Timberlake

Storage Limit

Labels

OS X’s Mail.app vs. Gmail

POP3 vs. IMAP vs. Exchange

Burner Phone

Your private phone app

Public and Private Keys

• Mailinator
• Guerrilla Mail
• 10 Minute Mail

Email encrypted end-to-end

Edit email headers

Email spoofing

The Email Service for Developers

OneReceipt

Clean up your inbox

Quilted Northern Ultra Plush Bath Tissue, 48 Double Rolls

T.E.A.R.A.W.A.Y.T.R.O.U.S.E.R.S.

Quickly swipe messages to your archive or trash and scan entire conversations in a chat-like view. 

Google buys Sparrow

OWA

Microsoft Outlook

How did you enjoy this episode? We hope it was great, but we'd love to know what you thought—both the good and the bad.

Episode 013: The Cloud

We explore what the cloud really is, how all the things on the Internet are crazy, and weigh the pros and cons for education's reliance on third parties for their friendly neighborhood cloud necessities.

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This fierce blizzard has made February Boston’s snowiest month ever

What is “the Cloud” — and Where is it?

iCloud vs. iTunes backups: The crucial differences that affect your data

iCloud’s previous over-simplification of file hierarchy

Jennifer Lyn Morone incorporates herself

You own it, but Facebook can still use it

This new rule about paid product placements caused a stir

Old article about Facebook’s “deleted” photo challenge

How Snaps are Stored and Deleted

How the Library of Congress receives Twitter’s firehose, and what that really means for deleted tweets

A nice project that aims to help people with long Terms of Service agreements by giving them grades

Cloud computing

Free hour-long workshops

iCloud

Step 8: Do a satanic ritual

My Photo Stream FAQ

#25: The Microsoft of Ourselves

iCloud Drive

OS X Yosemite: Manage iCloud storage

Surprise.

The Rat Pack

Packrat a.k.a. Extended Version History

HIPPA-compliant servers are a can of worms

Those Dropbox checkmarks were hacks. Yosemite made them official. Some people don’t like it.

Users need feedback… man.

Post-Show Follow-Up: There is some visual feedback when your Mac can’t connect to the Internet to upload the file to iCloud Drive, but it varies in helpfulness depending on your Finder view:

• Icons
• List
• Columns
• Good ole’ Cover Flow

Now anyone can use Pages, Numbers, and Keynote for iCloud

Mat Honan gets hacked — Apple and Amazon were accomplices

Naoki Hiroshima’s @N gets hacked — PayPal and GoDaddy were accomplices

If this, then that — and that, and this, and those

We are manure, I mean.. mature

Skedaddle as a Service

Urban Dictionary: qq

Philip’s Hue Starter Pack

166 as of February 24, 2015

Internet of Things (IoT) a.k.a. Cloud of Crazy Things

Intel and Samsung loves them some IoT

VESSYL AUTOMATICALLY KNOWS AND TRACKS EVERYTHING YOU DRINK. EVERYTHING.

We weren’t joking

Surprise.

Beam Brush

Surprise.

This is a challenge

Ladies and Gentlemen, the iKettle

Cost benefit analysis of cloud computing in education

Digitize all the things.

Learning Management Systems (LMS)

It happens.

Build Your Platform – Not Someone Else’s

This person really hates Blackboard.

Googley education

Percentages for cloud usage in different Industrial Sectors and Services Pie Chart

Cloud computing for education: A new dawn?

Affordable. Easy management. Classroom impact.

Increase funds for the U.S. Department of Education — part of it going towards technology

iPad in Education

Hey… lmgtfy!

“Each serving of Soylent provides maximum nutrition with minimum effort.”

Episode 012: Voice as UI, with Scott Ryan-Hart

We explore how our vocal chords control our electronic devices, and why the current implementations are leaving a bad taste in our mouth. Scott Ryan-Hart joins us as he is currently finishing up his Master's at Kent State University for User Experience Design. His thesis is about the mismatch between the user's mental model of Siri, and the conceptual model of Siri — and marketing's role in that.

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• Kent State: Masters in User Experience Design
• Wikipedia: Siri
• Cult of Mac: Apple’s 1987 Vision of the Knowledge Navigator
• The Wall Street Journal (2012): Siri’s fast adoption for certain things
• The Wall Street Journal (2011): How Siri got it’s ‘tude
• Daring Fireball: Siri Improvements
• Journal of Network and Computer Applications (2008): Hands-free & Accessibility
• TechBlog (2015): Full list of Siri commands
• UXmas (2012): The 4 H’s of Writing Error Messages
• The New York Times (2014): How One Boy With Autism Became BFF With Apple’s Siri

Bryan Brush with a Blue Power Ring by Scott Ryan-Hart

• Powerful Learning Network (2012): Teaching in the Age of Siri
• Concordia Online Education (2013): Does Apple’s Siri Belong in the Classroom?
• Amazon: A lovely TI–84 Graphing Calculator
• The New Yorker (2005): The Old Man Effect — Records
• Techdirt (2011): The Old Man Effect — Printing Press
• Skwirk: Home appliances give us more time, but possibly more to do
• Isaac Asimov: The Feeling of Power
• Minecraft’s Official Site
• Lego: Digital Designer
• Photo: The Humans of Wall-E

Sam Bantner with an Orange Power Ring by Scott Ryan-Hart

• Microsoft Research — Matthew Turk: Perceptual User Interfaces
• Perceptual User Interfaces Group
• Cooper (2012): The best interface is no interface
• Definition: User Interface (UI)
• Hongkiat (2013): 8 “Next-Gen” User Interfaces
• Amazon: Mindflex — A brain controlled toy
• UX Magazine (2012): Cognitive Load
• Harvard: SUPPLE — Automatically generating personalized user interfaces
• Wikipedia: Power Ring

Sean Doran with a Green Power Ring by Scott Ryan-Hart

• TechBlog (2015): Full list of Siri commands
• Medium (2014): Towards a New Information Architecture
• UX Matters (2012): The Importance of Knowing User Intent
• UX Magazine (2011): Learning Interfaces
• Amazon Echo
• Wikipedia: Natural Language Processing
• Quora: Her & Siri
• iMore (2014): How to make Siri not use the default Maps app for directions
• Slack API
• Facebook Developers
• Quora: Does Siri have an API?
• Gigaom (2012): Live by the API, Die by the API
• Nuance: Dragon NaturallySpeaking
• Lifehacker (2015): A week of voice
• Apple: Voice Control
• Android Origin (2015)Siri v. Cortana v. Google Now Different Languages
• Gizmodo (2014): Siri v. Cortana v. Google Now Comparison (2014)
• Wikipedia: Guardians of the Galaxy
• Wikipedia: Guardians of the Universe
• Wikipedia: Power Ring

• Twitter: Scott Ryan-Hart is @mmmmmpig
• 20 Questions Tuesday

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Episode 011: Personalities

This week we take a look at the strange world of personalities. Bryan kicks things off by discussing learning styles and whether or not they really have an impact on us or not. Sean discusses the interesting challenge of designing for apps and platforms that have a personality of their own, and how we design for the personality of our users. Finally, Sam closes things out by considering how we quantify and group personalities through various tests such as the Myers-Briggs, DISC, and the Big Five.

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• WebMD: Weather triggering migraines
• Sean’s Blog Post: The Stress is Real
• Alcoholics Anonymous

• Overview of Learning Styles
• Sean’s STEM Experience
• Wikipedia: Learning Styles
• Wikipedia: iPAQ
• StackExchange: Audiobooks for Programmers
• SparkNotes: Base Case and Recursion
• All of the Above: Episode 008: Writing, with John Saddington
• NYU Article: Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence
• PBS: The Santa Squeeze
• Institute of Education Sciences: Teacher to Student Ratio Map
• The Washington Post: The Flip
• Adayana: One of the many companies in the adult learning industry

• UX Lady: Using Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) for User Personas
• Facebook Data Science: What’s on your mind?
• Twitter Corporate Blog: What’s Happening?
• Know Your Meme: You Are Now Breathing Manually
• The Guardian: Facebook Rants & Bikini Pics
• CARROT’s Website
• iOS App: CARROT To-Do - Talking Task List
• iOS App: CARROT Alarm - Talking Alarm Clock
• iOS APP: CARROT Fit
• The New York Times: Why I Use Snapchat
• Slate: Snapchat makes Facebook users feel old
• Snapchat Corporate Blog: Discover
• The Hollywood Reporter: Comedy Central’s Snapchat Discover Web Series
• Ello Corporate Blog: What is Ello?
• All of the Above on Ello

• Human Scavenger Hunt PDF
• Nodes Agency: Tinder, etc.
• Wikipedia: DISC Assessment
• Wikipedia: Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
• 16Personalities:
  • Bryan is an INFJ Princess
  • Sam is an ENTJ Horseback General
  • Sean is just in the middle of a puzzle, being an INTP
• Wikipedia: Big Five Personality Traits
• Parks & Recreation: Swanson Pyramid of Greatness
• SlideShare: Beliefs, Values, and Attitudes + Behavior
• Bloomberg: Big Data, Advertising, and Your Poor Children
• Amazon: Kurt Vonnegut’s Hocus Pocus
• ScienceDaily: Confirmation Bias
• XKCD Forums: Google and Confirmation Bias
• Dictionary: Platitude
• Daring Fireball: The Plus in Google Plus
• DuckDuckGo Web Search
• DuckDuckGo: Don’t Track Us
• DuckDuckGo: Don’t Bubble Us

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Episode 010: Retrospective

This will be a different kind of episode. Since we cover a lot on this show, and sometimes in a very short span of time, we wanted to take a look back at what we have learned and what new ideas came from those discoveries. It also gives our new listeners a chance to jump right in without feeling they have missed too much.

This is an experiment, so let us know if you like it or not. If it is something that you seem to enjoy then we will start doing these at regular intervals to help keep everyone up to date in case they missed an episode or two. Just let us know.

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• Listen to the episode
• PICTURE: The Foambrero
• Our Pinterest page
• VIDEO: Game of Thrones Quote

• Listen to the episode
• PODCAST: 3 Guys 3 Questions (3G3Q)
• Emojli: The emoji-only network

• Listen to the episode
• TWITTER: Connor Mason is @conmas
• EBOOK: Punchkick Interactive’s CarPlay for Automakers
• EBOOK: Punchkick Interactive’s iOS 8 in Context
• ARTICLE: Publishers take note: Native app development is the ebook’s next frontier
• APP: OverDrive

• Listen to the episode
• Oculus Rift: Virtual Reality
• Microsoft HoloLens: Holographic Computing
• Tell Me A Story
• BOOK: The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama

Here are all the promotional images I created for every day leading up to our launch. The social network images are easily reusable, and handy for marketing efforts in the future. I also made a bit.ly link for each social network that consisted of the bit.ly/aotanetwork format. It helps both users to easily navigate directly to the page if the image is out of context, and it helps us quickly get to a page as it's a consistent URL scheme.

Some of these didn't see the light of day, such as the Egg Nog one. That page simply doesn't exist.

And then there's this one. It was way too inside joke-based, but there isn't even a joke—it's just confusing. Here are all the references:

• Relay.fm
• 5by5
• The Talk Show
• Accidental Tech Podcast
• Professor Blastoff
• This American Life
• Overcast
• Debug

If you want to see what I did, you can download the actual Sketch file I used to make all these. I didn't cleanup anything, so this is pretty raw, and to give you some context — I did all of these within three hours, starting around midnight. Once I get going, I don't like to stop. If you don't have Sketch, you can download a free trial or buy it from the Mac App Store.

Also, if you're interested in seeing the Social Media spreadsheet that has all of the links and purpose of each site, you can download it in the format you'd like.

This ended up being show notes mixed with a blog post, and it feels like a great way of doing things.

Two birds, one stone, tons of value.

If you liked what you read, and are interested in getting updates about The Upper Echelon community, the best way will be to subscribe below. Be the first to know about anything new we have in store, as well as relevant updates from previous episodes that you'll love.

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Episode 009: Writing, with John Saddington

Desk: tell me a story

We had a great conversation with Indie Mac Developer John Saddington (a hacker, a human, a doer) about writing and his new app Desk PM, which is now available in the Mac App Store. We talk about life, death and doing things that matter.

To start things off, Bryan brings up flash fiction and asks if limitations can actually help creativity. Sam puts on his software engineering hat as he asks whether or not programming should be considered a foreign language. And to close things up, Sean asks the group what the evolution of writing could look like.

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The websites we talked about and references to everything we said.

Episode 008: eBooks, with Connor Mason

This week we are joined by special guest, Connor Mason, as we continue our series inspired by stock iOS apps. This time around we tackle eBooks and discuss what they mean for the future of reading and physical books.

Connor questions how eBooks differentiate themselves from physical books. Bryan has us contemplate whether digital books are effective for learning, while Sean ponders the future of the library in a digital world. Sam wraps things up by discussing the challenges engineers and developers face when translating ink on a page into pixels on a screen. This episode, like War and Peace, is a doozie.

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Links to what we talked about, and follow-up info we dug up after we recorded.

Episode 009: Writing, with John Saddington

We have a real deep conversation about life, death, and writing with John Saddington, the sole creator of the distraction-free writing and blogging app Desk. It was hand-picked by Apple for their Best Apps of 2014.

Download Desk from the Mac App Store.

Episode 007: Episode

Continuing our series inspired by stock iOS apps, we tackle messaging and how our human brains can't handle it. Sean explores the world of sensors and the additional contextual information they provide, while Sam is obsessed with emoji. We get deep with Bryan and how we are constantly connected. We don't mean to make you depressed, but it might happen. Oh, and Pokémon.

If you haven't already, subscribe and rate us on iTunes so you can enjoy us every week, and so other people can find us as well!

Episode 008: eBooks, with Connor Mason

We will have our first guest on the show, Connor Mason!

He’s a copywriter at Punchkick Interactive in Chicago, and he’s actually written two eBooks within the past year (iOS 8 in Context and CarPlay for AutoMakers), so we couldn’t think of a better person to help us tackle our next topic: eBooks.

Episode 006: Calendars

Time. Is it a real thing, or just a way to keep our sanity? Listen in to find out as we talk about wearing foambreros as we present "the bird" to the syllabus, comparing new and old age time tracking methods, all while going through a bit of time dilation. Sean may even squeal like a pig.

If you haven't already, subscribe on iTunes.

Note: Betsy and Bryan are a thing

Keep dodging the IRS until you die.