I missed the planning for this event probably because I paid my student loans a couple of years after graduating and that was a while ago. Now, all the Other Guys going to college have accumulated an estimated one trillion dollars of debt, more than the debt for credit cards or automobiles. This issue got lost in the larger Occupy Wall Street movement, but was part of the concern. Folks with over a hundred thousand in debt and only a sociology degree to show for it! And they thought that put them in a 99%. Man. A hundred grand for a soc degree must surely be a 1%. But, that’s not the persuasion point today.

On April 25 folks organized a national protest day, 1Tday, the 1 Trillion Dollar day. Like I said, I hadn’t been contacted earlier and just learned about it in a bottom story somewhere. (The Google news aggregator notes about 60 sources.) You’d think with a total debt of one trillion dollars and all those people with at least some college experience and a Facebook page that this would have been the lead story of the day much like OWS in those early days. But, not so much.

Here’s their Facebook page.

Jeepers. Fewer than 400 people indicate they are attending a rally. Fewer than 60 maybes. Shootfire on any college campus on any day anywhere in America you can get more than 60 maybes for picking up litter. And look at their twitter page. The 1Tday twitter page has 166 followers as of April 25. It’s tweeted more (193) than it is followed.

You might have noticed that President Obama has been talking up the issue of student debt on college campuses. The President feels their pain. He notes that the Obama’s themselves were paying off their student debt up until eight years ago. (Is this a great country or what? You make your last payment on your student loan and eight years later you’re running for re-election as President of the US. Kinda undercuts the protest if you think about it, but I don’t think anyone wants you to think about it that way. Back to the opera.)

While I admire much of Obama’s election persuasion, I think he should rethink courting college voters on this issue. His similarity to them is engaging, but ultimately counterproductive. Worse still, even Other Guys with the debt won’t even sign up as Maybes for a protest on a spring day. Where do you think these Other Guys will be on a dreary November later this year?

We stand in the light of a New New Day brought forth from the New New Things, twitter, Facebook, and the rest. Don’t look for social media much in the next one.

As they prosecute hundreds of Occupy protesters on lower-level charges such as disorderly conduct, Manhattan prosecutors have turned one of the movement’s principal organizing tools—social media such as Twitter—against the defendants. In short Twitter messages, protesters coordinate activities and warn others of law-enforcement efforts. In doing so, prosecutors believe some have revealed an intent to break the law.

In New York over 1900 people were arrested as part of the OWS Revolution. Just over 1000 have faced a judge so far with 20% having charges dismissed and 80% found guilty or pleading guilty. Even New New Revolutionaries see the problem.

When Jeff Rae was arrested last October with hundreds of other Occupy Wall Street protesters during a march on the Brooklyn Bridge, he decided to fight the charges, believing he had been entrapped. On Monday, Mr. Rae changed his mind and accepted a plea agreement with Manhattan prosecutors. Why? The district attorney’s office had subpoenaed his Twitter account, raising the stakes in what he had thought would be a speedy case he could win, he said.

Perhaps there’ll be an Anonymous Anonymous App for the next one!

Combine technology, statistics, and sports to find that sweet spot where science and persuasion meet.

Head coach Keith Guy and the Muskegon Heights Tigers headed into Tuesday night’s quarterfinals of the Michigan high-school basketball playoffs armed with a secret weapon. On the coach’s iPad, there was a series of charts and diagrams that plotted almost everything that’s plottable about his team and its opponents, Cadillac High School. This included their shot locations and scoring pace, the offensive and defensive potency of every five-man unit they’d put on the floor this season and how effective their star players have been when they’ve received the ball at any spot on the court.

Moneyball hits the high school hardwood. For about $2,000 bucks cutting edge high school basketball coaches acquire the services of

Vasu Kulkarni, a 25-year-old computer whiz and basketball junkie from Bangalore, India, who developed a program that helps human analysts quickly break down game film.

Coaches send digital game film to Kulkarni who farms it out to analysts who then run it through Kulkarni’s program to spew out enough statistics to warm the heart of a second year research methods and statistics grad student. All that sabermetrician sass, just like the pros, only at your local high school.

The science part of me shouts, Show Me The Money! I have trouble believing that this approach makes much positive difference, especially at the high school level, but even at the pros. I’m not aware of any good research evidence that demonstrates a practical, positive effect for winning championships with moneyball. Not that it isn’t illuminating if only for embarrassment.

For coaches, Krossover’s results can be rather shocking. For years, Tammy Lusinger, head coach of the girls’ basketball team at Mansfield Summit High School in Arlington, Texas, had a favorite play called “Bama” in which the girls cleared out one side of the court then set up a series of screens to free a player for an open shot. “It’s a great looking little play,” Lusinger said last week. But after she started using Krossover, she was in for a surprise: The numbers showed that they were only scoring on that play 5% of the time.

Talk about a fabulous demonstration of the powers of self persuasion. Coaches and players convince themselves that they’ll beat you with Bama, then they Count the Change and come up short. See how easy it is to fool yourself in a complex game like basketball or even life. But back to my original request to view the money. Here’s the closing line on the Bama story.

Earlier this month, Lusinger and Mansfield Summit won their second Texas state championship in the last four years.

See, Kulkarni began selling this service in 2010 which means that Tammy Lusinger’s team won a state championship without it and then won a championship with it. I appreciate the lessons learned and that the service can be a valuable teaching tool, but where’s the money?

Just as people mistakenly believed Bama made them invincible, they will also mistakenly believe that high school hardwood moneyball makes them invincible. Again, don’t get me wrong. As the son of a high school football coach, I appreciate preparation and game tape (ask me how many times I’ve seen the coach’s film of the 1956 Tangerine Bowl). Information is useful. But we’re clearly in a statistical stampede and that brings us back to persuasion.

You see the powerful Normative influence going on here. Simply as the Comparison Cue (If Others Are Doing It, You Should, Too), high school moneyball is golden. And, it can function as a Warrior Cue, like those H-P calculators that mark seasoned financial veterans against their younger laptop colleagues. Just flash an image from Krossover during warm-ups and the opponents will know they are facing a technologically superior team!

All of this is made possible through the double edged sword of cheap technology. Kulkarni has made a computer program that takes raw digital images, converts motion into numbers, then sausages those numbers into millions of marvelous casings called EFG%, ORtg, PER, and even OWS. Every adoring parent has the latest digital video camera and you can see the moms and dads coordinating themselves into teams with plans for positioning and editing. And parents probably pony up the 2k in cash to buy the Krossover service.

In its own way the Moneyball Persuasion Play play fools people with randomness. Simply because technology makes Scientific Science available, people think they now know something when all they are doing is running the new version of Bama to win the state championship.

We’re learning about a nearly one million dollar conference for GSA employees in Las Vegas. Hundreds of government employees were involved in the conference along with hundreds of other people who delivered the services for the conference. Within a few weeks of the conference, an Inspector General was investigating and reporting his findings up and down the supervisory chain in the government, including the White House. And, now, a year later the story is finally breaking. The key administrator in the scandal has already taken the 5th in his testimony and faces legal charges. The GSA chief executive fired two key deputies for their role in the scandal, then resigned.

Where was twitter on this?

Seriously. I thought that social media had become the New New Thing in journalism, like a Wisdom of the Crowd Journalism. We no longer speak truth to power, we tweet, right? The whole world’s tweeting! The whole world’s tweeting!

Except this scandal broke the old fashioned way. Key employees in GSA lodged complaints to oversight. Those oversight guys then did their due diligence and discovered likely criminal behavior in government workers. They wrote it down and reported it up the line. And it took a year for Your Father’s Oldsmobile to drive up on the story. Social media are still looking for Kony.

Yeah. Web 2.0 changes everything.

Consider two learning programs with computer game narratives.

First, Crystal Island was developed and revised by James Lester at North Carolina State University, who is a well-known expert in narrative game design. In Crystal Island (Spires, Turner, Rowe, Mott, & Lester, 2010), the player is a visitor to a research team on a remote island whose stay is disrupted by the spread of an unknown disease (shown in Figure 1). The player’s task is to discover the source of the disease through interacting with other characters and using lab microscopes to run tests. The game is intended to help the player learn about how pathogens work within the context of playing the game.

Sounds like a CDC bugs ‘n drugs detective game. Cool.

Second, Cache 17 was developed by Alan Koenig at Arizona State University, using game design principles with a focus on narrative theme (Koenig, 2008). Development required approximately 6 months of programming time, and the game has undergone several cycles of revision based on field testing. In Cache 17, the player views a brief introductory cinematic that lays out the story line about a long-lost painting that may be found in an old bunker system dating back to World War II. The player’s job is to make his or her way through the bunker system to solve the detective story about the whereabouts of the painting, along the way constructing electromechanical devices to help open doors (shown in Figure 2).

Hey, cool teaching idea, huh? Use sophisticated computer games to hook students into learning about pathogens or electromechanical devices. Kids grow up with computer games and get intensively drawn into the narrative meme inherent in the game with characters, plots, movement, success and failure. It’s all about the narrative, baby. The meme. That hooks the kid’s attention and the rest is learning theory. Let’s compare it to something more standard, more doggy, more like Your Father’s Oldsmobile.

The learning environment for the slideshow was a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation containing information that was presented within the game, excluding information about the game’s story line (e.g., the mystery of the disease carrier, who was responsible for the infections, names of the staff). All text and poster images relevant to learning about human diseases were taken directly from the game and presented on static slides. All three quizzes given in the game were also given during slideshow, with each quiz being given after the relevant slideshow information was presented. The slideshow was self-paced and included 28 slides of information.

What a hoot. A PowerPoint presentation! With 28 slides. Bor-Ing! Randomly assign college students to either the compelling narrative of an immersive game or that PPT presentation, then give everyone tests of learning about pathogens (Experiment 1) or electromechanical devices (Experiment 2). Here’s the results from Experiment 1.

Students in the slideshow group scored significantly better than did students in the narrative group on the retention test, t(40) = 4.37, p < .001, d = 1.37, and marginally better on the transfer test, t(40) = 1.84, p = .07, d = 0.57. In terms of self-reported learning measures, students in the narrative group rated their learning experience as significantly more difficult than did students in the slideshow group, t(40) = 2.96, p = .005, d = 0.93. The narrative group also reported more effort in learning than did the slideshow group, although this difference was not statistically significant, t(40) = 1.56, p = .127, d = 0.49. These results offer no support for the claim of the discovery hypothesis that narrative computer games are superior or easier venues for academic learning than conventional instructional media.

What? The PPT participants did better than the computer game narrative? Here’s the graph to help with the numbers from the analysis.

Now recall those d effect sizes. The retention test, the most basic measure of learning information from the game or PPT is 1.37. A d of 0.80 is a Large Windowpane, a 25/75, so a d of 1.37 is a Stupendous difference. All that crapola about narrative and immersion and involvement is just that: crapola.

Experiment 2 replicates the basic finding of PPT superiority over the narrative game and looks at various process differences, too. Most interestingly, the narrative game technique took a much longer time to complete compared to the PPT presentation, yet the PPT group scored better on basic learning measures.

I regret to report that the researchers did not collect (or at least did not report) any measures of attitude or affect towards the presentations or the learning experience. I suspect that people more strongly liked the narrative game with all that immersion, involvement, and, let’s not forget, all that meme compared to the PPT. Maybe not. For many people learning is always a pig even if the pig is wearing lipstick.

What’s this got to do with Persuasion?

1. There’s a difference between Learning and Persuasion. Stories (or narratives or memes or Flavor) are strong persuasion tools, especially on the Peripheral Route as a Cue. Simply because you have something that is compelling, attractive, and involving to the Other Guy does not mean They will then Learn from it. They may Like it, but Liking isn’t Learning.

2. Persuasion is useful for leading the horse to water, but you need to use Learning Theory, not Persuasion Theory, to get the horses to drink. If students do not receive well structured information with repetition and feedback, learning will not occur. Anything that interferes with basic learning processes – like narrative or meme or Flavor – will reduce learning. And that’s what narrative or meme or Flavor is in the learning environment, interference. Now, generalize the Learning here past the traditional Learning context, the classroom with students. All kinds of organizations require Learning. You don’t need Teachers and Students in this role playing drama. Anytime you’ve got Information Acquisition as a goal, you’re doing Learning Theory.

3. Smart people are stupid about computers. Some view them as the New New Thing whether for political revolution, social relationships, or, here, for learning. Sure, computers are powerful devices, but you need to understand how they fit in the Local, the box and play, you are running on Other Guys. For example, Facebook permits all kind of interactivity among groups of people, but using a Facebook computer interface for teaching about pathogens, electromagnetic devices, or the five steps of the Monroe Motivated Sequence for Persuasive Speaking would kill learning because all that interactivity between learners is not fundamental to learning.

4. These games would be fabulous Persuasion Plays on Parent’s Night at a school. Put them up on free running laptops and let parents play with them and get all gassed up in a group. Hubba-hubba. Then hand out a sign up sheet for volunteers.

It was a dark and stormy night as I fumbled over the floor searching for that pathogen . . .

Adams, D. M., Mayer, R. E., MacNamara, A., Koenig, A., & Wainess, R. (2012). Narrative games for learning: Testing the discovery and narrative hypotheses. Journal of Educational Psychology, 104(1), 235-249.

doi:10.1037/a0025595