Just Saying…

That’s Mr. Mayor to you. For those of you who are not familiar this is foursquare.

From their site:

Foursquare on your phone gives you & your friends new ways of exploring
your city. Earn points & unlock badges for discovering new things.

I’ve been “playing” foursquare for the past week and it is fun. I like the game like aspect of it – but unless the network affect kicks in relatively soon I can see that it will be a passing fancy – just like the other casual games that slip through my fingers. If a large number of my acquaintances end up in here then it will be fun to see where people are to and connect when we are close.

That and lording it over people in my new mayorial capacity….

How could this translate to education?
How about something that isn’t location based but is content based. I could “log in” to reading a particular book and watch the comment stream of others who are reading it too – or a movie – or anything I might chose to do with one of my mobile devices. In real time.

It would also be cool – imagine a kid claiming to be the Mayor of Moby Dick.

But Lee (you say) – this combination of kids and location/content based services seems ripe for bullying and or creeps.

If the service is school authenticated via the SIS then security issues can be mitigated for students. In my conversations with teachers they don’t typically have cyber bullying or other problems with school sponsored systems. Their woes are from external systems – Facebook et al.

School authentication could allow global learning communities that have some layer of protection that schools should be providing.

If this app already exists (entirely possible) please let us know in comments.