The above video is the TED talk by Deb Roy (link here), director of MIT Media Lab's Cognitive Machines group. The entire talk covers his work with capturing and linguistically analysing 5 years' worth of his son's development from birth, through the use of ubiquitous and continuously-tracking audio/video recording systems embedded within his home.
I'm an advocate of the idea that our current obsession with data is more about the act of defining data as something tangible and less about the seeming amazingness of its existance (see: The rise of open data, and why more data "exists" now than before). So I'd like to focus on just one note from the above, at 7:15:
It appears that all three primary caregivers -- myself, my wife and our nanny -- were systematically (and, I would think, subconsciously) restructuring our language to meet him at the birth of a word and bring him gently into more complex language. And the implications of this -- there are many, but one I just want to point out, is that there must be amazing feedback loops. Of course, my son is learning from his linguistic environment, but the environment is learning from him. That environment - people - are in these tight feedback loops and creating a kind of scaffolding that has not been noticed until now.
"Has not been noticed until now" is the key phrase here. Seemingly superfluous - but tangible (read: noticable) - data as scaffolding for complex learning through subtle feedback loops: an idea that's starting to sound more familiar to us more these days (see: "Tangible/intuitive feedback, as illustrated by my broken jump rope").
This is in fact what is at the core of the momentum building around gaming and play.
(important note: this is about games and play, not about gamification).
