16/06/2008 by nicola.

Learning Circuits Big Q for June is Second Life Training?

This video shows an example of problem based learning in Second Life. For more details of the PREVIEW project, there is a blog available which has more videos, screenshots etc. Professor Maggi Savin-Baden at Coventry University is directing the project.

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04/04/2008 by nicola.

I was extremely lucky today to attend a superb course on presenting research at conferences led by Dr Margaret Collins

Also just by chance of them being there - I began to realise that to explain virtual worlds, you needed to explain avatars - and these were on my desk:

Do you remember when you were a child - you used to play with figures - maybe dolls or action figures - Barbie, Ken, it could have been plasticine - and then you maybe took the play aspect further - creating scenarios - it could be police, fire, hospital - role playing different scenarios
. If like me, you did stuff like this - you used to get them to talk to each other - role playing conversations and probably learning experiences too.

Well - forget the technology - for this it doesn’t matter - an avatar in a virtual world is a little ‘figure’ that you manipulate in a very similar way to you did as a child, it doesn’t matter that you are an adult and using a keyboard instead of picking up the figure and moving it around. This doesn’t mean you have to do what you did as a child, but the experience in a virtual world allows you and your avatar to explore - to demonstrate - to ask questions from others and communicate.

Photos taken very quickly with phone and thanks to Margaret for permission to use her training ‘materials’ :-)))

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18/03/2008 by nicola.

exploring-learning-in-virtual-worlds-v10.doc

more of ‘me’ in it - think am several versions away from finished product - nothing like attempting to write a uni paper to realise how many writing flaws, corp papers very different & blog, wiki etc :-)))

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16/03/2008 by nicola.

Have been experimenting for about an hour - Linden Labs released a new version (1.19.1 release candidate) this week where you can edit a shape to display web pages (you can already display movies on them).This is my first attempt (have no 3D modelling experience but managed to get this far). I used the brilliant Torley Linden video tutorial to do it. You need to own land or a bit of land or persuade someone to give you building rights to edit their land, in order to do this.

You cannot scroll pages or click on any links as yet, its just for display purposes. If you can write in Lindenscript, you could turn a shape displaying a web page, into a chatbot so it could add interaction that way. You could make the links clickable too. There is a Firefox browser in SecondLife, but I do not have the ability yet to use it.

Re twitter one, have twitter linked into SecondLife so can see live tweets, but was interesting to see the page instead of just semi-transparent lines of tweets appearing across the screen.

have probably spent around 15 hours in SL to date - interesting that can user-generate 3D content with no coding required, although some limitations.One disadvantage is that you can’t copy and paste what you have created out of secondlife - its proprietary code - but with Sun/NMC open virtual worlds initiative underway, hopefully this will change.

Does html on a prim have any business / learning use ? With movies on a shape, SGI have done this to display live meetings and conferences so that users in SL can view them. Not sure yet about html on a prim but think it has lots of potential - anyone else have any ideas ?

PS as a postscript to this, have been property hunting this week for a place to rent - in real life; and in order to explore web page display in Second Life, have also been land / property hunting in Second Life so it has been completely crazy where I have been on the phone in real life, checking land, land auctions in Second Life, viewing estate agent signs in both, checking payments / fees details in both - sometimes within a matter of minutes - it was so similar switching between worlds………:-))))

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28/02/2008 by nicola.

Hi, have done a draft of an overview of MUVEs for an internal paper at work, if useful, please feel free to read (but not distribute yet please) and any edits/comments welcomed. Will hopefully have a more exciting title. Have not completed conclusions, format of reference, footnotes, glossary and appendix so please feel free to ignore.

If already very VW familiar then probably not anything particularly new in here - it has a bias in the examples towards the types of faculties Surrey has. If you are VW familiar and not seen the recent Sun stream from their conference about the NMC/SUn open virtual world project - is now on uStream

pedagogical-benefits-of-multi-user-virtual-environments-v05-2008-02-28.doc

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24/02/2008 by nicola.

Difficult to manage time this week and tired from the amount of time I have spent in front of a pc, will definitely do less next week. Self-defeating anyway, in that the more time you spend in front of a screen makes you tired in itself.

Online Tutor Course
Participating in online tutor course took on a new flavour this week as we were divided into 2 small groups and asked to put an argument together along the lines of whether participation should be compulsory or not. We were then tasked with putting a small presentation together on a wiki. Within my group I think that I was the only one who had edited a wiki before so I think for some of the group - have managed to find their way around a VLE and getting used to feeling part of a community - being able to post some comments in a discussion - then asked to go further and try and manage this via a wiki…

Its difficult to remember how I felt when I first used a wiki, one of our group remarked that it felt intrusive to be editing someone else’s entries. It is true and because you are using editing a document, you can’t explain to the person whose entry you are editing, your justification for doing so - you just do it. Its good that in just over two weeks, the community is able to respond to each other and even able to do some very basic wiki editing is great.

So should participation be compulsory? We didn’t come to a conclusion on this. People participate online in different ways, logging in and looking at discussions or reading is participating. Also observing others behaviour and then applying it to future practices is a form of participation. These more reflective forms of participation are impossible to assess and do you even need to assess participation? We have a ‘backup’ on this course which is recording your thoughts on the week in a log (which I am doing here) so a course tutor could go and analyse from any personal contributions on their log.

I don’t think you need to ‘assess’ participation in a formal sense - but that is difficult for tutors who are making an online element a key area of the course, it stems from - we want to help people find their way around an online environment, we want them to have a go at actively participating because we have seen benefits for ourselves, but it comes down to their motivation for studying and probably how much time they are prepared to study. Some of this also comes down to money - when I did my CIW, I funded it myself so did participate very actively because I needed to justify the investment to myself, even if I did lose the majority of evenings and weekends for over a year.

This week, Stewart Mader has continued his wiki adoption in 21 days series and is asking whether wiki patterns and anti-patterns apply elsewhere - I think they do apply across a range of online experiences. I am ‘guilty’ of both anti and positive wiki patterns myself when struggling to find the balance between intervention and letting things flow against a timeline. However I do not believe that online patterns of behaviour e.g. on a wiki or other online ‘thing’ are a permanent state of affairs, yet again, some of these simply arise from using an environment and technology to get online for the first time e.g.

“Antipatterns are patterns that represent a negative behaviour or consequence. They describe situations that you’d rather didn’t occur, but that are common nonetheless.

The most important part of an Antipattern is the refactored solution, which answers the question: “If we find ourselves in this situation, how best can we extricate ourselves from it and get back on track?”

Second Life and MUVEs
Attended the ALT labs group open day this week where there were some demos and discussion around virtual worlds, serious games. I am currently putting together a small paper on pedagogical benefits of MUVEs and it does seem to date that Second Life is where most educators have experience to date. In order to find, understand something like Second Life, there is a huge amount of information out there - videos, wikis, blogs, papers - but it takes AGES AND AGES to scroll through lists of resources and look at them, then go to another list of resources and go through them. You could easily spend an entire year and that’s just Second Life. I only discovered the Salamander wiki project this week, which I wish I had found 3 weeks ago - but they are finding what they are calling learning materials objects in Second life and categorising them by learner engagement types. Its a brilliant resource which I have only just started to peek into, if you are trying to find out about learning experiences this is a good place to start before attempting to wade through everything else.

I attended my first small group meeting in Second Life, it was quite mad meeting one of the students who is here at Surrey, for the first time online instead of F2F or whatever. In terms of others MUVEs I personally have found it difficult to find much evidence of other educators doing things - some corporate learning is being done using Olive (recently received an IEEE award, I saw at Serious Virtual Worlds and it is great), and I guess very soon with IBM’s Active Worlds, but am continuing this over next week to try and find out some more.

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19/02/2008 by nicola.

Only test posts in there at the moment, so I wouldn’t bother looking at. Using an app called BlogHud which at the moment is appearing on a separate blog. I am attempting to link it to my regular blog, but this will also wait until I can spend more time in there, but if you are interested in following anything I am going to be up to in SL may be worth getting a feed or checking in once a week, something like that.

Am also able to now ‘tweet’ in and out of Second Life using an app called Twitterbox. It only took a few mins to find and set up - but part of it does involve looking at a piece of code (for anyone who has never coded anything and finds the idea terrifying) and sticking in your twitter details. the instructions are very very easy to follow and it simply won’t accept your details if you either stick them in the wrong place or think you might have deleted something by mistake, so you can’t really go too far wrong

Have posted elsewhere but this can be very useful for a backup, if you are with a bunch of people who have not used Second Life for the first time and you have arranged an event/meeting in-world, if they are either running late, experiencing technical difficulties / logging in/ can’t figure out how to move / have teleported to a different location by mistake and / or lost, they could use either their phone or open a web page, to send a tweet through to you, which you can pick up.
Getting in and finding way around can be a big learning curve and if this is their first experience, it could put them off, but finding a back up plan - such as twitter, can help them overcome ‘perceived’ hurdles.

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07/02/2008 by nicola.

Bilkent Uni su anda 3boyutlu cep telepfonlari uzerinde calismaktadir. Daha fazla bilgi icin linki tiklayin.

There has been an EU funded project, running since 2004. They are investigating using mobile phones to create 3D environments/games.

Some links:
1.A paper has been produced on mobile 3D environments. They use the camera as the input device and the user’s physical movements are captured in incoming video. The paper then outlines how they map the motion to 2D and 3D interaction.
2. 3D phone project website has more details.

There is a lot of buzz about 3D in Turkey at the moment, we are having multiple requests from nephews for 3D glasses etc

Very cool stuff - would love to be a fly on the wall at the meeting today !

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05/02/2008 by nicola.

Some thoughts following setting up an avatar and visiting 3 today

There.com
Could download it onto desktop and could straightaway get going with avatar, no additional drivers, cards etc reqired. Did need to spend money to change basic outfit. Easy to chat, VOIP available but one off additional cost. Quick and easy to navigate. Currency and commercial options available, can create stuff and resell. Not as wide usage as 2L.

Second Life.
Doesn’t download / work with current desktop.
Similar to There, graphics better, more interactivity but not that much different. VOIP free. Particle Lab and Infolit very good examples of what can be done especially Particle lab.

You can download notes (like flashcards) with information on, touch things, move things, very interactive but without other people, its like visiting an exhibition or museum by yourself.

In hour or so, because I had done There.com first, was able to navigate fairly easy - more fidelity with graphics in terms of moving - i.e. if I don’t land carefully I fall over in a realistic way.

Need more time to explore both, but 1 hour was enough for me to cover basics of ‘dressing’, moving, talking via text chat and visiting other areas using teleport function.

In both There and Second Life, can take pictures of places visiting and save to desktop. RSS feeds of events available in There, didn’t get time in Second Life to see if same.

Multiverse.nettechnology platform - need to explore in more detail, went into Times Square briefly, you choose a character before you go in, at moment, no choice over appearance, some realistic graphics, but need to revist before evaluating, movement seemed fairly realistic in terms of walking.

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01/02/2008 by nicola.

Brilliant presentation from Roo Reynolds, explaining the people and social, community interaction rather than just the tech side of virtual worlds.

| View | Upload your own

Starting to look more and SL and virtual worlds as part of my new role here, pedagogical benefits, learning opportunities and social interaction etc

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