Where next for virtual worlds?

On Monday I had the pleasure of presenting at the Eduserv ‘where next for virtual worlds’ workshop. Being asked to talk about the future gave me a nice opportunity to widely name-check a whole bunch of stuff and try and imagine how it might all tie into virtual worlds and learning environments a few years down the line. Since then it’s been full on marking and grading, just enough time to post this…

All of the presentations from the day are online at the Eduserv website. Most of these are in the form of embedded SlideShare presentations – though there is also a (slightly noisy) video of Ralph Schroeder’s presentation there. Hopefully other videos will follow. A wee note tho – if you are looking at John Kirriemuir’s presentation or my own, you’ll find a lot of extra supporting text and notes is only visible when viewing via the SlideShare website itself.

This is a bit of a problem with SlideShare embeds – it isn’t at all obvious when there is a lot of hidden extra content that you can only get via the SlideShare site itself.

(It also took me three attempts to get my slides to load up correctly without blank slides. And I’m not too sure why…)

As to the talks themselves… I enjoyed Ralph’s presentation – some good examples of the differences between high-end video conferencing, immersive virtual reality and virtual worlds and their strengths and weaknesses. His argument that there are two end states got a bit of a picking over on twitter afterwards.

Over on her blog, JISC’s Heather Williamson provides a summary of the day.

Intl. Journal of Virtual and Personal Learning Environments 1(1)

The launch issue of the International Journal of Virtual and Personal Learning Environments (of which I am an associate editor) is now available. Contents here.

A few papers relevant to games and learning. The late (and sadly missed) Leslie Jarmon’s article Homo Virtualis: Virtual Worlds, Learning, and an Ecology of Embodied Interaction. I’m not overly taken with the idea of the emergence of a new type of human (similar to my disquiet with many of the notions around Digital Natives), but
the paper does provide some good material on how immersion in Second Life affects many of its users – both in and out of the virtual world.

Michael Vallance, et al. have a paper which extends their ALT-C presentation on Designing Effective Spaces, Tasks and Metrics for Communication in Second Life Within the Context of Programming LEGO NXT Mindstorms™ Robots.While the students were working to programming robots inside Second Life, the focus of this paper is the communication between students. A number of factors supporting effective communication were identified, including such simple but effective points such as:

• “Blend familiarity such as use of print-based materials”

A third article, from fwo of my UWS colleagues – Thomas Hainey and Thomas Connolly, is on Evaluating Games-Based Learning:

One of the main problems with games-based learning is that there is a distinct lack of empirical evidence supporting the approach. This paper will describe the evaluation of the requirements collection and analysis process using a newly developed framework for the evaluation of games-based learning and will focus on evaluation from a pedagogical perspective.

The other two papers in the issue will be of interest to a wider audience – in these Martin Weller and Niall Sclater (both of the Open University) consider The Centralisation Dilemma in Educational IT and eLearning in the Cloud respectively.

Subscription required for access to full text (or online purchase for individual articles) – though I note that there is a form to request a free sample issue. <SHAMELESS PROMOTION>And of course you can request the journal for your institutions library.</SHAMELESS PROMOTION>

Looking ahead to 2010 and 2020

I’m a bit late with my ‘predictions for the new year/decade’ post… but on Tuesday night I took part in a Virtual Worlds in Education Roundtable panel discussion (a ‘first of the month’ panel is a regular departure from the normal roundtable format, before you ask!) on predicting the possible and preferable future of virtual worlds in education. As the meeting took place shortly after Second Life’s Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon posted his own predictions for the coming year and decade, his comments naturally became a point of reference for much of the discussion.

Image: VWER Panel, taken by Olivia Hotshot

The panel featured Chris Collins/Fleep Tuque, Anthony Fontana, AJ Kelton/AJ Brooks (Chair), myself, Ken Hudson/Kenny Hubble and Jon Richter. Sarah Robbins was sadly unable to make it

We all seemed to have high hopes for the potential of Augmented Reality and mobile technology to enhance and extend the capabilities of virtual worlds – though I felt there to be a lot of uncertainty about how exactly the very different worlds of mobile AR and desk-bound virtual worlds will best be meaningfully and usefully merged. Charles Stross’ “Halting State” presents one picture, but still a little way to go to get there.

From M Linden’s blog post a few things stood out:

• Chris and myself were both excited by the prospects of an improved API for communications between SL and the web. Currently a large degree of hackery is required to connect web 2.0 applications to SL – the app might provide a simple API, but to connect that to SL almost always requires creating an intermediary service running on a server to act as a go-between.
• M’s predictions for 2020 were a mixed bag. Some outlined systems that are perfectly feasible already, or have already been demonstrated (The VUE group at Edinburgh have demonstrated video/virtual conferencing already, along the lines M suggests might happen in 2020: ‘Walls in your office become portals to the metaverse’)
• “Second Life is galactic.” Some discussion here, that is Linden Lab want this outcome then they will have to work hard to ensure that SL makes itself an essential hub world for the growing number of other virtual worlds out there. Second Life is currently a de-facto standard – with the largely compatible OpenSim being one of the main competitors. Can Linden Lab pull off this feat?
• “Second Life becomes a standard in business, education and government.” Well, it already is largely a standard for virtual worlds – simply because it is the dominant virtual world. Again, the issue for 2020 is whether SL will stay that way…
• “SLHD blurs the distinction between real and virtual.” This is possibly the only area where M actually makes some far-sighted predictions. And what he is looking to is virtual world technology that provides the physical sensations of the places, objects and avatars one interacts with. This IMHO is something that will remain in the research lab, demonstration systems and theme park – I don’t see this as being a regularly used technology to access virtual worlds by 2020. If nothing else, it goes against current trends towards more mobile uses of technology, and increasing access via mobile and low powered devices.
• M also suggests that improvements to content management and protection are in the pipeline – this comes a little late for many inworld vendors whose hard work has been cracked and made freely available due to flaws in SL’s security and copy protection mechanisms. (I am talking here about scripted objects, where the scripts themselves should be secure – an inherent feature of digital technology such as SL is that it simply is not possible to prevent theft of textures and 3D data for models – as this data is required by the client to render content. Scripts are supposed to be secure – but have not been.)

In discussion I made one prediction for next year that I’d like to withdraw – I said that at the first VWER meeting of 2011 we’d almost certainly meet in SL, not some other virtual world. It’s still most likely place to hold the meeting – but an OpenSim grid now how to be a very strong second place contender.

It was a long and free flowing chat – apologies if I’ve missed out your personal highlights!

Computer Programming as Digital Literacy

If the so-called ‘Digital Natives’ don’t know how to program a computer, are they really digitally literate? In his blog, Tony Forster presents an “argument for the authoring of interactive or programmable multimedia as an important meta-literacy skill.”  It’s a good start to this particular discussion, I think.

Certainly, in traditional schooling literacy is not just about reading – it is also about authoring. With digital literacy, in writing blogs or posting videos to YouTube students are using digital technologies while authoring written or visual content. They are acting as consumers of digital technology while producing content. Full digital literacy requires the ability to create new interactive experiences – i.e. programming. This view is also presented by Mitch Resnick et. al. in their recent paper for CACM:

Resnick, M., Maloney, J., Monroy-Hernández, A., Rusk, N., Eastmond, E., Brennan, K., et al. (2009). Scratch: programming for all. Commun. ACM, 52(11), 60-67. doi: 10.1145/1592761.1592779

Festive reading: Two virtual world reports

Some festive reading for folks not suffering under the weight of recently released books on education in virtual worlds.

First up, Virtual World Watch released the 7th in the series of reports surveying use of virtual worlds in UK further and higher education – get it here. The other report is the SLOODLE project’s final report to Eduserv. No, SLOODLE isn’t ‘finished’, the project is continuing – although the pace of development may be slower until additional funding is secured.

More on the report here, on the SLOODLE blog.

The VirtualWorldWatch reports are also Eduserv funded – and will happily continue for a while yet. John Kirriemuir has done a good job reading through a large number of responses, seeking out commanalities and identifying current issues. From the summary on the VWW blog of the latest instalment:

Overall, the picture is one of more virtual world activity in UK academia than in previous years.

…

While cases of virtual world use in academia have steadily risen, evaluations and evidence of their effectiveness has been fragmented and low-key. Though the same observation could be leveled at many other technologies – take a bow, Virtual Learning Environments – used in education.Many academics – possibly a significant majority – are still wary, sceptical or openly hostile to virtual world use in education. More visible proof of where it works may swing the more open-minded of them. With the mass of teaching and research activity currently under way in higher education, it’s only reasonable to hope for more (and better) evaluations, and clarity concerning where virtual worlds can be put to good use and where not. For proof, evidence, data and convincing arguments, 2009 to 2010 feels like the year of virtual world expectation.

The 3D web is getting closer…

I’m writing this post using the ‘nightly build’ version of Firefox, with a single (easily changed) setting altered. This allows me to view some of the early WebGL (the web version of the OpenGL graphics library for javascript) demos in all their glory. Well, the demos that work anyway!

The WebGL draft specification was only published yesterday, but intrepid folks have been building demos for a while now based on early implementations. Of the three mentioned here, I could only get the last one to work, but the animation was very smooth. The Mozilla Hacks blog also has a simple demo with a 3D creature exported from Spore.

WebGL enabled versions of Firefox, WebKit (which is used in Safari) and Chrome are all available – see browsers with support for WebGL. I’ve only tried Firefox, but it works pretty smoothly. Download and install the ‘nightly build’ version of Firefox – don’t worry, it won’t remove or replace your existing installation. On windows it installs into a different folder and with different shortcut names (the reassuring ‘Minefield’!).

The executable file itself is still called firefox.exe, which has the side effect (on Windows Vista at any rate) that you can only run one version at a time. Closing Firefox completely then choosing your existing Firefox shortcut or one of the new Minefield shortcuts will allow you to swap between them.

I’m *hoping* to find time to play around with writing some demo 3D code for WebGL (perhaps sneak it into one of my classes next semester?) – and am looking forward to seeing what great apps come down the pipeline in the next couple of years.

SLOODLE wins 4th Novatica Award

From http://www.stellarnet.eu/news/2009/11/03/50/ :

In the 4th edition of the Novática Award for the best paper published by the journal in 2008, the jury has selected the article of Daniel Livingstone from the University of the West of Scotland and Jeremy Kemp from San José State University on “Integrando entornos de aprendizaje basados en Web y 3D: Second Life y Moodle se encuentran” (”Integrating Web-Based and 3D Learning Environments: Second Life Meets Moodle”).

The article was published in the issue #193 of Novática (May-June 2008), within the monograph “El futuro de la tecnología educativa” (“Technology-Enhanced Learning”). It appeared as a spanish translation of the English special issue appearing simultaneously in UPGRADE. The editors of the monograph have been Carlos Delgado-Kloos from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and Fridolin Wild from the Open University of the UK.

The Award, consisting of a diploma, will presented in Madrid, November 13th, 2009, Friday morning, within the frame of a Software Quality event organized by the Spanish Ministry of Industry and ATI, the Spanish a IT association that publishes Novática.

The Jury was composed by the Editors of the Technical Sections of Novática, the Chief Editor of our journal and a representative of the Board of ATI (Asociación de Técnicos de Informática), the publisher of Novática.

Details about the awards event (in Spanish) are here.

The Obligitary Wave Post – with added AR

I’ve been spending a little time with Google Wave over the last week or so – nothing much, just very light puttering about. I think there are issues about persistance, vulnerability of public waves to vandalism (much more fragile than Wiki), and a general messiness as folk try and figure out how to actually use Wave productively. Basically I haven’t got very far with it.

Meanwhile, other folks are already thinking about how to use Google Wave as the underlying protocol and communications architecture for… stuff. Prime example: AR Wave – building a distributed Augmented Reality system ontop of Wave. (In following this, I also discovered that it is possible to embed a view of a Wave in a web-page – as here.)

If you have Google Wave access, you can hopefully join the wave here (hope the link works!)

Technology Strategy?

Technology Strategy?

Originally uploaded by Daniel Livingstone.

Posting from Second Life at the Technology Strategy Board island – and wondering more than a little what strategy they actually have for using the virtual world.

It is undoubtably a ‘nice’ island, but like many in Second Life it seems like an virtual world presence that has been created specifically to host a launch event, gather some publicity and allow the owners to say they are in Second Life. Are there any plans to actually *use* this space?

The blog linked to here doesn’t inspire confidence – having last been updated in December last year.

Handheld Learning 2009

I *still* haven’t found time to watch all the videos from ALT-C, or review all the virtual world related papers that I picked out from the proceedings. Now the video and audio proceedings are available from Handheld Learning 2009, here: http://www.handheldlearning2009.com/proceedings.

I wonder if I download the proceedings to my phone and put it under my pillow if I’ll be able to absorb all the information by osmosis…