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…

OER in Games, Sims and Virtual Worlds

My talk earlier this week at SJSU SLIS on ‘Opening up education in games, simulations and virtual worlds’ went pretty well, with some good questions and response from the audience on campus and in Second Life. A video of the talk is being prepared by the tech support folks, but in the meantime I’ve posted my slides to SlideShare (under CC-Attribution-ShareAlike):

To summarise some of the key points:

• Generally speaking computer games are too expensive to produce for most OER purposes
• Even where games include source code and art assets, and allow remixing, the level of expertise required means that 3rd party remixing of OER games is unlikely
• User-generated content in *some* virtual worlds (Second Life is the key example) can be produced much more cheaply than creating novel games or simulations
• There are current challenges in effectively sharing OER content in virtual worlds
• ‘Open’ can refer to content that is free to use/visit, content that might be free to copy, content that might be free to give-away and content that might be free to remix/repurpose. Check the terms and conditions!
• Being able to backup content out of virtual worlds more readily will allow virtual world OER content to be stored in repositories outside of the virtual world, and help guarantee availability over longer periods of time
• Linden Lab have recently announced policies relating to copying items out of Second Life, and more action is expected soon. Using some copying technologies may result in banning?

Answering demand for instruction and guidance… in real-time

A mind-blowing article in November issue of Wired (17.11 – not yet on the web) on page 158 – and it isn’t even on the cover. Demand Media, which runs sites such as eHow and has published tens of thousands of instructional videos on YouTube produce over 4,000 articles and videos EACH DAY.

Demand use a few computer programs to mine current search engine terms, the ad market and competitor articles to determine daily what topics and articles to produce. A computer algorithm generates suggested article titles based on this information, these are then proofed and edited by humans proofers before the titles are added to an online repository of articles needed. Freelance writers and video producers trawl this site, write up their articles or shoot their videos for low, low fees (a typical video producer might need to make 10 videos a day to earn a wage).

This is a highly industrialized method of production, production to meet demand in real-time. And all of this is funded through advertising revenues…

Are there ways that academia could better use some of these notions? I would hate to see such an industrialised mode of content production, but the contrast with institutions, consortiums and even nations that have in the past spent millions of pounds on distance learning initiatives that have failed to return even one tenth of the investment could not be starker.

Yet another AR game – Invizimals

Yet another Augmented Reality game makes it to commercial handhelds – this time the Sony PSP (with Go!Cam). Invizimals is a Pokemon pet training game that allows users to capture pets, then trade them or pit them in combat against friends’ pets – the twist being that you have to first find them in their hiding places somewhere around your house, and the AR interface places the Invizimals in the environment. Looks good – but from viewing the video I think I’m somewhat disappointed that the use of real world environment seems very limited – but I think more interesting and clever exploitation of the environment might be a bit beyond the current generation hand held hardware.

It would be great to be proven wrong though…

Distance Learning initiatives reviewed

On Friday, Paul Bacisch of Re.ViCa gave talk and led some discussion at the University of the West of Scotland, just along from my own office. One of the key aspects of his talk was consideration of the Open Learning Innovation Fund – a large HEFCE initiative to support the development of distance learning activities of UK universities. But not for all the UK – as HEFCE’s remit only covers England, Scotland (along with Ulster and perhaps also Wales) is not covered. This would seem to put Scottish universities at a significant disadvantage, however as Paul’s talk amply showed large investments of money do not always lead to success.

Indeed many of the largest and most well funded distance learning projects fail to cover their own expenses. Paul has some direct experience of this from his time at the UK eUniversity, and his presentation was on the same day that THES reported on the small returns on investment so far from the large international U21Global collaborative distance learning project.

Technology is not a differentiator, with VLEs available to all – pedagogy is more important than technology. But Paul he was particularly critical of the lack of market research involved in many of the larger projects, and highlighted a number of success stories. These tend to be home grown, organically developed, and as likely to come from the FE or commercial sectors as from a university. Basically, universities that are doing it right have got a head start and are succeeding – most universities are not.

Meanwhile world markets are not sitting ducks – Paul pointed out that distance learning offerings come from over 100 countries. As well as other British institutions, American, Canadian, and European universities, colleges and companies, recruiters have to also consider the local competition.

At the end of the meeting it was interesting to discuss with other faculty from across the university about where we might be going wrong with some of our own DL offerings. Illuminating, but nothing I can share here

Scottish Learning Festival ‘09

First post from this year’s Scottish Learning Festival. I made it to two talks so far – Derek Robertson’s presentation of Canvas – the OpenSim based 3D online art gallery for Scottish schools, and Ollie Bray’s more general one on game based learning. More on that later.

From the expo floor there is the usual mix of computer, smart board, educational play, books, software, etc etc vendors. What caught my eye the most was the connectED stand. For a few years now, connectED have been providing Sony PSP hardware, software and training specifically for the education sector – but it was not that that caught my attention.

They are currently working on a system called Second Sight – this is an augmented reality authoring toolkit for teachers. This was demoed on PSP, but education director Andy Goff assures me that a Nokia version is very well advanced with iPhone also in the works.

In the PSP screen you can see the AR dinosaur overlaid ontop of the camera view

connectED are apparently already working with English Heritage on using this on some EH sites, and have a number of collaborations active for rolling this out. Final product ready in about six months, but already the authoring environment seems very straightforward – allowing markers to be inserted into books, into displays or into the environment to add AR audio, video and 3D content.

What is Connectivism trying to be?

After a little reflection, and reading a little more from the forums/blogs etc., I thought I’d ask what Connectivism is trying to be rather than the more obvious ‘What is Connectivism’ – but there is a reason for this, and I think it might help me get to heart of my issues with Connectivism. Apologies for any incoherent rambling below…