So far it’s gone fairly smoothly, though there will be some rough edges to sort out over coming weeks no doubt.

But you can see a fairly similar looking blog to this one over at… http://lg.dlivingstone.com/

See you there!

• Tim Berners-Lee
• Sherry Turkle
• Howard Rheingold
• Arianna Huffington
• Stephen Fry
• Vint Cerf
• … and many others

A fantastic learning resource.The series itself is good viewing, though in a few places I thought the narrative imposed in the first couple of episodes a little off.  The first episode almost seemed to claim that the big professional blogs (e.g. Arianna and the Huffington Post) as a self-imposed elite attempting to control the blogosphere. But the Huffington Post doesn’t stop anyone who wants to from creating their own blog – and the rise of the professional blog can hardly be blamed for the millions of dead blogs out there. The bit on ‘balkanization’ was spot on however.

In Episode Two Aleks very conveiniently met the Russian teenager responsible for all the cyber-attacks on Estonia. How do we know he was responsible for all the cyber-attacks? Because he said so. The rushes of that interview are not online though, but wish the link between botnets and other forms of crime were hammered home in that interview. The only people in control of botnets are criminals – so if he was responsible for even some of the attacks, what other criminal activity is he involved in? I have to accept though that Aleks was almost certainly caught off guard with the confession – I’m not sure I’d be able to retain enough composure to ask the right questions in a similar situation.

While leaves Digital Nation, a PBS programme from the US. This has a good collection of interviews online too – mostly from members of the public, and these make a good resource for anyone interested in looking at the effects the internet and mobile technologies are having on modern lives. Check them out here.

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.

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>

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!

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

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 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.

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.

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!)