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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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…

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?

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 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…