Entries by Aaron Griffiths

Had been contemplating video in Second Life lately and how it could be used effectively for presentations.  I guess I have never been that comfortable with streaming video into the Sl environment when it could be done just as well and probably with less hiccups over the web, but nonetheless still had it under consideration.  So what has that got to do with Pink Floyd.  Well an all time favourite band of mine I have of late been annoying my children with loud renditions of the Pulse DVD (my vacuum cleaning music *smiles*).  In one of those moments you have I'd thought of the possibilty of streaming the concert into SL for a party and creating dance animations to fit the music... the sort of thing you do contemplate as an Sler.  Low and behold I get an invitation this afternoon from two great friends to COME AND LOOK.  Below is what I got.... YouTube Pulse videos streamed into the inside surface of a 50m wide megaprim ball with an invisible dance floor across its middle.  Thanks Katipo and CiderJack... was a treat I needed and a good fertilising of imagination in terms of video possibility.  Yet to create the animations... but they'll come *grins*

For a video tutorial on streaming YouTube videos into Second Life go here.

Cheers
Aaron/Isa Goodman

Long White Cloud, Auckland University's Second Life sim, pushed its head above the SL waters this week and already the dust is starting to fly as the team begin to assemble the build.  Led by Scott Diener Ph.D., the Associate Director of IT Services, Academic and Collaborative Technologies, the island will be used generally for research purposes.  In Scott's words "Our initial goals will be to develop several medical simulations (e.g. a hospital environment), along with interactive spaces for students and staff...but all will be experimental".  The image below shows the sim build underway.  For anyone wishing to find out more about the University of Auckland's SL activities in Second Life you can contact Scott through sladmin@auckland.ac.nz

I look forward to seeing the development as it happens and will post further information as and when it becomes available.

Cheers
Aaron/Isa Goodman

During the last week Koru has been playing host to an interactive explanation of Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences, built by Zotarah Shepherd (SL name), one of the Kiwi Educators' Group's international members from California.  Zotarah has assembled the exhibit as part of her Masters and built a number of immersive, interactive displays to portray the different intelligences.  The exhibit is currently to be seen on the F/Xual Education Services parcel, NW Koru (down by the beach) and will be given a semi-permanent display position on general land once the project has been assessed by her lecturer.

The image below shows the attendees at last Sunday's Kiwi Educators session trying out the different displays.  Zotarah is definitely to be commended for all the hard work she has done creating the exhibit and being inworld for many hours talking with visitors to the displays.

Cheers

Aaron/Isa Goodman

After many months of setting up and finding our feet the NMIT owned Second Life sim Koru is starting to take shape as a uniquely New Zealand educational collaborative.  From a building perspective I have taken pains to give it a definitive Kiwi flavour, in the interest of creating a familiar environment for New Zealand users.  The central area, used mainly for meetings and presentations (though the odd dance or two gets thrown in) has been fashioned as a kauri grove with seating, a visual display board of past events and up to the left (see image below), a resource area for new users and educators.  Video or slide displays are added to the meeting area as required for different users.

Along with the Kiwi Educators group meetings a number of other presentations have been held here including one on midwifery hosted by Carolyn McIntosh, a midwifery lecturer from Otago Polytechnic, one from Leigh Blackall of Otago Polytechnic on Creative Commons and just recently, a live streamed-in concert from Nelson (thanks to Todd Cochrane for his streaming account, Doug for his engineering skills and Sam for the wonderful live performance).  And of course Clare Atkins of NMIT for organising this special event on my 2nd Rez-Day (my avatar's 2nd anniversary in SL).  As you can see below we all took advantage and danced to celebrate the occassion. *smiles*

And great to see today, Todd Cochrane of Weltec busy inworld introducing his students to the SL environment and letting them loose on SL's building tools on Weltec's private parcel on the sim (see below).

As the TEC funded project gets underway I expect Koru to get even busier as members start the actual work involved and interested educators gather to upskill, discuss and take part in this exciting challenge.  All in all it looks like a fun year ahead.

As an added note in terms of upskilling in SL, I am currently offering inworld building classes for Kiwi Educator group members.  If you wish to participate join the group in SL and IM me with your interest.  Places are limited so if you are keen let me know asap.

Regards

Aaron Griffiths/SL: Isa Goodman

Quite a time ago, while down in Wellington for the IBM forum, I met with a group of educators and began a conversation.  After many months the result has been an acceptance for funding from the TEC Encouraging and Supporting Innovation fund for what I hope will be a worthwhile educational project; Engaging with Second Life: real education in a virtual world.

The anticipated benefits of this project are:

• identifying the additional value of SL to the learning experience e.g. increased engagement, collaborative problem solving
• identifying the learning outcomes that would most benefit from the use of SL resources
• increased understanding of the benefits and challenges of teaching and learning in global virtual immersive environments for New Zealand educators and learners
• increased capability in designing and developing shareable resources for innovative delivery within SL for New Zealand educators and learners
• increased capability in teaching and learning within SL for New Zealand educators and learners
• increasing understanding of the benefits and challenges of cross-discipline and cross-institution collaboration in the development of online resources in SL
• the creation of a New Zealand space and community to encourage, support and share best practice in relevant SL education.

Early days obviously as the successful applicants have only just been announced but very exciting news.

Watch this space *smiles*

Aaron/Isa Goodman

Koru, NMITs collaborative educational sim, was host to an excellent gathering of midwives last Sunday. The meeting was hosted by Carolyn McIntosh, a midwifery lecturer from Otago Polytechnic and was attended by around 20 midwives from a number of different countries including the UK, USA and Canada as well as New Zealand of course.

The group has come together specifically to investigate the potential of virtual worlds in terms of opportunities for networking and communities of practise for midwives and intends to have weekly meetings on Koru (time permitting). It will be very interesting to follow the discussions and see where they lead. A screen shot of the meeting is shown below.

Regards
Aaron/Isa Goodman

Though not having blogged again for a while I have however been busy coding a new variant of RPG Storyteller for the Medical Dept of Auckland University, specifically for delivering medical case studies to under-graduate students. Though a big sideways step visually from the original this engine uses a large number of the original code blocks, being based on a similar concept of having an authorable xml document for the case study creation.

Menu and navigation button driven it supplies screens of text, images and movie clips. Popup assets such as documents, movies and audio can also be added to each screen. The menu display is configurable enabling the author to display all available content or demand a linear progression through the content by disabling unvisited areas of the case study. In an educational context investigation of student learning is also enabled through the use of questions (answer input, labeled movieClips, true/false, multichoice and multi-multichoice) with submitted answers saved off to an external database. Students can also save a current version of their progression through the case study to the local computer.

A capture of the test case study screen is shown below.

Regards
Aaron

It seems as though Second Life is starting to garner more interest in the educational sector in New Zealand with this being noticed particularly by the number of institutions with a presense on the Koru sim (the island that I administer and that is owned by NMIT).  We now have, in addition of course to NMIT, Massey University Albany, UCOL, Weltec, Otago Polytechnic and Open Polytechnic owning their own parcels.  In addition Victoria University has their own island in SL (as previously mentioned) and AUT language department has snapped up a parcel on the Cybrary City II sim.

It will be interesting to see what develops out of this community over the coming year in terms of integrating virtual environments into the educational toolbox.  I for one will be watching closely.

Aaron/SL: Isa Goodman

Its very unlike me to go a month between blogs on this site but my late redundancy has had me concentrating my efforts more on things that may progress my re-employment, rather than Second Life.  Kiwi Educators Sunday sessions had also come to a close a couple of weeks before Christmas and the few previous had low attendance due to end of year madness so a break was sort of looming anyway (btw... we'll be starting the sessions up again later on in January no doubt).

In the break I have thought quite a bit on SL and am re-evaluating what I'm doing there currently.  Not a lot of concrete conclusions so far but I do know that I'm dissatisfied with where I am in terms of teaching in these environents and want to practice in more tangible educational ways.  At the moment its all very much in the realms of theory in terms of what I actually do.  I'd definitely like it to me more than that this year.

Ok... New Year's resolution out of the way... except for the doing something about it *smiles*

Happy New Year All.

Aaron/SL: Isa Goodman

Last Wednesday and Thursday I had the privilege of attending the Digital Futures Summit held in Auckland, New Zealand.  I say privilege because it is not the sort of thing I could normally afford to attend.  But many thanks to Dexter Acquitaine (Pete Rive of LaunchSite) for streaming the complete 2 days into Second Life.  A very indepth conversation for sure and am looking forward to seeing whether the talk and the walk meet up.  Hoping they will.

Cheers

Aaron/SL: Isa Goodman

Would have liked to have been a little more upbeat on this post as we have had a great time over the last two Kiwi Educators' sessions, one especially informative and the other just great fun. 

The former relates to the IBM tour described in the last post and led by Pipe Hesse (SL), one of IBMs virtual world engineers, in which we were guided over a number of the IBM sims and were able to discuss many of the exciting research projects they are involved with.  I was very impressed by the Australian Open sim which was set up to feed in and visually display, in near real-time, captured data from the actual Australian Open.  Ball and player postion set by set was fed into the sim and SL users could take the position of the players on court and virtually experience the game.  Incredible!

Then on to the IBM Business Centre which is staffed 24/5 by IBM support people and enables you to basically get all the same information that you would if you dialled the standard IBM sales line.  It also has great references and public conference areas and architecturally was also very impressive.

From there we teleported to the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Hub which uses SL to teach people about SOA in an interesting and informative way.  IBM are currently developing a more game based approach to this form of tuition and as an extra to the SOA Hub we got to have a quick look at SOA Adventure Island.  Will be keen to go back there when development is complete.

As happens on these tours all too often, time flew past, and before we knew it the tour was over.  Pipe (and Gizzy) offered to give us another one at a later date so am looking forward to that possibility.

The week after the IBM tour we abandoned discussions, tours and tutorials and set out to PARTY!!  The occassion was the first Rez-Day for Arwenna Stardust (Dr Clare Atkins of NMIT), rez-day being the day your avatar first appears (or is rezzed) inworld in Second Life.  Was a chance for us all to just let our hair down and socialise for a change.  Another great night *grins*

Unfortunately for myself the upbeat mood bought on by these occassions was blued dramatically by receiving notice of my redundancy a couple of days ago.  So Aaron/Isa is now job hunting.  All offers considered in the online and virtual eLearning worlds.  Seriously folks if there are any opportunities going, either full-time or on a contract basis I would be grateful for the chance to apply.  In that vein I have attached my CV to the Files section of this project site.  Contact details are on the last page.

Regards
Aaron/SL: Isa Goodman

Just to update you all on the itinerary for the IBM Second Life islands tour (see this post).  The tour, guided by Pipe Hesse, one of IBMs virtual world research team, will cover the following: 

• Tour of Australian Open Sim demonstrating bringing external data into Second Life and visualising it
• IBM Virtual Worlds Business Center
• Core memory exhibit
• SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) Hub and SOA Adventure Island
• and if we have time, we'll go through some of the simple educational games around IBM and Open Source technologies. I know I'll be making time for every bit of it I can *smiles*.

The tour will kick off from the IBM Australian Development Labs building at 8pm (NZ time) on Sunday 28th.  Note: You must logged into Second Life to activate the inworld links below.

IBM Australian Development Labs

For those relatively new to the group who would like a quick group intro/orientation, myself and other group members will be at the Koru Kiwi Educators meeting area from around 7.00pm until the start of the tour.  Note: The tour itinerary can also be found on the Kiwi Educators' photo board in the meeting area (click on Next Kiwi Ed Group Session button for notecard).

Kiwi Educators' Meeting Area

Tour attendees must belong to the Second Life Kiwi Educators group for the purposes of inworld communication and entry permissions to some of the IBM sims.

Times for zones other than New Zealand can be found here.

Regards
Aaron/SL: Isa Goodman

Yesterday afternoon I had the pleasure of attending Victoria University's School of Digital Design students' festival of machinima, on their island MediaZone.  Yes finally the borders came down and in getting to see their island at last, I can understand the need to keep the casual visitor out.  MediaZone is basically set up as a number of movie sets where obviously students have been building, directing and filming their machinima and in the nature of the real life versions closed sets are definitely called for.  A storyboard/design area is set up on the platform that can be seen above the island.  A bird's eye view of the island can be seen below.

The screenings were held in an open air theatre (see below) in the middle of the island and though Arwenna (who attended with me) couldn't get the video stream working I did get to see a fair sample of the work produced.  It was a shame in a way that most of the audience consisted of the students as some of the work definitely deserved a larger crowd.  I would also have liked to hear each of the students introduce their work but its possible that they were doing so on their group channel and forgot there were non groupies about.  It certainly would have given it more of a "festival" atmosphere.

Cheers
Aaron/Isa Goodman

I am astounded at how long it has been since I have blogged, or indeed done anything, on this project site.  I still check the downloads periodically and am very pleased to still see a regular number happening each week but other projects, mainly my work inside the MUVE Second Life, have unfortunately left me little time to do any further work on RPG Storyteller.

I was pleased though when attending MoodleMootNZ07 a few weeks back (where I presented on Sloodle, a mashup of the LMS Moodle and Second Life), to see that the variant I created for the Open Educational Resources repository has now been populated with content and an example can viewed online.  The following link should open the example but if not try going in through the OER link, Construction Planning (at the bottom of that page), then look for 3. Making decisions - Simulation exercise.

Construction Planning : Simulation exercise

Nice to see an actual example of the Storyteller (albiet a variant) being used in an educational setting.

Enjoy
Aaron

Slowly, step by step, I'm starting to tranform small areas of Koru, NMIT's Second Life island, into little bits of home, at least to the point that it will be easily recognisable as being part of Aotearoa.  I finally managed to get a decent photo of a ponga frond and with quite a bit of warping got it to sit reasonably well on a torus.  The result can be seen in the image below.  Now to get a half decent shot of a trunk thats not too bent so that I can get full-length shots rotationally around it.

Have also been adjusting some of my standard items (e.g. the torch stand post) to give them a slightly more Kiwi feel by adding paua trim to them.  Definitely finer detail but the little things can all add up to give the general feel.  And in the Kiwi Educators meeting area Arwenna has added her bird sound effects that really make it feel as though you are sitting in a bush clearing.  It was rather funny the other night to be on Koru, hearing the sound of a morepork (there are day and night sounds) and to be also hearing one just outside my house.

Cheers
Aaron/SL: Isa Goodman