eLearning conference

The conference this year proved to have some particularly interesting parallel presentations for me as they included two on the use of Second Life and one on collaborative distance learning. For our own part I felt the Bromley session ‘Virtual Landscapes’ went down well, as we tried to leverage out the clear success of the four trials that we had conducted with student groups, against the clear and obvious problems that we ran into while driving OpenSim to its limits with multiple physics objects in a mega region. On balance though, I felt it was all received very positively, given that we were able to produce some good student feedback and evaluation of the platform, after all lets remember the software is still in Alpha release and given that fact , its actually amazingly robust. I was going to include links to my resources on the day in this blog but decided instead to give a single link to the presentation where you will find them on a links page toward the end. Apart from the three student feedback reports, you may like to have a listen to the mp3 file. I decided that the standard feedback forms did not really support a few questions that I had in mind, and so collared three of my group who seemed to be hanging around with not very much to do and asked them, not much of an approach to random systematic sampling I agree. Anyway apart from the very rewarding responses that they gave, a surprise was that they felt the thing that made a virtual world a real benefit could also be its downfall, so see what you think on that one. The final link on the page is to an swf movie that I captured using CamStudio of the Maze game; the file is big so will take a while before it starts to play. As always it was good to network and meet up with old friends, which leaves me looking forward to next year. If you have any comments then please feel free to post.

Kind regards Vega

Good signs of growing pains in the Metaverse

Some very encouraging news for both OpenSim and Second Life as OpenSim as the framework begins to show signs of expansion into mobile and web applications. All good news for the metaverse roadmap.

Getting ready for conference

Just putting the finishing touches to the presentation for the Greenwich University e-Learning conference on July 7. The OpenSim project, despite still being in Alpha release, has proved to be a useful development tool for our students and equally worthwhile experience for us in running a virtual world platform. We shall be including details of four separate projects that have been run this year, including feedback. The conference will also provide a good platform for us to advise others wishing to deploy the simulator, as we now have a not inconsiderable amount of experience in dealing with the daily running issues that come about when you decide to deploy mega regions or make use of functions that have at this stage remain not fully supported. Having said, this I feel that as the platform moves into Beta and then finally to stable release, most of our current advice is likely to simply become negated as a matter of course. I you are unable to make it along to the conference yourself; I shall be posting our presentation and student survey reports to this blog.

Regards Vega

Is Open Source like an Ant hill?

The answer to this is almost certainly no, as you will come to agree I am sure if you follow this link to a recent podcast from the BBC. The podcast features a series of enlightening interviews from both within and beyond the software community that include, Mozilla Firefox Foundation, Linux Foundation, IBM, Microsoft and a Canadian mining company. As an educator now making real use the Open Source virtual world environment OpenSim, which lets face it looks and feels very much like Linden Labs Second Life, I found the podcast well worth a listen and recommend it. If you have any views then please feel free to comment to this posting.

regards Vega

Solar Cell Project Student Feedback

The feedback report from my BTEC National students who took part in the OpenSim Solar Cell project is now available from this link. Please feel free to take a look, If you have any comments, then by all means drop a reply to this posting.

Kind regards Vega

Web Services Project

The Web Services project for the second year FdEng Software Development students involves using http get and xml-rpc techniques for two way communication between an in-world avatar scanner and php/mysql on an external Web server.

This project has been underway for over two weeks and student response
has been enthusiastic. Most students now have a prototype avatar
scanner working. Several students have been spending a lot of time
outside college in-world. When many of the college PC's were
inaccessible for three days due to the worldwide fiasco caused by the
bug in McAfee anti-virus software, students were encouraged to work
from home and remote in-world support was provided.

The FdEng students have required relatively little support in learning
to use OpenSim. One of the main questions on starting out referred to
customising the gender of the default avatar. Some students spent a
considerable amount of time getting their appearance right, despite
the fact that the projects are individual and do not require social
interaction in-world.

The main problems encountered so far have been:

1) Students editing the terrain on their own initiative, necessitating
a reload of the terrain map from the simulator console.
2) OpenSim crashing every 24-48 hours, which necessitated a simulator
restart. This has been traced to one particular remote client, which
has been causing the simulator to spiral out of control by opening
more and more connections. Investigations are still underway to
determine the exact cause of the problem. The short term solution has
been to ask the student involved to refrain from logging in to OpenSim
from their home PC!

An end of project questionnaire for the students to complete has been
posted on the college VLE and the results of this will be posted to
this blog in due course. In addition a presentation on our use of
OpenSim will be made at the University of Greenwich eLearning
conference on July 7th 2010.
(http://web-dev-csc.gre.ac.uk/conference/conf62/index.php)

Clive Pro

Solar Panel project and beyond

With the work in Bromsim for my level 3 students completed, I have been spending some time during this end of term marking the project. The images that I have posted along with this entry are in fact some examples from the finished work. The activity that took place in-world was certainly encouraging for me and had some interesting and I must say unexpected surprises from time to time. In particular there was the case of one avatar, who shall remain nameless, who seemed to decide that rather than just spend the necessary time to orientate, would simply ask everyone and anyone else that happened to be in-world at the time for solutions. Clearly this became just too much for one group, with the result that one of its members, who shall also retain anonymity, created a large empty cylinder with linked top plate and placed the structure over their inquisitive companion. Finding themselves encapsulated in a rather small confined space, from which there seemed to be no immediate means of escape, did result in some frantic calls to the Estate Manager at the time, me. I guess at best this has been our first example here at Bromsim of what could be described as virtual world social exclusion, fascinating how quickly and imaginatively these new world skills come to be applied!

Next for me will be the new unit starting in the summer term, Designing Computer Games. In the last academic year I made use of Second Life for the project, which if you are interested has details including the results of a student feedback survey posted on my Shimmer Island blog

http://shimmer-island.blogspot.com/

When I suggested that we could continue with a similar scenario for this year there was enthusiastic agreement, “as long as we get to use guns”, someone said, yet more agreement. So it appears that the legend of the Illumni will enter yet another chapter. In fact staying with Bromsim for this could be a very useful outcome for engagement as one group had already started work on a large space station, just because they can, placed at high altitude above the sim, and I think this would form a realistic development area for them.

On return to the college in the new term, I shall be handing out a questionnaire as a means of gathering feedback from the students on their views of using Bromsim, and will be posting the results of that on this blog, so you may like to stay in touch for this as well as seeing how we progress with games design.

Bye for now, Vega