jmthoma5's blog

This is my final entry for the student blog of the Spring ELI focus session.  As I mentioned earlier, I have dropped this laptop on its head a few too many times and it has some hardware issues with powering up and video display changes.  These led to the loss of my notes on the Project Parlor sessions on Tuesday.  Fortunately, I attended, and have reported in depth on two of the sessions I attended Wednesday that covered quite a bit more material.  And I had already reported on the Haptic Force-feedback session from Tuedsay.  So that leaves two sessions for me to cover here, albeit from memory.

First was the GeoWall, presented by Michael Kelly.  Michael is an independent designer who has demonstrated how GeoWall can be used to provide 3D simulations to the classroom.  I was blown away by the fidelity of this tecnology.  The resolution was near-HD quality and the depth was astonishing considering it was projected onto a 7foot diagonal screen that was more than 20 feet away from me.  From a hardware perspective, it seems to be consist of two LCD projectors hooked to a PC and 3D glasses for the students.  These are not the crappy red/blue 3D glasses, but the IMAX variety where each lens is polarized and the planes of polarization are at right angles to each other (so when you look through the glasses at someone else who is wearing the same style glasses, one lens appears black).  I assume that similar polarizing filters are either within or snapped onto the LCD projectors.

Just down the road from us at UNC-Greensboro, Dr. Jeffrey Sarbaum has guided the development on an on-line game, written entirely in Macromedia's Flash, that covers the entire syllabus of an ECON 201 course.  For me, this was fascinating.  We can talk all we want about how new technology MIGHT help to teach certain topics or concepts, but to try to put an entire semester into a game - that is audacious.   I don't think many of the folks in this community realize how difficult and time-consuming good game construction can be.  Just as a 30 second TV commercial requires many hours of storyboarding, set design, rehearsal, filming and editing...30 seconds of computer game time can take many person-weeks to build.  Trying to replicate the 30-40 hours of a standard college lecture-based course means an incredible investment of design time.

As a professional economist, Dr. Sarbaum understands these costs very well.   However, I think he is overly modest in describing the benefits of the game his group has produced.  Yes, it is linear, and no, it does not have the photo-realistic graphics of the latest generation of console games, but I believe he has done the very hard work of translating traditional pedagogy into a game context.  Furthermore, he has done a great job in situating the game within a broader course infrastructure.  Students go through a course web page to directly access each of the four levels of the game.  Each level contains three quests.  Instructors closely monitor the progress of individual students and the entire class through the game.  When something seems to be causing problems, Dr. Sarbaum records a podcast to more fully describe the difficult concept and posts in online to help the students overcome whatever obstacle is stopping them.  Within the game, students are monitored and progressively stronger hints are offered when they get in trouble.  In addition, Elluminate-enabled lectures on the web page allow traditional lecture+blackboard type instruction to be accessible to the students.

The format of the ELI Session led everyone through five "Project Parlors" Tuesday afternoon for 15 minute introductions.  On Wednesday, each participant chose two of these projects to attend for more in-depth 45 minute sessions.  The Second Life parlor featured 30 or more laptops all with Second Life (SL) loaded up and ready to go.  Instructor Sarah Smith Robbins had her laptop screen projected on the mega screens around class for all to see.

Now, Sarah had wisely told everyone to register for a free SL account (http://secondlife.com/) the day before and almost everyone followed through.  Participants were segregated so that experienced users sat next to newbies (or NooBs) and some screen sharing was happening.

Okay, now I am going to write this just in case someone is reading this who knows nothing of Second Life.  Hopefully I can pull this off, because even though I am the "Student Blogger" who spans generations and has wasted more hours in games than many of you combined, I had never ventured into SL until just before this conference.  And frankly, I did not get what any of the fuss was about.

So, here is what we did in the session.  We all "teleported" to Middletown island.  Grok?  Didn't think so.  One of the primary ways that SL makes money is by having folks buy land.  Organizations who buy land often end up buying entire "islands".  Middletown island is the island associated with Ball State University, where Dr. Robbins teaches.  In SL you can move your "avatar" (the little 3D cartoon that represents you) by walking, flying, or by teleporting.  In the first two cases, you use keyboard keys and you see your avatar cross the space from point A to point B.  To teleport, you click on a button that says "search" and a menu pops up with locations (islands) you might want to port to.  By default, it shows this long list of available locations sorted by popularity.  From this list one is quickly able to discern that a number of popular places in SL focus on sex, gambling, and sex.  But we don't have time for that now, so we type "middletown" into a little text box on the search menu and shazzam! our screens start showing the same landscape we have been seeing on Sarah's screen projection up front, and in fact our  "avatars" start popping into existence on her screen.

I need to leave a bit early today to pick up my kids.  I have more notes to publish on the breakout sessions.  Today I attended the ECON201 and Second Life sessions.  Check this space later this evening.

jt

Whil Plavis, former student body president (as the pirate captain, see: http://www.whil.us/pirate/index.html), spoke about online time consuming real time. 

His talk was just a few slides but it generated more questions from the audience than any other.  His main points (again, a cyberdog ate my notes) were that he and others greatly underestimate the amount of time they have spent online gaming.  Specifically, with World of Warcraft (WoW), released just 800 days ago, Whil discovered he has spent a total of 32 days online.  He surveyed a large set of WoW users and got only around 30 responses.  So this is not a scientific sample, but it showed a range of a few days to 300 days total of on-line time in WoW.

The biggest reaction Whil received, however were for some specific anecdotes.  He has friends who used to do sports and outdoor activities that now choose to spend a majority of their leisure time in world.  Whil went snowboarding 6 times this winter, inviting these friends each time and each time they chose WoW.  He had FREE concert tix to Tom Petty, and again, they chose the game.  Time after time they would rather stay in than go to a bar, restaurant, whatever.  In his admittedly small sample size, they have become overweight, out of shape, and reclusive.

Again, I lost my notes on this session.

Phil Long of MIT describes his experience creating the MIT island in Second Life.

They started out looking at several other technologies, but the massive growth of SL made it an obvious choice.  The motivation was to introduce incoming freshmen to the MIT dorms.  There was a web site that showed the external characteristics of each dorm - size, appearance, but this did not capture the enormous cultural differences.  Apparently, for the past several decades, the bright folks in MIT have used the first two weeks for the freshman to move around until they decide which dorm to move to permanently.

So, SL would be ideal.  In fact, not only did current students express interest, but so did alumni.

Because I lost my notes, I found this web link for you:
    http://confab.mit.edu/confluence/display/SL/Second+LIfe+at+MIT+Home;jses...

The key thing is that there were big hurdles with two different aspects of the Univerisity's legal exposure in buying an island in SL just for MIT.

First, "indemnification".  MIT does not want to be responsible for all content students might put up on SL.  This was solved by having a third party (in this case, NMC) host the the island on behalf of MIT.

So, I messed up.  I finagled my way back up to the stage (not the most shy dude in the world) to show the video Whil Plavis (our 3rd Student Cameo) made when we ran and won the Student Body presidency a few years back.  The Mac I am using has been dropped on its head a  few too many times and in transition between different power supplies and display setups, it restarted.  I lost the temp TextEdit files I had been keeping this morning for other speakers and the apparently do not autosave.  I will update the blog from memory, which, come to think of it, might be more readable anyway.

jt

This presenter is Patrick Paczkowski.  He describes a multi-disciplinary group. From classical studiets, Art/Design, and Computer Science (CSC).

Classical studies: Dr. Clare Woods
CSC: Drs. Rachael Brady and Robert Duvall - behaviour, interactivity
Arts: Dr. Anya Belkina, Dr. Godwin (ECU)

Maya 7.0
Virtools 3.5 - interactivity, 3D scenes
DiVE - a Cave

Virtual worlds and "Visions of the Underworld"

      Combine texts from different cultures into a single landscape
      Interactivity: 3D scenes

Look at story of Aeneas - build models

Lessons learned
    Communicating with students in other disciplines is tough
    Linear narrative into interactive difficult
    Need to see visualization
    Having final presentation is important
    Hard to learn Maya and design at the same time

I think this is very interesting because we at NC State have learned the same lesson.  In fact, we have a senior-level course that brings together design/art students and computer scientists to form combined teams halfway through the semester.  These teams then create video games that are all presented to the public in a big auditorium to a large audience including local media.  In the first half of the semester, the design students are learning Maya and the CS students are learning game design in general.

G'day.  Your faithful student blogger was out taking his kids to school this mornnig and missed the better part of this presentation by Constance Steinkeuhler.

What I did see was good.  Interesting style of Powerpoint slides, she has a lot of slides that feature a stark phrase in the middle of a slide.  It is a really effective way of connecting a series of thoughts.

Her focus seems to be comparing the learning in games to learning in classrooms.  They (UWisc) that gaming is unfairly demonized by the media.  Games actually promote a more scientific, problem solving, "Habit of Mind" that is beyond what is encouraged by traditional lecture.

Games provide spaces for unstructured socializing that latchkey kids do not have any more.

pop.cosmopolitanism

     Games for classes
     2nd life
     Games are replacing TV

Conclusion: She quotes Will Wright, video game god (SimS) who say that games are teaching the next generation that the world is a place for creation, not just consumption.

She ends by plugging the GLS conference - July 2007 (http://glsconference.org/2007/)