SLOODLE website gets a face-lift
Posted by Peter | Filed under Sloodle, Websites
After much discussion and chatting and ideas and then silence for a few months, we have finally given the SLOODLE website a face-lift. I am really very pleased with the result. Check it out:
The theme was based on a Moodle theme called EduMoodle, which was itself based on a Joomla theme by dudes at EduGeek. Our little variant was originally modified by our good friend and Sloodler, Chris Surridge, using screenshots (swiped) from the inimitable Sloodlebrity, Gia. I then tweaked it a touch to suit our needs, and also mercilessly hammered it into the approximate shape of a WordPress theme, to keep our SLOODLE blog looking nice and consistent. (I nearly hammered my computer mercilessly too… I hate CSS sometimes! Silly float attribute…)
The astute observer will also notice that we have some handy new pages in our lovely new navigation menu: About, Research, and Tutorials. They are still under-construction, but well worth checking-out.
“How to Write a Thesis”
Posted by Peter | Filed under Academia, Publications
I got a book from my university library, called “How to Write a Thesis”, by Rowena Murray (I’ve got it on 3-day loan only, which is a pest, so I might buy my own).
I’m not much through the book yet, but I am liking its encouragement and guidance for writing early and often, which matches advice from Prof. Malcolm Crowe at our induction day for new research students (waaaay back in September). It is particularly good at encouraging action in the here-and-now, rather than waiting until you ‘feel ready’, and in so doing, seeks to portray writing as a discipline, rather than an art, for academics (even one only just starting his PhD!).
Part of the aim of the book is to get its readers able to write 1000 words an hour, and it labours the point that is might seem scary and unobtainable… but that is is achievable if I follow what the book says. Sure, it might not be the most polished, high-quality 1000 words ever, but it ought to be decently coherent and have at least some semblance of structure. As such, I tried one of the first exercises, which was to write (i.e. type at the computer) for five minutes, on the topic of “what can I write in five minutes?”. Somewhat vague target, but I thought I’d give it a go anyway, under the book’s guidance to write non-stop, in complete sentences, using the first person (i.e. “I do this…”).
The result? 275 words which are in fact rather coherent and structured. I won’t post them here, but suffice it to say, if I kept that rate up for an hour, I would have 3300 words! I figured it could be a fluke, and that maybe I couldn’t keep up that rate for more than 5 minutes.
Indeed, I was proven correct… somewhat. Next exercise was to write, for no particular amount of time, about what particularly interests me regarding my research area. I ended up writing for 19 minutes, producing an oddly well-structured and coherent piece of writing, totalling 818 words. If I kept up that rate for an hour, I would have written around 2583 words. A little slower than the 5 minute flurry, but still rather faster than the book claims to help me achieve if I follow all its advice!
OK, OK… I know it’s not about word count. Of course, it helps that after 18 years of being a pianist (which helps with dexterity) and a number of years’ computer programming, I can type a little more quickly than your average computer user (>100 correct words per minute if I’m copying text verbatim). So I won’t be benefiting much from the book’s writing speed claims… but I’m sure it will help me structure stuff better, which is the important thing. 
I’ve got to get into this other book too now, which is recommending everywhere… “How to Get a PhD”… sounds like the book for me!
Meet Gorrin…
Posted by Peter | Filed under Games
I’ve finally been and gone and done it… I’ve tried World of Warcraft. After a few hours, I have a level 8 Dwarf Hunter called Gorrin. I thought I was being at least a little original, but I’m seeing as many Dwarf Hunters as I am of everybody else put together. Doh!
It’s been an interesting experience so far. I have previously played a little Silkroad Online, so the basics were already somewhat familiar to me. I am struck by how clean and slick many of the graphics and animations are (a few questionable trees and things notwithstanding), although as I always suspected, everything just takes so long to do!
Enjoying it anyway, although I’m finding the balance of ranged/melee attacks quite hard to manage playing on my own (I really should be more social!). Best tactics I’ve found are to hit the bad guy hard and fast from a distance, and keep backing-off while firing more ranged attacks, preferably moving in the direction of an NPC guard who can bail you out if you’re in trouble!
Not sure how willing I’d be to pay £9 a month for the privilege of all this, being as I’m on a student budget again these days… but we’ll see. I’ve got more than a week to try it out for free (although I reckon I should keep my playing strictly to weekends, or else I’ll never get any work done!).
Virtual Happenings
Posted by Peter | Filed under Second Life, Software, Technology, Virtual Worlds
Lebanese business and tourism
Some interesting things happening lately in the realm of virtual stuff, be it worlds or otherwise. One article which particularly caught my eye was the Bab-ilu portal, which is designed to help foster international business and tourist interest in Lebanon. (I did some brief mission work in Lebanon in 1999, while they were at war with Israel. One thing which struck me wonderfully was the kindness and generosity of many people; despite being in a warzone, and despite the fact that we were outsiders from another religion, they treated us with utmost respect. Parts of it were also absolutely beautiful… if I can find and scan some of my old photos, I’ll post them.)
Virtual conferencing
In other news, a company called Altadyn has released “Online Meeting”, which is designed to support business meetings, based on their 3DXplorer platform, encouraging more participation than you typically get in video-based tele-conferencing. It’s good to see some competition opening up in this area, since Second Life seems to have been the virtual platform of choice for many business happenings of this nature, seeing lots of support from IBM in particular. I have nothing against SL being used for that purpose, but competition is healthy for the market and it’s healthy for innovation.
Music world
Similarly, there is talk of a music-centred virtual world, designed with “live” online concerts in mind. Once again, Second Life has been used for this quite a lot, but having something developed which is dedicated to the particular feature is great. (My experience of “live” music in SL is rather less-than-wonderful, usually due to technology issues.)
Ignorance ain’t bliss!
Let’s balance all the hope of good things with a shot of negativity. Teresa Hunter, writing for Scotland on Sunday, took a hefty, and downright ignorant swipe at Second Life, calling it a “virtual world for sad losers”. I am glad to say my good friend Gia dutifully reprimanded the shocking excuse for an article! (Woo! Go Gia…)
“Twinity” — my initial experience
Posted by Peter | Filed under Games, Software, Virtual Worlds
This evening, I decided to try out Twinity — a new virtual world which is in public beta at the moment. I’m still learning my way round, but it’s looking quite interesting so far… albeit running a tad slowly on my PC! Here’s a review of my first couple of hours playing with it, but be warned, this is pretty long!
Upon Arrival…
I started in a Welcome Area, which consisted of wide open spaces with information displays and tutorials around. Large texture-based signs load in from fuzzy blobs, but they are remarkably legible, giving all the basic pointers. As an introduction to the world, it definitely needs work though — I think I was only comfortable because I have been using virtual worlds for a while. Total newbies would likely get dazed and confused rather quickly.
Identity
When you first sign-up, you provide your first and last names, and it doesn’t seem to suggest anything other than real names (although I assume you could use anything quite happily). By default, your first name will appear above your avatar in-world, but you can make your last name visible too. I am not sure how wise it is to go by first-names only in a virtual world, given the scope for confusion, but things may change.
Graphics
I can’t say I’m impressed with the graphics in general at this stage, as the system requirements are fairly huge for (quite frankly) not a lot. It’s possible that the system automatically scaled-down the graphics level to suit my lower-end processor, but unlikely, and the only 2 graphics detail settings I’ve found are resolution, and anti-aliasing level.
Interface
The visual element of the user interface is fairly nice and clean, with that rounded-corner web-2.0-feel that everybody loves… or at least, that’s what designers tell us we’re supposed to love. The basic UI is fairly unobtrusive, primarily occupying a small panel at the bottom-middle, with some important buttons. (There’s also some important but small buttons at the top-right.) Everything appears in various windows, which can be moved and closed, but not resized or minimized. It looks like they’ve implemented a totally bespoke interface system, which is impressive, but was probably an unnecessary use of their development time (how many times can the wheel be re-invented?), and it’s not as responsive as I would like, but it certainly does the job admirably.
Regarding control scheme, I think it’s a little unintuitive, and it feels restrictive after being used to Second Life (although SL has unusually good controls) — you walk around with arrow keys or WASD, but your camera keeps a fixed angle/distance as you do that, even if you double-back on yourself. You rotate the camera around your avatar by clicking and holding the right-mouse button, and moving the mouse. You can zoom in/out using the scroll wheel, but I haven’t found a way to change the camera’s centre of focus though, so it seems that you actually have to walk right up to a sign in order to read it… although I could be wrong.
You can also run, by holding the shift key or toggling with Caps Lock, but I don’t think you can fly. Interacting with items occurs mostly by left-clicking on them, and right-clicking can bring up some other information/options. When you are near a seat, a nifty little ’seat’ 3d icon appears over it, which you click to sit down. It means you can’t just sit anywhere, but it’s more reliable where you can.
Appearance
Plenty of avatar customization is possible, and it seems you can even upload your own photographs to create your virtual face. Besides that, it’s the usual maniacally large number of slider controls in various categories, and a certain degree of control over your skin tone. It’s also possible to buy various attachments to wear, including different hair, hats, jackets, trousers, and so on. The selection is not huge yet, but I am sure it will increase as the virtual world matures. (I did notice the somewhat risky “Third Life” T-shirt, although chose not to wear it!)
One thing I will say is that it was unclear exactly whom I was buying the items from, as the menu of items just appeared as part of the process of altering my avatar. I was definitely using my starting supply of “Globals” (the in-world currency) to do it though, and I assume I was just buying them from ‘the game’, so the currency didn’t actually go anywhere… it just got deducted from my account. The great thing though is that you can preview items on your avatar before attaching them, although no customization of the items seems possible (e.g. colour changes).
Currency
Since we’re on the topic, the in-world currency (”Globals”) is intended to work as part of an actual economy, and you can buy more Globals through the website apparently. It seems that you can’t trade Globals back for real-world money, although I have seen job adverts around, suggesting that you can ‘earn’ money in the virtual world, as with MMORPGs. Quite what such jobs entail is a mystery to me, but I shall endeavour to find out.
Animation
The default animations look fairly nice… nothing to write home about, but fairly smooth. Clicking a button on the interface brings up the neat little animations window, which has one particularly nifty feature to check out: moods. You can pick from: Confident, Default, Depress, Drunken, and Relaxed. This will affect the basic way your avatar stands and walks, which is great, although I would like to see a broader range of moods, and/or the ability to explicitly change the animations used (maybe those will come in a later version).
You can also create a custom set of animation buttons (up to 10 viewable at a time) which you push to perform a certain animation/gesture on-demand. As with editing your own appearance, you populate these slots by purchasing stuff with your Globals. There’s already a fairly huge number available, with plenty of dance moves, of course! The animations certainly seem fairly detailed, with facial expressions included in many, which is very nice.
User-Content
There is differing information regarding user-content — some of the support information on the website says it’s not yet possible, and yet there is an interface for it in-world. The interface indicates “you must be a premium member to upload content”, and since I am on a student-budget, I am not even considering paying them anything just now! If/when user-content is enabled though, it seems to support at least avatar attachments and animations, and perhaps other stuff will come along too, such as separate objects. There does not appear to be any facility for in-world creation though, a la Second Life, so it looks like everything would need to be created off-line, potentially with proprietary tools.
Membership
Basic membership is free, and as mentioned above, you can pay to get more “Globals” to spend in-world. There is also a premium membership level, which seems to be free during the public beta period, but which will cost more money later on. What does premium membership get you? Aside from being able to upload custom content (if/when that is implemented), it lets you buy a virtual apartment, which you seem to pay for with real-world money. From what I have picked-up, you can customize your apartment to some degree, and even designate ‘flatmates’ who can customize it too. Eventually, I think people will be able to buy and sell virtual apartments from/to each other, creating an in-world real-estate market.
Communication
There’s not a whole lot of people with whom to communicate at the moment (I should have tried this out with a friend!). However, I’ve experimented with text-chat a little, and it seems to appear as chat bubbles over avatars’ heads. That’s an option I’ve tried in Second Life, but which I didn’t like, because it makes it very hard to follow a line of conversation unless you can negotiate your camera to view all the other avatars. It apparently supports voice-chat though, which is very important. No idea how reliable it is! There seems to be an asynchronous messaging system too.
Conclusion
It’s got a lot of promise, and it seems fairly well-made so far. From the point-of-view of education, I am not hopeful at all, since it looks like custom content creation will require a substantial outlay, and potentially expertise with offline tools (which are often very hard to learn, in my experience). Having said that, though, I have got used to the remarkable affordances of Second Life, so perhaps I am being pessimistic, and teachers could work with far less customization, with more ready-made education packs.
That aside, the text chat system being based on chat-bubbles, combined with the lack of camera freedom, would make discussions of more than a few avatars very difficult to do in text… but perhaps the aim is to encourage voice chat in Twinity anyway. The camera issues would also make it hard to present information to a group of people, or for multiple avatars to use a single resource, since they all need to be close to it ‘physically’ in order to see it.
Attempting a modicum of objectivity (since I have undoubtedly glossed-over many important differences between this and other such platforms), the tag-line of Twinity is “Powered by real life”. They seem to be aiming for a much more real-life-based experience, which means all the above issues of chat bubbles, camera freedom, and even lack of content creation tools, are entirely in-line with the philosophy. They want the virtual world to mimic the real-world in layout, too, with Berlin being their first virtual city. The aim seems to be a good deal of integration with other media forms too, as I have seen in the form of much “Quantum of Solace” advertising! (Consider: how often do you see advertisements for real-world stuff when you’re just out-and-about in Second Life?)
I am looking forward to seeing where Twinity goes. Nobody can predict these things, so I won’t even guess how popular it is likely to be, but it has plenty of potential. Granted, the transition will likely be uncomfortable at first for folks used to other platforms, as it seems to do things in very much its own way, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. A little originality and character in a sometimes-saturated market is well worth the plunge.
Chemistry for the YouTube Generation
Posted by Peter | Filed under Education, University, Websites
OK, I know I’m guilty of the horrible generalisation of calling anything technology-related a “generation”… but it seemed like a good name for this entry. I’ll be brief! If you’ve never seen it before, I strongly recommend checking out the Periodic Table of Videos, starring some of the lovely folks from the University of Nottingham. It’s a series of videos, with one for each element in the periodic table, some short, some long.
It’s a wonderful endeavour, making lots of interesting chemistry facts available to folks like me who sometimes watch far too many videos online! Thanks Nottingham Uni dudes… great work!
WoW… that’s what I call commitment…
Posted by Peter | Filed under Faith, Games
(Apologies for the terrible pun… pain killers available at the nearest emergency exit)
I’ve just been watching a video of World of Warcraft players queuing for long hours to get what I assume is the latest add-on pack (I am utterly clueless about most stuff WoW-related!). Loads of folks were dressed-up in home-made costumes from game creatures, making it seem little like a comic convention (I guess many of the attendees will be the same), with one person says she’s been playing 6 hours a day, pretty much every day for a couple of years.
Now I’ve been a bit of a gamer at stages in my life… when I first discovered online multiplayer gaming, I was somewhat hooked for a while. However, 6 hours a day…? Every day…? Dressing up as warlocks and mages…?
I mean absolutely no disrespect to them… but it’s a level of commitment to a game that I just can’t identify with.
In saying that, chances are that if I wasn’t a Christian and didn’t have my church, I would probably find other stuff like WoW to fill the void. I probably spend at least 12 hours per week going out to Christian stuff, plus time I spend at home involved in it too (e.g. preparing teachings and so on), so I can hardly criticize.
One of the greatest gifts is free will… the choice to pursue life the way we want to (I begrudge it to no one). After all, if we didn’t have freedom of choice, we’d never appreciate all that’s good.
Virtual Rome
Posted by Peter | Filed under Projects, Software, Virtual Worlds
I never was much good at history (and neither were most of the rest of my family), but nonetheless, I enjoy a few histories in moderation: Scottish, Egyptian, and Roman. As such, the recreation of ancient Rome on Google Earth sparked my interest.
I can’t say I’ve used Google Earth in quite a long time — it was OK last time I used it, but never showed a whole lot of detail around the area I live, and I honestly don’t normally care much about the terrain of downtown New York and such like! Expanding the horizons of the app is therefore a good thing, opening up a wide range of interesting possibilities for educational uses (beyond present-day geography, that is). Perhaps I can incorporate Google Earth into my own research? (It’s not exactly a virtual world in the usual sense… but it seems pretty close sometimes…)
Learning Through Play
Posted by Peter | Filed under Education, Misc.
Through my work and research in the university and on the SLOODLE project, I’ve encountered plenty of mention of constructivism in relation to education. However, considering my wonderful neice (who will be 2 in January), and my practically newborn nephew, I was quite interested by a recent Newswise article about constructivist play for young children.
The principle is that simpler toys encourage greater use of imagination and development of cognitive skills for very young children, but slightly older ones will benefit from more directly educational toys, such as board games and chemistry sets. The article quotes a great example from R. Keith Sawyer:
“For example, if you bought your child the toy cowboy from the movie “Toy Story,” the child will probably already be familiar with the movie, with the character and how the character talks and acts. That narrows the range of pretend play options or scenarios the child will engage in. However, if you get your child a generic cowboy toy, the child might act out scenes from “Toy Story,” but might also do something completely different.”
Watching my niece play with absolutely anything and everything she can get her hands on, from placemates to cuddly toys, certainly bears this out. I cannot suggest what she sees in the toys when she plays, as she’s too young to express much verbally (although for a not-yet 2 year old, she’s doing remarkably well with language… or maybe that’s just my proud uncle-ness talking!). At any rate, she manages to play equally well (if not better) with abstract objects as she does with realstic items.
I see very similar things with a couple of slightly older children at my church: one is about 2 and a half, and the other (who started school this year) is nearly 5. They certainly love acting out superhero scenes from series they watch on TV or DVD, but after church this past Sunday, they seemed to be having a lot more fun pretending an upturned toy table was a boat. It doesn’t look like a boat, nor is it in anyway seaworthy, and the carpet certainly doesn’t look (or feel) like the ocean, but those things didn’t matter to them… it was just a bit of fun. (Perhaps more significantly, they happily involved a bit of superhero stuff in the boat scene, but not the other way round.)
The slightly older kids (particularly the 4 year old) were capable of constructing more complex scenes than my little niece, but it all seems to be part of the same process. It leads me to wonder what learning is actually going on in these cases. Certainly getting the imagination active is great, and learning the difference between fantasy and reality is very important. Perhaps also through doing these things, they are experimenting with relationships, learning social skills. They are also using language to express themselves in their make-believe personae. Most importantly, I think, they are maybe learning to see things from another perspective — i.e. from the point-of-view of their character, rather than themselves.
I’m not a developmental psychologist though, so I’m probably just waffling. One wee thing I will mention though is that similar situations exist in video games for kids and adults of all ages — in bygone days, I remember having lots of fun racing a line around a bunch of dots on an old Spectrum. The hyper-realism of today’s games is great, but not necessary for fun, and can in many ways perhaps impede it.
Slide Toggler 1.2 — now with reset timer
Posted by Peter | Filed under Projects, Second Life, Software
If you mosey on over to the Projects page, you can grab version 1.2 of the Slide Toggler script. It has a very minor addition which was requested, and that is an auto-reset timer: in addition to clicking slides to toggle them between foreground and background, it lets you optionally also specify a time after which foreground slides will automatically revert to the background. This is probably more useful for public displays, where other users can toggle the slides, than for presentations… but feel free to use it however you like! Open source, as always.
Many thanks to SL resident Maihem Randt for suggesting the feature, and to Void Singer and Hewee Zetkin for their input on the SL Scripting Tips forum.
