Another Day, another Online World service: Metaplace

…but this one might indeed be more useful for many people. The key is always to lower the barriers to entry. Make it easy to visit for people for whom blinking digital clocks cause panic. Make it easy to build stuff for people for whom word processing is just about the extent of their digital literacy. I would love to see archaeological VR become more than a sideshow, a passing fancy. Maybe Metaplace is the solution? Perhaps, if their promotional literature is true:

Metaplace is a next-generation virtual worlds platform designed to work the way the Web does. Instead of giant custom clients and huge downloads, Metaplace lets you play the same game on any platform that reads our open client standard. We supply a suite of tools so you can make worlds, and we host servers for you so that anyone can connect and play. And the client could be anywhere on the Web….Every world is a web server, and every object has a URL. You can script an object so that it feeds RSS, XML, or HTML to a browser. This lets you do things like high score tables, objects that email you, player profile pages right on the player — whatever you want. Every object can also browse the Web: a chat bot can chatter headlines from an RSS feed, a newspaper with real headlines can sit on your virtual desk, game data could come from real world data… you get the idea. No more walled garden.

Electric Archaeology: Research Notes - writers wanted!

The turn-around time for publishing research can sometimes feel like it takes ages. This isn’t - necessarily- problematic when you are publishing the results of years of study in a field that doesn’t change all that much (like my own cozy world of brick stamp studies…). But when you’re working in a field that changes monthly, if not weekly (like anything connected with digital media) by the time that article of yours comes out, it could very well be out of date. My article on agent-based modeling the Antonine Itineraries was published quite quickly, but by the time it came out the platform I used - Netlogo - had already undergone a substantial upgrade. My code was already out of date (though upgrading the model code would probably only take a day or two). I did find though that the comments and correspondence I received as a result of putting up a tatty web 1.0 website during that research were invaluable to the development of my project. I was able to put up ‘work-in-progress’ notes that generated great feedback that helped negate some of the dangers of working in a void (I was the only person in my department interested in agent modeling, at the time).

Reflecting on that experience - the lag time to final publication, and the power of many eyes looking at your work - I would like therefore to offer to anyone (especially at the senior undergrad or grad student level) who is working with digital media and archaeology or history, space on this blog to publish a series of ‘research notes’ - short articles, updates or ideas concerning their research. If you’re interested, drop me a line and I’ll set you up as an author: grahams at cc.umanitoba.ca

Why Grand Theft Auto Should be Taught in Schools

Came across this today, an interview with my colleague at Brock University, David Hutchinson, whose book Playing to Learn: Video Games in the Classroom has recently come out…

“I recently had a chance to interview Hutchinson about his goals for this project and wanted to share his responses with you. In explaining the value of games for schools, I often say that “nobody is advocating bringing Grand Theft Auto into the classroom” and go on to point to a broader range of other titles which do seem more appropriate for school use. But Hutchinson makes a fairly compelling argument for why schools should be addressing Grand Theft Auto in the comments which follow. His arguments here is consistent with his perspective that just as traditional media literacy involves learning to think critically about mass media, games literacy has to include asking hard questions of this still emerging medium, questions concerning representations, ideology, and of course, commercial motives….” more

Wikis in plain english

 Sometimes, a glorious failure has as much to teach as a resounding success…

I’ve tried now, in two classes (one at an online university, the other at an online high school), to use wikis and collaborative writing as part of my formative assessment. The online university was asynchronous, the highschool was synchronous. Both did not work out very well, but for very different reasons.

I think it was James Paul Gee who coined the phrase ‘digital natives’, ie, our students are immersed in digital media, they understand it intuitively, and we, as ‘digital immigrants’, will never wade through the sea of 1s and 0s as successfully as they do. At the online high school, this did not prove to be the case. My students were certainly familiar with digital technology, but their familiarity was profoundly superficial (if I can say that). While they had often used wikis (most often as a source of information for History class), they had never actually considered what was involved in making them, or the implications of how that information was collated/created into the wiki article they so freely copied. I had to take them by the hand (voip-style) and talk them through the entire process several times before they started to catch on… but by that time, the needs of the curriculum were such that I had to abandon the project.

At the online university, my course was organised by topic, over the duration of the session. The student on their own time, whenever they felt like logging in, could digest whatever topic they chose. At the end of each topic was a wiki, with several possible article suggestions. The idea was that instead of writing a 3000 word term paper, they’d write - and edit others’ - short articles (which in total would equal more or less the same amount of work). In the process, they’d be communicating with each other via an online forum or by voip, and as a class they’d create what would be essentially a text-book. It’s now the end of the session, and I finally got the first wiki articles posted, all in a rush. No time for editing, no time for collaboration, just a series of v.small essays, with no external links or images.

Clearly, I hadn’t explained the concept well. Just as clearly, I can’t rely on my students to be motivated enough to get the articles done early enough so that the collaboration process can start. I dug a little, and found that the main problem, as far as my students were concerned, was the fear of letting others see their written work. Procrastination was of course another issue, which was compounded by my error in letting the students ‘choose their own adventure’ through my materials. And finally, like my high school students, they were not familiar with how/why wikis work (which I found astonishing - but why should I? I spend every day online and so encounter wikis all the time, but my students apparently do have lives…

The next time I run that course I think what I shall do is abandon the wiki format in favour of journals (that only the student and myself may view). The topics and questions and the amount of writing will all be the same. I will also set firm deadlines and chart a linear progression through the course. And I think I shall make the students watch the wee video below:

Civ IV, some high school students, and some statistics - measuring game based learning

Came across a paper today on the educational potential of Civilization IV. I’ve written on this topic before, but my report was anecdotal; Andrew Moshirnia tried it rather more rigorously with some high school students… read his paper here.

From the report:

“…Students in the experimental group showed significant growth after being exposed to the modified video game. This growth was not significantly altered by a pretest effect. Students in the experimental group felt that they had learned more than their test results indicated. Test items were knowledge-level items and students in the game group felt that they could attempt higher-order thinking questions. The growth for all groups was significant, but students who received information from lecture showed a significantly lower rate of knowledge retention than students who learned from the mod. This suggests that modified video games could not only improve comprehension, but also retention of knowledge-level items. Students learned more from information that was delivered through sprites. However, the small sample size of this study prevents generalization of results…”

Platial and Pleiades - rss feeds

I’ve become a beta-tester on Platial. The RSS feed tool seems to work better on the testing side of the site, although it is still somewhat quirky. The screenshot shows what you get once you submit a feed - in this case, the atom geo-referenced feed from the Pleiades Project. Now, what I would’ve expected, is that Platial automatically extracted the geographic coordinates for each item in the feed, and mapped it. That’s not what happens - rather, the Platial tool is expecting that you’ve added a feed that doesn’t contain geographic info (say, a list of church suppers in your area), and then you punch in the address, city, state, or lat/long coordinates. Now, that is indeed a handy tool for non-georeferenced feeds, but defeats my purpose. At least for today.

I’ve also tried using automatic feed generators for third party sites, things like Feedity on Archaeology magazine’s archaeological news page with Platial, and with Yahoo Pipes. I’d like to see where in the world things are happening! To date, not much success (Feedity tosses in advertisements which - I’m guessing - cause problems). I suppose were I handy with coding etc I could make it all work… but again, that’d be defeating the purpose.

Pyla-Koutsopetria: archaeological site in Second Life

Bill Caraher, from the University of North Dakota, reports on his blog The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World, about an archaeological build in Second Life, of the Pyla-Koutsopetria site on Cyprus. He writes:

“…The plan, if I understand it, is to build a model of the site so that we can orient students, meet, and have discussions with the student-volunteers prior to actually arriving in Cyprus….”

which strikes me as an excellent use of Second Life for archaeologists. If they have access to broadband while they’re on site, it might also make an excellent public archaeology project - showing the world what they discover while they discover it. Every archaeological project should have some means of public interaction, whether that’s by site visits, public lectures or what have you… move that online, and you can really involve the donors back home too… experiential learning without the cost of the airline ticket! I look forward to seeing what happens with this build.

Canadians on the Nile

The first piece of interactive fiction that I wrote (and continue to work on) puts far too many words into the mouth of Major Boulton. I need to make the conversation there far more natural - a menu system has been suggested, so I’m slowly learning how to implement that. The general idea of the piece is for it to be a one or two room rambling conversation, over the course of which, the player discovers truths about the Northwest Rebellion.

In the interests of overloading my work schedule, I’ve started working on a second piece, that isn’t quite so literal. In ‘Canadians on the Nile’, I’m taking my inspiration from the expedition to relieve General Gordon at Khartoum by using logdrivers and river men from the Ottawa Valley to Manitoba to navigate the Nile (living in the Ottawa Valley as I do, this is one of my favourite historical episodes). This one is less ‘faithful’ that the Northwest Rebellion, since I’m putting words into my characters’ mouths that they didn’t actually say…  Right now, there are two non-player characters, in the opening scene which ends with the player’s enlistment. Ideally, there’d be several npcs for the player to interact with, learning the historical background, etc… and then self-contained episodes reflecting the real historical course of the expedition. Eventually.

Here’s what I’ve got so far.  (…the though occurs: I’m a Romanist, by training… why am I not trying Roman themes…?)

Multiverse & Sketchup : Doom of Second Life?

I have always had difficulty in building what I wanted to build in Second Life. Not only do I find it difficult to manipulate primitives etc, but I have to be online to do it. Some of us still live in rural areas to which the telecoms and cable companies are not interested in providing broadband service (I lurk outside the closest library with wireless to get my broadband). Anyway, various reports are emerging of a collaboration between Multiverse and Google, allowing models created in Sketchup AND terrain from Google Earth (!) to be imported into any online world hosted by multiverse. Couple that with Multiverse’s ability to allow the user to move from world to world, and I think we might just have a challenger to Second Life on our hands. ‘Doom’ might be too strong a word, but hey, makes for a great headline.

From an archaeological point of view, creating 3d representations of a site using Sketchup, and then moving that with the terrain into an online world, with the associated annotations etc could really be revolutionary - what immediately springs to mind is that this would make a far better way of publishing a site than a traditional monograph. Internet Archaeology (the journal) has been trying for just that kind of thing for a while. Maybe IA should host a world in Multiverse…?

From C-Net News:

“Get ready for online games set in your favorite Google Earth locations.

Virtual-worlds platform developer Multiverse Network is set to announce a partnership Tuesday that will allow anyone to create a new online interactive 3D environment with just about any model from Google’s online repository of 3D models, its 3D Warehouse, as well as terrain from Google Earth.

The idea is simple: Multiverse’s technology–which gives game developers tools to design custom virtual worlds–will let those designers pick and choose from most of the millions of 3D models created using Google’s 3D software tool SketchUp, and to import pieces of terrain, as defined by entering specific longitude and latitude data, from Google Earth.

If you want to build a virtual world centered on, say, downtown San Francisco, you could use the new technology to create the area itself and populate it with the digital versions of real-world buildings that have been created and uploaded to the 3D Warehouse.

“The goal is to grab things from the 3D Warehouse when looking at things in Google Earth and then make an instant multiverse world,” said Multiverse co-founder Corey Bridges. “What we’ve done is provide a more streamlined interface for using (Google’s technology) as a virtual-world production tool.”

Until now, incorporating this kind of information from Google has mostly been the province of fantasy. For some time, Multiverse has made it possible to upload some SketchUp models into a virtual world created using its platform. But the technology the company plans to announce Tuesday, informally called “Architectural Wonders,” brings the concept to much more well-rounded fruition, and answers what some people have been crying out for as obvious and necessary technology integration. MORE

On Caesar IV and the Ancient Economy

Having spent a great deal of time in my thesis pondering (amongst other things) the mysteries of Roman economics, it is curious to see how a city-builder game like Caesar IV demands many of the same skills - working with cost ratios, determining how much of a particular resource certain kinds of activities consume, distance & profit calculations - see for instance the discussion here and the tables here. Then go and study something like The Baths of Caracalla by Janet DeLaine. It is all strangely similar. I would have done better to have spent a few months playing the game and then looking at my copy of Finley or Hopkins. I’m not saying that the assumptions that underlie the game mechanics are analogous to the actual workings of the Roman economy; I’m saying that the game foregrounds the interconnectedness of production, consumption, taxes and society, which in my opinion is extremely important when working with the archaeology.

Imagine a seminar on the ancient economy where the aim is to mod Caesar IV (or similar) to reflect the latest thinking on the ancient economy, and then playing it out… I am constantly running out of money & resources as I play the game, which brings a whole new appreciation to the problems of monetary supply…