MadLat Conference, Winnipeg

Just got back, will post more when I have a moment - keynote speaker was excellent, and his session on ‘Instructional Robotics’ was fantastic, though poorly attended. I expect people were put off by the title… but imagine a remotely operated vehicle, armed with camera, directional microphone, and wee video screen roaming the aisles of a distance-ed classroom, and you get the picture…

My presentation was well attended, which made a nice change from the Classics conferences I’ve gone to and given an online learning or games-related paper. Typically, the classicists are just not interested - there’ll be me, the moderator, the other two presenters, and the guy who thought that this was a session on Attic pottery….

Anyway, one nice comment at the end of my paper was along the lines of, ‘it’s very interesting to see someone actually implementing games or Second Life, and not just talking about the theoretical side of things!’ In truth, I’m not that far removed from the theoretical side, though I have subjected students to some of my experiments.

Right. Presentation is here, designed and implemented courtesy of Flypaper, whom I thanked in my talk. It might not live at that location for too long, in which case I’ll post it somewhere else, if necessary.

RWU: first in the world!

Robert Welch University got an excellent mention in a recent article in The Classical Journal.

From  Andrew Reinhard, “From Slate to Tablet PC: Using New Technologies to Teach and Learn Latin and Greek”, CJ Forum Online 2008.03.03:

[...snip...!]Robert Welch University is the first school in the world to offer
an on-line major in Classics featuring courses that include regular
journeys into Second Life to an eLearning island called EduNation.
The school has rented space for teaching Latin here, giving students
from around the world a place to play and interact within the
constructs of the language. Other schools such as the University of
Central Missouri have been using Second Life for language
education for over a year, but Robert Welch University is the first to
offer anything Classics-related.[...]

I had thought that maybe we were the first, so it’s nice to have independent verification! Andrew then goes on to survey current trends in Classical teaching online, and comes to the conclusion:

I challenge Classics teachers to find their way to new technology
and play with it. 100% book-learning is dead.

You said it, brother.

Online learning in SL & RWU

Here’s a short video clip I made mostly to figure out how to do it. It shows a one-on-one tutorial going on inside Second Life, at RWU’s virtual campus. The last section of the film features a field trip to Catal Hoyuk, as reconstructed by the ‘Remixing Catalhoyuk‘ team at Okapi Island. Where else but in Second Life can you begin with a language tutorial, move on to intro to archaeology, and finish up by exploring an ancient settlement, while sitting in your slippers drinking coffee?

SLED Events - Places to go to see education in action in Second Life

A calendar of educational events (everything from courses to conferences) taking place in Second Life is available at http://sledevents.blogspot.com

I note with interest a six week course on using SL for education begins tomorrow Feb 28…

“Speculum Fantasia” and thoughts on other Invented Worlds

Mark Hall has published an article, Speculum Fantasia - Middle Earth and Discworld as Mirrors of Medieval Europe on the European Journal of Archaeology blogsite. It’s an interesting exposition of how fictitious examples of what might perhaps be called ‘alternative’ histories intersect with what might be called’true’ history.  I was especially taken with his example of a report stating that:

“Ashdown Forest was both the best surviving heathland forest in Britain and the setting for A A Milne’s Winnie the Pooh stories. As a result several million pounds of grant-aid had been allocated for conservation work to maintain the heathland and clear some of the trees – trees, it was noted, that Winnie the Pooh and friends would not have recognised and so they had to go.”

The point being that our narratives and stories  reflect back and alter the ‘real’ world.  For archaeologists, the lesson seems to be that archaeologically we’re going to find instances of these invented worlds, so we’d better know what to do with them:

“The question of what archaeology can learn from the popularity of these and other invented civilisations is a difficult one for me because of the paradox at its root. In the words of Terry Eagleton (2004, 4) ‘human existence is at least as much about fantasy and desire as it is about truth and reason’. Imagined realities have been an ever present part of the human drive to explain and adapt through narrative constructions. The same wellspring produced the creative drives for mythopoesis, invention, and material culture. Archaeological and historical explanations have grown and sought their own path, influenced mostly by an honestly meant desire to be objective. The paradox has grown as a consequence of the fantasy / truth split. On the one hand invention and mythopoesis are part of the human condition and so infuse the material culture / archaeological record. The cult of saints and the associated cult of heroes is a prime example: thus in the 12th century the abbey of Landevennec, Finistere, Brittany under the patronage of local secular potentates had a new chapel built dedicated to King Gradlon, a fictitious first ancestor and king of Avalon. He was given a reality in stone, mortar and worship.9 On the other hand in a contemporary context we require an objective separation between archaeological, scientific, fact-centred analysis of reality and narrative desires. It can be hard to separate fact from fiction when fiction is a fact of existence.”

I found this article useful for thinking about other invented worlds, especially the online variety. I’ve argued elsewhere that virtual worlds can be amenable to archaeological study, and perhaps what Mark Hall’s article is suggesting is one way of approaching that virtual material culture.  The key I think is that line, ‘invention and mythopoesis are part of the human condition and so infuse the material culture / archaeological record’. In Second Life, everyone is a god. Everyone can say ‘fiat lux’, and there will be light.  The things we see in Second Life are the remnants of each user’s own personal myth-making.  Studying an individual parcel of land then in Second Life requires knowing the myth. An archaeology of a virtual world on this reading is an exercise in cosmology then…

Virtual Excavation Update 5

Turns out that ‘digging’ virtually with the land tools in Second Life is emphatically not a good idea. Things get out of control waaaay too easily. I suddenly had an abyss and a Matterhorn side-by-side in the middle of our plot of land, the bits and pieces of the demolished cabin flying violently about the place… yikes. Throw in a bit of lag and some rendering issues, and I had my own personal Bosch going on.

I tried show-hide scripts, which worked well enough, except I could not then excavate what was underneath, though I could see it. That was because of course the original prim was still in position. D’oh.
What I’m trying to do instead - and it seems to be working well - is to put a ‘fly-away’ script into each prim (representing a single context). When the student touches the context, it repositions itself 10m up in the air, revealing the next context underneath. I place internet-linked objects within the contexts as desired. When the context is ‘excavated’ - touched - the object goes into the student’s inventory. The student needs to rename the objects appropriately - cataloging them - so as not to lose them in the inventory. They can then rez the objects to examine them, which opens up a browser window to the Open Context archive. Next thing to think about is the interface with Nabonidus, whether to try to bring it in-world or let the students lose in their own browsers.

Note also my prototype contexts are just wee boxes as of yet. They’ll get better, promise. I suppose I could combine the show/hide with the fly-away, but then I’d have a devil of a time finding them again to reset for the next student.

Picture below shows the current state of affairs. For reasons I cannot fathom, the regular Second Life client is not loading info from the website, but the OnRez viewer works great. Go figure.

Solipsis - another online world

They’re getting to be like cockroaches: everywhere. Here’s another online world. From its own publicity:

“Solipsis is a pure peer-to-peer system for a massively shared virtual world. There are no central servers at all: it only relies on end-users’ machines.

Solipsis is a public virtual territory. The world is initially empty and only users will fill it by creating and running entities. No pre-existing cities, inhabitants nor scenario to respect…

Solipsis is open-source, so everybody can enhance the protocols and the algorithms. Moreover, the system architecture clearly separates the different tasks, so that peer-to-peer hackers as well as multimedia geeks can find a good place to have fun here!

Current versions of Solipsis give the opportunity to act as pionneers in a pre-cambrian world. You only have a 2D representation of the virtual world and some basic tools devoted to communications and interactions. But it just works, so, come on and enjoy !”

Some reflection on this is provided here:

“[...]I wonder if Linden’s mad rush to open up its servers over the coming quarters towards “multiple grids by 2009″ (see my previous post) is driven at all by the accompanying mad rush of developers in all corners to open source other options. I’ll make a call to the Virtual World’s Standards Consortium to check that all these worlds will be interoperable and that we’ll have access to portable avatars per IBM’s scheme, if I can only find the number.

Final notes:
- Oh, and if anyone can slice through the acronyms and tell me whether it will support interoperability with 3D modeling I’d love to know.
- Keep an eye on the Wikipedia entry for Solipsis. It sounds like it was written by the company’s PR folks. Now that Wayne has brought attention to this (yay attention!) expect the OpenSim and Linden folks to go over and make a few corrective adjustments to the entry. “

University of Leicester - Designing in Second Life

This was posted originally here. Gilly Salmon, Professor of E-Learning Technologies at the University of Leicester, talks in this video about Second Life and using it to teach ancient history.

SL_Archaeology (or, the virtual excavation update 4)

I recently posted a query on the Second Life Educator’s list explaining what I was up to, and, in the interests of not reinventing the wheel, whether anything similar has been done. I received a number of notes from people with suggestions of approaches to try, and examples of other archaeologically-themed sims, chief amongst them Okapi Island (read about opportunities for apprenticeships here!) and Indiana University of Pennsylvania’s Crimson Island. Thank you so much!

(By the way, there is a session titled ‘Current Experiments in Interpretation‘ at this year’s World Archaeological Conference that should be of interest to readers of this blog.)

An interesting approach was suggested to me by Paula Christopher at Georgia State. Using simple box-prims layered on on top of the other displaying the ‘texture’ (picture) I want to show for each layer, she suggests putting a show/hide script in each prim. That way, the student can touch each layer, and have it ‘excavated’ away to reveal the layer below. This I think might be a ’safer’ way of doing it than what I’ve been trying this past week:

I had noticed, inadvertently, that I could lose prims ‘underground’. I could only recover them by using the land tool to lower the ground, exposing the prim. This gave me an ‘ah ha!’ moment. I rezzed the simple cabin that comes with every avatar’s inventory on a piece of ground that I had lowered to just above the level of the ur-ocean that underlays every piece of land in SL. I then unlinked all of its component prims, and made them all ‘physical’. They collapsed according to SL’s physics engine, making a pile of beams, etc. I then made them all ‘normal’ again ie they don’t move unless you use the repositioning tool. At this point, I raised the land around the prims as unevenly as I could, making sure to make the land a bit bumpy over the long walls and so on - site formation processes in SL! Then, a few bits of grass and other bits of greenery, placed to mimic growth over an archaeological site, salt with web-linked prims to archaeological databases, and voila.

The flaw in this plan, is that in order to excavate, I would have to turn over permissions to alter the landscape to my students. Maybe that’s not an issue, but on reflection I can think of one or two ways that that could go horribly wrong. That’s why I think I’ll redo this show/hide prims rather than the actual landscape of SL.

Digital History Class at Indiana University of Pennsylvania

Scott Moore, of the history department at IUP, is beginning a class in digital history this semester. He’s blogging his experience too, providing the rest of us with perhaps a peek into the future? I’m looking forward to following this project. Scott writes:

“My Digital History class is all set to go, I think. I finished the syllabus and created a WebCT site for it this afternoon. I use WebCT mainly for lecture notes, images, threaded discussions, and record keeping. Unfortunately, WebCT was bought by Blackboard and is being phased out. IUP’s license for it expires in June 2009 and we will have to adopt different CMS software. In trying to get ready for that, I volunteered to try out Sakai with the class to see what I think of it. I also intend to try out Moodle and its connection to Sloodle with the class - ensuring that these students will be able to give me good feedback to pass on to the IT guys.

I did not order a textbook for this course, but will rely on on-line articles, databases, and websites - appropriate for a digital history class, I think.One of the main ones will be Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig’s Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web. The web project, Digital History, also has a nice collection of links to articles, journals, and websites.

I also finished up the pre-test and put it into WebCT. It is 30 questions and is composed of multiple choice, matching, and short answer questions. I intend to give them 50 minutes to take the test and haven’t decided whether to do it in class or let them do it on their own - each has advantages and shortcomings. I won’t probably decide until Monday morning. The questions cover information literacy, Internet topics, and  software. I will be very interested in seeing how the students perform on it. I may give it to my other classes to see if I can get better data on how a wider range of students do on it. For example, since my digital history students are taking this as an elective, doesn’t that mean that they have an interest in the topic and therefore probably will do better on it, than say a Western Civ student? Questions to ponder…..”