Text-based virtual worlds: an archaeological MOO

Who says immersive learning or virtual worlds have to be in 3D? Text-based worlds solve a lot of problems for the designer of a virtual world, since, as the old Infocom advertisement had it, your brain is the best graphics processor out there. From a few words, you can fill in the blanks, making the world as rich as you can imagine it. I mentioned the Like-a-Fishhook MOO in this post, but I didn’t explore it very much.

The Like-a-Fishhook MOO aims to be a representation of an archaeological excavation. You can browse the content without necessarily playing the game.

“This project aims to construct a virtual, immersive, multi-user, spatially oriented, exploratory, “to the inch” simulation of the Fort Berthold and Like-A-Fishhook Village site complex. The reconstruction is based on archeological data and records of the site’s excavation. The first version is text-based, with migration to a 3D graphical interface part of the project plan. Our goal is to create an active and educational space where visitors are engaged in goal-based tasks that promote exploration and problem-solving.

This is NOT intended to be a museum peice where people come to wander around and passively look at things. Visitors will be engaged in learning a) writing, or b) history, or c) anthroplogy, or d) archeology; later modules may incorporate elements of e) geology, or f) botany, or g) nutrition.”

The opening screen looks like this:

“Entrance to 32ML2

Room # 515

The pickup stops and you get out. You are on a road heading west from Fort Stevenson. You see a large, flat, grass-covered plain that extends for about 2000 feet.

To the south, you see that this terrace slopes down toward a body of water.

Far to the west, near the edge of the terrace, you see a some tiny specks that look tents, some even smaller specks that might be people, and several mounds of dirt.

To the north you see a grassy area and north of that a field.”

Now, I copied-and-pasted that description from the ‘Browse the MOO’ popup, since when I tried to create an account, there was mismatch between the domain name of my email, and the domain through which I connect to the net. Wiser minds than mine will have to explain what was going on. Anyway, the text version of this world - in which the player will conduct archaeological research - is supposed to migrate to a 3d world eventually. But having been made motion sick playing Oblivion recently, there’s something to be said for text…

One advantage of having this text-only world (which is of course similar to the text adventures that dominated computer gaming in the 1980s) is best put by the authors of the Wikipedia entry on MOOs:

“One of the most distinguishing features of a MOO is that its users can perform object oriented programming within the server, ultimately expanding and changing how the server behaves to everyone. Examples of such changes include authoring new rooms and objects, creating new generic objects for others to use, and changing the way the MOO interface operates. “

This enables the user, a la Second Life, to make the world around them (more or less)  and differentiates a MOO from a straight-forward text adventure such as you’d create using Inform.

It would be interesting to have students work through both this text simulation of an excavation, and my 3d version in Second Life, and examine the kind of (and if!) learning occurs…

Special issue of Innovate Online

The February/March issue of Innovate Online has a number of articles of interest for readers of this blog. To read these articles, you need to register, which takes about a minute. Then the full text is made available in a variety of formats.

V-Learning:

How Gaming and Avatars are Engaging Online Students

Len Annetta, Marta Klesath, and Shawn Holmes describe how avatars in virtual learning environments (VLEs) can contribute to the learning experience by giving students a sense of social presence and investment in the learning community that may otherwise be difficult to access. VLEs have the potential to become the next generation of instructional tools for online learning. By allowing students to simulate the campus experience online, VLEs offer rich, flexible class environments without compromising their reach to diverse students desiring online courses. Describing studies carried out in the WolfDen VLE, Annetta, Klesath, and Holmes examine how gaming and avatars are engaging online students and the role personality may play in a student’s selection of an avatars.

Learning at a Distance:

Engaged or Not?

In this study, Pu-Shih Chen, Robert Gonyea, and George Kuh compare the engagement of distance learners in educationally effective activities with that of their campus-based counterparts and compare the engagement of older distance learners relative to younger online students. Although distance learning is the fastest growing segment of postsecondary education, questions remain about the quality of distance education; a key unresolved issue is the degree to which online learners are engaged in effective educational practices. These results indicate that distance learners are generally as engaged and often more engaged than other students in most educational practices, with the exception of active and collaborative learning activities. Older distance learners report greater gains and are more likely to use higher-order mental processes (e.g., analysis and synthesis) than younger distance learners. Chen, Gonyea, and Kuh discuss the implications of these results for colleges and universities and indicate directions for future work.

Experiential Work-Integrated Online Learning:

Insights from an Established UK Higher Education Program

Lydia Arnold explores how work-based learners can embrace technology-enabled ways of learning. The case study of the BA (Honours) Learning Technology Research (BA LTR) program at Anglia Ruskin University, United Kingdom , shows how a unique learning blend that combines online social learning, work-based learning, inquiry-led learning, and high degrees of personalization can be used to enable and empower learners. Additionally, Arnold illustrates the unique characteristics of the BA LTR program and the role that these play in enabling work-based learners to participate fully in learning. The article explores the role of the work-based context as both a source of motivation and an authentic learning environment for BA LTR learners.

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.

CALL FOR PAPERS for ALT-J - Learning and Teaching in Immersive Virtual Worlds

My thanks to Eleanor for drawing my attention to the following call for papers from the Association for Learning Technology:

“CALL FOR PAPERS for ALT-J

Learning and Teaching in Immersive Virtual Worlds

Special issue of ALT-J, Research in Learning Technology

Immersive virtual worlds (IVWs), such as Second Life, Active Worlds, Croquet and Forterra and massive multi-player games (MMPGs), such as EverQuest and World of Warcraft represent a paradigm shift in learning technology, and an important challenge to the world of education. They provide a platform with the potential to support a wide variety of activities, many of which have been adapted to learning and teaching, particularly in higher education. For some the spatial and social qualities of IVWs are exciting and attractive, for others, such as those involved in games-based learning, they can be seen as slow and troublesome. Nevertheless, interest in using IVWs and MMPGs in learning and teaching is growing rapidly.

The aim of this special issue of ALT-J is to develop and publish a timely collection of papers representing current research, developments and ideas in educational applications of IVWs and MMPGs. Of particular interest are papers that go beyond descriptions of objects and activities to build links between practice and pedagogy, and offer conceptual, methodological and analytical rigour. Example topic areas for inclusion in this special issue include, but are not necessarily confined to:

1. Issues of embodiment
2. Running IVWs and MMPGs cost effectively on a large scale
3. Contexts in which use of IVWs is likely to be pedagogically effective
4. Understandings of identity
5. Research into learning and teaching in IVWs and MMPGs
6. The impact of virtual quests
7. Uses of collaborative simulation
8. Collaborative construction
9. The value of virtual laboratories
10. Uses of virtual field work
11. Group discussion in IVWs and MMPGs
12. Problem-based learning in IVWs and MMPGs
13. Geo-spatial representation of content
14. The impact on learners and teachers
15. Institutional aspects of IVWs and MMPGs
16. How IVWs and MMPGs alter views of learning
17. IVWs and MMPGs in schools

For queries and guidance relating to the call please contact Special Issue Editors Maggi Savin-Baden or Robert Ward.

Important dates:

Until 22 February 2008 Submission of abstracts and formal/informal response from Special Issue Editors.Submission of full papers: 31st March 2008

Types of papers:

To ensure both the quality and usefulness of the contributions a variety of papers will be considered. These might include, for example,

1. a review of current literature practice,
2. a paper that theorized particular aspects IVWs and MMPGs
3. a critical stance on issues such as linking the previous studies on student learning with aspects of IVWs and MMPGs

ALT-J submission process and Timetable:
Manuscripts Papers should not exceed 5,000 words. Authors should submit their papers electronically to the ALT-J Administrator. Submissions in Microsoft Word are preferred.

Papers should be formatted as A4 size (or equivalent), double-spaced, with ample margins. In order to guarantee anonymous peer review the name(s) of the author(s) and the address where the work was carried out should only appear on a separate first page, along with the full postal address of the author who will check proofs, receive correspondence and offprints, as well as an email address. All pages should be numbered.

Each article should include an abstract/summary of 100-500 words, Footnotes to the text should be avoided as far as possible, notes should be marked with [1], [2] and should be collected at the end of the article, before the reference section.

Further details on submission (including types of papers) may be found at the Routledge Taylor Francis Group.

Until 22 February 2008 Submission of abstracts and formal/informal response from Special Issue Editors.

31 March 2008 Submission of papers.”

Open source virtual world: Croquet

I’m sure I’ve mentioned this one before, but if not, check out this post here to understand a bit more of what’s going on on the technological front concerning immersive worlds for learning… and why Croquet might be a better place to spend our time:

“The Croquet Constortium is “an open source metaverse software foundation” which has developed Croquet, a development environment/architecture for creating virtual worlds. The presentation was given by two of the founding architects of the platform: Julian Lombardi, Duke University’s assistant vice president of Academic Services and Technology Support (Julian’s blog), and Mark McCahill, also at Duke (and creator of the Gopher protocol). Their point was that the Internet was designed as a client-server model back when computing power and bandwidth were scarce, so authoritative servers were needed to provide clients with the necessary state.  But that model is no longer valid — 30 users can stress a game server using that antiquated architectural model.  And so to build new virtual environments using that schema is thus fundamentally flawed.  Their Croquet platform is peer-to-peer based, so the users retain the current state of the virtual worlds, and new users logging on get the latest version of the world from the closest node on the network.  The architecture stresses the replication of computing rather than of data — it is a coordination protocol.”

And finally, “7 ways Croquet is Better than Second Life“. I have yet to try Croquet, but it is certainly worth keeping an eye on.

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…..”

Excavating in Second Life (3)

Some nice feedback over at ClioAudio on my plans for a virtual excavation in Second Life -

“In my head till now Second Life has been next door to Doom, Quake and Half-Life, but not as compelling due to the lack of gore. The archaeological models I’ve seen have been painstakingly created, but they’ve always seemed unrealistic. Partly because of the limitations of technology, but also because they tend to be re-creations of monuments and artefacts in pristine condition. Between them Shawn and Eric have shown Second Life could be much more interesting if you take another approach and try and build a virtual excavation.”

Alun raises an important point when he expresses reservations about the fact that this is in Second Life.

“Really it’s the fact it’s in Second Life which is my concern. Is it possible to export the information out from Second Life and make it accessible to other programs? If not then you would seem to be at the mercy of one company. Which is why I should go back and see what you can and cannot do in Second Life.”

It is in fact possible to export information out of Second Life - the Sloodle project for instance has been working very hard to integrate the Moodle learning management system with learning activities carried out in Second Life. I’ve used some of the tools that they’ve developed to post directly from Second Life into the blog part of a Moodle course area, for instance. I can imagine recording information from the virtual excavation directly in this way… but sometimes the easiest way to export information from one system or world is to do it in your head. If I have Nabonidus and Second Life both open at the same time on a computer, I can just switch from one to the other…

People with whom I chat about things like Second Life express reservations about my project being on just the one platform, owned by a commercial company. At the current moment, there’s not much I can do about that. Part of me wants to say, ‘but do you object to writing your papers using MS Word?’. The analogy isn’t exact. Were Microsoft to go under, your copy of Word would still work. If Linden Labs goes under, Second Life might cease to exist altogether. This is a very real concern. Other virtual worlds (proper games) have gone *ppphhht* as their parent companies pull the plug (The Economist did an article, ‘The End is Virtually Nigh’ on one such). New projects, such as the Multiverse project, would allow you to set up your own world independent of a commercial company (see also this article). But really, how many of us archaeologists have the kind of skill sets necessary to get something like that up and running?

This was the initial genius of Second Life - it promised to let anybody (with a broadband connection), build their own virtual reality. Now in truth it’s not so simple, but as the first to really roll that out on a grand scale, it has been a success. I fully expect, if I am able to get this virtual excavation to work as I imagine it, that someday I’ll have to migrate it to a different world or platform. It probably won’t be a straight one-to-one transfer. But having done it once, and understanding what is involved, it’ll be much easier to do a second time.