Friday 17 December 2010

Missionmaker, Virtual Identity, OpenSim_9th Virtual Worlds in Education Forum

The first presentation was by Andrew Hutchinson, Project Leader, Midland Leadership Centre, who gave an enthusiastic demo of an interesting and inexpensive tool for drag-and-drop creation of virtual learning/gaming spaces. Missionmaker is touted as a game authoring tool for creative learning. A child could use it, yet the interactivity creation seemed quite feasible and the results looked professional. Some examples were shown with Western environments, and Space centers, complete with avatars, props and a robot with a voice recording. Apparently, it is fun to use, and a standalone version costs under £100 with VAT included. Site licences are also available. Missionmaker is made by Immersive Education, who also created Kar2ouche.

Hey, Spike! What’ya Like?*

After the coffee break, Mark Childs made a presentation from the floor, highlighting his recently completed PhD, Learners’ Experiences in Virtual Worlds. The gist of his talk centered around the notion of ‘embodied cognition’. Mark had found that for cognition in Virtual Worlds to be effective, one first needed to establish a virtual body schema.

Learning outcomes were tied to how well students inhabited and related to their avatar selves. In the absence of sufficient time in which to customise an avatar, students felt less immersed in their surroundings. A newcomer, for example, would not understand the notion of the ‘feel’ of a virtual space. Thus, immersive feelings such as ‘claustrophobic’, ‘airy’ or ‘cosy’ would not be understood as descriptions of a virtual space in the absence of self projection. To illustrate the difference between pre- and post-embodiment, Mark, aka, Gann McGann, has allowed his virtual self to be photographed ‘before’ and ‘after’. A certain jaded look seems to have accompanied the transformation, and he now looks like he knows how to use those spikes. *Tom Petty, 1985

Is there VoIP on Mars?

In another presentation from the floor, Drew Crow from Worcestershire Local Authority shared some insights into development and use of Open Sim for creating a virtual space in which school students themselves could recreate a Cholera Hospital. Another project shown was their Mars open terrain sim, housed in a crater at a reduced scale, wherein students explored issues relating to creation and habitation of space stations.

Projects and workflow are covered in greater detail, with videos, in Drew’s own blog. The difficulties in arranging for Linden Labs to accept under 18 yr-olds in Second Life precluded use of that environment, so OS seemed the best choice, with FreeSWITCH used to enable Open Source Voice Conferencing. Apparently, some fore-knowledge of Linux was useful, but not mandatory. Drew mentioned that OS allowed creation of 2×2 regions, and demonstrated it could even be run as a standalone on a laptop, installed with time-saving Diva Distro . Drew has also created a blog covering solutions to getting the most out of the commercial University learning platform, which many of the schools in his area are using.

More presentations to follow: WW1 in SL, COMSLIVE and VERT.

No comments:

Post a Comment