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I have heard of some “teaching to the unconscious” in the sense of marketing, advertising, and branding. I have also read that the jury is out in terms of the research on the efficacy / inefficacy of whether such outreaches actually work.
Then recently, after I wheedled a book from a colleague that I’d been wanting to read for a long time, I came across this concept again. The concept here was found in Raph Koster’s much-cited book “A ...
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MERLOT's JOLT (Journal of Online Learning and Teaching) just published a position paper titled "Exploring the Immersive Parasocial: Is it You or the Thought of You?" related to 3D immersive learning.
http://jolt.merlot.org/vol5no3/hai-jew_0909.htm
http://jolt.merlot.org/currentissue.html
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Artificial intelligence has been used to code “agents” in the ways of conviviality and social norms. What does this mean? This means that in some immersive spaces, there are AI agents that simulate social niceties and behaviors that are appropriate for that particular cultural milieu. When people enter those spaces, they may learn about other ways of being. They may interact with these robots, and they may start forming awareness and habits that fit that particular social setting.
These technologies ...
Continue reading The Transfer of Sociability to a Curriculum
Blog Entry
by Eruditio Loginquitas
17 July 2009
The simulation creator and author Clark Aldrich held a webinar recently titled “The Unifying View of Highly Interactive Virtual Environment (HIVE) Learning.” While I’d long looked forward to this presentation, I ended up with one of those mash-up days that allowed me to log on for the last 10 minutes of the presentation, and so I ended up experiencing this presentation as a re-run. Still, I found much that was thoughtful about his ideas.
(Truth to tell, I have ...
Continue reading Employing Highly Interactive Virtual Environments for "Learning to Do"
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Hello, all: I am soliciting responses to a brief survey on the experiences instructors and facilitators have had regarding security in 3D immersive, interactive and persistent spaces (like Second Life) in higher education. This information will be used for a forthcoming article or chapter.
Survey Title: Security in 3D Immersive and Interactive Spaces in Higher Education
This survey will be offered Mar 9, 2009 through Mar 31, 2009.
To participate in the survey, please go to the following link:
https ...
Continue reading Survey on Security in 3D Immersive Spaces in Higher Education
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
05 January 2009
Why do computer games need to evolve to keep people’s interests? How may AI enhance game playability?
For Darryl Charles, Colin Fyfe, Daniel Livingstone, and Stephen McGlinchey, who have teamed up for a new text that highlights biologically inspired AI for computer games, the answer is to create worthy game opponents. Games that adapt and learn are more challenging and therefore offer more learning and play value.
In Biologically Inspired Artificial Intelligence for Computer Games, these authors offer case ...
Continue reading Biologically Inspired AI for Computer Games (brief resource review)
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Readers who want a basic primer on how video games may promote learning may wish to give James Paul Gee’s Good Video Games + Good Learning a spin. With his folksy writing style and use of personal anecdotes, Gee’s work is highly accessible and non-threatening, and yet, it does offer some academic perspectives.
This author is a social linguist and professor who came to gaming in his 50s, through his son. It may be safe to assert that his ...
Continue reading Good Video Games + Good Learning (brief resource review)
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“Teaching with Online Games” Webinar with Dr. David Gibson
I’d never taken part in a truly global webinar. Most of the ones I attend are local…or only have the occasional person tapping in from a few other locales. Then, I attended Dr. Gibson’s “Teaching with Online Games,” and as a warm-up to the actual presentation, the facilitator asked participants to indicate their locations on a virtual map. She turned on that annotation tool in Elluminate, and the ...
Continue reading "Teaching with Online Games" Webinar with Dr. David Gibson
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It came as a bit of a shock to faculty at my university that there would be a foray into Second Life for educational purposes, social networking, and university service provision. There had been apparently long debates over concerns of what could happen in immersive 3D spaces in terms of griefers or other buses. And after some deep analysis, the advisory committee apparently was putting forward some solid recommendations along with hopes to maximize the use of this social virtual ...
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Dr. Michael Wesch always offers an engaging presentation, mixed with aptly used high tech, and there are always surprises—of the technological kind and absolutely of the human kind. In a recent standing-room only presentation at K-State, he spoke of the need to use technologies to help college students engage with learning. (“A Portal to New Media Literacy: Engaging New Technologies to Engage Students”)
He showed his digital ethnography dashboard http://www.netvibes.com/wesch#Digital_Ethnography To show his uses ...
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K-State's Second Life Academic Users Group will meet Nov. 20, 2008, from noon to 1 p.m. at the Union Stateroom 1...
Current or potential SL users are welcome to attend.
Contact Larry Jackson at ljackson@ksu.edu for more information.
Continue reading K-State's Second Life Academic Users Group Meeting
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At a recent conference, the presenters discussed their on-campus policy for using Second Life. A few strategies emerged from the presentation.
First, this campus simulated buildings from the physical campus to the virtual island—as grounds for familiarity. I know of another campus that has used its mascot and logo as a design element for an island on SL as well. The term used to describe this was “mimic proximity.” The spaces mimicked were ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
20 August 2008
Dr.Michael Wesch’s "digital anthropology" presentation to the Library of Congress resulted in a thought-provoking video that has garnered a lot of airplay.
http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/?p=179
Some of his observations about virtual “community” showed people with the art of mimicry and highly suggestible in terms of following others’ actions (something like lemmings).
Seeing Dr. Wesch’s presentation and then reading Andrew Keen’s “The Cult of the Amateur” (2007 ...
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Usually when an all-day training takes the morning to launch, few will return in the afternoon for the rest of it. So there were about a dozen of us huddled in an upscale hotel conference room with very minimal wireless connectivity and trying to get in on Second Life and to embody our avatars.
Here was yet another foray into Second Life, this time, under the able guidance of Dr. Jonathon Richter (U of Oregon) as part of a day-long ...
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It would seem that a central piece to designing well for online learning involves deeper understandings of the learner. So it’s not just the curricula, the domain knowledge and the technology that’s critical, but the nature of humans at their core is relevant.
It was in that spirit that I embarked on reading a classic—Colin Ware’s Information Visualization: Perception for Design (2004).
One curious observation was that people have very limited visual working memory. Given that ...
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A chance comment by a faculty member started me on a brief run of research on “herding” behaviors in automated agents. The idea was initially to have a herd of cows online behavior as their real-life counterparts do when approached from a particular angle. Having only seen one cow up close (at a gas station, no less), I wasn’t sure about the actual behaviors, but I had read a little something about “flocking” behaviors and figured I’d look ...
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Professor John Scigliano’s initiation into online space was not very salutary the way he tells it. He had logged on to Second Life when he was approached by a “furry” in lizard form, who promptly assaulted his avatar. This professor at the Graduate School of Computer and Information Sciences of Nova Southeastern University in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, was somewhat traumatized, the way he tells it.
In “Payoffs, Spin-offs, and Ripoffs in Virtual Worlds: What Gain? What Pain?” at the ...
Continue reading IRBs, Video Releases and 3D Virtual Avatars
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Dale A. Morris, an instructional development meteorologist of NOAA, in the presentation titled "National Severe Weather Workshop Scenario," presented a powerful live tabletop exercise designed to raise the situational awareness of the various entities that may be involved in a severe weather incident - the meteorologists, TV newscasters, and an emergency operations center.
A National Weather Service (NWS) forecast office piped in simulated weather information (based on past weather events). To create this, they built a weather event simulator ...
Continue reading The National Severe Weather Workshop Scenario
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Visualize a doctor who needs to trim a bone in order to fit a new hip. Or imagine some other surgical procedure which requires a steady hand and practical finesse.
A manufacturer of a haptic device showed what such a learning experience might be like by combining 3D computerized visuals with sound along with a haptic device (linked to the haptic virtual objects on-screen). Haptics, of course, relates to “touch” or “contact.”
The tabletop device was a white pen device ...
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Rich media refers to Web artifacts and sites that provide audio, video and interactivity. This includes downloadable or streaming videos that may be played on different media players like Adobe's Flash Player, Apple's QuickTime, Real Networks' RealPlayer, and Microsoft's Windows Media Player.
Rich multimedia can add more full-sensory learning such as sound and dynamic motion video to an online or hybrid learning experience. The digital interactive media may offer a more active learner experience than passive viewing ...
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Genevieve Wood (Concurrent Technologies Corporation), a speaker at the Washingotn Interactive Technologies conference in late August, introduced a tool that may help instructional designers collaborate with subject matter experts (SMEs), through the use of a shared building site. Her presentation was titled "Collaborative Design of Immersive Simulations." One front-line challenge for instructional designers may be that they receive contradictory feedback from subject matter experts and may have difficulties resolving these, particularly when there is no overriding power of a lead ...
Continue reading Collaborative Design of Immersive Simulations
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
17 September 2007
"The immersive nature of computer games, and the invisibility or transparency of the medium that Moulthrop suggests this produces, works both to empower the user and to simultaneously serve the interests of the oligopolies that produce them. The nature of immersion is seen not only as a desired quality for the production of active, engaging and meaningful experiences, but also simultaneously as the means through which the gameplayer is most likely to be exploited in the interests of monster conglomerates ...
Continue reading Creating "Controlled" Cyber Addiction for Training Purposes
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Lou Iorizzo, the head of the Army Training Staff Center in Training and Doctrine Command, gave the Interactive Technologies keynote for SALT in Crystal City, Virginia, on Aug. 22. He spoke on "Enabling Authentic Environments." One of the main challenges is to help their learners acclimate and function well in changing and adaptive situations. While people tend to be comfortable with a known through-put, those who would design learning need to focus, too on unintended consequences and flux in situations ...
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Those who would immerse in persistent virtual worlds may well enjoy getting a glimpse of Neo's post-death view of The Matrix. Here, instead of the illusions of the space, he sees the substructure and the streams, and he sees the reality.
In the same way, economist Dr. Edward Castronova offers a synthetic world-building / image-breaking view in his text that may shake loose some of those images of digital gold pieces and wizards and virtual furniture.
With Synthetic Worlds , he ...
Continue reading Castronova's "Synthetic Worlds" (Brief Resource Review)
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Sims have been a part of higher education for many years. A simple one may be a kind of role play held in a classroom where students take on different roles. It may be a mock court.
My first design of an online sim occurred about a year ago, and it involved designing a digital replacement for a real nation-wide sim that stretched over several weeks. The sim design was coming near the end of a three-university grant (and I ...
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So over break, as part of a family road trip, I got to visit some condo models in Chicago. One in particular was a luxury building that involved the use of a sophisticated DVD with virtual depictions of the various units and the new building itself just a few blocks off the Magnificant Mile. The quality of this simulated experience was something only an established builder with many years of marketing could really build or commission. And this experience, while ...
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"There's no reason to have walls in a classroom."
In any number of conferences - whether about journalism or advertising / branding or filmmaking or eLearning - the phenom of Second Life (http://secondlife.com/) keeps resurfacing. It's 3D; it's immersive; it's creative, and it's the in-thing right now.
At the recent SIDLIT (Summer Institute on Distance Learning, of C2C or Colleague-to-Colleague), Stacey Fox of the University of Kansas offered "Synthetic Worlds: Second Life in Education ...
Continue reading Classrooms without Walls and Thousands of Feet Above Ground
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In an academic office with plenty of technology-minded people around, it's not often that one sees a lot of obvious primping. As I consider this further, I am awestruck by the rarity of this event that occurred.
So there we were at the end of a virtual simulated tour conducted by a representative of an East Coast company. A group of us were beings in Second Life. One kept walking around with a virtual torch for quite a while ...
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Digital simulations may be used in situations where live simulations may be expensive, time-consuming, impractical and / or fast-changing.
At a recent conference, a representative of Chi Systems introduced the use of synthetic teammates for undergraduate pilot training. Here, pilots-in-training may practice the various voice communications with the tower (controller) and others in a runway take-off situation. Their voice inputs would be captured by voice recognition software (and VOIP for Net-mediated learning), and their responses and the timing of ...
Continue reading Fielding Synthetic Teammates for a Flying Simulation
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Christopher Stapleton, one of the staff members of Simiosys at the University of Central Florida, calls himself a "faculty entrepreneur." With decades of experience working in the entertainment industry "creating memories of a lifetime," he left managing a megabudget (over a hundred million) and a fat salary...in order to apply himself to meaningful work. That said, he still describes some of his works that he's helped create with an earned sense of pride. He describes the ...
Continue reading Virtual Puppetry and a Simulated Urban Classroom
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"Humanists look at these games as a new expressive genre like drama, opera, or movies; social scientists view them as anew form of collective behavior; computer scientists, engineers, and industrial designers find them a new focus of invention." -- Murray, Bogost, Mateas and Nitsche
So digital gaming has been around for 35 years now. So the talk in the academic literature on educational gaming is that games can be much more than that. They serve a learning purpose. They ...
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The features that make a game a strong one often enhances that game's efficacy as an elearning tool. An effective game needs to be engaging, playable and challenging; it shouldn't be confusing or unexciting. In the same way, a training game needs to be engaging in order to foster learning and skills acquisition and mastery. Training games are used in corporate and military environments to address new learning and to head off skills degradation.
(I would argue that ...
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Virtual reality consists of simulations. Users suspend reality in order to participate in this universe. Augmented reality consists of add-ons to the real-world.
The sci-fi version goes like this. A person puts on fashionable light-weight glasses empowered with cameras and displays. He or she goes into a live environment. The glasses collect information in the live environment and report that back to a computer. The computer generates informational overlays and details not available in the natural environment in ...
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The pattern, it seems, is that there are ever more entrancing layers of assimilation into machine life. We're learning scripted behaviors by integrating with machines. We can immerse into our digital alter egos with ease. We can live out a whole day and never leave the digital cocoon. The machine world so far has been one of predictability, do-overs, the quick thrills, the visual / sensory overloads, and ...
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At the SALT Washington Interactive Technologies conference held in late August, the gaming and simulation track consistently attracted a crowd. Given its popularity, I thought I'd share some highlights from some of the presentations. Gaming offers creative ways to promote education - in cognitive, affective and psychomotor ways.
The games ranged from multiple-choice frames with simple graphics to those with 3D backgrounds to video dramatizations with narrative voiceovers to dashboard simulators. The technologies now can offer some fairly ...
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I was speaking to Nick deKanter, VP of Muzzy Lane Software (http://www.muzzylane.com/). His company creates educational software games of varying complexity for the liberal arts.
One complaint of online games is that many are necessarily closed-systems. Players choose limited options. There are only so many factors that may be played or input, and every game is bounded. Real-time interactive live-player games add open-systems complexity by the addition of the other ...