Open Blackboard

Do Women Make Technology Differently?

2011-12-18T00:16:00.001-05:00

This is a very nice post by Carla Diana. It makes me more determined to bring opportunities to my school for girls to make technology.

Great Student Opensim Build: St. Peter's Basilica

2011-11-30T22:44:00.000-05:00

St. Peter's Basilica, Maderno's Facade

A ninth grade student at my school just finished an amazing build for her history class Renaissance Faire event. I really did very little of this beyond advising her on how to approach it and it's really gratifying to see a student get so much out of an experience like this and produce something that is such a sight to behold! She didn't do any more than the facade of the building, but that was plenty to tackle. As you get into the details of a piece of architecture like this you begin to appreciate what an immense task it is to make the real thing.

Students Managing Their Own Data

2011-09-25T01:09:00.002-04:00

Moodle RSS block

Post on Tumblr

Post pulled into Moodle page

I'm trying an experiment this year with my high school robotics students. I had been wanting them to document their work in a fun and creative way so I thought I would have them set up Tumblr accounts so they could easily post not only their code but videos and photos with their phones. Then I got thinking that I could pull in the RSS feeds from their Tumblrs to our Moodle class site. There's a block, or widget, for just that in Moodle. Then I thought why not just put them in the teacher role and give them an assignment to figure out how to connect up their own feeds. They didn't know what RSS was but I explained the concept and the purpose and gave them a couple hints. A few of them did figure it out and the rest did the next best thing, which was adding a link to their Tumblr on the page.

Why go to all this trouble? I think this exercise is important because they need to have experience making things with web tools for real purposes, not just using the web.

UPDATE on this: So one of my students got re-blogged by a porn site. I had to end the experiment. Fortunately I caught the spam before she could see it. Made me disappointed in the Internet.

Maker Faire NY

2011-09-25T00:26:00.001-04:00

I had the great fortune of attending Maker Faire NY for the second time. What a thrill! And this time the highlight was bringing some of my students. I decided to bring a few students from each age division of our school so everyone from young to old could enjoy it. I plan to have the students present pictures and videos to their peers and talk briefly about what they found inspiring and exciting.

What amazed me was that most of the projects on exhibit were different from last year. Of course some things have already become and deserve to be standard fare, such as MakerBots and the Life Size Mouse Trap. But the growth of affordable 3D printer technology was evident with so many more types on exhibit. I'm just amazed at the successful effort to coordinate so many new makers and their work in one place. What an event!

Some highlights were watching my older students attend a 25 minute presentation at the lockpicking booth so determined to learn the secrets inside the average lock, seeing the younger students' delight at 3D printers printing chocolate and cheese, the middle schoolers playing with the robotic drummer, walking into a wacky techno duo set bathed in technicolor patterns with Game Boys and Casios hanging off the musicians, and interacting with so many kinds of robots. Putting Flip cameras in the hands of the students was great because as our groups split up to explore different areas I got to learn about twice as many amazing projects than I would have had we stayed in one group, like the keyboard-on-a-glove.

The best thing about the whole trip was the chance to show girls the huge variety of applied science and technology there was to see. It was a great step in our effort to help them see themselves as makers of technology and not just consumers of it.

Multi-user Sim-on-a-stick

2011-07-23T01:45:00.004-04:00

I love how accessible Sim-on-a-stick makes OpenSimulator. Just plug it in and double click one batch file and after a succession of pretty windows a virtual world awaits. It's like a virtual Rube Goldberg machine unfolding right before your eyes. By default the Sim-on-a-stick flavor of Opensim is for a single user. So teachers with access to a bunch of PCs (yes, it only runs on PCs so far, but I'm sure some dedicated people will figure it out for Mac) could make as many copies on USB drives as they have students, hand them out, and let students manage their own personal sims. Or students could pair up or whatever.

I mentioned in a previous post that an adventurous teacher could configure a Sim-on-a-stick for multiple users, so you'd have all of your students logging into the same sim from their own computers. This would be nice for collaborating on a project, like when I had students build The Parthenon together. In keeping with the Sim-on-a-stick's ease-of-use, here's a step-by-step to doing that. So here goes.

You can go ahead and plug in your USB stick, download the latest version of Sim-on-a-stick from the website and unzip it to the stick. Before you run the Opensim_autostart you have to change a few things.

First, open the folder 'config-include' on the stick at the path in the image.

Find the file 'MyWorld.ini'.

Right click on it and open it with Notepad.

Before you can make the necessary changes to it, you need to know your computer's IP address. So click Start and in the search bar (or Run window if on XP) type 'cmd' and hit enter.

At the C: prompt, type 'ipconfig' and hit enter.

Many lines will fly by, but just scroll back up until you find the section for your IP address. Now, if you are connecting to your network wirelessly, look for the IPv4 Address under the Wireless section. But this setup will cause considerable lag for your students in the sim. Better to connect with an ethernet cable, in which case you will find your IP address in that section. Write down that number. You can type exit and hit enter to close the command line. NOTE: Your IP address does not stay the same, but is likely to change whenever you restart this computer. So to keep this setup you can just not turn off this computer, otherwise do a quick check on the command line to see that it hasn't changed. If it has, you'll need to modify the IP address settings you make in the following steps and to the students' viewers when they log in.

Go back to MyWorld.ini and find the line under [GridService] with the IP 127.0.0.1 and change that to the IP you found with ipconfig. Save and close that file.

Now go up one folder and find the Regions folder and open that.

Find the RegionConfig.ini file, right click on it and open it in Notepad.

In this file, find all 4 occurrences of the ExternalHostName IP address of 127.0.0.1 and change them to your IP. Save and close this.

NOW you can double click the Opensim_autostart file. Sit back and watch the pretty text and windows fly by. The last thing to open will be the Imprudence viewer. When that opens you'll see orange planets on a black background.

At this point you have the option of creating your students' accounts for them or letting them create accounts when they log in. If you choose the former, click "CREATE ACCOUNT" and fill in the relevant information for each of your students.

To log in to your sim, use the Simona Stick (pswd: 123) account and log in using the fields at the bottom. So now you are logged in and your students have accounts (or will make them).

Now for your students! They will need the Imprudence viewer on their computers for them to log in to your sim, so you will have to get that installed.

Once they open it they will see a different default screen. They should click the Grid Manager button, click Add new grid, for Grid Name type whatever name you want for your sim, and MOST IMPORTANTLY, for Login URI they need to type http://your.IP.add.ress:9000/wifi, and the same under Login page. This will direct their viewer to your computer where your sim will be running.

They can click OK and select that sim in the grid dropdown. Once they select it they should also be seeing the orange planets.

From here they either create their accounts or simply log in! Then the fun can begin!

Ahh, a couple more things. Your entire operation is running on the USB drive, so don't ever pull it out while you have the world running! And you can't just X out of the various windows to shut down. Here's the shutdown process:

Make sure your students are logged out of the sim and log out yourself (In Imprudence, File > Quit).

Now at the Opensim console, type 'shutdown' and hit enter. Various shutdown processes will commence and that window will close.

Then go to the MoWeS window and click 'Stop server'. Wait until both Apache and MySQL are not running, and click 'End'. Now you can take out the USB drive.

Controlling LED from a web page with Arduino and Ethernet Shield

2011-07-19T00:13:00.001-04:00

I figured out how to make my Arduino into a web server pretty quickly, especially since the example program does just that. What was hard was to go the other way, controlling it from a web page. I got that working finally by cobbling together bits and pieces of this project and this project. What I wanted was a couple of form input buttons that would turn on and off an LED. That's what this does. One issue I still have is the first time you submit the Arduino responds immediately but from then on you have a passed value in the URL and for some reason you have to click twice to get the Arduino to respond. Actually it does respond the first click but goes back to its previous state, then stays on the new state on the second click. Something more complicated is going on than I can yet understand. Anyway, it's cool and now I think lots of possibilities are opened up.
Well, I tried posting the code here but the WYSIWYG eats a lot of it, so here it is in a txt file, linked here.
UPDATE: Ha, an anonymous reply (thanks!) solved my double-click problem. Add a break; after each digitalWrite which makes sense now:

if(c == '0') {

digitalWrite(9, LOW);

break;

}

if(c == '1') {

digitalWrite(9, HIGH);

break;

We've Come A Long Way

2011-07-13T15:21:00.003-04:00

A few clicks and a new Kitely
world is made.

"I've just upgraded to the newest version of OpenSim using Diva's Distribution, which makes all of the following pretty much obsolete. I'm just keeping the old steps below so I can look back some day and appreciate how far it's all come." I'm quoting myself from two years ago, when I started messing with virtual worlds, and it's come time to take that look and appreciate where we are.

Sim-on-a-stick is starting up a new
region after running one batch file!

Two years ago the drama teacher in my school wanted to explore having his students act with avatars. After looking into Second Life and There it was clear to me that a private OpenSimulator sim was the only option for our small experiment. The learning curve was steep for me and the consequences of deploying alpha software (v 0.6.3!) in an environment where we depended on it working with students ready to go was tough. We started our little acting project with few props, inventory we thought was lost that really wasn't because of DB connection timeouts, awkward kludges with FreeSWITCH, and a host of other issues.
The release of the Diva Distribution in the fall of 2009 was a major advance for me, with the helpful readme files and update and configure utilities. Despite this fantastic advance in OpenSimulator's ease of use, you still had to be a brave enough educator to install a MySQL database and mess with .ini files. These basic procedures have been prohibitive enough to keep the educators I've shown to keep their feet out of the virtual water.

A new me in seconds on Kitely

Well, that is all changing because of Kitely and sim-on-a-stick. I'd been hearing about these options over the last month or so, longer for sim-on-a-stick, but only had time to try them out a few days ago. I'm still buzzing from how easy both of these options are. With either one, you are up and running a sim in a few minutes with no back-end messing required. Each option has certain limitations compared to, say, paying for more full service sim hosting or running your own public grid from the ground up rather than on a stick.
In the case of Kitely, you don't have access to the back end at all but you can upload an OAR file at the time you create a new world. Pricing is extremely affordable and the team is very responsive to new feature requests and working hard to give users what they want.
Sim-on-a-stick (you'll find the relevant credits here) is an amazing new development that packages everything you need to run a sim on a USB drive. Having gone through the agony of making countless mistakes setting up this and that service and database and version of .NET and hunting down the meanings of various error messages I watch the pretty windows scroll by and things happening on their own after running ONLY ONE BATCH FILE and I'm just speechless at the magic of it.
Being the innovation enthusiast and teacher support person I am, I always think of how it will look to the first time non-geek teacher. I think the command lines of sim-on-a-stick, pretty as they are, will freak some people out, which may make Kitely, which hides all that scary-looking business, behind a clean and simple web front-end. But one thing that's beautiful about sim-on-a-stick is you can just say don't touch your computer until it's time to log in. And then there will be some adventurous people who will enjoy getting under the hood and, say, looking up their local IP, adding that to the bin\config-include\MyWorld.ini and bin\Regions\RegionConfig.ini files in place of 127.0.0.1 so that students on other computers in their LAN can direct their own Imprudence viewer to that IP and log in to the same sim-on-a-stick on your computer (the sim has to run on a PC for now, by the way, but the clients can be on Macs). I tried this today on a hunch and it rocked! Wired connections are best, of course. Then you have a collaborative environment and not just a single user operation. Before you do this, of course, you have to run the Diva Wifi service on the stick and create the new users for the students. Or even have the students create their own accounts by having their viewers directed to http://ip.add.re.ss:9000/wifi.
Anyway, all of this signals good times ahead for learning in virtual worlds!

You Wanna Buy a Parthenon?

2011-06-23T14:45:00.003-04:00

Actually it's free! This OAR file contains terrain modeled on the Athens Acropolis, a model of the Theatre of Dionysus built by me, and a model of the Parthenon built by about 40 8/9th grade students in their geometry class this past October. The models are built to scale, which was the point of having students do it as a geometry activity. The only thing that is way off is the Acropolis itself, which should be about twice as big, but it would have far exceeded the boundaries of a single 256 x 256 meter region.

I'm releasing it with an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) license. For attribution you can specify "Erik Nauman and The Hewitt School" as the original creators. Only one texture is used aside from the default viewer textures and that is a white marble texture downloaded from CG Textures. The link to the OAR file is here. My students and I would love to hear how anyone uses it, so please leave a comment if you do.
Here's a video of some of the students working.

It’s not the tech that matters

2011-06-23T00:19:00.001-04:00

I had the honor and pleasure of moderating a fantastic panel of presenters yesterday at the conference of the NCGS at Wellesley College. The session title was “Creative And Interdisciplinary Uses Of Technology To Engage Girls In STEM” and the panelists were Carolyn Steele, Middle School Math Teacher at Castilleja School in Palo Alto, CA, and Karen Kolkka, Lower School Educational Technologist at Springside School in Philadelphia, PA. Carolyn showed us how she and her colleague, Louise Madrid, integrate Scratch programming throughout the disciplines. They have 7^th graders programming science animations that depict and explain DNA replication, challenging interactive math games, and hypercard-like history presentations with embedded animation sequences. Carolyn and Louise have backgrounds in software development so they are able to give their girls a solid introduction to programming concepts and design iteration process. I could learn so much sitting in on their class! Karen showed us animation projects by their lower and upper students using Animation-ish and the Motion component of Final Cut Pro. Their focus is on using tech to combine art and creativity with science, the idea being that their students will understand science concepts more deeply by creating animations that represent causal relationships and develop their personal creative vision through their projects. Then I gave a little demo of our Parthenon sim project.

How does all of this tie together? As moderator I talked a little about the difference between patching the leaky pipeline to STEM and creating alternate pathways to STEM, the projects we demo-ed exemplifying the latter. Our common interest seemed to be casting a wider net to draw girls into using technology and engaging them in science, math, engineering, and technology in vital, personal, creative, and interdisciplinary ways.

A few more points from my comments:

● Effective modeling of technology integration, exemplified by Carolyn and Louise’s use of collaborative co-teaching between those who know the tech and those who know the content area

● Making explicit the connections between the students’ work and work in STEM fields: increasing girls’ confidence in STEM

● Making technology more accessible to girls with meaningful applications in content areas and room for personalization

○ Bringing together art and technology to foster greater engagement, understanding of science, other disciplines

OpenSim Diva upgrade

2011-06-20T11:43:00.010-04:00

I just finished upgrading my school sim to the latest version of the Diva + Wifi distribution of OpenSimulator, v0.7.1.1. It's a serverless grid setup, so I can shuffle the separate regions around in whatever layout best suits our current needs. The last version of Diva was released back in September, so this was a major upgrade. Aside from the changes mentioned in the release notes (run configure.exe), here are a few changes I had to make between the last version, 0.7.0.2, and this one:

FreeSWITCH: My voice service didn't work until I read in the wiki that a path changed in one config file. In the "xml_curl.conf.xml" edit, a folder name changes from api to fsapi. That fixed a FreeSWITCH error I was getting.

I could add a start location for new accounts! Open up MyWorld.ini and under the [WifiService] section add this line.

In my Mars simulation I had changed the gravity setting to -3.8 so the astronaut avatars can bounce around. Many defaults have been moved out of the Opensim.ini and into separate files. Gravity is still under [ODEPhysicsSettings] but in a file called OpenSimDefaults.ini now. To retain that gravity setting I added an [ODEPhysicsSettings] section in MyWorld.ini with the gravity setting I want.

Those are the biggest things I've had to figure out. Now I have to see what sort of bugfixes have been implemented. Exciting!

Opensim Guide for Schools

2011-06-18T03:16:00.000-04:00

David W. Deeds has created a much needed guide to setting up OpenSimulator in your school. It's more than a step-by-step, including some discussion of the reasons for using virtual worlds in education. Here is the Scribd version (cool, that worked), or you can download a copy from his website. I've only just skimmed it but it looks great, explaining many of the complications one encounters in configuration and setup, as well as covering the options pretty well. IMHO the Diva setup could have been promoted more heavily as I think it's more user-friendly than the main release, since it includes documentation and update utilities. But it also uses MySQL as a default for storage rather than SQLite and he may have thought setting up a db would pose too great a challenge for the average user. Great service he's done, putting this together!

OpenSimulator: School Quick Start Guide

Learning with Gestures

2011-06-09T09:34:00.000-04:00

A sneak peek at Windows 8 reveals that Microsoft wants to integrate its os with tablet hardware to keep up with the huge growth in people's desire for the gestural UI of tablet devices. This should be a much bigger post because there are so many issues this transformation raises for schools but all I can come up with right now is a list of problems to think about and questions:

How does learning through apps restrict learning possibilities and how does it facilitate new learning possibilities?
Microsoft seems to be trying to simplify the user experience while still providing access to the file system (explorer.exe still exists!) but iOS removes a layer of user control in that sense. What happens to the learner when this level of control is taken away? Granted, file systems are simply TMI to many users, but if you know what you are looking for and aren't allowed access to it that takes away an important level of control over your machine.
The rush to gestural UI is happening so fast. My feeling is we're being led into making significant decisions about how best to provide and use technology by consumer preferences. It's way too early to say learning with apps is more effective than learning with software on a more open and transparent os. Of course, both can be effective, but it all comes down to how they are used, and there's still so much to learn about that.

Much more to say, but it will have to come in future posts...

What Do Girls Want to Do With HTML?

2011-03-24T22:57:00.002-04:00

I recently spent a few classes taking my 6th graders on an HTML crash course. I only intended to spend one or two classes on it but they couldn't get enough! It was interesting to see what really got them excited and what the majority of them didn't really care much for. I put together a couple handouts they could follow at their own pace so as the classes went on you started to see the pages become very original creative projects. Here are links to the handouts:

HTML part I (docx) (pdf)
HTML part II (docx) (pdf)

Part I covers text formatting using HTML tags only, no CSS, including font color and font face, heading tags, paragraph tag, block level alignment, and the image tag.

Part II gets more interesting with hyperlinks, fun and simple tricks with JavaScript, like alerts and buttons to change the background color, and finally using the embed and iframe tags to put videos, audio, and other web pages in your web page.
So while a few girls really got into the JavaScript and hyperlinks, what really went viral was the possibility of embedding videos and putting up images they made on some I HEART website using all their friends' names. So for the majority I would say it became a mini social network right there on our school network where they shared videos, photos, and shout-outs with each other. Pretty cool. I was having them save their pages on a network drive and with two other 6th grade classes doing the same project at the same time the pages themselves almost became a kind of social network, since they knew how to navigate to the network folder and see the other pages. Now I'm wishing I had taught them how to hyperlink to each others' pages! That would really have been a social network.

Understanding Photoshop Documents

2011-02-24T22:11:00.004-05:00

I find that my students often have a superficial understanding of aspects of how computers work that persists even after they've been explained. For example, after giving instructions to 7th graders recently to save cropped screenshots they were taking as jpegs to upload to voicethread, I saw one student navigate to her psd file in Windows Explorer and simply change the file extension from psd to jpeg. No, that won't work! I've been doing a lot of research lately about the need to provide visual representations of concepts, especially for girls, who tend to process information in the language areas of the brain rather than the spatial areas. I left it free of text so people can make their own points with the visuals. The main points are layered information vs. compressed "flat" information, Photoshop-specific platform vs. universal program platform, and large vs. small file size.

Photoshop vs Compressed Image from Erik Nauman on Vimeo.

Technology Connecting People

2011-02-18T22:35:00.005-05:00

5th graders together in the Mars sim
one pair of students Skyped in to the class from a different part of the building because one has a broken ankle and can't go up the stairs
remote pair also logged into the Mars sim, where the rest of the class can see their astronaut and chat with them
technology bringing people together!

Peaceful Moment On Mars

2011-02-18T22:22:00.001-05:00

Our Mars simulation was a big success this week. With the technical glitches and hurdles smoothed out, the students and I could focus on the uniqueness of the experience and enjoy it. At one moment I noticed a team of students had walked their astronaut away from the meteorite field where the other astronauts were gathered and ventured up the crater's side a ways. As they turned around to look over the scene below the screen held a beautifully captured moment with the expanse framed by the crevice in which the astronaut stood. I popped in and got a snapshot on their computer. It's worth looking at the larger version to see the tiny astronauts below.

1024 x 568

1920 x 1065

Second Annual Mars Sim Journey

2011-02-17T00:49:00.000-05:00

A year ago our school took a giant step for 5th grade girls by sending them into our OpenSimulator Mars crater sim to find meteorite samples and enjoy the low-gravity orange haze of the red planet. That first experience is documented here. This week the same science teacher and I are once again introducing our current 5th graders to the experience and I'm happy to say I've learned from my previous mistakes and made some valuable improvements. Disabling flying and showing the students how to use the mini-map allowed them to stay focused on the goal of working as a team and getting everyone through the mission together, which is really what the experience is about. The other technique they took much greater advantage of is local chat. I wish I had the logs because they reflect so much collaborative problem solving and cooperative negotiation. The one other improvement I made was to specify a different account for each pair of students right on the tutorial handouts I gave them, which prevented the duplicate logins that caused groups to kick each other out of the sim repeatedly last year and had me pulling my hair out until I figured it out. These changes greatly reduced the tendency toward chaos that took over at times last year and undermined the simulation experience. So the result has been that they really get the experience and what it's about. It's a really fun way to practice working as a team and solving complex problems. And hopefully we've captured their imaginations about the world of space flight to boot.

All Things Great and Small

2011-02-02T00:21:00.000-05:00

The hall of small. The hall
itself was designed and built by a
student!

I wrote about kids imagining things so small they can't see when I started this project with my 7th grade students, wondering why it was that some of them created 2D models in a 3D environment. I still don't have an answer to that question, but I'm certain that all of the students learned a lot from this no matter how they ended up visualizing the microscopic things they were studying in science class. Their work is beautiful. They loved creating bright, shiny things and I think the images they conjured from the building tools will stay with them for a lifetime, like Ener's experience making a cell with epoxy resin and paper clips!
There were tears along the way in this project. While some students settled happily into the world of possibilities in the edit panel and prim handles, others were overwhelmed and made careless mistakes, sometimes deleting their work without a clue how they had done so. You can bet that helped them slow down. They came out stronger for the experience. Just today a student jumped up and shouted out so happy she'd figured out how to successfully edit a script without my help.
It took me a while to figure out the exact workflow of this project, but I settled on 1) having them build in open space somewhere outside the exhibit hall, 2) teaching them how to link their prims and take them into their inventory, 3) rezzing their models in the exhibit hall and resizing them to an appropriate size (some started out huge!), 4) receiving a script from a script-giver I made (script me!) that makes hover text with or without rotation on touch (they edited the strings and hover text color) and putting that into their models, and, 5) adding an open URL button near their models that gives people more information about their topic.
That was all a lot to chew on for 7th graders. There were many steps to follow and I found it helpful to make printed tutorials for the major steps. I figured out a good solution for the script givers. At first they were running the scripts to be given when touched, which was confusing. I finally figured out I could uncheck run to stop them from running when they were given.

The students had to experiment. Their
favorite shape seems to be the torus.

Paving the Road To Digital Success

2011-01-15T07:29:00.002-05:00

7th graders are creating 3D cell models with an interface
they've never seen before.

I imagine it would be an exciting time to be a kid learning to use computers thes days. There are so many computing environments that make so many things possible there are new cool surprises around every corner. But from an educator's perspective this poses a tough problem. How can they develop a solid foundation in all of these important tools? Video editing, image editing, web publishing, collaborative document editing, non-collaborative document editing, physical computing, digital game creation, programming...okay, I'm dizzy. Obviously they can't. Ten years ago an instructor in a web design class I was taking warned us against becoming a 'tool monkey' by specializing in one program in a domain like web graphics or HTML rather than understanding how any program in a domain has to work and figuring it out when you need it. I don't think anyone needs to be told that now. There are places in the world for Dreamweaver or PHP gurus but not that many. For the power user or anyone who gets under the hood of hardware and software technology has always been what Rand Spiro calls an ill-structured domain, but the ubiquity of apps, platforms, and insinuations of technology into so many areas of our lives now forces the average user to contend with some very complex user experiences.

As a technology instructor this problem is always foremost in my mind when I design new lessons and units. I want to strike a balance between telling students enough to feel comfortable with something and challenging them to relate what they know to figure out a new situation and test out their own theories. Sometimes I have to reteach things because I've thrown too much at them with too little scaffolding and the class has gone haywire with requests for help.

Aside from appropriate scaffolding I've been working on making sure that whatever new topics students learn are placed in a meaningful context so they have some compelling reason to be learning a confusing, complex subject. Recently I had my 9th grade robotics students learning to calibrate the four types of sensors we'll be using for our next project (photocell, ir reflective, distance, and a temperature sensor I hacked together). They went haywire and had much frustration, sometimes saying things like "I don't get what we're doing at all." That's a sign something isn't making sense, right? So for the next class I put together a worksheet and emphasized the main purpose of sensors. "Sensors are the robot's ONLY way to know anything about its environment. Without them it exists in a dark, silent, empty world." That conjured an intense image for the students and while they still found it challenging to get it to work they enjoyed investigating the sensor readings much more.

Amazing Building Communities Workshop

2011-01-08T05:03:00.059-05:00

Futuristic buses in Beijing

Working In-World

We just wrapped up an amazing four-day workshop on design and engineering of public spaces. Each year we spend this week after winter break teaching special collaborative courses with multi-age groups of students so I worked with a math teacher, a science teacher, and another technology coordinator to put together a series of amazing field trips and a design and building project in OpenSim with nine students in 9 - 12th grades. Our field trips were unbelievable, starting at the MOMA with Design and the Modern Kitchen and Design Over Time, then to the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum's Why Design Now? exhibit and a workshop, and finally into what felt like the center of the Earth with a tour of the NY Metropolitan Transit Authority's excavation of the planned 2nd Ave. subway tunnel. (More amazing info and pictures of that here!)

Working RL

Renewable Energy Community

Interspersed with those experiences was our project using OpenSim to design and build communities. The students broke into groups, picked a location in the world to design for, and researched the needs, cultures, and geography of the local region. Once they had chosen their places I created approximate heightmaps and imported them to adjacent regions. I had hoped to use Virtual White's steps to importing USGS Seamless Server data to OpenSim but I couldn't find anything similar for international GIS data. So I did some quick brush work and came up with some okay approximations, though way off scale. The areas they chose were Syndey Harbor, Fengtai in Beijing, and an area modeled after Table Mountain near Capetown, South Africa, though the actual Table Mountain is a nature reserve. Each group focused on different aspects of their communities. The Beijing group worked primarily on a transportation center with a station and a futuristic bus. I got them started with a script to move the bus with passengers inside that they obsessively refined to suit different transportation objectives.

Sydney Harbour Bridge

Syndey Harbor Heightmap

The Table Mountain group focused on a community supported by renewable energy resources. They chose their location because of the high winds in the area and integrated purple wind turbines inspired by Ener Hax's amazing work and solar panels on light-filled structures. And the Sydney Harbour group worked really hard on a fantastic replica of the actual bridge complete with a waving flag and built an extensive housing complex. They had fun inhabiting the city with some pretty awesome kangaroos they built, though I doubt those are roaming as freely as they would like to imagine.

Aside from Ener's work, we looked at an amazing video of Encitra's model for integrating a podcar system in Uppsala, Sweden. And we took a virtual tour of some Second Life regions, like Ijinle 1796, a composite Yoruba village in Africa Illuminated, the impressive Edmonton Civic Center build, and a nice Chinatown build called Chukagai in Yokohama. I don't know how to do SLURLs but if you search in SL you should be able to find these locations. And we read and discussed some passages about affordances and affective elements of design from Donald Norman's books, The Design of Everyday Things, and Emotional Design.

I was so impressed that they really got some essential concepts about what it means to design things for people. On one of our field trips the guide asked them some questions about design and they said things like, "You design things to solve particular problems," "Your first design will never work," and "At some point you will have to use math to get your design to work right." I was so proud of them!

A bit of fun on the bridge

What else can I say....It is so rewarding to work in a way that allows for learning from such different angles, gives them such great latitude for creativity, ingenuity, and collaboration, and provides a social element that really makes it fun. At some points we all feel like it's a game that we're playing together but there's enough freedom to set goals together and for the students to set and revise their own goals. There are even a few girls who want to continue working and create a replica of our school building in the sim! It's also the kind of work that is tremendously engrossing and the concentration is exhausting. They liked working steadily on something and then sitting back and realizing how tired they were from concentrating so hard. In all, what an amazing experience. I look forward to next year's Winterim class.

Two New Google Apps Worth Checking Out

2010-12-21T09:37:00.000-05:00

I told the science and English/history teachers I work with about these two new apps from GoogleLabs. Now I imagine they are spending their vacations browsing the human body and published word usage history, respectively. The first is the Google Body Browser. Think Google Earth for the human body. Truly amazing! For it to work you have to download the beta version of Google Chrome. The other is Google Ngram Viewer. This lets you enter a word or collection of words and search the entirety of what Google Books has scanned and made public to give you a graph showing their occurrences over time. If you enter more than one word the graphs are shown together so you can compare. It's an amazing tool for English, history, and even math. Really any discipline if you want to see how certain domain-specific terms have changed in importance over time.

How do kids visualize science?

2010-12-16T23:26:00.000-05:00

My 7th grade students are building models of microscopic things they are studying in science class in our sim. The science teachers said they briefly cover many topics and don't have time to explore cell division, elements, compounds, photosynthesis, and nucleic acids in depth. So I thought it would be helpful for the students to make 3D models of these things to have a more vivid mental model of them when they come back to studying them more in depth later on.

All I did is show them how to build. They had to find images and build 3D models that made sense to them since I'm no science teacher. Now what surprised me is that some of them reproduced 2D representations in this 3D environment. I assumed they would be able to imagine a 3D version of the pictures they were looking at but in many cases they couldn't take that leap.

So it seems to represent a developmental snapshot of sorts in terms of their ability or lack of ability to visualize these abstract things they are learning about. As I told the science teachers, I'm not sure there is anything we should do about this. It could be that as they continue to study these topics they should make new models that reflect their deeper understanding, including what these things look like in 3D space.

To Sim or Not To Sim

2010-12-03T22:14:00.003-05:00

I know, silly title. Here’s my main question: Are virtual worlds effective environments for the presentation of dramatic arts? Maybe some genres are more appropriate than others?

The reason I’m asking is I presented a short video of two students' inworld performance of a scene from Approaching Zanzibar. Here's the vid. Part of the dialog is about fears the characters have about visiting an aunt who is sick with cancer. To my horror the whole auditorium of 4-8 graders reacted with laughter during some of the most sobering and serious lines. I’m sure this was in part a way to relieve anxiety about a heavy subject. But I also believe it had to do with the content being delivered by awkward-looking cartoony figures. This leads me to think we really shouldn’t be trying to present serious dramatic material in this format. Kids this age have never even seen anything like this. Their closest point of reference is probably video games. If a performance with any emotional gravity comes across as goofy, funny, or unconvincing this might be the wrong medium for those kinds of dramatic experiences.

On the other hand there are dramatic genres that seem like they would lend themselves well to the fantastical possibilities of virtual environments. I would have liked to show the Alice in Wonderland scene but the FreeSWITCH service that's been so dependable kept dropping Alice’s voice during their performance for some inexplicable reason.

The Peter Pan scene might have been good, too, with Peter flying onstage and having trouble getting his shadow to attach properly. But I was kind of smitten with the local light effect and wanted the kids to see it. It's like that with virtual worlds. The magic of it is hard to explain to people. They have to see it for themselves, have the experience.

So what kind of dramatic performances are VWs good for? Now I'm thinking material that takes advantage of the special capabilities of the platform--the ability to fly, script objects to do unexpected and magical things, the ability to make amazing, gravity-defying costumes, the ability to appear and disappear magically (teleport). In our Aesop's Fable of The Frogs Desiring a King Jupiter was able to throw down a huge log onto the stage out of thin air. That was a surprising, fun experience and in that world it also made sense. It just added to the magic the kids watched unfolding in front of them.

I don't think serious drama should be avoided altogether in VWs. The drama teacher I do this with put it well when he said one of the best things about it for him as a drama teacher is it forces the students to treat dramatic devices--tone of voice, gesture, movement--more consciously since they have to do it from a distance through the narrow parameters of the avatar. They can't fall back on their own default expressions like they can in RL. So I still think it's an effective tool for students to learn more about all genres of dramatic performance. I just don't think all genres in this medium need to have an audience.

Cricket Microcomputer Cell Phone

2010-11-29T10:31:00.000-05:00

Created by my 9th graders! What I love about this is the experience of cramming all the electronics inside a box. They even routed the IR beamer from the computer to inside the box so it matches up with the transceiver inside. It really feels like an electronic object with the UI on the outside and the complicated stuff on the inside. This is a simple robot as you can't choose the numbers you dial but just hit the same switch and it dials pre-programmed numbers that are displayed on the LED. We aren't working on conditional statements yet. It is their first project after all.

Student Performance in OpenSim

2010-11-27T23:48:00.001-05:00

Performed by two 8th grade students. Note my atrocious camera work. But my excuse is we can so much with tech in education; it's just so hard to do it well. What I like about this, though, is the virtual puppetry (what we're calling it) is getting better and this scene uses local lights in an effective way.

Virtual Learning is Fun

2010-11-23T21:12:00.000-05:00

Many times during my work with students in HewittSim unexpected things happen. Once a student accidentally attached an 8 foot tall mushroom to her spine, becoming a walking fungus. If students click on the wrong surface of a chair they want their avatar to sit on, they can end up sitting sideways with their avatar looking none the wiser.

Usually we are pressed for time and when these mishaps spring up during our short class periods as teachers we have to suppress the urge to tell students to quiet down and focus. They are very funny and you can’t blame kids for being amused by things that are so preposterous in this parallel universe we’ve begun inhabiting for our educational adventures.

So when today’s math class explored our completed Parthenon to measure parts of it looking for examples of The Golden Ratio, we allowed the girls to get off task a bit when they discovered a runaway piece of marble floating at least 100 meters above the building. It was just pure fun to fly up and stand on it with empty space around and below our avatars. It was just as normal in this unusual world to walk right off and fall to the ground intact and continue with the task of measuring. I actually think having a laugh at the crazy things that happen enriches the learning experience they are having because of its novelty.

A Special Place

2010-11-23T20:45:00.003-05:00

We just finished our first go-round with the 8th graders' dramatized scenes in our sim. Some videos will come soon, but I wanted to put up some photos of their stages. They spend a few weeks in charge of these stages, setting up and modifying props, learning to navigate their spaces and execute their blocking. And to different degrees, they become works of art themselves. The Alice In Wonderland scene is the most impressive, of course, but others are thoughtfully laid out and harmoniously composed. I like that you come to have a similar experience on a virtual stage as I imagine you do on a real one. The cast rehearses and pushes together towards the final performance, and when the show is done, everything is taken down and the stage becomes empty and bare, waiting for the next dramatic cycle.

Super Cricket IR Distance Sensor

2010-11-22T22:18:00.002-05:00

Gleason Research released a new sensor to use with their Super Cricket microcontroller. It's an infrared distance sensor, which got me excited thinking we can start doing with the crickets what my younger students have been doing with NXT robots. When I tested them out I found that rather than outputting the actual distance reading, the sensor sends the microcontroller data similar to that of other cricket sensors--that is, a number from 0 to 255 that is inversely related to the intensity of environmental variable. So as the photocell sensor returns a higher number for lower light levels and a lower number for higher light levels, the distance sensor returns a higher number for close distances and lower for greater distances. You could work out some data points and calibrate the sensor that way for use in a conditional statement, but it would be nicer to have it return an actual distance. With the aid of this website, I was able to figure out a conversion formula that takes the raw data and outputs something close to actual centimeters. I used the formula given on the website but had to divide the result by 2. Its range is about 8 - 50 cm and it's more accurate from 8 - 15, becoming progressively wider than actual centimeters until up around 50 cm it's about 5 cm too wide. There is probably some fiddling I could do with the formula to lessen the slope a bit but for our purposes--making a functional educational robot--it should work well enough.

So here's a test program I put together:

global [distance]
to convert
   setdistance ((2914 / (sensora + 5) - 1) / 2)
end
to main
   loop
   [convert
   display distance
   wait 2]
end
This will display the sensor data, converted to cm, on an LED display.

Exciting Developments with Microsoft Kinect

2010-11-19T11:36:00.000-05:00

I'm much more excited about what people are doing with Kinect than what Kinect is made to do out of the box, no matter how Microsoft feels about it. There are some great developments, and so quickly!

And to think after I showed my students a couple early hacks they wondered why you would want to do that...

Action! Our School's First Live Virtual Performance

2010-11-13T00:52:00.000-05:00

Our K-12 school was immersed for a week in activities revolving around Sophocles' Antigone with loads of exciting projects across the entire curriculum. But Antigone is not for the little ones, so the drama teacher and I cooked up a virtual performance in the style of Ancient Greek theater that would give the elementary students an idea of what it looked and felt like. The drama teacher had five students in grades 10-12 rehearse an adapted Aesop's Fable, The Frogs Desiring A King, and perform it in our standalone sim. Over the summer, I made a replica of the Theatre of Dionysus and some basic clothing. So the show took place at the foot of the Acropolis, upon which The Parthenon was being built by other students! How cool is that! I had to figure out some fun solutions to theatrical problems, like the giant log, which is rezzed from a button at the top of the stage. The stairs that appear briefly are actually rezzed by the log and help the actors get on the log more easily. Voice chat is provided by FreeSWITCH and the recording was made with Fraps in the Imprudence viewer.

As it happened scheduling conflicts resulted in the students having only three 40 minute classes to go from zero to showtime. They had never set foot in a virtual world, much less get an avatar to act, so I think they did a terrific job considering. And one fell ill so the drama teacher had to step in to play Jupiter. Ah, show biz. The little kids loved the show and I think had an experience of Ancient Greek theater that was in some ways closer to the original than the rest of the school.

Avatar Costume Design Noob

2010-11-12T12:58:00.000-05:00

I just finished my most developed avatar costume for a character in our 8th grade drama project. I know it's really elementary and clunky but it works well enough for the audience, which will be medium range back. If anyone has suggestions for ways to make attachments that aren't too time consuming, I'm interested. I know better methods have something to do with 'mesh' but haven't had time to investigate.

Robotic Inventions

2010-11-11T23:39:00.001-05:00

I couldn't make a nicer microwave myself!

Random chatting

2010-11-10T00:06:00.002-05:00

Omegle is a website for having text or webcam chats with random people. Though it is simply a website for chatting I have to believe it is a game for reasons I will explain. My 7th grade students just told me about this during a class in which they have been working on making posters about internet safety to put up around our school. The website has as its motto "Talk to Strangers" and the statement "Chats are completely anonymous, although there is nothing to stop you from revealing personal details if you would like," both of which are behaviors my students are fully aware should be avoided. But as they showed me the website they were clearly excited and having a great time trying it out to see what happens. The most important reason I want this to be a game is that it is a medium for kids to do something their parents are always telling them not to do. My first thought was that it makes the concept of strangers meaningless to them by reducing them to harmless sources of funny conversations. After a lot of exposure to this stuff will they start thinking of strangers on the street as random people to play around with, flirt with, have a crazy wacky time with? But if they treat it as a game by just playing with it or seeing how long they can maintain a chat before the stranger leaves or seeing how many strangers they can surprise or whatever goal makes it fun for them, then they are participating in an activity with its own set of rules that is apart from reality and strangers will still be strangers, to be wary and suspicious of, in real life. That is my hope, and theories about games should bear it out. Of course, there are many reasons for them to avoid this type of activity online at this website and the hundreds of others like it, such as chatroulette, even if they do treat it as a game. An informal study on techcrunch found that 1 in 8 video chats on chatroulette had content that was not suitable for children. The same study found that a little hacking can determine the IP address of the chat partner, giving at least a general idea of your physical location.

Too Many Cooks Spoil the Collaboration

2010-11-06T23:26:00.003-04:00

I tend to assume collaboration with technology is great for education. There are so many excellent tools out now that enable students to build things like stories, presentations, and concept webs together, in the process learning how to listen to each other, communicate effectively, and use the affordances of the tool to reach their goal. Google Docs, Webspiration, Voicethread, and Etherpad (one of its many manifestations is linked below) are all examples of these. I've used a couple of tools recently that highlighted the limits of collaborative environments, however, and the experience helps underscore a couple of good principles to work from when setting up a collaborative learning activity. When I worked with 8/9th graders in building The Parthenon with OpenSim the project went really well until the last session. There were just two specific tasks to accomplish--placing a few more ceiling pieces and lining the rest up better and doing the same with some columns in the chamber of Athena--and students were concentrating on doing them well, knowing that the appearance of the final product was up to them. But they kept running up against the problem of two people moving pieces around at the same time. Interestingly, there is nothing built in to OpenSim to prevent multiple people from editing the same prim. Because they were moving them into place based on their perspective, both were often trying to move them into different positions, undermining each others' efforts. The problem came down to there not really being enough for everyone to do.

Etherpad (great version at typewith.me--35 collaborators and no registration) is another wonderful tool for collaboration that I've been using with great success in my robotics class as a way for pairs of students to document project descriptions, plans, pseudo-code, and program versions that allows me to see who is contributing what. But before I start students using it I open it up as a sandbox activity for everyone to try for a bit and get their desire to play with it out of their system. It always ends up freaking them out a bit, because with a blank page and 18 students trying to type at once no one can get anything done. For this reason, when an English teacher asked if she could have her class use it to collaborate on a sort of fan fiction activity, I cautioned against her just tossing them in there simultaneously to start writing. They would just get in each others' way. I suggested small groups take turns working on it while the rest are doing something else, or somehow starting with a big chunk of text already there so they would be less likely to undermine each others' work.

So the principles I can think of that help manage collaboration with these robust tools are 1) make sure there is enough meaningful work for everyone to do, and 2) provide systems and procedures to ensure no one is duplicating efforts of anyone else.

Writing Across the Curriculum

2010-10-25T00:03:00.000-04:00

I was interviewed this week by one of our upper school English teachers for a qualitative study about writing across the curriculum. Our conversation got me thinking about tie-ins between writing and virtual worlds and towards the end of the interview we had some head-spinning brainstorming going on. It occurred to me that virtual world experiences could set the context for some really rich writing activities. We tend to think of very specific learning activities for students to do inworld, building something, performing something, engaging in some interactive environment that is set up for them to get something out of. Why not go there to reflect and write? I started thinking of it like tourism. You go somewhere that is new to you and it can be transformative, bring out new thoughts and feelings. Yet you are the same person, just having new ideas sparked because you are seeing new things. A visit to a virtual world could be a window on that type of experience and facilitate a new perspective for writing. It's just a thought for now, but we'll likely try it out later this year.

Students Build The Parthenon in Opensim

2010-10-23T00:02:00.004-04:00

(Can't get the blip.tv embed to work, but here's the link to video.)

For the last couple weeks I've been working with 8th/9th grade students in their geometry class as they build a life-size replica of The Parthenon atop the Athens Acropolis. It's been a fantastic experience watching students collaborate on such a project. One thing I argued for in planning this project with the math teachers was to give the students part or all of a class to edit their default avatars. They spent the first class making avatars as ugly and as beautiful as they could (this is an all girls school) and I think the investment paid off in their apparent engagement in the project. It's hard learning to use the building tools but they are doing a great job and very proud of it.

Opensim Grid

2010-08-28T08:25:00.003-04:00

Finally got a "serverless grid" going, just the ticket. Three separate opensim instances running on the same database. This is really the best setup for managing multiple projects in my school, and FreeSWITCH provides voice across all the sims, bounded within each region. One thing I learned the hard way is for the grid to work dependably you must disable the megaregion configuration. In the DivaPreferences.ini file CombineContiguousRegions will be set to true so megaregions can be enabled by default. This causes the separate sim instances to lose sight of each other and you have to keep relogging to get them back. To remedy this add the line CombineContiguousRegions=false in the [Startup] section of MyWorld.ini. So each sim instance has to be one region. With this configuration it is very stable, though. I've got 8 regions going without any problems and lots of users bouncing around among them.

MAKEzine Kids

2010-08-03T10:06:00.001-04:00

I love making things, learning about making things, seeing other people make things, and teaching kids how to make things. So I'm very excited that the MAKE video podcasts have begun featuring kids, and girls only so far, making things. Cool technical things, like rockets and solar powered robot grasshoppers. The girls take center stage and really are the voice of the podcast, no grown up leading the show and telling them what to do, which is also cool. There are four so far, Crazy Putty, Sidewalk Chalk, Rockets, and the Solar Grasshopper.

Black Box Antidote

2010-08-01T18:13:00.001-04:00

UPDATE: How timely that there is a new Make video podcast on how to change a broken iPhone touch screen!

This week I taught a robotics workshop to several Bronx teachers. One of my themes for the workshop was providing their students with an alternate view of technology to the 'black box' model that's becoming more and more prevalent. That is, the idea that technology is given to us consumers ready to use and we shouldn't mess with it if it doesn't do what we want it to, Apple mobile devices being the prime example.

To make this point I showed two videos, the first being an SNL Weekend Update in which Steve Jobs talks about the virtues of the iPhone 3, then closes by admitting the battery only carries 20 minutes of charge (It's a spoof). Then I played a video detailing the steps to change your own iPhone battery. It amazes me that in order to maintain the pristine case you are forced to remove the motherboard to access the battery--the most user-replaceable part there is. It would be so easy to put a little door on the back to pop those failed batteries out, but that would ruin the look and feel of the device.

Not that I dislike Apple products or think people who have iPhones have made a poor choice. They are great for what they do. But I don't want people to think we have to be at the mercy of the company making the technology if it's not working properly or if we want it to do something it wasn't specifically designed to do. (I'm a big fan of MAKE magazine, too, for that reason.)

The best thing about teaching robotics is that it's all about inventing with technology. A robotics kit is simply a tool kit that only begins to do something when you have a purpose in mind and make the robot do it. It's a unique experience for most kids to have such control over technology and hopefully that feeling can extend to technology in general.

ISTE10 Denver Conference Take-Aways

2010-06-30T16:03:00.001-04:00

Without even leaving my desk I had a surprisingly fun and rewarding time at the ISTE conference this year. That's because I focused on virtual world presentations, many of which were presented on ISTE Island in Second Life.

Aside from my crazy virtual bike ride, here are some of my take aways:

The mixture of hyper- and multi-media made my head spin. I was forced to upgrade to SL Viewer 2 which I don't particularly like but it did allow for some amazing new options, like HTTP on a prim. The result was experiencing multiple simultaneous realities as presenters stood in the physical Virtual Environments area in Denver talking to a real audience WHILE projecting their avatars in Second Life to that audience WHILE directing their avatars in the Red Rocks presentation stage in SL to an audience of virtual attendees in-world, WHILE the attendees also watched the ustream broadcast of the real life presenter in the physical space on a dynamic HTTP surface behind the presenter's avatar. It gets complicated, right? You can imagine the complications of setting up the audio feeds.
There were more than a few tech issues for myself and others, but it was gratifying to see how calm and helpful everyone was. Somehow, the show always went on.
JB Hancroft gave an exciting presentation on the possibilities of scripting and media sharing with Viewer 2.0 and in a way what was most interesting was that for a while his examples didn't work and as he grew more apologetic and despondent we kept plugging away at figuring out how to interact with his prims to make his effects visible and finally got it. It was a mixture of JavaScript and lsl that gave you a button on the prim surface you could click to reveal a text message and hide it again. Really amazing. I was so impressed by the breadth of his innovations and the support coming from the audience reminding him it's all a work in progress and really great that he was trying this stuff.
I caught enough of Kyle Gomboy's presentation about Reaction Grid to know that I have to set something up there. As much as I enjoy OS Grid I think it's focus on software development and innovation makes it a hard place to set up a dependable educational region. I always crash when I go there for whatever reason. Taking a quick look at some of the regions in RG convinced me that's the place to take students and start working out some collaborative possibilities between schools. Having our standalone in our school has been great and of course we'll continue using it but the ability to share things with a wider audience is an important ultimate goal.
Bernajean Porter and Peggy Sheehy: "Get away from museum mode, move into narrative."

Mars Simulation for distribution

2010-06-18T00:50:00.025-04:00

This is the quick-and-dirty version of this tutorial for creating a 3D simulation of the Mars crater Tharsis Tholus from scratch. Actually it's really long, but this is a big project, at least an hour's worth if all goes well. I'll do something more extensive soon in some form, but I just finished making the distributables (OAR and IAR files) so I wanted to get it out there. No previous OpenSimulator experience is required, but some command line stuff will be necessary and there are many opportunities for getting stuck, which I may or may not be able to help with.
This is a standalone 2x2 sim run on Windows XP SP2 that one would connect with using a client viewer like Second Life that is configured to connect over a wired LAN to the IP address of the computer running the sim. All this is detailed below, but there are many other configurations you could have, so I just wanna make that clear. One thing, for the client computers using the viewer app, you MUST use computers with high end video cards. Desktop PCs will tend to have them, as will all (in my experience) newer Macs, from MacBook Pros to iMacs. If you don't have a good video card, the orange sky effect created in step 26 just won't happen, which almost makes it not worth it in my opinion. The space station is set up for 7 astronauts, or a class of 14 students working in pairs to direct the avatars. The lesson I've implemented is documented here. So let's go!
Permissions: "One or more textures on this 3D model have been created with images from CGTextures.com. These images may not be redistributed by default, please visit www.cgtextures.com for more information."

Choose a host computer for the sim. Preferably a desktop, definitely wired to your LAN. Assign--or have your network administrator assign--a static IP to that computer.
Download .NET framework 3.5. OpenSimulator requires this on a PC to compile and run. Install it (takes a while, requires a restart). If you're running this on Windows 7 skip this step as .NET 3.5 is included in the OS.

Download MySQL server, Windows Essentials version. Make sure you check the box for including mysql bin folder in the Windows path. This will allow you to easily start the mysql command line later on. Don't forget the password you set for the root user! (The installation should be fine as is, but if at some point you find the sim crashing and red console messages reference inability to connect to database, you may have to increase the 'wait_timeout' value in MySQL from 28800 seconds to 604800 seconds (google it). After a crash and the first restart of the sim you'll see a lot missing, probably much of the space station, but shutting down and restarting a second time will bring it all back. I think this issue was fixed in a recent opensim update, but I'm not sure.)
Download OpenSimulator, Diva distro (at this time version 0.6.9 r17521), a little down on the right. As you see there are many versions. OpenSim will run on a Mac or Linux, but for those you have to deal with Mono as the code framework and I've seen lots of people have trouble. I tried and failed. Also, Diva has created a binary version with actual helpful documentation and configuration and update utilities in the bundle.
Once downloaded, extract Diva to a folder in your Program Files, say "OpenSim."
Once extracted, open that folder and go into the version folder inside (currently diva-r12751). There you'll find several help files. Open "MySQL.txt" and follow the directions for creating a database and a user with full permissions. If "start the command line console for the mysql root account" makes your head spin, I can get you started with this: Click Start > Run. Type "mysql -u root -p -h localhost". You'll be prompted for the password you gave when you installed MySQL. Where Diva gives two options in her instructions here just do the first. Then type 'exit' and again 'exit'. It can't hurt to read the other help files in there, too.
Now, using Windows Explorer, go into the bin folder inside your OpenSim installation in Program Files. Double click "Configure.exe". If on Windows 7 make sure to give full perms to all users for the bin folder and its contents. You'll be asked to enter some details about your sim. I named my sim "Mars". For the IP address, give the static IP assigned to the computer, numbers only. Give the other appropriate info, like the password for the 'opensim' mysql user you set earlier. Hit enter when it says it's done.
Now, in the same folder, double click "OpenSim.exe" and watch all the pretty colors. It will take a minute or so as it creates more than two dozen tables in the database and sets a lot of other things in motion. Hopefully you'll have no errors at this point. If you do and it has to crash, look in the bin folder for the OpenSim.log file, open it, and see if you can figure out what crashed it by skimming the code at the end. It's usually an error connecting to the database or wrong version of .NET. Good luck if you're seeing red.
Once it says "logins enabled for Mars 4" and stops spewing jargon leave it alone and install Second Life on another computer. WARNING: Second Life's new viewer version 2.1 isn't yet compatible with OpenSim. Look further down and download version 1.23. Once installed, don't start it yet. For a PC, right click on the desktop icon, click properties and add the following flag in the 'target' field: "-loginuri http://fixed.ip.ad.dress:9000/". That reroutes the viewer to your sim rather than actual Second Life on the web. If you don't want the occasionally racy SL screenshots showing up either you can add "-loginpage http://fixed.ip.ad.dress:9000/?method=login". On a Mac, follow these steps.
Save and now open Second Life. If you used both flag in the previous step you'll see two login fields. Don't log in at the top, but at the bottom. First name 'master', last name 'avatar', password whatever you set when you ran configure.exe.
When it finishes logging in, you'll be a female avatar (Ruth) standing on a mound in the ocean. Now let's load some content. You'll be adding terrain and the space station straight from the opensim command line but it's cool to watch through the viewer.
Download and extract this zip file to the server computer. A convenient place to extract to would be OpenSim\...\bin\Terrain. It contains 4 OAR (archive) files, one for each of four regions, and two IAR (inventory) files, for the space suit and basic avatar body.
Now in the viewer, press and hold the Page Up key to fly up to about 150 meters. You can see your altitude (and X, Y position) at the top of the screen. If you don't your avatar may get knocked a thousand meters up as the ground elevation suddenly increases.
Back at the command line, type "load oar Terrain\Mars1.tar.gz" and hit enter. Watch the crater begin to materialize beneath you. You can get a better idea of what's going on by clicking "mini-map" in the viewer and it will show you the terrain loading. This terrain was first given to me by Drew Crow, who created terrain files from Mars satellite data available from NASA.
Now type "change region Mars 2", hit enter. Instead of typing a new load oar command, hit the up arrow until you see the previous load oar command and change Mars1.tar.gz to Mars2.tar.gz. Change region to Mars 3, load that OAR, and the same with Mars 4. As you fly around and explore you may notice some holes in the ground. To get everything to settle in properly, log out of the sim (File > Quit) and shut down the sim from the command line (type shutdown). When it's finished, open Opensim.exe again (you may want to put a shortcut to the desktop) and log in when it's ready. The ground should be in better shape.
Go find the space station. If you need to get your bearings, open the Mini-Map again. You *should* be able to click the door to open it. If it's not clickable, right click on the outer door, click edit and locate the contents tab and click it. Open the 'sliding door script'. Make a small change to the script, like adding a space, then removing it, with the goal being enabling the 'save' button in the lower right. Click the save button and it should say "Compiled successfully!" You can now X out of the script window and the edit window. Repeat the previous step for the inner door. You won't have to do any of this again now that they've been activated. Now log out. You'll be adding some inventory items next.
Shut down the sim again. Navigate to the Terrain folder. Move the "Clothing Library spacesuit.iar" and "BodyParts Library astronauts.iar" files out of the Terrain folder and into the Libraries folder. Now start the sim.
When it's ready, log in again. Open the Inventory on the lower right. Your avatar's inventory is open at the top and below are standard Diva inventory items you can copy into your inventory if you like. Open the Diva inventory and open Body Parts. Open the boy or girl folder, depending on which you want to be. Ruth is the default, uneditable avatar, so even if you're female you'll need to add your own editable body parts to make any changes in your appearance. Drag all four items in the folder you chose up to your own body parts folder and drop them in. Select them all, right click, and click 'wear'. If you want to play around with editing your features, right click on your avatar, and click appearance.
Now you need a space suit. Open the Clothing folder in the Diva inventory. Drag everything in the space suit folder up into your clothing folder and 'wear' them. Cool, right? If you want, you can put on your helmet and backpack now. Leave the ones that are out, as they are for the astronauts you'll be making, and instead open your Objects folder in your inventory, right click the helmet, click attach, and skull. Then attach the backpack to your spine.
Next go back to the opensim console. Type 'create user mars one', hit enter, give it an easy password, and hit enter three times until the user is created. Do the same for mars two - seven. Give them all the same password to make it easy for the students. Now back in the viewer you'll have to log out and log in as each astronaut. Take each one to the space station so it will be there when the students log in and make them wear the body and space suit like you did for your Master Avatar. Also, have each one take a copy of the helmet and backpack (right click, more, take copy), then drag their OWN helmet from their inventory into their OWN cubby hole and the same with their own backpack. They will not be able to attach an object, called a prim, to their avatars unless they own them, which they do by taking a copy.
One note about the Master Avatar. It alone can delete or edit anything. The other avatars can't edit or attach what belongs to the MA. Students shouldn't use the MA account.
So now your astronauts should be ready for students to use, with their space suits on and body configured to your liking, and their own helmet and backpack in their cubby.
Just a couple more things to do. First let's lower the gravity. Make sure you are logged out and shut down the sim. Inside the bin folder find the Opensim.ini file. Open it in Wordpad (not Notepad). Ctrl + F to find 'gravity'. Change it from -9.8 to -3.8. The gravity on Mars makes us about half as heavy but I found this number to have a good, weightless effect, especially when walking over bumps. Save and close. Start the sim.
Now download these sky and water settings files to the computer where you're running the viewer. These will make the atmosphere look more like Mars. They were also given to me by Drew, who made them. Put "Mars-sky.xml" in C:\Program Files\Second Life\app_settings\windlight\skies and put "Mars-water.xml" in C:\Program Files\Second Life\app_settings\windlight\water, renaming both to "Mars.xml" when they've been placed.
Now log in. First, in the Edit menu > Preferences > Graphics tab, set Quality and Performance to High, or check Custom and make sure Atmospheric Shaders is checked. Then go to World menu > Environmental Settings > Environment Editor. Click the Advanced Sky button and choose Mars from the extensive list. You'll see the difference immediately, especially if you're outside. Click Advanced Water and choose Mars there, too. If the sim doesn't look remarkably Mars-like at this point, you don't have the good graphics card I mentioned above. While the high quality and performance setting will stay set between logins, unfortunately the Mars sky and water have to be set each time a student logs in, which I did for them, running from station to station.
Before you let your students loose in the sim you might want to use the master avatar account to disable the copy permissions from the space station. You wouldn't want students copying it into their inventory and dropping new ones all over the sim. Do do this, right click on the space station, click edit, and under the general tab uncheck 'allow anyone to copy.'

Finally, here is a handout I made for my students doing the mission (Mac, PC). Again, read this post for details on how that was set up.

Now you should have a functioning sim ready for use! If you try it out, let me know. I'd love to hear how it goes and what improvements you can think of.

Cool Tool

2010-06-14T12:56:00.000-04:00

Paraphrasing, The most important tool of industrial designers is the factory.
-Masamichi Udagawa of Antenna Design

OpenSim Virtual Acting/Machinema

2010-06-03T06:41:00.002-04:00

8th grade drama project, best on full screen:

Machinema with Students in OpenSim

2010-06-03T06:35:00.001-04:00

Our virtual drama project is wrapping up. Towards the end I need to make machinema recordings of the students' rehearsals of their 2- and 3-person scenes that they watch and use to improve their in-world performances and in the final class I make recordings of their performances. It's taken me a year, but I finally have an optimal recipe for making the machinema recordings:

Voice: Rehearse with 3rd party voice app and final performance with onboard voice. Teamspeak was the best option for students to rehearse simultaneously in their own groups as it offers spatial voice by virtue of separate channels. For the final performances we drop that and use the FreeSWITCH module because the rest of the students are being audience members and need to hear the actors.
Hide the UI: It takes practice and seems to work better on a PC than a Mac, but looks so much better. Elsewhere on this link there are some other great tips, worthy of another year of practice, but this is the most important.
Drop the SLViewer, get Imprudence: Hiding the UI in the Second Life Viewer has the unfortunate effect of filling the space around avatars with swirlies, a problem documented here. Linden Labs has let this annoying feature persist despite its being outdated. Imprudence lets the swirlies decay quickly and has a host of other improvements that I've only begun to discover. The beta installers are here, but it's reported that the weekly updates are actually more stable and my experience bears that out, with the beta 1.3.0 beta 4 crashing pretty frequently for no reason I can see.
Getting FreeSWITCH voice in Imprudence: Imprudence can't be distributed with the proprietary SLVoice app so you'll have to drop it in yourself. Fortunately, it's an easy fix.
Finally, the setup is complete! But wait, you need something to record it. Fraps is the standard on PC. Fraps is excellent as long as you have a good enough sound card to get the "Stereo Mix" or "What U Hear" settings and don't use a USB headset as there is a little documented but known issue with them. I haven't found anything for Mac that successfully records the voice when using a separate app, like the Teamspeak/Imprudence combo for rehearsals.

Nuts and Bolts

2010-05-26T22:56:00.001-04:00

My Advanced Robotics students have made a lot of progress this year. They are so proud of what they've accomplished; autonomous NXT critters, a choreographed dance with TETRIX robots, and just now a joystick-controlled mobile robotic arm. TETRIX parts require a lot of tools and these girls were not used to attaching things with screws, nuts, bolts, allen wrenches, and screwdrivers. I noticed something interesting during one of our classes this week. They were completing their construction of the robotic arms when one student said, "No, put the screw on that side and the back on this side." She referred to the kep nut as a "back" again later. I couldn't imagine why she would call a nut a back. It finally occurred to me she was talking about earrings and when I asked her if that's what she was referring to she smiled, knowing it wasn't 'correct' but it worked for them. One thing they've gotten out of their experience this year is a way to relate to making robots from their own perspectives, nuts, bolts, and all.

Virtual Drama Project in OpenSim

2010-05-10T20:50:00.005-04:00

The 8th grade drama teacher and I are in the third cycle of our virtual drama project. The last two groups showed inconsistent engagement in the project, which has been surprising considering they get to act with an avatar and design their own stage sets. With the first group I can understand the lower engagement as they had to weather the bumps of the first run--disappearing prims (after a sim crash) finding the optimal hardware, few pre-made prims, and our lack of knowledge of what might provide a good experience. One improvement we've made is facilitating the students' taking ownership of their performance stages. They really don’t have time in a trimester to learn to build their own props but I’m finding that at least encouraging them to modify what I build for them is resulting in much more engagement. The stage for a scene from Alice in Wonderland is becoming truly surreal and the others are really working to make their sets as convincing as they can. One innovation from a couple groups last trimester was for them to find an image for their stage backdrop and they are all doing that now.We are so pressed for time in the few classes we have for each run of the project (about 10) that we’ve been stingy about letting them edit their props and appearances. Unsurprisingly it turns out this is what makes them want to make it good in the end.

Creating Spatial Voice for Opensim Projects With Teamspeak

2010-05-08T22:55:00.000-04:00

I'm currently on the third go-round with an 8th grade drama project on our LAN-based sim. As you could imagine the requirements for voice capabilities are pretty specific in a virtual drama project and after trying several options I've finally found the perfect solution--Teamspeak. Teamspeak is easy to set up, allows up to 32 slots on the free version, and uses a cross-platform codec, Speex, so I can have students on Macs and PCs in the same session. Client configuration is easy as well, allowing for settings I pre-configure, like the server IP, to be global, applying to all users, so students don't have to set anything up. All they do is open the client, type their own name in the connect dialog, and since it has the host IP already in the global settings they can ignore that part. I've set up channels for the students to be able to rehearse in groups and not have to hear the other groups, 6 channels in all.

What I tried before is the Opensim's onboard voice module, FreeSWITCH, which is fine but not spatial. That was a deal breaker because students couldn't practice using voice in simultaneous rehearsals. I heard that Vivox was being integrated as a new voice module and is spatial but after looking into that I found that it costs thousands to get a license to host it. Then I tried Ventrilo, often used by World of Warcraft players, and it worked until I got more that 8 students on the server. Only 8 slots unless you rent server hosting! So I ran two Ventrilo servers on two different computers and had to go around connecting students to different IPs, making sure they were with their group partners. Much hassle.

So until Vivox offers an affordable package for use with Opensim Teamspeak will be the best option for this project. Which is a project I should describe in more detail. Will do, soon.

Who's Afraid of Copyright Infringement?

2010-05-05T23:37:00.001-04:00

If you saw this on your computer would you think you'd done something wrong? Probably, because most of us have copied something or other without permission. It's pretty scary looking, too. I took this picture of a student's screen after she got this crazy alert. But I wonder how effective this is. Are people really afraid of getting caught illegally downloading music, movies, or TV shows? A small percentage must click the "settle and avoid court proceedings" button; enough for them to make money off the hoax.

Papert's Prediction

2010-04-03T14:14:00.002-04:00

From Mindstorms: "My conjecture is that much of what we now see as too 'formal' or 'too mathematical' will be learned just as easily when children grow up in the computer-rich world of the very near future." Not with the iPad.

Reading Papert's "Mindstorms"

2010-04-01T13:06:00.006-04:00

I'm finally reading Seymour Papert's Mindstorms from the early 90's. The two main ideas throughout the book are: "It is possible to design computers so that learning to communicate with them can be a natural process," and "Learning to communicate with a computer may change the way other learning takes place." These two ideas have been so ingrained in my thinking since I started teaching with technology I can't wait to see how he talks about them in the book.

OpenSim Mars Simulation

2010-03-25T11:49:00.012-04:00

I just finished a fantastic series of classes taking three groups of 5th graders on a virtual Mars field trip. First we looked together at the surface of Mars using the Mars edition of Google Earth. We zoomed in to a particular crater named Tharsis Tholus. Then the students logged in to a Mars Tharsis Tholus 3D simulation I created with OpenSim (standalone, Diva Distro v.0.6.8, 2x2 subset of 4x4 megaregion). Pairs of students manipulated an astronaut avatar. Their mission, as you can see in the video, is to don their helmet and backpack in the space station, venture out into the crater, find and collect meteorite samples, and bring them back to the space station for analysis. (This was all possible because of the work of Drew Crow of BlueSkySchool blog, who figured out how to use NASA MOLA terrain data to make the terrain files for OpenSim. He sent me the terrain files as well as xml files for the Windlight settings so the sky and water would look more like Mars.)

I embellished Drew's efforts by creating a space station, avatar astronaut clothing, and helmet and backpack prim attachments. I also changed the gravity settings in OpenSim.ini to z=-3.8 so they would bounce really high when they went over bumps in the terrain. That was cool. The students logged in using accounts I created and had pre-configured to be located in the space station. I made a tutorial on paper they used to log in, move around, and attach their helmets and backpacks properly, and copy and rez their meteorite samples. They needed to work in pairs to manage all the details of the experience.

And what an experience! The students were awestruck at what they were seeing and doing. I was impressed these kids were able to do this, given that they have never used this type of interface before. It really helped to provide them with the preparation and scaffolding. In our wrap up talk at the end of each class they talked about how they really felt like astronauts and found it interesting figuring out how to coordinate staying together, which I emphasized as a big challenge of the simulation (I mean, who wants to get lost on Mars...).

Some thoughts for next time:

Despite the tutorial, they did need quite a bit of support. I had to help them detach and reattach helmets that go stuck onto hands and torsos, keep them from flying (extremely fun when they realized how, but not part of the simulation--who could blame them?), and help those who wandered off use the mini-map to find their way.
One snafu was that in one class two groups got confused about which account they were supposed to use and kept logging in with the same account, resulting in the other group getting kicked out. I didn't figure this out (actually they figured it out) until well into the class, which prevented me from providing the above support to the rest of the class. So that session became a bit of a free-for-all. What I'll do next time is include the specific account info in each tutorial sheet so they won't make that mistake.
The most difficult part for these virtual world newbies was attaching prims. I mean, when have they ever seen a pie menu? I think in the future I'll see if there's a way to script helmets and backpacks that attach themselves when touched.
We had to use high-end video cards, iMacs and Dell XPS desktops, for the windlight settings to work. This wouldn't look like Mars on, say, laptops, or even the older (~5 yrs) iMacs we have. And of course wired network connections.
For the machinema, I found some good tips here, such as hiding the UI. Actually I think Drew sent me this, too.
I found it really interesting that in order to stay together some students started using local chat. I hadn't shown them that or intended for them to use it, but it did come in handy, for example, as a way to tell another astronaut they had finished collecting meteorite samples and were ready to go back to the station. One thing it suggests is that at times at least they were feeling more present "in-world" than out since they could have looked a few feet away and just spoken to the students directing that astronaut. One thing that would be really interesting--though it would only work with 1 : 1 students to avis--would be using headsets and voice chat for them to talk as if they had radio communication. On the one hand it would be more immersive. On the downside they would have a harder time following the paper tutorial.

Instructional Videos With Storytelling Alice

2010-03-25T06:50:00.000-04:00

I had a more successful time using Storytelling Alice with my 7th grade students this year. Last year I constrained the content of the animations to their current biology topic, genetic inheritance. Understandably, this didn't excite them, though a few came up with some good animations. Instead, I decided to let them choose any topic for their animation as long as it was something students learn in our school in Kindergarten through 7th grade with the intention of making the good ones available to teachers to teach with. I thought they would be more invested in their topics if they could choose them and knew that they might be used in the future. Here below is one of the best examples:

Some observations:

I required them to use at least two scenes and they did for the most part. One interesting thing is some of them simply scripted only one scene, fading the camera to black and back up in the middle of it to transition to the second scene, avoiding the somewhat confusing process of creating a new scene and that business of moving the camera tripod.
Many of them manipulated the camera angles a lot more, such as following a character, resulting in much more dynamic animations.
Looking at them as pedagogical resources, many of them ended up looking more like lectures rather than showing their topic with some kind of illustrative narrative. The above example follows the latter approach, but many of them simply depicted a teacher in a classroom talking to the students about the topic! I think this is a result of the dominant paradigm in my school. Students are so familiar with the lecture format so that's how they imagine their animation being used.
Widening the availability of topics appeared to work well. The topics they chose ranged from teaching math strategies and topics to history topics to French vocabulary to social development, which they learn about in their "life skills" class. This last topic was quite popular, as it allowed them to focus on issues of friendship, social status, and bullying.
Students this year discovered a couple new things about Alice. One is the ability to drag methods and drop them onto characters even in "adding objects" mode to move them around, which surprised me. They also became very interested in recording their own audio to make the characters speak and matching the audio with the say content using do together. In some cases this resulted in file sizes above 10 MB that became hard to save to network folders and I had to make them keep their audio clips really short.

Scalable Shapes

2010-02-26T23:41:00.006-05:00

I'm just about done scripting the first interactive models for our ScienceSim parcel; a cube and sphere that can be scaled up or down, giving their new sizes and volumes when touched. The info is given by llSay so it appears in the lower left. The sphere volume is the only part not working yet. While the formula is indeed correct, the script calculates it differently than when I do it myself. So I've got something wrong in my order of operations or something.

Messaging Prims in OpenSim (lsl)

2010-02-16T22:47:00.005-05:00

I just had a big realization about how to make a lot possible in scripting prims with LSL in OpenSimulator. A great way to get prims to play off of each other is to have them send messages to each other on specific channels. This capability makes OpenSimulator and Second Life pretty special environments for network simulations, but that's another topic. What I have done so far with this is make a button that opens and closes curtains on a stage, and clothes that pack themselves when touched. In the first example, you can see the two scripts, the button on the left (the red button itself behind its script), and one of the curtains on the right. Both curtains can listen for the button's message and more than one button can be placed around the stage for easy access.

For the second example, the clothes message the suitcase, which responds with its position so the clothes know where to move. One piece of clothing is shown on the left and the suitcase is on the right. I thought there would be some way to dynamically update the suitcase's position for the clothes and this is it. It gets a little more complicated because there are three pieces of clothing, requiring three different messages from the clothes and three different reply channels depending on which message is received by the suitcase.

OpenSim Virtual Architecture Flythrough

2010-02-15T07:20:00.011-05:00

Crash course on building in OpenSim with nine 10-12 grade students. Here are the results:

ScienceSim Land Grant Program

2010-02-05T20:50:00.003-05:00

I'm really excited to be a recipient of a ScienceSim Land Grant. I will be developing a parcel from now until June with interactive educational content, with the assistance of science and math teachers and a few students. One student in particular is very interested in architecture and wants to design and build our welcome/info center. The content we have in mind so far range from scalable two- and three-dimensional objects that will assist in students' understanding of area and volume, representations of mathematical formulas, such as distance = rate x time, and molecular models.

Vocaroo, a nice little audio service

2010-02-05T20:41:00.003-05:00

Vocaroo looks like a great little service. It seems to do just what you would want with your voice recording-link to it, embed it, or download it. And there's no sign-up and account hassle. You just use it. And it looks simple.

Rotating Sculptures in OpenSim

2010-01-15T06:46:00.004-05:00

I've been playing around with overlapping rotating volumes in OpenSim. They make nice sculptures but could also make for nice visualizations of concepts in Calculus. Some math teachers got excited when they saw them.

Virtual Architecture Course in OpenSim

2010-01-08T00:12:00.008-05:00

I've been teaching a week-long class on virtual architecture with nine 10-12th grade girls at my school using one region of our school sandbox 4x4 megaregion. It's been one of the most enjoyable teaching experiences I've had. They've taken to the project of building homes on the mountainous terrain I've provided with so much care and attention, placing some furniture I provided just so, and yet they clearly delight in the ability to defy gravity by building in mid-air or jutting over a sheer cliff. There's a general thing for circular houses, one of the most impractical shapes you could have in real life. One student made a diving board off her 20-meter-high pool only to find that she landed on the ground when she walked her avatar off it. So she moved the diving board to the other side of the pool and happily flailed her way down to the water. They've been having fun visiting each others' houses and pushing each other around when they feel too cramped in houses they wish they had made bigger. One student has been working very hard on a more thoughtfully planned spacious house and it turns out she is interested in studying architecture in college. I mentioned that the architecture departments of many colleges have land for their students to work with in Second Life. I had to tell her to stick to campuses, though, with the wild west atmosphere of so much of "mature" SL.

Possibly the most exciting event was the sim crashing. At one point everyone reported losing control of their avatars. I logged in to the server to see a big alert and lots of red errors on the console. They all logged out and as I restarted one student mentioned a warning message she had gotten when linking the prims in her house that the limit for linked objects was 255. She had the craziest staircase with dozens of irregularly placed steps that turn out to be really easy for avatars to ascend and descend. So she crashed the sim trying to link them all with her house. Once it was back up they logged in to find that half of their work was gone. They were so upset and old enough to laugh at how upset they were. Fortunately I had seen this before and knew that the sim probably needed a second restart after crashing to put things back in order, which turned out to be the case.

Virtual building is an amazing creative medium for teaching. The students learned the tools fairly quickly and in just a few classes have applied them to developing such unique visions for their spaces. I'm interested to see how they want to wrap up the class. I'll leave them the option of working on their creations when they have time after this week but this will end our collaborative effort. I plan on trying to corral their avatars in one place long enough to snap a photo at least.

Computers and Hard Work

2010-01-05T23:19:00.003-05:00

This week I'm teaching three special courses for our Winterim session: Virtual Architecture with OpenSim, Mix Your Own Tunes with Audacity, and 3D Storytelling with Storytelling Alice. I'm having a great time. I love putting building tools in kids' hands and watching what they will do with them. The students range in age from 9-18 in three separate age groups and I've noticed a common reaction to the content of all of the classes. On the first day, once I'd finished my intro to each program and the goals of the course, students started working and very soon became whiny and frustrated. Across the board, they were confused by the unfamiliar interface of each program as well as the workflow required to complete different tasks. Once they realized what making a song out of audio clips, scripting a story, or building a house piece by piece was going to involve, they pushed back and wanted it to be easier.

My response was to say that we had four more days (1.25 hr classes each) to work with this and that they would get used to it once they decided what they wanted to do. Basically, each class is just a lot of time to work! Since then they have complained--mostly to their computers--but it's hard to get them to stop when it's time. They have settled into a rhythm and are focused on making their musical, animation, or building ideas work. Almost without exception I haven't had to tell any students to get to work. One student confessed that she is still completely lost in Storytelling Alice and will need more guidance. And another student finished one audio mix and exported her MP3, saying, "There's no way I can start another one right now." I know how she felt. You finish a big project that's required a lot of focus and the last thing you want to do upon finishing it is jump back into a new project.

When students complain about work on the computer being hard it's often a knee-jerk reaction to having to think and focus with something that in most other contexts is used for entertainment. But they will stick with it through all the complaining if they feel that what they are doing is meaningful.

ScienceSim: Highly Recommended

2009-12-30T00:37:00.006-05:00

I was just trying out ScienceSim, an OpenSimulator project sponsored by Intel and run and maintained by a loosely organized group of participating scientists and programmers. The main goal of the project is to "Enable new usages in education and visualization through the construction of persistent 3D spaces build and deployed by a federation of organizations and users (from the website)." You can create a free account at the first link and follow the instructions for downloading a viewer and configuring it to connect to the sim. Then you just explore. There doesn't seem to be any guiding organization to what projects and simulations are developed there and some could really use more information to be useful to the outside observer. One, however, is far and above the most worthwhile, especially for a teacher, and worth the price of admission itself (which is free, but...). That is the planetarium, which allows you to fly your avatar among the planets as they orbit the sun. UPDATE 1-27: To get there go to the Pascal region. The easiest way is to choose Pascal from the region menu on the left of the login screen. Or you can teleport over using the map once you log in. It would be an excellent simulation for any elementary or middle school class to experience as you can really see the different rates of the planetary orbits.

Some other simulations are promised but not always accessible. The project is comprised of different people hosting their own sims and linking them to this main one. So if someone's sim isn't running at the moment their teleport link won't work.

Making Robots Real: Constructionism and Robotics

2009-12-16T06:49:00.004-05:00

I'm finally teaching robotics the way I've been wanting to for the last 5 years. Really the way I've been wanting to teach period for the last 17 years! Early on in my teaching career I read about constructionism and wanted to get my students doing writer's workshop, writing their own meaningful stories that intrinsically motivate them to become better writers. It never happened to my satisfaction because I could never find the right balance between teaching didactically and giving students the freedom to write what and how they wanted. Suddenly I find that it's coming together in my 9th grade robotics class. My students are inventing their own robots, and long-story-short here's how it happened.

Last year was my first year teaching 9th grade robotics and I went into it with the intention of making it as rigorous as they could handle with a focus on fundamental programming concepts. So while it was project-based in the sense that they produced projects, such as a vehicle that could follow a course taped out on white paper, I laid out a series of goals for them to reach so they could develop each project with progressively more sophisticated algorithms. What ended up happening is that a few students completed and understood everything, most got some of the way through the challenges, and some barely got past the first step, having been stuck just getting the project built and communication down. At no point during the class did I feel that they had ownership of their projects. When they completed the projects I gave them all they wanted to do was sit and talk rather than try more ideas.

This year I decided to give them more control over what they made and let their needs dictate the programming concepts they would learn. From the outset I gave them very few parameters--the first project simply had to involve programming the LED display, the second project using motors to illustrate gearing up or down and a switch to activate the motors--and have given them little explicit programming instruction. They have been much more involved in their projects and there have been many great opportunities to teach programming concepts that have been useful to them. In one case, a student had three procedures that were separate actions of her DJ robot and to get them all to run, she was typing their names separately in the direct command line. I hadn't taught them about creating a 'main' procedure that calls the sub-procedures. But once I showed her that it made sense right away. She was able to then go on to show the class and teach them the concept in a more effective way than I could have.

I think one key thing going forward will be giving them opportunities to explain their programming structures to the class, both to help them articulate what they are doing and to share good ideas that other students will hopefully want to try out and learn.

Looking back on last year's class, I realize I was not letting the students develop as much ownership of their projects as I could have by making the point of their projects being to move up through this sequence of concepts in a stepwise way. Rather than discovering the need for programming tools I was telling them when to use them so they never really took any interest in figuring out what they were for.

Wav2Rso: Making it Work Properly

2009-11-17T23:58:00.003-05:00

Wav2Rso (scroll down) is a great program for doing one thing--converting WAV audio files to RSO format so they will play on a Lego NXT robot. You can take any WAV file--one you record or one you download from a website like findsounds.com--and put it on your robot. How fun! The only catch is that for some reason Wav2Rso is set to a sample rate of 8000 Hz. The typical WAV file is more like 11,025 Hz, so when you convert it, the sample lowers in pitch considerably and you have a quiet, baritone robot. The fix is to open the WAV file in Audacity or another audio editing program, edit the preferences to set the sample rate to 8000 Hz, then export it to WAV again. This file will convert properly and at the right frequency.

OpenSim in the Classroom: Diva Distribution Makes It So Much Easier

2009-10-16T23:31:00.008-04:00

I have a sim running on XPSP3 on a desktop with a static IP. I set up a network switch so I can run network cables to a class of students' laptops with the Second Life Viewer with a command in the shortcut that makes it connect to the IP of our sim rather than Second Life online. A little more on the details of my setup is here. And here is the step-by-step for getting it up and running:

Desktop running Windows XP SP3, assigned a static IP by the DNS server, no monitor, I just log in remotely. (Ask your system administrator to assign the IP if you, like me, can't.)
Download the zip file for the latest Diva Distribution here. Unzip it to a folder in your Program Files folder called OpenSim or whatever you like. Diva is one of the core developers of OpenSim and has come out with this great binary distribution with good documentation and an update utility, which is an otherwise difficult task. Additionally, Diva has included several major improvements in the program, including 'megaregions,' or a seamlessly connected grid of regions. The default here is 2 X 2, or a total sim of 512 m X 512 m.
Now look in your downloaded folder for the documentation. Read 'install.txt' first just to get an overview. Then read 'MySQL.txt.'
Then install MySQL 5.1. There are good instructions here, though a little old. Stop following it when he gets to configuring the opensim.ini file because it's for an older version of OpenSim. The Toad--MySQL GUI--part is for an earlier version of Toad, but the idea is to create a root account and create a new database called 'opensim'. Then create another account named 'opensim' and any password you like that has full privileges to the opensim database. If you prefer you can use the mysqladmin commands (tutorials are here and here). That's also the method explained in MySQL.txt but you might need a little more to go on than just what commands to type. No need to create any tables. OpenSim will do that on first run.
Download and install the .NET framework 3.5.
Now follow the steps in 'install.txt.' After running OpenSim.exe in the steps you'll see lots of colorful commands fly by and hopefully no errors.
Next you'll need a viewer. I tried Hippo and it's great except that if students are connecting on Windows machines with network accounts Hippo has no way I could figure out of saving the sim IP as the default for all users on the machine. Instead, I downloaded the Second Life viewer, installed it on the student laptops, right clicked on the desktop icon (which will need to be moved to the All Users desktop and given full permissions to 'everyone') and added the following flag in the 'target' field: -loginuri http://fixed.ip.ad.dress:9000/ That reroutes the viewer to your sim rather than actual Second Life on the web. If you don't want the occasionally racy SL screenshots showing up either you can add -loginpagehttp://fixed.ip.ad.dress:9000/?method=login.
Now with your sim running, open the SL viewer from the icon and login with the master avatar account you created during the config. I hope it works! Enjoy it for a bit before tackling the next steps.
For voice chat you need a voice conference service called FreeSWITCH. At the time of this writing there is a new option for voice called Vivox that sounds better and is fully spatial while FreeSWITCH isn't. But Vivox requires a "customer admin account" from Vivox and I don't know how to get that. (I've since found out it's a commercial application that costs thousands of dollars.) You can download a precompiled binary of FreeSWITCH here, and, yes, you have to install the Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable Package like it says before you run the Freeswitch program.
To configure Freeswitch to work with OpenSim, you have to change some config settings in a few xml files, explained here. This video also demos the steps. One confusing part of this video is that he's using v1.22 but he says anything after 1.22 is compatible with FreeSWITCH voice. It turns out the option to enable voice only exists in v1.22, but you switch to 1.23 to use it. More on that later.
Now you're ready to configure settings for OpenSim in the OpenSim.ini file. Find the section labeled Freeswitch and configure those settings as shown at the bottom of the Freeswitch config instructions.
Now you can start up Freeswitch. Double click freeswitch.exe. Ignore the red error messages (really!). Start up OpenSim exe.
Open your viewer (v1.22) and log in to your sim.
You have to enable voice chat for the estate. Click Edit > Preferences and under Voice Chat make sure it's enabled. Then click World > Region/Estate, click the estate tab and make sure "Allow Voice Chat" is checked. Finally, right click on the terrain, click About Land, click the Media tab, and click "use estate spatial channel."
Then log out and log back in with v1.23. To use voice, make sure your headset is plugged in before you start the viewer and to talk click the talk button or the lock next to it.
Once these things are set, you need someone else to log on or you could talk to yourself over two computers. To talk, look for the talk button on the lower right. Click the lock next to it to toggle talking on or just click and hold the talk button while you're talking.

Diva OpenSim Distribution looks promising

2009-10-13T00:03:00.002-04:00

I've been thinking I will need to upgrade my OpenSim installation from 0.6.5 to 0.6.6 for hopefully some increased stability and reliability. This may be the ticket. I'll have to wait until we go through one round of the drama project, though. Don't want to break the sim at a crucial time.

OpenSim in the Classroom: Just Avoid Wireless

2009-10-02T15:54:00.005-04:00

An app like this just needs more solid throughput than a wireless connection with at least a dozen clients over a single AP can provide. It just works so much better with wired computers. Today voice was crisp and clear--loud, even--without wireless and 13 clients. And I didn't let them edit appearance during the voice testing so voice stayed strong. I did confirm that FreeSWITCH is not spatial, unfortunately. Everyone is audible to everyone else at the same level no matter their relative grid position. We (the drama teacher and I) though we might be able to get small groups rehearsing simultaneously in different parts of the region, but that won't work.

The only problems were two accounts getting repeated failed logins, alternating between a "session crashed" message and a message that were already logged in when trying to log in. Turns out this resulted from their data not saving properly during an earlier session using wireless. This drove me nuts until I figured out a fix. Log in to the MySQL opensim database (using Toad or whatever MySQL GUI you were able to get, or MySQL admin if you can), go to the users table and find the user in question's UUID. Then go to the agents table and you'll find that that UUID has a few field values that the rest don't. AgentOnline will be 1 (true) instead of 0 (false), so change it to 0. LogoutTime will say 0 so you can just insert another user's value there. Then the currentPos will have some null value codes so just insert another user's values there, too. The user should be able to log in again, no problem. Since it's clear the crappy session data resulted from a poor connection, this type of thing is one more headache that can be avoided if you stick with wires.

OpenSim in the Classroom: LAN Party

2009-10-01T21:52:00.004-04:00

Today I tried plugging 14 clients into the school network so they could log in to our sim and we could take the FreeSWITCH voice chat for a test drive. The network cables are bundled so they won't get horribly tangled so I couldn't quite reach cables to all of the computers, leaving 3 of them wireless, which may have had an effect. Anyway, with students really wanting to continue editing their appearance (It IS a girls' school after all.) I tried having students toggle the talk button one at a time while they were still editing. A couple (loud and clear!) utterances into it and the voice service dropped out. No one could toggle their talk switch anymore. Watching the console I could see avatar inventory flying into the server so I'm guessing my only option left to get this thing working is to avoid combining any significant editing with voice data. I'll try that tomorrow, in a room where I think everyone can be wired. One preparation I plan to make before starting the drama production with 12 eighth graders in a couple weeks is to configure and edit all of the avatars for the students so they don't have to spend our precious training and rehearsal time doing it. Maybe they can configure their avatars during study hall. That will go over well...

OpenSim in the Classroom: Wireless Issues

2009-09-19T18:51:00.003-04:00

Anyone who knows how virtual worlds work could have told me that I would have trouble logging 14 students in to a sim over a wireless connection to our school's LAN. Now I know from experience that each user's client has to download too much data during the login process for it to go smoothly. I had several failed logins on the first attempt. Next class I had the students do rolling logins--only one at a time--and it went much better, only taking 8 minutes to get everyone in, configuring their avatars. Lesson learned.
UPDATE: After some experimentation I've found that any more than about 8 users logging in over the wireless causes too much latency for it to be more than a frustrating experience for the students. So they double up. For more than 8 students I'll have to hook up a switch and provide network cables--only for very special projects, like the drama project coming up.

Connecting to OpenSim with SL Viewer on Mac

2009-08-29T02:03:00.008-04:00

I am just running a sim in standalone mode but I want to share it out to other computers on my home network. Whether you are or not it's the same. The only diff is where it says 'ipofyoursim' you'll put whatever fixed IP your sim has.

Download Second Life to your Mac, version 1.23, not viewer 2.
Make TextEdit.app edit as plain text rather than rtf. This is because when you run the commands in the plain text file the shell will encounter formatting codes if it's rtf format.
Paste this in a new file: /Applications/Second\ Life.app/Contents/MacOS/Second\ Life -loginuri http://ipofyoursim:9000/ -loginpage http://ipofyoursim:9000/?method=login. Save file as 'RunSLViewer.sh' on desktop.
Open terminal, navigate to desktop (cd desktop).
Change permissions to executable (chmod 777 RunSLViewer.sh).
Run executable (./RunSLViewer.sh). Preceding ./ is required because for a file to be run as an executable the shell needs the file's system path. If the terminal session is in the same folder as the file, ./ is shorthand for the system path to terminal's location.
Login to your sim!
For a more user-friendly method, create an applescript with the script do shell script "/Users/username/desktop/RunSLViewer.sh" and put that on the desktop. No need to bother with Terminal after the chmod.

FreeSWITCH log, successful connection

2009-08-27T15:04:00.009-04:00

Logfile contents of a successful OpenSim chat connection using FreeSWITCH, including text coloring.

2009-08-27 14:13:40.525224 [DEBUG] switch_core_state_machine.c:397 (sofia/internal/xWOiLAj9AQHGGCji61A8MMw==@210.195.1.26) Running State Change CS_NEW
2009-08-27 14:13:40.525224 [DEBUG] switch_core_state_machine.c:403 (sofia/internal/xWOiLAj9AQHGGCji61A8MMw==@210.195.1.26) State NEW
2009-08-27 14:13:40.525224 [DEBUG] sofia_glue.c:3079 Audio Codec Compare [SIREN14-3D:111:32000:0]/[G7221:115:32000:20]
2009-08-27 14:13:40.525224 [DEBUG] sofia_glue.c:3079 Audio Codec Compare [SIREN14-3D:111:32000:0]/[G722:9:8000:20]
2009-08-27 14:13:40.525224 [DEBUG] sofia_glue.c:3079 Audio Codec Compare [SIREN14-3D:111:32000:0]/[PCMU:0:8000:20]
2009-08-27 14:13:40.525224 [DEBUG] sofia_glue.c:3079 Audio Codec Compare [SIREN14-3D:111:32000:0]/[PCMA:8:8000:20]
2009-08-27 14:13:40.525224 [DEBUG] sofia_glue.c:3079 Audio Codec Compare [SIREN14-3D:111:32000:0]/[GSM:3:8000:20]
2009-08-27 14:13:40.525224 [DEBUG] sofia_glue.c:3079 Audio Codec Compare [PCMU:0:8000:0]/[G7221:115:32000:20]
2009-08-27 14:13:40.525224 [DEBUG] sofia_glue.c:3079 Audio Codec Compare [PCMU:0:8000:0]/[G722:9:8000:20]
2009-08-27 14:13:40.525224 [DEBUG] sofia_glue.c:3079 Audio Codec Compare [PCMU:0:8000:0]/[PCMU:0:8000:20]
2009-08-27 14:13:40.540848 [DEBUG] sofia_glue.c:2037 Set Codec sofia/internal/xWOiLAj9AQHGGCji61A8MMw==@210.195.1.26 PCMU/8000 20 ms 160 samples
2009-08-27 14:13:40.540848 [DEBUG] sofia_glue.c:3039 Set 2833 dtmf payload to 101
2009-08-27 14:13:40.540848 [DEBUG] sofia.c:3376 (sofia/internal/xWOiLAj9AQHGGCji61A8MMw==@210.195.1.26) State Change CS_NEW -> CS_INIT
2009-08-27 14:13:40.540848 [DEBUG] switch_core_session.c:933 Send signal sofia/internal/xWOiLAj9AQHGGCji61A8MMw==@210.195.1.26 [BREAK]
2009-08-27 14:13:40.540848 [DEBUG] switch_core_state_machine.c:397 (sofia/internal/xWOiLAj9AQHGGCji61A8MMw==@210.195.1.26) Running State Change CS_INIT
2009-08-27 14:13:40.540848 [DEBUG] switch_core_state_machine.c:480 (sofia/internal/xWOiLAj9AQHGGCji61A8MMw==@210.195.1.26) State INIT
2009-08-27 14:13:40.540848 [DEBUG] mod_sofia.c:83 sofia/internal/xWOiLAj9AQHGGCji61A8MMw==@210.195.1.26 SOFIA INIT
2009-08-27 14:13:40.540848 [DEBUG] mod_sofia.c:111 (sofia/internal/xWOiLAj9AQHGGCji61A8MMw==@210.195.1.26) State Change CS_INIT -> CS_ROUTING
2009-08-27 14:13:40.540848 [DEBUG] switch_core_session.c:933 Send signal sofia/internal/xWOiLAj9AQHGGCji61A8MMw==@210.195.1.26 [BREAK]
2009-08-27 14:13:40.540848 [DEBUG] switch_core_state_machine.c:480 (sofia/internal/xWOiLAj9AQHGGCji61A8MMw==@210.195.1.26) State INIT going to sleep
2009-08-27 14:13:40.540848 [DEBUG] switch_core_state_machine.c:397 (sofia/internal/xWOiLAj9AQHGGCji61A8MMw==@210.195.1.26) Running State Change CS_ROUTING
2009-08-27 14:13:40.540848 [DEBUG] switch_core_state_machine.c:483 (sofia/internal/xWOiLAj9AQHGGCji61A8MMw==@210.195.1.26) State ROUTING
2009-08-27 14:13:40.540848 [DEBUG] mod_sofia.c:130 sofia/internal/xWOiLAj9AQHGGCji61A8MMw==@210.195.1.26 SOFIA ROUTING
2009-08-27 14:13:40.540848 [DEBUG] switch_core_state_machine.c:78 sofia/internal/xWOiLAj9AQHGGCji61A8MMw==@210.195.1.26 Standard ROUTING
2009-08-27 14:13:40.540848 [INFO] mod_dialplan_xml.c:252 Processing Sophie Nauman->confctl-xNDFhZTQ4MjEtMDFmMi00NDNkLTkzMWEtOWRhMjA3YmQ1ZTFk in context default
Dialplan: sofia/internal/xWOiLAj9AQHGGCji61A8MMw==@210.195.1.26 parsing [default->sip_uri] continue=false
Dialplan: sofia/internal/xWOiLAj9AQHGGCji61A8MMw==@210.195.1.26 Regex (FAIL) [sip_uri] destination_number(confctl-xNDFhZTQ4MjEtMDFmMi00NDNkLTkzMWEtOWRhMjA3YmQ1ZTFk) =~ /^sip:(.*)$/ break=on-false
Dialplan: sofia/internal/xWOiLAj9AQHGGCji61A8MMw==@210.195.1.26 parsing [default->opensim_conferences] continue=false
Dialplan: sofia/internal/xWOiLAj9AQHGGCji61A8MMw==@210.195.1.26 Regex (PASS) [opensim_conferences] destination_number(confctl-xNDFhZTQ4MjEtMDFmMi00NDNkLTkzMWEtOWRhMjA3YmQ1ZTFk) =~ /^confctl-(.*)$/ break=on-false
Dialplan: sofia/internal/xWOiLAj9AQHGGCji61A8MMw==@210.195.1.26 Action answer()
Dialplan: sofia/internal/xWOiLAj9AQHGGCji61A8MMw==@210.195.1.26 Action conference(xNDFhZTQ4MjEtMDFmMi00NDNkLTkzMWEtOWRhMjA3YmQ1ZTFk-${domain_name}@default)
2009-08-27 14:13:41.556460 [DEBUG] switch_core_state_machine.c:114 (sofia/internal/xWOiLAj9AQHGGCji61A8MMw==@210.195.1.26) State Change CS_ROUTING -> CS_EXECUTE
2009-08-27 14:13:41.556460 [DEBUG] switch_core_session.c:933 Send signal sofia/internal/xWOiLAj9AQHGGCji61A8MMw==@210.195.1.26 [BREAK]
2009-08-27 14:13:41.556460 [DEBUG] switch_core_state_machine.c:483 (sofia/internal/xWOiLAj9AQHGGCji61A8MMw==@210.195.1.26) State ROUTING going to sleep
2009-08-27 14:13:41.556460 [DEBUG] switch_core_state_machine.c:397 (sofia/internal/xWOiLAj9AQHGGCji61A8MMw==@210.195.1.26) Running State Change CS_EXECUTE
2009-08-27 14:13:41.556460 [DEBUG] switch_core_state_machine.c:490 (sofia/internal/xWOiLAj9AQHGGCji61A8MMw==@210.195.1.26) State EXECUTE
2009-08-27 14:13:41.556460 [DEBUG] mod_sofia.c:173 sofia/internal/xWOiLAj9AQHGGCji61A8MMw==@210.195.1.26 SOFIA EXECUTE
2009-08-27 14:13:41.556460 [DEBUG] switch_core_state_machine.c:151 sofia/internal/xWOiLAj9AQHGGCji61A8MMw==@210.195.1.26 Standard EXECUTE
EXECUTE sofia/internal/xWOiLAj9AQHGGCji61A8MMw==@210.195.1.26 answer()
2009-08-27 14:13:41.556460 [DEBUG] mod_dptools.c:649 sofia/internal/xWOiLAj9AQHGGCji61A8MMw==@210.195.1.26 receive message [ANSWER]
2009-08-27 14:13:41.556460 [DEBUG] sofia_glue.c:2271 AUDIO RTP [sofia/internal/xWOiLAj9AQHGGCji61A8MMw==@210.195.1.26] 210.195.1.26 port 17858 -> 210.195.0.163 port 22860 codec: 0 ms: 20
2009-08-27 14:13:41.556460 [DEBUG] switch_rtp.c:1138 Starting timer [soft] 160 bytes per 20ms
2009-08-27 14:13:41.556460 [DEBUG] mod_sofia.c:549 Local SDP sofia/internal/xWOiLAj9AQHGGCji61A8MMw==@210.195.1.26:
v=0
o=FreeSWITCH 1251378963 1251378964 IN IP4 210.195.1.26
s=FreeSWITCH
c=IN IP4 210.195.1.26
t=0 0
m=audio 17858 RTP/AVP 0 101
a=rtpmap:0 PCMU/8000
a=rtpmap:101 telephone-event/8000
a=fmtp:101 0-16
a=silenceSupp:off - - - -
a=ptime:20
a=sendrecv

Daito Manabe, "Face Instrument"

2009-08-12T05:37:00.001-04:00

Voice chat in OpenSim

2009-08-06T15:54:00.013-04:00

Good news--it works. Bad news--it's hard to do.
(UPDATE 10/16: Not hard any more. The binary install of OpenSim is easy with the Diva Distribution. The FreeSWITCH part is kind of hard, still.)
This post explains my specific environment (standalone on a LAN).
This is my setup: XPSP2, compiled version 0.6.5 of OpenSim, Freeswitch, and SL Viewer version 1.23. Here are the steps to making it happen:

First install MySQL like in this tutorial.
The binary version of OpenSim doesn't include the Freeswitch voice module, so you'll have to compile an experimental version from source. (update: well, now I've upgraded to the 0.6.6 binary on a separate installation and it does include the FreeSwitch module, but I can't get it to run with MySQL storage, only SQLite. Something to work on...)
A couple weeks ago I used an SVN client, or subversion client, called TortoiseSVN to download the subversion 0.6.5 from http://dist.opensimulator.org/. They've since moved to a system called 'Git' for downloading subversions and the versions are no longer there. I haven't tried Git but the directions for installing it are here and downloading the right version here (scroll down). Just try to get 0.6.5 as I found when upgrading to 0.6.6 it wouldn't run with MySQL. Some configurations were changed I couldn't figure out. Download it to C:\Program Files\OpenSim (you have to create this first).
Once you have the files and folders, you have to compile the program. Go here and scroll down to the green Visual C# 2008 compiler and download and install it. It will also contain the .NET 2.0 framework, which is required for OpenSim to run.
Now it's time to compile. Navigate to your OpenSim directory and run "runprebuild.bat" by double clicking on it.
Open Visual C# through the start menu. Click File > Open Project. Browse to your OpenSim directory and choose a file called "OpenSim.sln". On the right side in a moment you should see a file tree under Solution Explorer. At the top menu, click Build > Build Solution. At the bottom of the Visual C# window you'll see the status change as it builds each project. It will tell you when it's done.
Before you configure OpenSim, you need to download and configure Freeswitch. You can download a precompiled binary here, and, yes, you have to install the Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable Package like it says before you run the Freeswitch program.
To configure Freeswitch to work with OpenSim, you have to change some config settings in a few xml files, explained here. This video also demos the steps, though the end, configuring the region, has conflicting info. He's using SLViewer v1.22 but it shouldn't work until 1.23.
Now you're ready to configure settings for OpenSim in the OpenSim.ini file. Follow these instructions from numbers 5-11 to set OpenSim to store data in your MySQL database and other stuff. This version will have the Freeswitch module section that was absent in the binary version. Configure those settings as shown at the bottom of the Freeswitch config instructions.
Now you can start up Freeswitch. Double click freeswitch.exe. Ignore the red error messages (really!). Start up OpenSim exe. Now go to exactly 3:00 here where they are starting OpenSim.exe and follow their steps, which continue on in part 2, EXCEPT where you put in the region IP (at 5:00) you'll want to put in the computer's fixed IP (Your sysadmin will have to assign the computer a fixed IP if you can't). You can stop when they get to downloading Hippo Viewer.
Now you need the SLViewer version 1.23. This is key, because earlier versions don't work with Freeswitch. Install it and configure it as in step 14 here.
Once you're logged in to your sim, you have to enable voice chat for the estate. Click Edit > Preferences and under Voice Chat make sure it's enabled. Then click World > Region/Estate, click the estate tab and make sure "Allow Voice Chat" is checked. The above video I mentioned is confusing because he is using SLViewer v1.22, which allows him to make the final config adjustment of right clicking on the terrain, clicking About Land, clicking the media tab, and choosing either "use the estate spatial channel" or "private channel". This option isn't available in v1.23, but I couldn't get voice to work in 1.22. Even now I'm wondering if I was able to get it to work in 1.23 because I had first selected the "use estate spatial channel" in a 1.22 viewer, then switched to 1.23. I don't know...It's also possible I didn't know to click the lock on the talk button and that's why it didn't work in 1.22, though I could swear the talk button was greyed out, unclickable.
Anyway, once these things are set, you need someone else to log on or you could talk to yourself over two computers. If you are using headsets, make sure they are plugged in before starting the viewer. To talk, look for the talk button on the lower right. Click the lock next to it to toggle talking on or just click and hold the talk button while you're talking.

Installing OpenSim to use over a LAN

2009-08-03T23:04:00.023-04:00

OpenSim is an open source version of Second Life. You install, run, and configure it, set up a viewer, and it's your very own virtual world. SL has tons of object (prims) that are given away or sold and OpenSim is a blank slate. But it's yours and you have full control over who can access it and what they can do there. That makes it an excellent resource for teaching.

There are lots of tutorials on getting your own OpenSim up and running out there but 90% are just for standalone sandbox on your own machine and the rest are for grid mode in which you link your region with others out there on other people's machines. I'm writing this tutorial because I want to run my own sim but have my students connect to it through a client viewer on laptops connecting over our school's wireless network. The basic plan is installing the opensim service on a computer, installing MySQL so objects have permanence and don't have to be reactivated when the sim restarts or users log off, and giving that computer a static IP so client apps always know where to find it. With this setup you can run the sim on one computer and connect to it from any other computer on your school network, but it's not publicly available outside your school unless you open that IP up through the firewall (which I may consider later on). Here's how I did it (UPDATE 10/16: I've just upgraded to the newest version of OpenSim using Diva's Distribution, which makes all of the following pretty much obsolete. I'm just keeping the old steps below so I can look back some day and appreciate how far it's all come. It's now SO much easier. Here is the tutorial for the Diva approach.)

Desktop running Windows XP SP3, assigned a static IP by the DNS server, no monitor, I just log in remotely. (Ask your system administrator to assign the IP if you, like me, can't.)
MySQL 5.1 installed (good instructions here, a little old. The Toad (MySQL GUI) part is for an earlier version of Toad, but the idea is to create a root account and create a new database called 'opensim'. If you prefer you can use the mysql command line (tutorials here and here instead for mysql command line tools. No need to create any tables. OpenSim will do that on first run. Stop the first tutorial and continue to the next step when he gets to configuring the opensim.ini file because it's for an older version of OpenSim.
Okay, now go download an opensim binary (look for the Windows binary on the right, soon to be version 0.6.6). The version I've installed is 'standalone' 0.6.3. The two flavors of OpenSim are standalone and grid mode and I spent two days thinking that since I wanted to share out my region with other computers on our LAN I needed grid mode (which is much more complicated to install). After much frustration (couldn't connect) it dawned on me that grid mode is for connecting regions over the internet. Standalone is what you want if you're just looking for an insulated virtual world not connected to the other regions out there.
Run the installer but don't start OpenSim yet. First you need to edit some settings in the OpenSim.ini file you'll find among the many files in the Program Files\OpenSim folder. OpenSim.exe looks to this file for all of its configuration info so you set these here by adding and removing semi-colons so it will ignore and follow what you want it to.
So open OpenSim.ini in a text editor.
Under STORAGE add a semi-colon in front of storage_plugin = "OpenSim.Data.SQLite.dll"
(and the next line "storage_connection_string" if it doesn't have one).
You want it to use your MySQL database to store primitives and user attributes so they stay from one session to another. I believe the default, SQLite, isn't good with that. So remove the semi-colon from storage_plugin="OpenSim.Data.MySQL.dll" and the next line.
One the connection string line you'll need to add your database details, storage_connection_string="Data Source=localhost;Database=opensim;User ID=root;Password=yourpassword;";
Under the PHYSICS section you might want to uncomment the physics = OpenDynamicsEngine line. This physics algorithm prevents objects from going through each other whereas the default doesn't.
The PERMISSIONS section allows you to set permissions (obviously) but I haven't played with that yet. I will definitely revisit those settings soon. Once OpenSim is running, you can shut it down, change settings, and restart it if you want to adjust things.
In the STANDALONE section there are more SQLite settings and you need to change them to the same MySQL settings as in the STORAGE section.
There are more interesting settings further down that I haven't investigated yet, like SUN for daytime and nighttime automation and VOICE for voice chat. I'll update when I get these figured out. You'll see below I'm not using the Hippo Opensim viewer but if you do you'll want to fill in the GRIDINFO section which gives the appropriate details to Hippo when you set it to your sim.
Now go to exactly 3:00 here where they are starting OpenSim.exe and follow their steps, which continue on in part 2, EXCEPT where you put in the region IP (at 5:00) you'll want to put in the computer's fixed IP. You can stop when they get to downloading Hippo Viewer.
I tried Hippo and it's great except that if students are connecting on Windows machines with network accounts Hippo has no way I could figure out of saving the sim IP as the default for all users on the machine. Instead, I downloaded the Second Life viewer, installed it on the student laptops, right clicked on the desktop icon (which will need to be moved to the All Users desktop and given full permissions to 'everyone') and added the following flag in the 'target' field: -loginuri http://fixed.ip.ad.dress:9000/ That reroutes the viewer to your sim rather than actual Second Life on the web. If you don't want the occasionally racy SL screenshots showing up either you can add -loginpagehttp://fixed.ip.ad.dress:9000/?method=login.
Now with your sim running, open the SL viewer from the icon and login with the master avatar account you created. I hope it works!
Finally, you might be wondering about voice chat. There's supposedly a module, explained here, that enables that through the SL viewer. We'll see. I've spent some time on this but I'll address it in a separate post because it turns out to be quite involved.

Teaching With OpenSim

2009-08-03T23:00:00.005-04:00

The drama teacher in my school asked me to look into setting up a virtual world like Second Life that he could use for his students to produce and perform a virtual play, with an eye towards eventually collaborating with another school. It's an amazing idea. I looked into a few existing options--Second Life and There. But neither fit our needs. SL is bandwidth heavy and segregates teens from adults unless you purchase a private island for a grand and while There is more affordable you can't share the prims you've purchased (I don't think you can actually make things yourself), which rules out easy collaboration. I have more thoughts on the ideologies of SL and There here.

So I settled on OpenSim for an adventure. Now that it's set up it is the perfect platform. Permissions can be managed, prims can be shared with other users, and in many other ways you have full control over your region.

A couple of other ideas that have occurred to me are virtual soccer (just for fun), and sculpture exhibits. I would like to have a department meeting in there, too. If anyone has more ideas let me know.

Notes on Mayer, Moreno, "Nine Ways to Reduce Cognitive Load in Multimedia Learning"

2009-07-24T20:46:00.004-04:00

"The goal of [their] research is to figure out how to use words and pictures to foster meaningful learning," and the biggest hurdle to doing that successfully is minimizing cognitive overload.
This paper is a summary of the entire Cognitive Science I syllabus. Every paragraph represents at least a paper or chapter. Wow, it's chock-full.
I think my website design avoids the split attention effect and reduces incidental processing by allowing only one section to be open at a time. So while you are looking at the information in one section you aren't distracted by what's going on in another section, like a video or school assignments. This is done with this nice little bit of JavaScript:
```
collapseprev: true,
```
Signaling: tell them how to use the information.

Final Project Web Site

2009-07-22T11:00:00.004-04:00

My final project web site is coming along. Here is the link to it. And here is a picture of my flow chart for the site.

Creative Commons Licensed Media

2009-07-22T10:15:00.001-04:00

I just found this article that lists more than 30 websites where you can find media released for public use (with attribution and varying restrictions). Here is the link: http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/04/30/30-creative-commons-sources/. Creative Commons Licensing can be a little confusing, so you can learn about it here: http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses.

Amazon Erasing Digital Books Should Come As No Surprise

2009-07-19T22:46:00.003-04:00

Kindle users were angered when their "1984" and "Animal Farm" copies were deleted from their e-readers because of a copyright issue. I would have been pretty annoyed (or very pissed if I were the student who lost all his notes for his summer assignment with his copy) but not surprised. Appearance is not the biggest difference between physical books and ebooks. A digital format offers a vastly greater amount of control by those who control its distribution than an analog format. An ebook is data to Amazon. Amazon has created a data architecture whereby they can monitor and manipulate everything they sell to Kindle users, which is pretty brilliant, though I don't like buying into that level of control myself. It's the way they executed their solution to their copyright problem that caused such a public relations fiasco. If they had given customers a bit of warning, say, in an email the day before to explain the need for the refund, most people would have had no problem.

Social Architecture of Cyberspaces

2009-07-16T11:45:00.005-04:00

In "Code Version 2.0" Lessig has a great section on virtual world spaces, specifically comparing Second Life and There. The major distinction he points out is that the architects of SL let members be the owners of anything they create; it's their intellectual property. In contrast, the creators of There follow a corporate model and take ownership of anything created in There with the exception of other businesses (Nike, etc.) with a presence in There. There's creators imagined businesses playing a central role in providing assets that individual users would then simply enjoy. Consequently, while There is still here it's fizzling as Second Life continues to grow.

A small but interesting point of comparison is the manner of accessing each. They both have their respective client VW viewers but There also allows you to access your account, including assets, help forums, and shopping, through the corporate Internet Explorer browser and its activeX technology.

Lastly, I wish Lessig would had discussed OpenSim, which I'm working on setting up now for my school. He discusses Open Source somewhat in the abstract in other parts of the book, but it would add an interesting perspective to the virtual world discussion.

Get Dropbox

2009-07-14T14:36:00.003-04:00

Go to dropbox.com now and get it if you regularly work on more than one computer. Dropbox does one thing really well, which is share and update versions of files among different computers. You get a folder at your user account level on your Mac or Windows computer and you drag an file you want to have access to at your other computer/s. Sure, you could easily do this by emailing it to yourself or uploading it to a web site of some kind, but this just takes all file types, up to 2 GB free, and makes the task so darn easy. Just log in to your other computer and after a little spinning of arrows the contents of your dropbox on that computer are updated. And if you are at a public computer, just go to dropbox.com, log in, and download what you need. Seriously, get it.

Fair Use Explained Clearly

2009-07-07T21:25:00.002-04:00

This document, "Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education," is an excellent resource for understanding Fair Use. It puts the power and responsibility of choosing appropriate media for instructional use in the hands of the educator as the law intends instead of making us feel like we are getting away with something by using any media. It also makes clear to me that in cases where I have felt like students' use of media wasn't covered by fair use I was right. "...students may use copyrighted music for a variety of purposes, but cannot rely on fair use when their goal is simply to establish a mood or convey an emotional tone, or when they employ popular songs simply to exploit their appeal and popularity." The original work needs to be repurposed or transformed in such a way that its use contributes to an educational goal.

Prensky, Digital Natives/Immigrants

2009-07-06T17:00:00.003-04:00

I noticed a point in Prensky's "Digital Natives Digital Immigrants" that was similar to the way I'm thinking of the Learning Wiki. To create software to teach engineers how to use a new type of CAD software Prensky had the developers and professors (content specialists) "create a series of graded tasks into which the skills to be learned were embedded." The skills were not to be organized by concept or vocabulary or in a certain sequence, but by practical application. This is how I envision information being organized in the Learning Wiki.

Point about Identity in Cyberspace

2009-07-02T11:00:00.002-04:00

Reading Lawrence Lessig's "Code Version 2.0." There's a good point about identity on the Internet. "While in real space...anonymity has to be created, in cyberspace anonymity is the given." On the Internet your identity is built from the IP address up. What you add to your IP adds to the picture of your identity. Of course, the main point of the book is that commerce, the law, and government have created an architecture of the Internet that prevents you from accessing many, if not most, spaces without significant creditials that certify who you are.

Learning Wiki

2009-07-02T09:07:00.002-04:00

In a constructivist learning environment providing sufficient support for students to be successful is tricky. Since students are working on solving unique problems at varying levels of difficulty the teacher can't predict very easily exactly what information they will need to find their solutions. In addition, the teacher can't, and shouldn't, be there to help every student with every problem. I propose developing a learning wiki as a means of providing some of this scaffolding. This wiki doesn't have a predetermined structure, nor specific predetermined content. The students will decide and maintain both. My hope is that when they encounter a problem they will be able to find possible solutions in the learning wiki. The key to making this successful is for students to update the wiki with their solutions as much as possible and create the structure of the wiki around the problems they faced. More on this later.

Robots in Different Cultures

2009-03-18T10:29:00.003-04:00

I've been listening to the robotics podcasts on Talking Robots. Dario Floreano spent about 2 years until August 2008 interviewing top researchers in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence. The podcast archive is a gold mine of information for someone wanting to get a leg up on what the current trends are in the field. One theme mentioned in several interviews is the different levels of acceptance of robots by the general public in different countries. One interviewee, I wish I could remember who, summed it up by saying "The Japanese embrace robots in their daily life, Americans are afraid robots will take control of their lives, and Europeans think robots will take their jobs." I guess for my part I hope to dispell my students' fear of robots taking over by teaching them that robots are only ever doing what they've been told to do. The key is understanding what that is. Then you know what you're dealing with.

Storytelling Alice: Looking Back

2009-03-16T05:25:00.007-04:00

My 7th grade students have just finished their animation projects. In the end I decided to collaborate with the science teacher and have the students apply what they were learning about genetics in that class in making these stories. The assignment was to portray two groups (families) of characters in two scenes and have a character's genetically inherited trait explained in some way. One family had to be human and the other non-human (animals, aliens, robots, fairies, etc) and while with the human family the traits had to be real, they could make up the non-human characters' traits. They came up with some interesting solutions to integrating scientific information into a narrative. A few students set the story in a classroom in which a teacher was beginning a lesson on genetics, then it would cut to a video the class was watching in which genetics were explained using animals or fairies.

So what did they get out of the project? I think they did benefit from applying the genetic vocabulary to a story of their own. I overheard many conversations trying to clarify trait types, recessiveness and dominance, and how to spell words like allele and phenotype. I also wanted to them to get some programming concepts as well, and this happened to varying degrees. I demonstrated what seemed like the most useful concepts as they began their stories and told them to use them when they felt they needed them in making their stories, like tools they may or may not need in a toolbox. I showed them the looping command, do together command, and how to create a new method. Do together was by far the most widely used, which is interesting because it gives the programmer a high degree of control over the action to a degree that would be very hard to do in most programming languages. Do together essentially allows instant multi-tasking, making that concept deceptively easy to apply in Alice. Some students found it necessary and worth the effort to make new methods. We discovered how challenging it can be to program a character that doesn't know how to kick to do so. Some students were, of course, quite lost. One big misconception a few students had was thinking they had to create a new method to make anything happen. They would create a 'stand up' method and drop a whole dialog sequence in it. They were missing the basic idea of methods as meaningful containers of instructions. Some of the students realized the possibilities for programming the camera actions and made some very exciting things happen with that. Many had to be walked through the steps to create the second scene and link the two together as described in this post. A few completely missed that idea and just started a new project when they went to create their second scene. If they hadn't gone too far I would stop them and show them how to add the second scene to the first.

Next go around I'll spend more time teaching them how to create multiple scenes. I want to create a screencast of the process so they can do it independently. I also want to spend more time practicing the commands at the bottom of the scripting panel, like looping, do together, and do in order so they have a better idea of when they will be appropriate.

I encountered few bugs after using it for 6 weeks. One was due to the wireless connection not being quite robust enough when students were saving to their network drives. A lot of students were getting corrupted projects that couldn't be opened until I updated the Dell wireless drivers on the laptops and that problem stopped. Often an animation would throw an error with the message "An error has occurred during simulation." I would go back to the script and disable the command directly after the point in the animation that the error happened to try and pinpoint the faulty code. More often than not once I found the command I had to delete it and reinsert it and it worked. It often occurred with the command "Camera fade to black" for some reason. Other than that the program was impressively reliable.

Will The White House Go Cutting Edge?

2009-01-22T23:35:00.002-05:00

Eye-opening post about the Obama tech team trying to make sense of the antiquated technology in The White House.

Britannica Wikifies

2009-01-22T23:29:00.000-05:00

Why?

Creating Multiple Scenes with Storytelling Alice

2009-01-11T00:14:00.005-05:00

I just had a great week teaching 6th graders how to program 3D animations with Storytelling Alice. (See here for more about the program.) But they also taught me a lot, because there were things I couldn't figure out how to do and their discoveries put it together for me. The biggest was how to create multiple scenes. Kelleher provides a sample animation you can access in the help section that sort of explains how, but wasn't explicit enough for me to get it. So here's how:

First, understand that the default method, 'World.scene 1 method,' must be used as the method in which the first scene is scripted and an organizing method that will play all of the other scenes in your story.
Add a few objects and characters to your first scene and click 'done.' You can go back and add more later.
Program an action for one character in the first scene so you have something to see when you play it.
Now create the second scene by clicking 'create new scene' and call it 'scene 2.'
Add a character to it.
Now change your current scene tripod to opening scene tripod and try playing the animation. You will see that the first scene plays but the second doesn't. We'll fix that.
Up in your object tree click on the world object. You'll see the scene 1 method and scene 2 method below the tree. Drag the scene 2 method into the script area of the scene 1 method, at the bottom of what you already scripted. In this way, the actions of the first scene will play and then the second scene will follow.
Now edit the scene 2 method and before any action in the scene occurs direct the camera to orient to that scene by clicking the camera in the object tree and dragging the 'camera orient to...' tile to the top of scene 2 method's script. Choose 'scene 2's tripod' in the context menu that pops up.
Try playing the animation again and you'll see that the second scene now plays.
Between scenes the camera swings wildly from one scene to the next. You can direct the camera to fade out before it changes orientation and fade back in when it's pointing at the second scene so you don't see the transition.
If you want a title first, click the tab for the first scene in the scripting area, click the camera in the object tree and drag the 'camera show title' tile before the first action in scene 1's script.

You can program as many scenes as you want this way. The amazing revelation to me about this is that now I can see how the program allows you to direct not only the characters in the scenes but the camera, lights, and titles, giving you a lot more control than I realized. My students really took off with this once we all put it together.

The Greening of the Web is Dark

2008-11-20T22:43:00.013-05:00

A student of mine recently introduced me to Earthle, powered by Google so you have the same results, same options, but it's black. That's so you'll use less energy while you're searching. It's a great idea. I think more of the web should get darker to promote energy conservation. #000000 instead of #FFFFFF.

Photosynth

2008-11-19T22:14:00.004-05:00

Microsoft has come up with something really amazing in its research labs called Photosynth. I learned about it from this TED talk with Blaise Aguera y Arcas. He demos the software, showing how it syncs photos of the same geographic location so you can manipulate the object of the photos in 3D passing through the lens of each picture. The pictures come from all over the web, from devices as varied as camera phones to high resolution cameras so as you pull each one into focus you can explore its specific resolution and visual character. The great quote from Aguera y Arcas comes when he compares the experience of changing one's point of view from a distant perspective to an extreme closeup to manipulating paper. He calls paper "an inherently multi-scale medium," which puts the finger on why e-paper could never take the place of physical paper. No matter what happens inside the screen, the metal and liquid crystal provide an impermeable barrier between you and the object you'd like to manipulate. Photosynth does bring you a little closer to that experience, though.

Open Source Electronics

2008-11-09T21:31:00.005-05:00

I've found another reason to love the Cricket. The electronics are open source, or at least some of the components are. I was having a lot of problems with wires coming out of the connectors that fasten them into the Cricket's ports. I received a bunch of crimped wires from the manufacturer that I had to splice onto the wires that came out until I started running out of those. Then I made a discovery in an unlikely source. My cordless phone battery was dying, so I went to Radio Shack to get a new one. It turned out they had changed the model and while the battery the sold was the same shape, voltage and amps as my bad one, the connector into the phone was a different shape. But the battery wires fastened into the connector in exactly the same way as the wires on the Cricket do. It turns out the crimps are a standard method of making a non-soldering wire connection. So all I have to do to fix the wires that come out is re-crimp them. There's even a page on the Molex web site (the manufacturer of the crimps) that shows how to make a good crimp.

Facebook

2008-11-09T07:59:00.003-05:00

Now I know why Facebook is so popular. It's the ease with which people can communicate in multimedia formats. The only one that's missing is audio messages. Text, pictures, and video are all there mixed together. The brilliance is how easy it is to relate objects to one another through comments, tags, and probably other ways I don't know about in a very fluid way.:)

Code Comments Are Essential

2008-11-01T20:18:00.004-04:00

My 9th graders have been navigating a paper road with their Super Crickets for a few classes now armed only with the knowledge of how to create a long sequence of commands that hard code every turn and straightway. No sensors, yet. So their programs are long. I finally introduced them to the practice of adding comments to code. They were so thankful to have a way to keep track of where each turn in the road was in their programs. I realized how essential comments are.

Problems are important

2008-10-20T20:18:00.003-04:00

This is the first year I've worked with the Cricket Logo microcomputer and I'm encountering some interesting problems. The crickets are actually increasing the problems quite a bit over the Mindstorms RCXs I used before so it's fortunate I'm teaching 9th grade instead of 7th. The crickets have some finicky hardware and to make things worse I've chosen to use Jackal, a finicky program, because it's the only one that provides syntax coloring for Logo. So today my class was getting the simple vehicles they had built to stay on a road course I made on white butcher paper. Four of the teams were successfully navigating the road little-by-little and three were stuck getting a single motor to turn on. So I trouble-shot with them. Here's what we did:

send the beep command. Success? Yes
send a, on. Success? No
maybe the batteries are dying, not strong enough to power the motor, so change them. Success? No
send it b, on for the second motor. Success? Yes, hah!
maybe it's the actual motor, so switch it for another. Success? No
maybe it's the wires connecting the motor to a, so switch the 9 volt adapters, try a, on Success? YES!
try b, on. Success? No!
So the wire or circuit board on the 9 volt adapter is bad

Replacing it worked and the students were happy campers. In the end, problems are good, because now I know even the 9 volt adapters can be faulty.

How to install Storytelling Alice

2008-10-05T20:32:00.007-04:00

It's almost as easy as 1, 2, 3, in that you have to install 3 things. Kelleher only made a version for PC and has no plans to make one for any other platform. First download the Storytelling Alice zip file and unzip it anywhere you want it, like your desktop. The program runs on Java and needs the Java 3D API and Media Platform to work. You can find the 3D API here (look for "j3d-1_5_2-windows-i586.exe") and run it from your desktop. Finally, download the Java Media Platform here (after clicking download you choose your platform).

UPDATE (7-2-09): In reinstalling SA on an image for a new model of Dells I realized that the Java software is only necessary for rendering the 3D content in an HTML page. You only need that if you're publishing a story as HTML, which you do from the file menu. If you don't plan on using this (and you may not as it doesn't support the speech bubbles or any audio) then all you need is SA itself!

Open Source Communities

2008-08-19T11:14:00.008-04:00

This is an excellent example of the process of open source software development and distribution. I came across this discussion on a forum at Moodle.org as I was refreshing my memory about how to upload our school courses in bulk. It's something we do once a year and I didn't take notes when I figured it out last summer. Fortunately, not only did my memory get refreshed, but during the year the Moodle community was hard at work improving the utility for it and had something that should prove to work even better than last year. In the process I saw that there are some great examples of how the open source process works in this forum. If you click the link to it and log in as guest you can read through it. It's long but really worth it.

There's a positive and helpful tone throughout. Lots of respect given.
People are negotiating responsibilities for projects, not in a pushy way ("Has Jeff agreed to maintain this? Jeff?"). When Jeff gives his reasons for not wanting to permanently support it they are very clear and the forum listens.
People are getting all sorts of help for big and small problems.
There's a big range of experience among the participants and newbies aren't afraid to identify themselves.
Towards the end there's a really interesting negotiation about how to distribute the utility and what status to give it so people will have appropriate access. One person recognizes the valuable work being done by contributors and says he'll create an entry in the Modules and Plugins database because he sees "some wonderful stuff get buried in layers and layers of forum discussion." Another person goes one further and prematurely creates a wiki documentation page and heartily apologizes when he is respectfully corrected because some issues have to be worked out before that should happen.

Del.icio.us makeover

2008-08-09T23:27:00.002-04:00

Wow. That's a shocking re-design.

The Logo Blog

2008-08-09T23:20:00.001-04:00

I post so much lately about Logo I figured I'd start a blog just about that. So it's The Logo Blog at logoandlearning.blogspot.com.

No EI 7 for networked computers

2008-08-09T22:44:00.001-04:00

I made this decision a year ago when EI 7 was still a new and curious application, and I've made the same decision a year later. IE 7 just won't work in a networked environment with multiple users. I get that Microsoft wants you to be safe and protected from the elements of evil on the internet. But aside from the fact that most people at home don't really know the consequences of choosing to activate the phishing filter or not among several other set-up decisions they are forced to make the first time they run the program, in a multi-user environment every student will have to click through all of those windows making all of those decisions every time they run IE 7 for the first time, which will be almost everytime they use a computer in the beginning of the year as they aren't assigned computers in a laptop cart situation, tapering off to almost never towards the middle of the year. I could teach them all how to configure IE 7 so they'll know what the choices mean, but even if they remember the steps it takes an extra few minutes to get the program ready to do what you wanted to in the first place, which for middle schoolers kills the whole experience, and forget about the primary grades. It seems to me that Microsoft hasn't considered the implications of such involved user-specific settings to a multi-user environment. It would be nice if there were a way for an administrator to make settings for all users of a networked computer but I haven't come across any (and forget about pushing out settings from the server, not worth our trouble to figure out and maintain). �