Action! Our School's First Live Virtual Performance

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

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

I couldn't make a nicer microwave myself!

Random chatting

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

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

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

(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

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

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

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.