The Devil Made Me, DoIT!

I am pleased to announce that I have resigned my position as Assistant Director with UW-Madison's Division of Information Technology (DoIT) in order to accept the position of Assistant Vice President for Academic Services and Technology Support wth Duke University's Office of Information Technology. The Office of Information Technology (OIT) is the primary central infrastructure and service provider of information technologies for Duke University. The organization provides a broad range of services, spanning the areas of networking, telecommunications, central computing facilities, enterprise systems, education and research support, general computing support, and security. In this new position, I have broad responsibilities for Duke's academic and research computing development and support efforts as well as all customer service functions of Duke's Office of Information Technology. I will also be working with others on the Duke Digital Initiative (DDI), a major instructional technology program focused on experimentation, development, and implementation of digital technology in academic environments and will be seeking to build Duke University's capability to develop, deploy, and support Croquet-based solutions for higher education in partnership with the newly forming Croquet Consortium. I am jazzed about the possibilities!

Apple Hill Learning Lab

Each year, Alan Kay brings a group of people together at the Apple Hill Center for the Performing Arts in the beautiful mountains of southern New Hampshire. This three-day event in August provides invitees with an opportunity to spend quality time interacting with one another. The group includes technologists, designers, artists, musicians, in the tradition of other north-eastern creative retreats (Yaddo, etc.). The event also features great food and great music (by the Apple Hill Chamber Players). As I reflect back on my experiences at Apple Hill, I am struck by the deep importance of the contextualized social presence that occurs there and the positive effect that it has in support of creativity among the participants. Bringing people together in a way that allows serendipitous social interactions to take place is a wonderful way of stimulating collaborative creativity - and at Apple Hill, it really does work. There is lots of group interaction and lots of one-on-ones. Hopefully, Croquet will provide a technological framework for extending the value of such contextualized social presence into online spaces. The success of doing so depends on how well applications are designed and built on the core technology of the Croquet SDK. Until then, Apple Hill will have to do ;) . This year's event was particularly interesting because of the presence there of many folks who are working on hardware and software for Nicholas Negroponte's $100 Laptop Initiative and on the final stages of the Croquet 1.0 SDK.

Synthetic World Conference

The increasing popularity of synthetic worlds (embodied as MMORPGs, or massively multiuser online role-polaying games, avatar-based communication systems, etc.) is a phenomenon that several key academics believe is worth considering in terms of its potential impact on education. This is because many of the students entering our academic institutions do so with a deep experience with synthetic worlds in the form of console and computer-based 'video games'. Now, there is emerging a coordinated effort among researchers at several major universities that seeks to develop plans for the implementation of what is being called "synthetic world technology". Organized by Edward Castronova, the effort proposes the establishment of a Center for the Study of Synthetic Worlds that will explore this technology, develop a deeper understanding of it, and then use it to build synthetic worlds for research and education. The inaugural conference of the Center for the Study of Synthetic Worlds will take place later this month in Bloomington Indiana. For details on this interesting conference click here.

Critical 3D

The Croquet development team at the University of Wisconsin is now beginning work on a six month pilot project to demonstrate instructional potential of a Croquet-based learning environment. The project involves partnering between our group and Michael Connors, a professor in the Department of Art at the UW School of Education, to develop authoring tools that allow the instructor to create an instructional environment to address critical barriers involved with the art critique process and provide students with means to upload, share, and critique their art projects within collaborative online spaces. The goals of critique in art are to remove individual perceptual barriers, develop an appreciation of how others perceive one's work, to overcome biases related to psycho-social conditioning, and develop skills of articulation and critical discourse. We are hoping that this project will lead to the development of generalized Croquet-based authoring tools that can be adapted to many different curricula, such as those in Law, Sociology, Psychology, Guidance, Business Management, Medicine, etc..

Its About Time?

Some of the recently reported Socket I/O problems with UNIX Squeak 3.8a1 VM may be related to why Squeak tends to perform so badly as a webserver and why there have been challenges in getting a robust TeaTime working in Croquet on platforms other than Windows. Without going into the technical details (some of which can be seen in David Shafer's emails posted on the Squeak VM List), a Socket I/O problem cascades in a way that causes bad behavior in UNIX Squeak-based servers when those servers are receiving large numbers of closely spaced connections. In certain cases this problem may be responsible for intermittent bouts of long latency in Squeak VMs - of up to 1.5 seconds before an incoming packet is detected by the Socket plugin. At the same time, the Squeak VM appears to handle UI input events at rates of 400 per second or more without a problem. All of this may be related to why it has been a challenge to pull together a robust TeaTime in Croquet and it now appears necessary to do some platform specific network layer tuning of the VM as we close in on a working v 1.0 release of Croquet. David P. Reed has recently suggested that this aspect of Squeak performance may have gone unnoticed since it doesn't manifest in large file transfers which have been the primary form of benchmarking to date.

Pay For Play

Many players of MMORPGs don't realize that some players are actually paying people in India to run up their character's status. For about $30 US you can advance your character significantly. This form of "cheating" shows that social status is, to some, even more important than game play. It may be interesting to recall that hiring someone to assume your identity and have them go into battle for you was something done by conscription-evading aristocrats during the American Civil War. Now, for a modest fee, you can hire a worker in India to go into virtual battle on your behalf. Some of you might ask why players wouldn't just enjoy getting there on their own - after all, isn't that the point of playing the game? It may be that the existence of this form of 'cheat' indicates the importance of social status over game play as a primary motivator to those engaged in MMORPGs. This is a notion often overlooked by game researchers who tend to focus on issues of game play as primary motivators of user involvement. We have only begun to scratch the surface on understanding how powerful verifiable online social status can be and how it can be used to benefit online education.

A Second Life

David Smith and I will be giving a virtual presentation on where the Croquet Project is heading at The Second Life Future Salon, a monthly mini-conference held within (but not affiliated with) Second Life. Our presentation on May 26th will be part of a larger discussion of innovation issues around digital worlds as well as wider technology, business, and social topics viewed through a digital worlds lens.




These screenshots are from the first of such SL Future Salons that took place last month. The way it works is that David and I will create an avatar, go into Second Life, give a 20-30 minute presentation via VOIP, and then do Q&A with the audience via text chat. Should be fun! I hope that may of you readers will join us there (by there I mean Second Life ;) ).

Audio from the first of such Salons available here.