Croquet: Help!?

As one of Croquet's architects, I'm often asked to provide assistance to people who have downloaded the Jasmine developer's preview of Croquet and who then discover the relative lack of documentation on the system and of the user options when navigating in Croquet spaces. Croquet is at present an unsupported system. Virtually all of the people working on the project are not in a position to provide any end-user support. However, there is an alternative mechanism for help for those in need which comes in the form of the croquet-user list server. Posting your questions to the list is the best way to have your specific questions answered. Go here to sign up for the list.

A lot of people tell me that they hesitate in posting questions to the list for fear that their questions are too elementary given the presence of more technical questions that many folks post to the list. The croquet-user list is there to serve the entire community. When the time comes, it may be necessary for us to maintain several lists. However, right now the community has settled on the croquet-user list. For every one person that asks a basic technical question, there are many more reading the list that appreciate the posting and its response. You should also keep in mind that all questions and responses on the list will serve well as many of us begin putting together Croquet's initial documentation. So please, go ahead and ask!

Presenting Croquet

Last October, Preston Austin and I gave a presentation on the Croquet Project at an event sponsored by Accelerate Madison, a premier Wisconsin-based networking and business support organization focused on information technology issues. Fortunately, the organizers arranged to record the entire presentation and make it available to anyone via Webcast. The Webcast includes the full program and presentation including video, audio and visual graphics. Its one of the only resources on the web that can provide you with view of Croquet technology in action. Click here to view the October 13th, 2005 presentation.

What Now Madison?

Now that I've moved to Duke University, people often ask me what will become of the Croquet effort at UW-Madison. The short answer is that all of the technical development efforts continue uninterrupted. There is lots of interest in Croquet at Madison and the project enjoys a wonderful momentum there (thanks to the wonderful leadership and support for the project from the CIO's office). During my tenure at UW-Madison, I worked to build a viable Croquet effort there and establish a first rate development team. I hired Howard Stearns over a year ago as technical project manager for UW-Madison's Croquet development efforts. With my departure, he now provides leadership for the entire UW-Madison effort (technical and non-technical). At the time of my departure in late October we were doing three main things in relation to Croquet:

1.   Contributing to the creation of the core open source technology

2.   Developing specific educational applications in partnership with faculty and instructional staff on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus

3.   Creating awareness of the effort and building and organizing an international community of effort

The first two areas will continue uninterrupted at Madison. And while I'm at Duke University, I'll also continue collaborating with the UW team on most of the technical and design efforts. It's the third area of effort that I'll initially concentrate on while at Duke University. Part of this involves setting up a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) corporation for the Croquet Consortium. It is hoped that this will be kind of like apache.org and other open source umbrella organizations. More on that in a future post....

World on a Phone

Here is another interesting tid-bit: The Hong Kong-based computer game company, Artificial Life, recently announced that it expects to release a Java-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) for third generation (3G) phones before the end of 2005 (hey - that should be right about now!). According to an article in The New Scientist:

"the game will let players assume a virtual persona and travel through a futuristic cityscape, the company says. They will be able to chat and interact with computer-controlled characters as well as other human players and tackle puzzles that can be solved more easily through cooperation."

If people actually begin using such handheld MMORPGs, wireless providers might profit greately since large numbers of addicted players would be compelled to spend many hours using their wireless devices. I actually don't think people will be inclined to run down their batteries to play an MMORPG over long periods on a small screen. It will be interesting to see how this all develops - and what role Croquet technologies might eventually play in the authoring of handheld social applications.

The complete article in The New Scientist may be accessed here.

A Croquet Cyberinfrastructure?

Within the National Science Foundation-funded report entitled Cyberinfrastructure for Education and Learning for the Future, there is what I believe to be a relevant section for those seeking NSF support for developing Croquet-based gaming, simulation, and modeling environments. The report was the result of a workshop on Modeling, Simulation and Gaming Technologies Applied to Education that took place from September 27-29, 2004.

Check it out this excerpt from the report:

"Gaming, simulation, and modeling. Games clearly motivate users in ways that much conventional instruction, including online non-routine challenge problems, does not. Some have observed that game players learn implicitly in the context of playing games, and are motivated to continue learning outside of the game in order to improve their game play. Game players are motivated to continue playing out of a sense of fun and enjoyment, characteristics that are often lost in formal instruction.

Simulations and models help provide (but do not guarantee) insights into scientific concepts and phenomena. Difficult abstract concepts and large data sets can be accessed in ways that are more visual, interactive, and concrete. As such, simulations and models, and the games that incorporate them, have much to offer throughout a student’s learning experience. Just as simulations and computational models play an increasing role in scientific and engineering practice, they can and should play a prominent role in learning. The challenge is to lay the scientific and technical groundwork to ensure that games and simulations have a positive influence on learning, not one that is negative or distracting.

To achieve these goals, a number of Cyberinfrastructure and research challenges must be addressed, including:

• Virtual learning environments need engines, authoring tools, and other modeling tools that make it easy for students, educators and other practitioners to create interactive services, games and simulations—quickly and at low cost. The current commercial game industry is characterized by proprietary platforms and licensing restrictions that create barriers for their educational applications. NSF and other government agencies can play a role in promoting interoperability standards, and in promulgating tools, platforms, and protocols for creating and modifying games.

• An infrastructure for data collection and analysis needs to be built into virtual learning environment engines to inform the development of Lifelong Learning Chronicles (LLCs; see chapter 3). Instrumentation is lacking from commercial game engines, yet is critical for the Cyberinfrastructure in general. This infrastructure must support distributed data collection, both at home and in school, yet be secure, sensitive to privacy concerns, and tolerant of network connectivity problems in real-life educational settings."

It seems to me that Croquet would provide a powerful and extensible technology environment for addressing these goals. Hopefully, the formation of a Croquet Consortium will assist researchers from multiple institutions to come together to seek NSF funding in order to address these challenges in a coordinated way. Unfortunately NSF does not have a good record in backing technologies that have any real impact in this area (that has been the domain of military-related funding - remember that thing called the Internet?). It should be interesting to see how things play out...

The complete NSF report in .pdf format may be accessed here.

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.