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.

Croquet on Macs

I've recently been asked to join the steering committee for Apple Computer's newly forming Mac Learning Enterprise. Along with other committee members from the New Media Consortium, NYU, Simon Frasier University, Rice University, UCLA, University of Michigan, and MIT (among others), the Mac Learning Enterprise community is intended to be a resource for educators, technologists, IT professionals, developers and change agents who are transforming education through innovation built on open standards.

The community seeks to document and share its experiences, expertise, and knowledge about implementing and deploying open source learning infrastructure solutions that can run on, or be integrated with, Apple technology. In addition to growing the community's knowledge base, members of the Mac Learning Enterprise community will provide feedback to Apple product and engineering managers so that they may improve functionality, performance, and integration across various Apple technologies, tools, and applications in support of open source software. Several working groups are now being convened to explore solution stacks and tools associated with the implementation of collaborative learning environments. At this time, Apple has identified technology implementations and deployments of Croquet, OSPI, OKI, and Sakai to be of primary interest.

It is great to see that Apple is now taking such an interest in Croquet and that the company is supporting the inclusion of Croquet as part of its effort to support the development of innovative open source solutions for learning enterprises.

A Croquet Bricolage?

OK, I'm just going to "throw this out there" and see what other people think - Could this idea from Claude Lévi-Strauss' The Savage Mind (The University of Chicago Press 1966 [1962]) have any bearing on the approach to our project or the approach of those who might most use Croquet? Well, I suspect it might. But I'm interested in hearing what others mights say...

"The 'bricoleur' is adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks; but, unlike the engineer, he does not subordinate each of them to the availability of raw materials and tools conceived and procured for the purpose of the project. His universe of instruments is closed and the rules of his game are always to make do with 'whatever is at hand', that is to say with a set of tools and materials which is always finite and is also heterogeneous because what it contains bears no relation to the current project, or indeed to any particular project, but is the contingent result of all the occasions there have been to renew or enrich the stock or to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destructions. The set of the 'bricoleur's' means cannot therefore be defined in terms of a project (which would presuppose besides, that, as in the case of the engineer, there were, at least in theory, as many sets of tools and materials or 'instrumental sets', as there are different kinds of projects). It is to be defined only by its potential use or, putting this another way and in the language of the 'bricoleur' himself, because the elements are collected or retained on the principle that 'they may always come in handy'. Such elements are specialized up to a point, sufficiently for the 'bricoleur' not to need the equipment and knowledge of all trades and professions, but not enough for each of them to have only one definite and determinate use. They each represent a set of actual and possible relations; they are 'operators' but they can be used for any operations of the same type."

As usual, comments to this post would be most welcome!

Welcome Joshua!

The UW-Madison has added yet another full-time Croquet developer. We are pleased to announce that Joshua Gargus, a highly experienced Squeak developer, will be bringing his deep skills and creativity to the Madison campus beginning May 9th. Joshua comes to us from PlayMotion where he was a lead developer involved in the design and implementation of a framework allowing applications to mix OpenGL and D3D, the developmnt of an OpenAL-based reactive sound engine, a vision re-calibration method for changing lighting conditions, and a unified XML configuration framework for all the company's applications. Prior to joining PlayMotion, Joshua was a research assistant at Georgia Tech where he worked on mo-cap (motion capture) and developed pen-based interfaces for use in animation. Joshua has also served as a contractor for Viewpoints Research where he worked on TrueType rendering of arbitrarily nested equations and developed EToys applications for Alan. We are excited to have a first-rate developer with such creativity and deep squeak experience join the team and contribute to the successful widespread adoption of Croquet. Welcome Joshua!

Annotation in Croquet

Our teams at Wisconsin and Minnesota have developed, implemented, and are now testing ways of creating annotations to objects by using pull-down and contextual menus in the Jasmine release of Croquet. Our earlier efforts to develop this capability were expended on the task of porting some of the work previously done by Yoshiki Ohshima from the Solar release of Croquet into the current Jasmine release. Now, we have something that is beginning to work pretty well in Jasmine.

Here's how it works: When you shift-click an object in Croquet, a pop-up contextual menu will appear at your present mouse location over the object being clicked. In the menu, there is an option to Create Annotation. By choosing this option, you'll be presented with a dialog asking you to enter text that you wish to have appear in your annotation.



Once you press the Create button, a window containing your annotation will appear and be linked by a green connector to the exact place you clicked on the original object.



The annotation window seen above is simply another object in Croquet. As such, it can be moved, edited or even be annotated with another annotation. This capability starts to be like that of a concept mapping application - and with some further modification, we'll have the beginnings of a pretty capable collaborative Croquet-based concept mapping application. Oh, and I should also mention that the annotations can be modified in place by multiple users.



Even more exciting is the idea that annotations need not be restricted to being text-based. Instead they may be other non-text objects, audio, or video based as is the case in the following screenshot:



Perhaps most interestingly, annotations can even be worlds in themselves!

Co-Lab Collaboration

Owing to some long term efforts on all sides, the UW-Madison Croquet team is now working in partnership with the Academic Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Co-Lab to develop Croquet-based frameworks for the production of simulation based learning environments capable of tracking and reporting student activities. Marilyn and I are pleased to be working directly with Judy Brown, director of the Co-Lab here in Madison to develop grant proposals that seek support for our combined efforts with Croquet.

The Academic ADL Co-Lab is one of three ADL Co-Labs in the US and its mission is to provide a higher-education focus for online education/simulation based training. It serves as 1) A focal point for the nation’s universities and colleges in promoting high quality, reusable content for distributed learning; 2) A way to promote collaboration in the research, development, demonstration, implementation, and evaluation of ADL technologies and products; 3) An academic partner and ADL link to test, evaluate, and demonstrate ADL-compliant tools and technologies to enhance teaching and learning; 4) An academic demonstration site for ADL tools and content, including those developed by the federal government, academia, and industry.

The other ADL Co-Labs are oriented to military services training, policies, tools, and standards for online education (see www.adlnet.org). In many ways, the overall ADL Strategy dovetails nicely with what may of us are already trying to do with Croquet. Consider that the ADL Co-Labs seek to "exploit existing network-based technologies, create platform-neutral, reusable courseware and content to lower costs, promote widespread collaboration to satisfy common needs enhance performance with emerging and next-generation learning technologies, develop common specifications and standards that drives COTS product cycle, and provide incentives for organizational and cultural change."

At this time, UW-Madison's work with ADL Co-Lab is to design and implement a prototype of a distributed, role-based, multi-user game-based simulation system with 1) SCORM compliance; 2) Shareable state persistence; 3) Role-based access to learning scenarios; and 4) Learner progress recording and tracking. We are doing this because for games to become an effective tool for academic, military, or industrial training, they need to be effectively linked to advanced distributed learning systems such as SCORM run-time environments or personnel systems so that learner progress may be tracked consistently. Trainers need the simulation to report back to the learning system that a trainee has successfully completed the module. Moreover, continuity is essential. An individual learner’s progress must be tracked from game to game. The simulation system must ensure that the skills acquired in the last learning scenario will “carry over” when the learner moves on to the next gaming scenario.

Our approach to the problem of learner progress tracking through a gaming environment takes advantage of capabilities unique to Croquet. Essentially, Croquet automatically records the state of every object within the shareable learning environment along with all interactions involving that object and all the gestures and behaviors of a particular learner within the virtual environment over time. In a sense, every object in Croquet (and this includes human participants) is capable of generating its own ordered history. We intend to link link the Croquet-based virtual environment to the SCORM-compliant LMS and then investigate and address the issues involved the sharing of learning tracking data between the virtual environment and a SCORM conformant LMS.

Because of the potential synergy, we look forward to a working partnership with the Academic ADL Co-Lab programmers, instructional designers, and staff in the development of compelling virtual learning environments. ADL Co-Lab is working closely with several UW-Madison faculty that are exploring the use of virtual environments in education. These include Jim Gee, Kurt Squire, David Schaffer, and Constance Steinkuehler (congrats to Constance who just agreed to join the UW faculty beginning this coming September!), and their post-docs and graduate students. I think that there is a potential for particularly strong synergy here and look forward to making our collaboration with the Co-Lab work for everyone.

Buckeye Meets Bucky

I just returned from giving an invited seminar on Croquet for the folks at at Ohio State University. The invitation to speak came from Laura Tull at the OSU Libraries. Both the library people and some of the key teaching/learning folks were there. The audience also contained a small group that drove up from Ohio University and included their CIO and head librarian.

I showed some of the newer stuff we are working on (annotation architecture and video avatar stuff). Some in the audience clearly connected with what we are trying to do. Overall, there was considerable interest expressed in learning more about Worldbase servers as digital repositories.

It was really nice to get some enthusiastic feedback from many in the audience after the comprehensive 90 minute presentation. The idea of multi-point video conferencing without the need for a server and the integration of a repository for all 'objects' was clearly very exciting to some. Both the Ohio State and Ohio University folks indicated that they will be each meeting separately to discuss if and how their institutions might participate in a consortium effort. Hopefully I will hear from them soon. We could all certainly benefit from what they can bring to the table in an expanded cross-institutional effort.