Stanford University's Humanities Lab; Metaverse U,

On-line interactive virtual worlds such as Second Life, as well as online 3D games have become increasingly popular among adults and teens. It isn't too surprising that virtual worlds and videogames are now topics of formal study at the graduate level!

Researchers from the Stanford Humanities Lab have been involved in some interesting work. For several years, they have been studying virtual worlds, participating in Second Life, documenting the of the history of video games, working towards archiving digital virtual worlds, and participating in variety of other trans-disciplinary projects.

The Stanford Humanities Lab will be hosting a two-day conference in February 2008 that focuses on the topic of virtual worlds:

"The proliferation of virtual worlds has garnered tremendous interest, both in the media and in academia. To explore the cultural, technological, legal, and economic issues surrounding virtual worlds, the Stanford Humanities Lab is excited to announce Metaverse U, a conference to be held on Saturday, February 16th and Sunday, February 17th, 2008. We invite you to participate in this unique event. Metaverse U aims to challenge traditional conference models with more collaborative and inclusive opportunities for participants, both virtual and physical. To ensure that its impact extends well beyond the actual conference, video from Metaverse U will be streamed live to the web, free of charge. After the conference, these videos will be archived and become part of a global conversation on virtual worlds."

If you are interested in learning more about interactive multimedia, 3D virtual worlds, on-line communication and collaboration, and the broader issues surrounding this area, don't miss the opportunity to attend - in person or on the web.

FYI

Metaverse U People

Stanford Humanities Lab's History of Computer Games Collection

Post about CITEd's multimedia instruction of social skills and related links.

The Center for Implementing Technology in Education (CITEd ) is a website with a wealth of information about technology and education. I particularly like the section that focuses on the use of multimedia for social skills instruction. Take a look at my post on the TechPsych blog for more information and links.

Information Visualization: Revisiting Hans Rosling's TED presentation

This semester I'm taking "Visualization and Visual Communication", which is a course I've wanted to take for a while now. Today, we looked at a variety of websites that provide interactive information data visualization applications, which I'll share on this blog in the near future.

After class, I came home and revisited Hans Rosling's TED presentation about information visualization, and thought I'd share it on this blog. This video is about 20 minutes, and provides a good overview how simple interactive information visualization applications can help to convey concepts and correct misconceptions in an engaging, effective manner.



For those of you who work in K-12 settings, imagine how powerful this method of visual communication would be for students, if presented on an interactive whiteboard or display.

Link to TechPsych blog with links to edubloggers, information about Classroom 2.0, and more!

Take a look at my recent post on the TechPsych blog about edubloggers, Classroom 2.0, and more. You'll find some links to interesting blogs.

If you know of related blog you'd like me to add, please let me know.

Johnny Lee's Wii Hacks: Can the Wii be configured to provide immersive learning experiences?

Thousands of people have been following Johnny Lee's progress as he hacks Nintendo's Wii system. Johnny Lee is a graduate student in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie-Mellon, and he has come up with the most amazing, creative uses for the various components of the Wi.

Take a look at Johnny's recent video of his work creating desk-top VR using a large-screen display:

"Head Tracking for Desktop Virtual Reality"


Although the Wii is a game system, the possibilities for the Wii as a platform for immersive educational experiences in the classroom - as well as in the family room - are endless, provided that a few people in educational technology are willing to contribute to this effort at the same level demonstrated by Johnny!

Since more classrooms are getting large-screen displays in the form of interactive whiteboards, there might just be a chance for teachers to use a few more tools to invigorate and engage their "digital native" students!

I think that learning activities utilizing the power of the Wii and Johnny's present (and future) hacks might also be very effective in reaching the needs of students who have disabilities. Visual and kinesthetic learners would also benefit, as well as kids and teens who are considered to have hyperactivity.

Johnny provides the code and instruction for all of his hacks on his website at http://johnnylee.net

You can subscribe to project updates at http://procrastineering.com

Johnny Lee's work is creative interactive multimedia technology at its best!

Scratch: A new programming language for kids that supports stories, animations, games, music, art, and web-sharing, from MIT.

"Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design." (Scratch website)

Scratch can be downloaded, free of charge, from the website. It can run on Windows as well on Macs. There are over 12,000 contributors to this project, with over 60,000 registered members. The website provides plenty of support for teachers and students.

The Scratch project is run by the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab, along with the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies. The project was funded by the National Science Foundation.

I'm looking forward to playing with Scratch on a touch-screen or interactive whiteboard.

Leave a comment if you use Scratch with kids- or for yourself.

The XO $100.00 laptop: One Laptop per Child (OLPC) - article and video of a 9-year-old child's perspective..

If you haven't heard of the OX laptop, take a few minutes and read about it!

Review of a child's experience with an XO laptop.

Clickable guide of the features of the XO laptop.

(The guide contains detailed information about each feature.)

60-Minutes Video

OLPC Website

Let me know what you think!

Keepon, BeatBot's robot: Potential to promote social behavior in children with autism spectrum and developmental disorders.

The BeatBots project develops rhythmically intelligent robots for research and entertainment. In the video below, the responsive robot, Keepon, dances to the Spoon song, "Don't You Evah".

Keepon was developed by Hideki Kozima and programmed by Marek Michalowski, from Carnegie Melon.


(The video is available to the public under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 license.)


According to an article by David Templeton in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

"While the videos have proven Keepon's human appeal, the double-bubble yellow fellow's key role is to interact with children. Keepon has shown promise in encouraging social behavior in children with developmental disorders, including autism."

"Keepon's simple appearance makes children comfortable, and its lifelike movement makes it attractive to them," Mr. Michalowski said. "This combination creates an environment in which social interaction is encouraged.""

"While the robot can dance to almost any song, it also can identify visual and other sensory rhythms, helping to prove how rhythm and synchronization in body language are paramount in human interaction. As such, Keepon has schooled roboticists in how to improve human interaction with robots."

An example of Keepon's attentive and emotive actions:



Another example of Keepon's entertainment value - Spoon's "I turn my camera on":



More videos can be found on the BeatBots website.

My Nokia n800 Internet Tablet!

I recently purchased a Nokia n800 Internet tablet for about $225.00. I'm impressed with all of the features for the price! It works well for making Internet calls via Skype, as it provides an integrated camera/ webcam.

The screen is crisp and easy to read, especially when zoomed in. The screen can be manipulated with a stylus or fingers, and the on-screen keyboard can be enlarged to allow for finger-typing.

Playing around with the device, I can see that it has potential for use in education. In my opinion, the n800 the potential to support low-cost assisted technology and augmented communication applications.

Screen shot of pictures on flickr.

A few specs:

• Direct access to shared media over Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) connectivity and Windows network shares
• Rhapsody Music service client (only available in US)
• Direct access to Nokia Internet Radio Directory with free internet radio stations available
• Supported audio formats: AAC, MP3, WMA, AMR, AWB, M4A, MP2, RA (RealAudio), WAV
• Supported video formats: 3GP, AVI, H.263, H.264, MP4, ASF, WMV, MPEG-1, MPEG-4, RV 7/8/9 (RealVideo)
• Supported playlist formats: M3U, PLS, ASX, WAX, WVX, WPL
• Desktop applet for internet radio
• Storage support for memory cards up to 8GB
• Additional specifications
  

Resources:

Nokia nSeries n800

Detailed Review of n800 running OS2008
(Tips, tricks, hacks, and news about Nokia Internet Tablets and related technology.)

Maemo Downloads for the n800

Internet Tablet Talk

Internet Tablet Wiki

The m-Learning potential of the n800

Linux on Board: Developing for the Nokia n800
Debian/Linux

Cross Post: Microsoft Research SenseCam

From the Microsoft Research SenseCam Website:

"SenseCam is a wearable digital camera that is designed to take photographs passively, without user intervention, while it is being worn. Unlike a regular digital camera or a cameraphone, SenseCam does not have a viewfinder or a display that can be used to frame photos. Instead, it is fitted with a wide-angle (fish-eye) lens that maximizes its field-of-view. This ensures that nearly everything in the wearer’s view is captured by the camera, which is important because a regular wearable camera would likely produce many uninteresting images."

Technology Review Article

The SenseCam application has the potential to be a resource for people who have developmental delays, traumatic brain injury, severe attention deficits, and autism spectrum disorders. It would be a great tool for special educators, occupational and speech/language therapists, and rehabilitation specialists.

Images from Microsoft Research:

Seth Sandler's AudioTouch Multi-user Musical Table

Seth Sandler is an undergraduate student finishing a Bachelors degree in Interdisciplinary Computing and the Arts with an emphasis in Music at the University of Southern California, San Diego.

Seth has been focusing his energies on research and developing a Multi-user, Multi-touch musical interface.

Here is a video of some musical multi-touch applications:

I'm pretty sure this will have a place in the music education world.

Seth is a member of the , (Natural User Interface), an interactive media group researching and creating open source machine sensing techniques to benefit artistic and educational applications.

Link to a great post about serious games and virtual reality in business

Elaine Alhadeff's Future-Making Serious Games blog has a wealth of interesting information for people interested in how interactive multimedia technology can impact the present- and the future. Take the time to visit her blog and take a look!

Here is a slice from one of her latest posts:

Via: daytaOhio - Barco and daytaOhio Equipped Collaborative Visualization Complex at Wright State’s Joshi Research Center
"Barco, a leading global provider of visual display systems, has partnered with daytaOhio to implement the industry’s most advanced virtual collaboration and visualization complex at Wright State University’s Joshi Research Center. "

It is exciting to learn about the growth in collaborative visualization! The businessmen below seem to be enjoying the experience:

For more interesting ideas, look at Eliane's archived posts about serious games.

iSocial: A Virtual Social Space for Youth with ASD, built with Croquet

iSocial is a 3D environment developed to support conversation and positive social skills for young people who have autism spectrum disorders. iSocial is a work in progress, designed by a team of researchers at the University of Missouri.

iSocial runs on Croquet, an open-source 3D SDK/tool designed to build 3D virtual collaborative environments. (EduSim applications also run on Croquet.)

iSocial Video

3D Virtual Learning Environment: Quest Atlantis

Quest Atlantis is an immersive 3-D learning environment for students, developed by researchers at the University of Indiana. For more information and links, read the post on the TechPsych blog.

Interaction Tomorrow: SIGGRAPH Course Materials On-line

If you are interested in interaction design for the future, take a look at the course notes from Interaction Tomorrow, presented at SIGGRAPH 2007.

Here is the course abstract:

"This course provides a comprehensive overview to user interface technologies on the newly emerging interactive tabletops and large wall displays. The course will cover input devices, interface metaphors, modality of interaction, sensing technologies, applications, and future directions. Materials will be drawn from both commercial systems and research prototypes." The Interaction Tomorrow is a document that contains 172 pages of pictures and text.

The course was organized by Michael Haller, from the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences, and Chia Shen, from the Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories. The lecturers included Gerald Morrison, from Smart Technologies, Bruce H. Thomas, from the University of Southern Australia, and Andy Wilson from Microsoft Research.

Bios

The course website http://www.interactiontomorrow.org/

This was cross-posted on the Technology Supported Human-World Interaction blog.

Link to post: How to use FireFox to use internet resources off-line

If you use digital media with students with special needs and you have limited Internet access, you are not alone. Kay, the author of the "Teaching Students with Multiple Special Needs", on a recent post, shares a way to use FireFox to use internet resources online. You can check out my recent TechPsych post on the topic, or access Kay's original post here.

More touch-screen videos...

Here is an interesting video about TouchTable's $59,000.00 system:



ESRI's ArcGIS running on a TouchTable:



The application supports collaboration. People can interact with one another around a single table, with others at remote tables, and people using laptops and mobile devices out in the field.

Link: ESRI's GIS for K12 Schools

Interactive information visualization: Digg labs website

I thought I'd share a view examples of information visualization as it relates to on-line news. Stories are grouped in various configurations over time. Click on the images below to see each example in real-time:

NEWSMAP

Click on the image to link to Newsmap.

" Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap's objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe."

DIGG

Click an image to see digg visualizations in action!
STACK
"Diggers fall from above and stack up on active stories." If you click on a story, you'll get a pop-up that provides more details about the story, including information over time.


SWARM

Digger swarm around different categories of stories and make them grow. You can look at popular stories, newly submitted stories, or all activity. Click on a circle, and you'll get more information, and the option to keep or "kill" the story.

BIGSPY

"Bigspy: Active stories appear at the top when people digg them. Bigger stories have more diggs..." If you click on a story, you'll link to more information about it from the digg website.


ARC

"Stories arrange themselves as users digg them. Larger stories have more diggs." If you click on a story, you'll link to more information about it from the digg wesbsite.

Check back for more examples- and leave a comment if you have others to share.

Related Link:

Article from PBS.org's Idea Lab, by Rich Gordon, about information visualization and journalist-programmers. "Idea Lab is a group blog by innovators who are reinventing community news for the digital age..."

About: Programming for interactive multimedia applications- WPF, Silverlight, EduSim, NeuroVR..

Part I Musings: Learning about application development and programming at mid-life:

I thought I'd write on a more personal level this time.

I'm a school psychologist, so in 2003, my motivation for taking computers at mid-life stemmed from my desire to create engaging interactive multimedia games for learning, games that could be played on hand-held devices as well as on the interactive whiteboards that I noticed were inching into my schools.

It was difficult for me to figure out how to get from Point A to Point B.

I shouldn't have been shocked to learn that most introductory programming classes provide instruction, as well as endless lab assignments, that are geared for people who want to make business forms and manipulate business-related data, build e-commerce websites, or create relational databases for... banks!

I now can make a mortgage calculator forms that adjust for various scenarios and provide cute error messages, in beginning Visual Basic.Net, C#, and Java. I can create a database that will let users look up part numbers for all sorts of widgets, in all sorts of combinations, and ensure that client data can be easily accessed in a nice looking form.

Why should I learn all of the old stuff when there are so many new avenues to explore?

Over the past few years, I've been fortunate to take a variety of classes that were not readily available just 8-10 years ago:

Computer/Internet Multimedia. Computer Music Technology. Game Design/Development. AI for Games. Ubiquitous Computing. Web Development Tools. Virtual Reality for Education and Training. These courses have motivated me to learn more about programming. The traditional programming courses had the opposite effect.


PART II Keeping up

I recently attended a day-long code camp at Central Piedmont Community College to learn more about Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Silverlight. WPF and Silverlight provide the foundation for applications that can run on Microsoft's Surface. WPF and Silverlight provide designers and developers with more efficient ways of developing visualization and interactive multimedia applications.

The architecture behind WPF and Silverlight seems to align more with the way people think and envision, which in my opinion, gives hope for those of us who have toyed with the idea of programming, but were frightened off the first time they opened up a traditional programming textbook.


Part III Visualization and Interactive Multimedia

For more information about WPF, Silverlight, design, etc, read Sam Batterman's (a Microsoft Evangalist) recent blog post: Some thoughts about WPF and Data Visualization

Here are some pictures and text that I lifted from Sam's blog that will give you a picture of what I'm talking about:

"Here's an application that one of our partners built in a few weeks - all WPF and actually, not complicated code...getting that heart rendered was probably less than 100 lines of code. This app is used in a hospital for documenting heart surgery procedures. You can draw and annotate the 3D surface, rotate the heart, etc."





Can you imagine how kids would love to manipulate something like this in a science class?! This would be great on an interactive whiteboard or display.

This focuses on user experience, much more so than applications in the past. For more information about designing for user experience, take a look at the link to Bill Buxton's book, "Sketching User Experiences."

Bill Buxton's webiste, "Multi-touch systems that I have known and loved" is a good resource for those of you who'd like to get a better picture of multi-touch systems and interaction.

(I'll write more about WPF and Silverlight after I get my laptop repaired and have a chance to experiment some more.)

Croquet and EduSim

Right now, I've been experimenting with Croquet, which uses Squeak, and EduSim, which is powered by Croquet, to put together some learning activities for students.The best part is that Croquet is open-source, and all of the EduSim applications are free.

Here are some pictures that link to short video clips from the Greenbush EduSim website:






Neuro VR

Another application that I'm working with is NeuroVR.

NeuroVR is a free virtual environment that was designed for use in clinical settings. If you don't have access to virtual-reality hardware, you can still use NeuroVR on a desktop or large-screen display. Available 3D environments include an office, a supermarket, a park, a classroom, a poolside setting, and a home.

Andrea Gaggioli, Ph.D., is the Chief Technical Officer of the this project. He's also behind the Positive Technology blog, which is a great resource. Andrea is a researcher working at the intersections of psychology, neuroscience, and emerging technologies.

NeuroVR allows the clinician (or educator) to easily insert pictures, objects, and videoclips into each virtual world. Doors open and close, and you can move items around in the environment. For example, fruit set on a table can be moved over to a counter.

In my opinion, NeuroVR has potential not only in the area of rehabilitation and therapy, but in special education as well, particularly for students who have multiple special needs, including severe autism. A variety of "how-to" videos are posted on DaevornLi's YouTube channel.


Here are some videos clips to give you a better picture of the application:

Question about games and learning....

Someone recently asked me this question:

"If you look at Sim type games, for example Roller Coaster Tycoon, these are without question games that are filled with lessons and real-world applicable knowledge. Do you think kids go into a game like this knowing they're learning useful skills?"


Read my response on the TechPsych blog.

Any comments?