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Austin Tate :: Blog :: Archives

November 2011

November 03, 2011

I am experimenting with a style of non-linear essay employing a customised Typographical Visual "Neo-Grammar". It involves experimentation with expressing the core message carrying semantically tagged "connectors" in a type and layout style and with interactive linking capabilities well suited to on-line communications of layers of content.

Grammar ::=  <Planet>: <Locale>: <Connector>  [ — <Annotation> ] 

<Connector> ::= <Token> ⊃—⊂ <Token>

Token gives identity elements, citations and references.

Keywords: IDEL11, Neo-grammar

Posted by Austin Tate | 2 comment(s)

November 04, 2011

My interest in personal portable information stores and information predates my use of the approach as a PLE.

I am interested in a computer-based personal assistant and ways in which that could build information to help you throughout your life.  Issues of privacy and ownership and location of that information immediately are an issue when that is contemplated.  Its clear to me that this means the data must be owned, hosted and controlled by an individual in some way, and ANY access to it approved and logged at the user ownership end.  This is WAY WAY different to its being hosted and accesible to Facebook and Google+ (or an Institution like a government, insurance company or teaching organisation). 

I liked recently a pointer from Daniel Griffin on the MSc Digital Cultures course on the Diaspora Freedom in Software community (http://diasporafoundation.org/ and https://joindiaspora.com/) and specifically to Eben Moglen's "Freedom in The Cloud" presentation at NYU Feb 5 2010. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOEMv0S8AcA

I was reminded of some discussions I had 20 years ago with telecoms providers about a user centric architecture for use of personal profile information from a computer-based personal assistant. the personal information was served on each request from the user end and with access to information and resources controlled by the user... WAY WAY different o how we have come to use Facebook and Google+ where our data is in their servers and used when they want for their benefit.

Section 3 - The Personal Profile - From http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~bat/tania.pdf

One important feature of the approach to be taken is that the concept of a long lived Personal Profile for communications and information use will be established. It will be a guarantee of the approach that the information that an individual builds in their co-worker personal profile will be able to stand alone and be meaningful outside of its specific use in this particular generation of information agent. We will establish the concept of a separate transportable personal profile that can accompany the user for the rest of his or her life and can grow with him or her.

Keywords: Diaspora, EDC11, Personal Profile

Posted by Austin Tate | 0 comment(s)

November 07, 2011

My earlier blog postings have described my own preferred approach to the creation of a PLE which at its outer level is simply an easily customised web page.  I chose a freely available well constructed CSS1 stylesheet that maximised the viewable area of the central content when viewed on a wide range fo devices and browsers, using a layout that allows for flexible width.  Below this top levele entry web page a number of directories hold the locally stored content, for my own images, screenshots, and resources that it is suitable to provide locally (i.e. have no copyright issues) and these can be pulled into the web page via relative URLs to allow for the whole PLE to be easily shifted to a new hosting environment, used locally off a memory stick, or cut to CD.  The resources and images can also be used in other blogging and course discussion forums via URL reference where appropriate.

This approach works fine for me, as I am comfortable with using a simple text editor to edit HTML directly, and have a simplistic but working understanding of the CSS style sheet approach.  I also can access an area where I can store and serve the files easily.  But this custom approach is not suitable for all.  Technically a way to create such a custom web area and make changing its content and layout easier would be preferable for some. There are many drag and drop frameworks for dropping in content in "frames" and an emerging set of "widgets" that can be dropped into "containers" in such self hosted web sites using a number of script libraries.  Again, this can be quite technical to initially set up, but easy to use thereafter. I do worry about the long term stability of some of these mechanisms though, and they do mean that the contents have to be served using a web server, rather than it being possible to simply copy and use the files on a memory stick or off a CD locally on a single computer off-line Some blogging frameworks like WordPress, richer content management systems like Drupal and Joomla, and commercial platforms like iGoogle provide simple approaches for columns of content with inclusion of "blocks" made up of various types of content, widgets and frames.

The issue of security and legality must also be taken into account.  there can be legal constraints on the monitoring which an institution is obliged to perform on its own staff communications, and in some cases on the official communications of its students.  Issues of copyright infringement may also need to be investigated.  These legal requirements can be made more difficult in highly decentralised and personalised environments.

A study of the use of personal web sites as the basis for PLEs at Graz University of Technology (UT Graz) in Austria (Taraghi et al., 2010) described a set of issues to be considered before going on to describe their own framework and approach. They base their approach on work by Schaffert & Hilzensauer who describe seven crucial aspects to consider in the adoption of PLEs:

  • The role of the learner
  • Personalisation
  • Content
  • Social involvement
  • Educational & organisational

So, it is important to look at ways in which the basic approach of using a personalised web page and web area as the basis for a PLE might be made more widely accessible and accesptable within the constraints of an educational institution's role and requirements.  An educational establishment can encourage the use of PLEs alongside their institutional learning support systems.  It could seek to provide a framework or "template" approach which all students can adopt and adapt a framework or arrangement that suits them, and that they feel comfortable supports them and the degree of autonomy they seek.

Reference

Schaffert, S. and Hilzensauer, W (2008) "On the way towards Personal Learning Environments: Seven crucial aspects," in eLearning Papers, no. 9, July, 2008.

Taraghi, B.,  Ebner, M., Till, G. and Muhlburger, H. (2010) "Personal Learning Environment - A Conceptual Study", iJET - Volume 5, Special Issue 1: "ICL2009 - MashUps for Learning", January 2010.

Keywords: IDEL11, PLE

Posted by Austin Tate | 1 comment(s)

November 10, 2011

Our experience of setting up Moodle as an administrator, for a couple of sample courses of different kinds (weekly, topic based and social format) and by adding in the SLoodle module both in the web end of Moodle and in Second Life classroom has been a frustrating experience.  This is a mostly due to the very many layers of user permissions, user roles, different styles of setup, confusion over what happens at site, user and course levels, and interactions between these, and so on.  We still cannot work out why some users can see their SLoodle profiles and others cannot even with all permissions ticked on (more than should be needed).

This makes me think of the "Walled Garden" idea which is how I see VLEs like Blackboard's WebCT.  The wall is there for a number of reasons:

  • To protect those inside;
  • To protect and control access to the assets inside;
  • To keep out undesirables;
  • To provide a clear gateway where people can enter, or request entry.

 

But my mental picture of Moodle is more like a complex arrangement of "Castle Defences" with multiple battlements, with entry points offset from one another and the direction to turn not obvious at every level. There are moats and some bridges across.  But you are not sure where they all are. There may even be secret tunnels you don't know about and that others may be able to use, and you suspect there are as its all so labyrinthine.

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November 15, 2011

Responsive Open Learning Environments (ROLE - http://www.role-project.eu/) is an EU project which provides an interesting example of a learning environment being created with an open widget based approach which might allow for a personal learning environment to be created by an individual within the context of a managed learning environment for a course.

It makes use of the OpenSocial (http://opensocial.org) API for widgets to allow for a range of community contributed widgets to be used.

There is an Open University provided introductory course on ROLE and information on incorporating ROLE elements into a Personal Learning Environment accessible at http://labspace.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=7433

 

Keywords: IDEL11, ROLE

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November 16, 2011

Landow (2006, pp 284-285) gives a very nice example of the effect of using Hypermedia alongside Peter Heywood's usual weekly topic based course on cell plant biology. He observed that students could follow links ahead into later materials, versus being over constrained by the current topics and resources to hand.  This encouraged them to make links between items in the course, and look for more interesting opportunities to them as individuals for discussions and assignment topics. The wiki and hypertext elements added to the traditional weekly format course made possible a way for the class to work asynchronously, we well as to maintain class focus based on the weekly content and milestones.

I have come across this also in my use of Moodle along side the OpenVCE.net community portal (for asynchronous community support) and meeting spaces in Second Life, Adobe Connect or Skype (for synchronous meetings of the community).  We wanted to have both elements of a cross course community resource area and a topic or time tabled element.  We did this by having a standing OpenVCE community "course" using Moodle's "social" format, and also a "topic" or "weekly".

I would observe that in some studies we have done of communities who engage in distributed collaboration (Hansberger et al., 2010) we find that the types of functions they wish to perform together leads to a set fop requirements for both synchronous and asynchronous interactions, which can be facilitated by different tools.

Hansberger, J.T., Tate, A., Moon, B. and Cross, R., Cognitively Engineering a Virtual Collaboration Environment for Crisis Response, Proceedings of the 2010 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Working. (CSCW 2010), Savannah, Georgia, USA, 6-10 February 2010.

Landow, George P., (2006) "Reconfiguring literary education" from Landow, George P., Hypertext 3.0: critical theory and new media in an Era of Globalization pp.278-291,302-309, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Keywords: IDEL11

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I have been cooking up another project… the appeal of utopian “Other Worlds” and projecting identities into them (see Gee, 2003). The creative experience of imagineering such a world, making it plausible and “real”, and inhabiting it in a social context is something I want to explore more.

http://atate.org/another-planet/

I have been initially building some images related to this on WallWisher and making some notes about a grammar of "connections", which I hope to partially explore in a Digital Cultures course assignment.

Gee, James Paul (2003) "Learning and Identity: what does it mean to be a half-elf?" from Gee, James Paul, What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy, pp 51-71, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Keywords: IDEL11, Other Worlds

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I have always been fascinated by fast cars, advanced planes and spacecraft and there is a thread running through my interests which I have been able to explore while creating my "Life Wall" - http://atate.org/ as part of the MSc in e-Learning Digital Cultures course - so this blog post fills in some background.

Fast Cars

Many members of my family have been involved in motorsport at a number of levels, and I got the bug early on. I had a scrambling motorbike that we used in fields adjacent to our house in Knottingley, West Yorkshire, and later developed a drag racing sprint bike that we raced at Ricall aerodrome on Drag Racing weekends with the North of Britain based British Quarter Mile Association (BQMA). I was already a rally car navigator for my older brotherSon local De Lacy Motor Club events before I could legally drive myself. I can read a map as if its a 3D model laid out before my eyes. We were taught to drive by my dad in our field and on local aerodromes, and I used my brother's (fast racing) go-kart a few times. Scary to be that close to the ground at nearly 100mph. I passed my driving test almost as soon as I was 17, joined the De Lacy Motor Club and competed in local rallies and driving test and motorcross, and I have a few trophies to show for the effort.

But my interest in fast cars and vehicles went beyond that. I loved the engineering cutaways shown in the "Eagle" comic each week, and I followed a number of UK and US Hot Rod and Drag Racing communities via magazines. I was lucky to be taken by my elder brother to see the first visit of the US Drag Racing Team to the UK, who brought over the dragsters then just touching 200mph from a standing start in a quarter mile sprint. Don Garlits, Don Prudehome, Tony Nancy and the other famous racers of the 1960s were all there when I saw a 200mph run at RAF Woodvale in Lancashire. I was an avid followers of the fascinating battle for the land speed record in the US between Art Arfons and Craig Breedlove as they went through 400mph, then 500mph and then 600mph in the space of a couple of years. My dad took us over to see Donald Campbell doing some of his trials runs on Coniston Water in the UK Lake District. I continue to follow the more recent land speed records attempts and have been a supporter of Richard Noble and Andy Green's supersonic record car in 1997 with my name being carried in certificates in the car as it did its runs at Black Rock Desert in Nevada. I now support the new Bloodhound SSC car being designed to do 1,000mph. My name will be on its tail.

Fast Planes

The early 1960s were a good time for those interested in fast planes and supersonic or hypersonic travel - with the X-15 rocket plane able to do hundreds of flights straight up into space and back on a ballistic trajectory. We are only just getting back to the time that will be reasonably feasible again with Virgin Galactic's SpaceShip Two. Though it was not something that was known about to the general population in the 1960s, it later transpired that the SR-71 Blackbird was routinely flying at Mach 3 or more for many hours on high altitude spying and scientific missions since the 1950s. I still find the SR-71 the most beautiful aircraft and take every opportunity to visit one in the museums around the world as I travel. And I take one for a spin any time I can in Flight Simulators.

Far Space

So with these interests, its not surprising I was also interested in space. I was interested in space before sputnik flew, and already had (and still have) a well thumbed copy of Patrick Moore's "Boys Book of Space", with pencil drawings of the features of the moon in the back from my pre-teen years. I lived through the early Space Race years, and have my collectors cards that went from Sputnik up to visionary deep space probes and talk of a "Grand Tour" of the solar system which I loved the idea of. It would be some years before my AI planning software was used by NASA JPL as a basis for Steve Vere's Deviser planning system that would (after its launch) model the activity of the Voyager spacecraft which actually flew this Grand Tour mission, and continues to send tweets which I receive each day of its position far beyond the Solar System edge.

Thomas Cook Luggage Labels LUN

I have ready to use luggage labels (issued for promotional purposes) when I registered my interest in Thomas Cook flights to the Moon!

I am a Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society which is a fantastic way to stay in touch with space related activities as an amateur. But I have also worked professionally with the European Space Agency consulting on autonomous spacecraft, and worked on projects with them on planners for the ERS-1 spacecraft and a system for assembly. integration and test of Ariane launchers. Our work at AIAI has also fed into telecommand systems for EUMETSAT metrological spacecraft and for ground station planning for the UK Skynet observation spacecraft.

One thing we have found to be a great way to stay in touch with missions has been to place our name on lists carried on CDs, chips or plaques on board exploration spacecraft. We have had our names on the Opportunity and Spirit rovers now on Mars, and our name was carried on a chip on-board the return capsule on Stardust sample return mission to Comet Temple 1. The chip should be in the Smithsonian museum in future. Our names were also on the Deep Impact comet penetrator mission. Our names and photos (and those of my virtual world avatar after an invitation from a NASA Colab group I am part of in Second Life) have flown on each of the last flights of the Space Shuttle in the last 12 months. Unfortunately, we just missed seeing one launch while in Florida after a launch scrub, but did visit and see the penultimate Space Shuttle Discovery on its pad at Cape Canaveral. But in the past we have seen two shuttle launches. And we will shortly be off to Mars again on the new "Curiosity" Mars Exploration Lab.

Forever - To infinity and Beyond

But perhaps the one I find most interesting, is that our names and a poem I wrote were carried alongside other digital artifacts on board the European Space Agency's Huygens Titan lander taken by the Cassini spacecraft to Saturn. All contributors were provided with a copy of the whole set of artifacts by ESA when the content were completed before launch. We followed that whole mission. Huygens drifted down through methane clouds gently to land in soft terrain on the shores of a liquid methane lake overlooked by the rings of Saturn through a hazy sky.

Huygens at Titan by Emile Raphael Franco for Planetary Society Art Competition

Drift down through the clouds... We're with you.
Swing slowly on the parachutes aloft...

Our names now stand by that methane sea, at a point in the solar system beyond the distance where the Sun will eventually grow in its red giant stage and consume the Earth. To infinity... and beyond...

[Blog post originally on Digital Cultures on 8-Oct-2011. Reposted on Holyrood Park IDEL11 Blog for Presentation Purposes]

Keywords: IDEL11

Posted by Austin Tate | 2 comment(s)

iGoogle is sometimes used as a framework for an individual’s PLE, since it provides a  convenient and readily accessible “container” for a range of widgets and content items which can easily be added and removed. It is also relatively open in the types of widget and content that can be embedded.

My iGoogle page is here... I occasionally have it up on a secondary computer as its convenient to have the calculator, search functions and quick links to my Google calendar, contacts, e-mail etc. I also like the world map with sun shadow widget which can be made full screen on the secondary computer screen which is a nice. Better than buying the $3,000 executive version :-)

Keywords: IDEL11, iGoogle

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Professor John McCarthy died on 24th October 2011 at the age of 84. He was an early pioneer of computer technology, computer time-sharing, and inventor of LISP, one of the very first computer programming languages. LISP was, radically, based on symbolic computing.  He was an early pioneer of Artificial Intelligence, and indeed originator of the term "AI" which was adopted following the title he gave to a conference at Dartmouth College in Vermont which John convened in the summer of 1956. John received the Turing Award, and many other accolades and honours, including the United States National Medal of Science.

John McCarthy was known to many of us in the Artificial Intelligence community as the "Father of AI", and I came to know him as very much a baby in the subject. In my student days in the early 1970s he appeared on the BBC TV program "Controversy" in debate with Sir James Lighthill on the value of research on general purpose robots alongside my PhD supervisor, Donald Michie, himself an AI pioneer and war time code breaker who had worked with Alan Turing at Bletchley Park.  He wrote and communicated widely on his interests in robot decision making.

Typical of John's desire to communicate about his field was a short sci-fi story he wrote in 2001, "The Robot and the Baby" which has many interesting themes, and to me epitomises his breadth of interests, politics and fascinating opinions.  A capable companion robot – “Robot Model number GenRob337L3, serial number 337942781--R781 for short” – was one of many deployed to assist people and deliberately made unappealing and emasculated by the constraints society had placed on robot use.

The story begins:

“Mistress, your baby is doing poorly. He needs your attention.”
“Stop bothering me, you …''  …  “Love the … baby, yourself.”

John amusingly includes a long line of reasoning by R781 in the bracketed notation of LISP on probabilities of the baby being harmed if it disobeys its key constraints:

(= (Command 337) (Love Travis))
(True (Not (Executable (Command 337))) (Reason (Impossible-for robot (Action Love))))
(Will-cause (Not (Believes Travis) (Loved Travis)) (Die Travis))
(= (Value (Die Travis)) -0.883)
(Will-cause (Believes Travis (Loves R781 Travis) (Not (Die Travis))))

With this reasoning R781 decided that the value of simulating loving Travis and thereby saving its life was greater by 0.002 than the value of obeying the directive to not simulate a person. There follows a progressively escalating series of events where the whole world is watching the handling of the situation by the authorities, and commenting in real time on the event on social media - anticipating Twitter by some years.

Read the story (at http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/robotandbaby.html) if you want to explore an informed opinion on the ethics, issues and dilemmas involved in human and robot interaction, which one day we may face. The story has many thought provoking elements. I personally feel for the emasculated robot that is left in the Smithsonian.

Keywords: IDEL11, McCarthy

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November 18, 2011

 

A very beautifully designed Second Life region is worth exploring. I suggest you arrive in the Meta_Body area first. Use this teleport link:

Look at the (freely available) avatars to explore your identity and see which feel strange to you, and some which might appeal. There are a few male and more female avatars available to try. Select the strangest before you embark on a tour of the lovely areas which are on the land surface, on small islands, on sky islands, and underwater. Sit for a while on some of the areas. Click on things to see what they do.

Eventually find your way to a white ice themed area with a lady playing a white piano. Try touching the black "Omega Star Dream 5" sphere for an animated tour through some of the lower elements of the region. If you cannot find this use this SLurl to get there directly:

[Reposted from EDEDC Digital Cultures Blog]

Keywords: IDEL11, Second Life

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November 24, 2011

All images for the MSc in e-Learning graduates, and some overview shots are at http://atate.org/mscel/virtual-grad/

      

Keywords: IDEL11, Virtual Graduation

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Also see

Space Navigator device I mentioned:

Keywords: IDEL11, Second Life

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November 25, 2011

With kind support from Edmund Edgar I have been experimenting with the "Demo Object" in SLoodle, which is a stub or template for developing customised objects in Second Life or OpenSim which can connect with a corresponding module in the Moodle VLE.

Moodle Module Setup

The Moodle "demo-1.0" module is in the standard SLoodle distribution - I am using version 2.0.10 alpha. And can be found in mod/sloodle/mod/demo-1.0.  The object_definitions/default.php script should be altered to "show" the object in the inworld Rezzer.

Edmund Edgar points out:

Note that if you have syntax errors in an object definition file or extra whitespace outside the PHP brackets, lots of things will break.

The in-world object will need an extra script:
         .../mod/sloodle/mod/set-1.0/sloodle_rezzer_object.lsl
which deals with setting up communication with the server, and sends linked messages to any other scripts in it with information about the Moodle server it needs to connect to, and any other configuration parameters it might have.

Inworld Object Setup

  1. An object should be created in world with default name "SLOODLE Demo Object" or an alias "SLOODLE 1.1 Demo Object" both of which are permitted by settings which act as exemplars in object_definitions/default.php
  2. Into this object, two scripts should be placed. One is obtained from .../mod/sloodle/mod/demo-1.0/sloodle_mod_demo-1.0.lsl The other is a generic script and can be obtained from .../mod/sloodle/mod/set-1.0/sloodle_rezzer_object.lsl. These are the base that can be used to create a custom module.
  3. Set the permissions of the in world object and its scripts as appropriate and then take a copy into inventory. 
  4. Drop that object into the contents of the inworld SLOODLE Rezzer.

You should now be able to use the Rezzer as normal to select an appropriate SLOODLE controller and scene, and then under "Other" objects you will find the "Demo Object"  which you can add to the scene.   After it rezzes in a default position close by the Rezzer, reposition it where you want, and then hit the "Freeze" button on the Rezzer screen to sync the current position of the scene objects.

Other Templates

There are some other objects in the SLoodle kit which can also act as guides, such as the "SLOODLE Tracker Button" which when clicked in world communicates with a Moodle module and gives a message back.

Current Status

At the time of writing I have the SLOODLE Demo Objects rezzing from the SLOODLE Rezzer, but don't yet have Moodle responding through it. Testing continues.

Posted by Austin Tate | 1 comment(s)

November 30, 2011

On my research project related to supporting the OpenVCE communities at http://openvce.net/ I was engaged in setting up a new group portal on the APAN (All Partners Access Network) hosted by the US Government for non-classified work between government agencies, NGOs, organisation and individuals across the world. This replaces the previous HarmonieWeb portal. the APAN network uses the Telligent Collaboration framework to provide the usual blogs, discussion forums, wikis, group chat, etc. And then provides an Adobe Connect service attached to that for the supported communities. We provide "web observer" meeting access to virtual words meeting spaces via Adobe Connect services through these portals.  I was involved in a number of training programmes and setup exercises as I took on the group owner role on APAN.

I did some further experimentation with the Unity3D platform, and used a Collada mesh translation of the OpenVCE OpenSim region buildings created via a converter service from Tipodean technologies in the USA.  We are further experimenting also with the OpenSim-based MOSES grid hosted by the US Government also for work with non-government agencies internationally.

We believe that a combination of the APAN OpenVCE Group for a community web portal and a simplified meeting space in either the OpenSim-based MOSES grid or on a Unity3D setup might offer a long term stable basis for continuing work in the OpenVCE.net community.  Currently a Drupal server at Edinburgh is used for the community web portal, and the virtual words service is hosted on the VCE region in Second Life.

Keywords: Adobe Connect, APAN, HarmonieWeb, IDEL11, OpenSim, OpenVCE, Unity3D

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