1. Can our choice of avatar influence a change in real world behaviour through a virtual world experience?

original title used for essay 

2. Can avatars be used to change behaviours in real life?

Snappy but I am not doing the research - i am just reflecting on others work 

3. Does choice of avatar influence offline behaviour?

Like this actually, but not sure of use of offline behaviour, but i suppose it contrasts to online behaviour - but that is also an interesting topic 

4. A reflection on the role of avatars in supporting real life behavioural changes?

Like the reflection bit as it tells people im not actualy doing the research. Not sure if the word behavioural is too encompassing and out of the small remit of the study 

I tried the free to play Aion MMORPG available for download from http://www.aionfreetoplay.com/. I am on EU server "Anuhart".

I entered as one of the races of Daeva (assigned to me on account creation), and selected the Elyos faction and Scout class. It was raining, hence the leaf umbrella.

The free to play Aion game allows for only 2 characters to be created, but gives access to all 55 levels, nearly 4,000 quests, and all territory travel, unlike the level 20 restricted World of Warcraft free starter edition.

• There is an official wiki and getting started guide at http://gameguide.na.aiononline.com/aion/
• A community contributed wiki with information of the land, characters and play is at http://aion.wikia.com/wiki/Elyos

Entering a new world, with a new character, even though the interface had many similarities to World of Warcraft, reminded me how important scaffolding was, and the value of the community created wiki information sites. I will hold off creating my main (male) character with my usual name prefixed aith "Ai" until I know more about the game and the factions. 

The three papers present what the future universities and colleges would probably be like with the increasing digital media available. They are very enlightening and desirable, especially for the college practitioners. The new learning environment would be completely different from what we have assumed. It would be the complex combination of the present in–campus education system,  the digital online environment and the online real-life community.

 In the new learning environment, the new digital generation will have free access to a broader continuum of tools in their lives. The decentralized modal could set up a new environment where experts or masters help learn better and be more helpful as facilitators. It's important for the teachers to accept their position as a learning teacher. The teachers will face greater challenges. Traditionally, teachers will have more resources and should be a master or at least an expert in certain field. The dominant position and the authority will be challenged with the learners as a team who will have the same resources at hand. Confucius said “If three of us are walking together, at least one of the other two is good enough to be my teacher”. Hanyu, a learned poet and essayist in ancient China, noted "Students are not necessarily inferior to their masters, and instead the teachers not superior to the students." Not only the soft boundary exists between the distance education and the in-campus education, but also the difference between teacher and students would not be so significant. Teachers would be the program facilitator and coordinator. More different positions for the learning program would arise.  

More teachers need work together as a team for some program in order to handle the complex learning environment. The requirement that the different websites be seamless and uniform posit a challenging situation where not only the program developers, the course designers and the teachers should be in pace with what and how the websites will present. Teaching groups will  work together in a seamless way.

 The decentralized modal of learning environment would not solve all the problems in the new personal learning environment. The in-campus education will still play an essential role even in the new learning environment. Human being likes communication and group work and encouragement. It is necessary to have experience of working together.   

I have been thinking about the game design asessment since Christmas.  It is my style to make notes and get ideas flowing early on and collect assets before seriously starting any work element.  I had originally thought a game using assets already available to me from a project on the "Virtual World of Whisky" might make a suitable topic for the game design.  See for example:

• http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/i-room/resources/vwow/VWoW-I-Room-Final-Report-2008-03-19.pdf
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4nqlqRAd04

I have seen other opportunities while exploring quests in World of Warcraft, a number of space-themed games mentioned in this blog, and playing a range of new (to me) games on the course.

I am finding that a number of themes keep arising in my interests while engaging with these games and thinking about their narrative, objectives, and the ways in which they introduce artifacts and skills.

• Situated Learning and Narrative
• Levels, Scaffolding and Push to the ZPD (Vygotsky)
• Use of encyclopaedia resources
• Community-based Learning
• "Ancient" style of learning at the feet of teachers

My interests continue to be strongly with games which have a social and community dimension, and a way to engage players with the broader community involved is often something they involve.

So, I have begun development of a game design for a quest style game in the Avatar movie theme areas of a MMO such as Second Life. The game is based on an exploration of the Pandora moon flora and Na'vi culture.  It will have strong community and knowledge sharing aspects, but allow for play that engages with others or not, with consequences.  I call the game "Moon Bloom – The Legend of the Bloom of the Aligned Moons".

‘The importance of narrative in game-based learning is that it provides a cognitive framework for problem-solving’. (Dickey, 2000 p.131) To be precise, the narrative design provides the learners some hints about the scenario behind and actively involved them in the game environment.

 

Therefore, regarding the digital games, there are two ways of approaches to the narrative game design, and they can be listed as below.

 

1. Quest: Hero’s journey, storyline with task to be completed by a character, and followed by a starting point and an ending point.

 

2. Plot hooks: The storyline is conducted by revealing unanswered questions and uncertainties. It allows players to choose actions to activate responses from the scenes.

 

As it can be seen that the platform of Labyrinth allows people to investigate the learning process and unique learning path by clicking one of the options provided, I think it can be considered as a method to create through the Plot hook approach or similarly.

 

Furthermore, if the designer intent to involve a ‘Quest’ approach to a course on the environment of Labyrinth, it is also possible to adopt both ways (quest and plot hooks) to the game design.

 

Reference:

Dickey, M., 2000. Murder on Grimm Isle: The design of a Game-based Learning Environment. In: Freitas, S., & Maharg, P. eds., 2010, Digital Games And Learning, London : Continuum. Ch.6.

A couple of posts ago I wrote about game walk-throughs after a conversation with a fellow MSc-er suggested that they thought they constituted cheating. I'm quite a fan of them and it got me thinking about the true value of these documents in a learning context.

So, Bloom. He and his committee mates wrote themselves a taxonomy. This is the revised 2001 version which most of us are familiar with, it is worth going back and looking at the original too. As always wikipedia a good start point.

And, this is the WOWwiki. It's a community created guide to the game spanning over 90,000 pages, after Wikipedia it's the 2nd largest community authored document on the Internet. There are loads of examples of game walkthroughs out there, but the really interesting ones are those that involve this level of collaboration. 

Here are some ideas about how each of the skill levels in the diagram are demonstrated by the wiki users:

Knowledge: Do I need to explain this one? I've been to the wiki and read up on a particular quest, remembered what I needed to do, job done.

Understand: At a basic level of ability in the game I can read the wiki to fill in any blanks, and have successfully broken down complex tasks into simple individual stages I can share with others.

Apply: I can take something I read in one quest, and see where a particular skill would work in another. This is also where the benefits of writing the walkthrough rather than just reading it start to come in. I take something I discovered in the game, write it down to share for others.

Analyse: Writing the walkthrough forces this. Look back at how you got through a particular stage, was it similar to something else you have done? Are there other possible outcomes? As an individual player you may do some of this in passing naturally, but the act of authorship brings it to the foreground.

Evaluate: This is the real high order part of the walkthrough. If you look in any detail at a quest page in the WOWWiki it's really obvious. This page is discussing a single task in a huge game, but it looks at the best method to complete with each particular race, strategies for approaching it in a group, and places it in context with other things Warcraft related both past and present.

Create: Beyond the obvious here, how the users structure and link throughout the wiki is an interesting aspect of the creation process.

So, what is interesting here is that while we can apply these skills to gameplay itself (I probably should have written a post on that too..), what the walkthrough achieves is to extend these. The cognitive abilities involved in this process are certainly something that justify it more attention from educators than simply labeling it as cheating.

Image source- Signpost by JMC Photos

It seemed appropriate at the start of a module devoted to games based learning to start by reflecting on my experience of gaming, particularly in the digital realm. My earliest memories of computer games are of the Atari, hooked up to our big ol' 80's TV playing Pong (was this just tennis?) for long periods of time against my brother. For a pair of children who had access to a garden, tennis racquets and a patio wall that served the purpose of a net it is an interesting indicator of the novelty of the games console that we spent so much time sat 2 feet from the screen playing this version. Beyond that early memory we graduated to the games console. We had a Gameboy between us, and used to be assigned strict turns to play Tetris. We had Mario, and other platform games but I distinctly remember spending far more time on the puzzle games. It'd be somewhat crude to assign personality types to game styles, but I do wonder if there is something in that. From there we moved through a couple of Playstation models. Game style was far more varied there, and generally followed the popular trends of the day. Certainly an indication that the social aspects (peer pressure) of gaming with others started to kick in. At that stage we were certainly not playing others online, but certainly discussion about games at school influenced our choice of purchases. Mortal Kombat, Tomb Raider, Gran Turismo are the titles that stick out in my head now but there were many more. In terms of timeline it might be a little wooly but around about the same time we got our first computer, and the wonders of dialup Internet access. I can still remember the sound identifying when the modem had successfully connected. I had two real loves on that Acorn, Sensible Soccer (the never fail to score at the edge of the D thing was great), and Sim City. If Gladwell claimed mastery is at 10,000 hours I think we probably got pretty damn close in the few years we played. Certainly if you consider that our Sims ran in faster than real-time we definitely were. Interestingly, I can't remember the Internet enhancing my gaming experience at all. As an aside- there was something about Sim City that strikes me as unique now. We devoted hours to building cities, planning layouts, transport networks and the like in order to see them destroyed. Our goal was to build something and then initiate the disasters. Seeing the city ruined and bankrupt never felt like a bad thing, just an opportunity to modify strategy and try again. At a step back (and 20 years post..) repeatedly adapting strategies to minimise failure is not an immediately sell-able concept for a game but certainly one that appealed to me. Realising the correct save/revert to saved technique while experimenting was something that I think I could accurately claim is a skill I need almost daily in my current role, and one that I certainly learnt from games. As a group of software developers I'm not sure my intro to version control should have been here, but it probably was. Leaping forward the web properly kicks in, and my next major milestone is gaming while at University. It was early days for web games, but simple puzzles and (weirdly, considering the technology available…) online versions of the old-school Tetris style games were popular. My shared house had a Gamecube which was largely used for social gaming in a similar way to the board games we also had (a damn expensive board game..), we played Quake online in small communities (largely of people we knew in RL), and Championship Manager was something that I would say actually disrupted my studies (and was probably the cause of one of my housemates failing and dropping out in year 1). I can also claim to have become an expert virtual skateboarder courtesy of Tony Hawk during this period while never actually physically attempting the activity... Jumping over a whole set of events we're largely now at the current. Gaming for me now is almost entirely on portable devices. As a group of staff in previous years we spent a lot of time playing Travian, again about the community experience and team building, but it started to disappear as the time commitment grew. Or, it disappeared as the group started to get to know each other and we found other common interests beyond the game activity itself. I can't actually prove that, but I imagine my colleagues would confirm. The conclusion of this is about the future. Games for me are now about potential. What is it that makes me spend 4 hours last week playing golf on my iPad, but 0 hours actually on a golf course? More importantly, what is it that motivates our students to devote hours to achieving something that has no major impact on the things that we measure on them on, whether that is grades, careers, salaries, or whatever measure you choose? Are we measuring the wrong things? That is why this is important. Game mechanics motivate us to do more for the pure enjoyment of doing it, and if you think back through your own personal gaming history you'll find that you're learning skills along the way without realising it. Over the posts that follow I intend to explore my own learning experiences through games, and start to develop some ideas about how we can encourage this in our schools. And more importantly, in our students.

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.

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.

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.

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]