Science is typically thought of as compartmentalized and discrete pieces of information and taught in a vacuum. In reality, science is part of day-to-day life and not separate at all. When I see news of science being rejected or painted as a this or that argument in the American educational system, particularly K-12, I become frustrated. Those individuals denouncing science as some form of dogma don’t seem to have an issue driving automobiles, flying across the country, or using mobile phones and computers – all impossible with technology (applied science).

Science is a tool in our toolbox of life that can help us understand the world around us. It allows us to create sunglasses, live and work in greater comfort, and even carry a library of 10,000 songs in our pocket. As such, science is intertwined in our lives and is not simply a set of discrete and separate concepts.

In writing a virtual science field trip workbook, I have science activities and exercises. An example of an activity is a nuclear power plant and within that activity there are supplementary exercises.

Real field trips are like this also and, unlike a text book, field trips can offer an opportunity to explore more than the topic at hand. This virtual nuclear power plant has more learning opportunities than only nuclear fission and those are incorporated into its learning objectives because learning science can be more than studying discrete concepts.

A holistic approach to science education isn’t the current norm is school where we have schedules, curriculum, standards, and the real task of reaching 20-30 (or more) in a very short time period. However, for self-paced education done at home, these constraints are reduced and a student can take additional time to learn more. The exercises I include are part of the virtual 3D location that the student can enter and explore first hand.

In Enclave Harbour, a virtual municipality, there is a nuclear power plant where a nuclear reactor is being constructed and, as part of that, a tower crane is in use. A tower crane is a fantastic way to illustrate simple machines because it is minimalistic in design and utilitarian in function. The concepts of levers and pulleys is easily demonstrated and explored, and this presents a wonderful opportunity to “weave” in some additional science into this field trip activity.

One of the tasks in this “extra” exercise is to calculate the mass of the crane’s counterweights. Other tasks include calculating lift capacities at various distances along the crane’s jib and the mechanical advantage of block and tackle systems. These exercises are intended to bring about an awareness of how science is always around us and that it is not a dogma.

The student is provided with the dimensions of the counterweight, the density of its material, and the formulas needed. In this case, steel counterweights with a density of 8,000 kilograms per cubic meter and overall dimensions of  2 meters long, half a meter wide, and 1 meter tall. Volume (V) is determined by multiplying length (l) times width (w) times height (h). The mass (m) of the counterweight is its volume times the material’s density (ρ, the Greek letter rho).

1. V = l · w · h
2. m = V · ρ

In this example, we first find the volume of one weight which is 2 m · 0.5 m · 1 m = 1 m³ (one cubic meter) and then calculate its mass with 1 m³ · 8,000 kg/m³ = 8,000 kg.

There are three counterweights on this crane for a total of 24,000 kg or 24 metric tons. This exercise continues with calculating that the crane can lift 12,000 kg at its farthest end and calculating maximum lift at other points along the jib. Also covered is the mechanical advantage through its block and tackle, which is six, meaning that 2,000 kg of force is required along with 6 meters of cable for every meter that the 12,000 kg is lifted.

This physics exercise on simple machines supplements others in Enclave Harbour such as an overhead crane and screw jacks at the desalination plant and pulleys in a vertical-lift bridge.

Science does not exist in a vacuum in the real world and supplemental science programs such as Enclave Harbour allow ambitious students to see how intertwined it is. Understanding this helps us make better and more informed decisions in life.

                          

Ener Hax asked me to write an article on how I have used Sim-on-a-Stick for commercial projects and to illustrate that a USB-based, standalone grid is applicable for usage previously only possible via a solution such as Second Life. In 2008 and 2009 I spoke at conferences and webinars about the use of Second Life for corporate eLearning as an easy-to-use 3D animation application. “Easy” is a relative term to true 3D animation applications such as Blender and 3ds Max (formerly 3D Studio Max). The typical corporate eLearning department often does not have the budget for true 3D animators nor the hardware for video rendering (such as a render farm).

Creating video in this manner using Sim-on-a-Stick is not ideal because some eLearning videos need a cast of characters for branched scenarios. However, it is a viable way to build sets for use in eLearning videos and “sets” are the example I’ll illustrate here.

Last year, I had a chance to use Sim-on-a-Stick for a project ideally suited for a portable OpenSim deployment. A marketing company was looking for a way to have their sales team create 3D images of product placement in cinema lobbies. In responding to their client’s proposals, they would have an advantage by providing images from multiple angles and perhaps even videos of their client’s products. Product placement includes anything from a self-service kiosk to exhibit-style booths showcasing a new product or service with reverse spotlights showing product logos on the walls or floors.

They needed to be able to respond to proposals (RFPs) as quickly as possible because the first response typically wins the business. OpenSim was not my first thought for this; Google SketchUp was my initial choice because of the ability to use a ray tracer such as Kerkythea to create photo-realistic renders. Part of the project requirements included training them on the tool and this tipped the scale toward OpenSim. I have done Sim-on-a-Stick workshops and was confident that I could train them in a day on how to set up product displays, import appropriate textures, snap quality photographs, and even do videos of the space.

The deliverables were ten cinema lobbies from each of ten U.S. metropolitan areas to be accurate in dimension and appearance (laser surveyed and CAD-based with photos of each venue’s textures), 30 standard display items (booths, tables, chairs, banners, etc), and training. Training included how to set up premade display items, import and apply textures to the display components, lighting and snapshot settings, using a Space Navigator with Fraps and Windows Movie Maker to create video, and saving OARs.

Sim-on-a-Stick allows for each lobby to be stored as an OAR file with each proposal response to also be archived for reference or future use (for example, an iPad 2 roll out in Manhattan theatres could be re-purposed for an iPad 3 event).

The following images were proposal images and are not depicting a real cinema lobby. The images do show a hypothetical HP display in which the two reverse spotlights on the floor and one spotlight on the ceiling were animated, a feature not possible had this solution been done in Google SketchUp. The lower polygon count of OpenSim was an acceptable quality compromise for the ability to script movement and to “fly” a camera real-time through the space (no need for overnight rendering which means faster RFP response time).

this post also appears on iliveisl.com

                          

This post by my virtual world guru, Ener Hax, was too timely not to repost here:

i have written about FERPA a few times in the past, but always in relation to Second Life

FERPA is an American privacy act specific to K-12 and universities – the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. many countries have similar laws and some teachers and professors use Second Life despite violating FERPA, which the Second Life privacy policy allows. Linden Lab collects user account information (of course, or how could it have a log in service) and also “may collect and retain any other information relating to your account data or in-world activities including chat or IM logs, . . .”. that last bit is where FERPA can be violated

i know that's right! =p

it is against American law to disclose a student’s grade on an assignment or course through any means without the student’s written permission (or to disclose any personal information). FERPA is so tight that even a school within a university can not share student information with another school in that same university without the student’s written consent!

to go further, K-12 teachers and university professors can not share grades via email unless it is 100% secure. a teacher at My High School can never send an email regarding grades or personal student information to a student’s Gmail account

that’s what brings me to write this post – Google’s new privacy policy. Google offers their convenient enterprise solutions to educational institutions to use and include email, docs, video, blogs, and almost every Google offering (many schools do use these services)

under FERPA, a school can outsource email but only if the service provider is subject to the same terms that the school is. Google is not subject to FERPA and the burden is on the school and not on Google to be compliant with FERPA

this same compliance applies to virtual worlds. that’s why the safest way to implement OpenSim is on your own institution’s firewalled servers or possibly via sim-on-a-stick (which is ideal since it is a closed individual system – dang, i need to start selling sim-on-a-stick and buy that south pacific island!) =)

this doesn’t mean that educators and students can’t use Kitely, In-Worldz, or 3rd Rock; it just means they need to not talk about grades while in-world

                          

I keenly read Ener’s posts and I am almost as passionate about virtual worlds but from a slightly differing perspective. They can be a wonderfully immersive media that can increase user engagement particularly in training and education.

In education circles we like to discuss learning styles such as visual, auditory, and kinesthetic (tactile). There are other models as well and today we recognize that learners often use a combination and that the styles for a learner may change day to day.

The more styles we can intertwine into educational materials and techniques, the greater the chances are that our learners will learn what we are teaching them.

Reading text and looking at illustrations access certain parts of our brain. Writing information relative to what we are learning accesses other parts of the brain (thus the value of written activities). Reading aloud accesses yet different areas as does teaching our newly learned information to others (such as a mentoring program).

With virtual worlds, I believe we engage additional areas of the brain as well as parts of the brain accessed via “standard” learning styles. Virtual worlds allow us to engage with the learner’s imagination and trigger thoughts of touch, smell, sound, the visual, and the kinesthetic (such as a scripted object reacting to the avatar) – the same senses we access in a real life situations. This increases the learner’s engagement, the immersion provided by the imagination, when their avatar is placed into a virtual world.

I contend that we may even engage more deeply with the user because of the simple look that OpenSim presents as contrasted with more sophisticated graphics such as Blender imported into Unity. This simpler look, sometimes referred to as cartoon class in comments to Ener’s blog, forces the user to fill in details and use their imagination to a greater degree.

Playing ‘Call of Duty: Black Ops’ is something done by millions but I don’t believe it engages the imagination as much as OpenSim can. Think about how Legos engage the imagination, how the unseen movie monster is typically scarier than the one revealed, or playing army or having a tea party when you are little. The imagination lets us fill in what we think the situation calls for.

Happy Halloween and think about how scary the dark can be when our minds are left to wander and wonder.

                          

One of the tenets of Enclave Harbor is to help raise environmental awareness while teaching middle school kids a little “real life” science via virtual field trips.  It is fitting to look at the environmental costs of computer usage since we are using OpenSim on a dedicated server that is on 24/7.

Today a perfect opportunity arose to explore this on a personal level.

I use Defraggler regularly on my work and home computers. Today I updated to the latest version of Defraggler and it has a new “Health” tab (see below). I was intrigued at the total number of hours that my work machine has been powered on.

My work PC has been on for a total of 14,924 hours over the last five years. I am the second “owner” of this box and the only time I leave it on overnight is for Blender renders (time consuming 3D graphics and animations).

If this power supply runs at 500 watts that means the PC has used 7,462 kilowatt-hours of electricity during that time.

In the US, the average cost per kilowatt is 13.4 cents (June ’11 national average – double that for Hawai’i). It has cost my company $999.91 in electricity to power this computer over the last 5 years. That’s only to power the box and does not include the dual monitors or any servers I access for work files.

Let’s compare my machine’s ~$200 a year cost with two hypothetical scenarios – one in which the machine is on eight hours a day, five days a week for 50 weeks a year and one left on 24/7.

• 8 hours X 5 days X 50 weeks = 2,000 hours or $134.00 a year in electricity
• 24 hours X 7 days X 52 weeks = 8,736 hours or $585.31 a year

That is a difference of $451.31 in one year! Or 4.37 times more electricity!

If we extend these scenarios to a company with 300 employees then we would have a difference of $135,393.00 in one year!

The numbers speak for themselves.

also posted on iliveisl.com

                          

A few years ago I spoke at a number of eLearning conferences about using Second Life for creating fast video footage. Now I use OpenSim, mainly on a USB stick, and the ideology is the same: easy-to-build 3D models combined with fast, real-time rendering makes OpenSim a “rapid development” tool for eLearning. The alternative is to use Blender or Autodesk 3ds Max which mean much longer development time for building sets and characters as well as long render times. With OpenSim you create video footage in real-time but trade that for quality and lighting only possible in a tool like Blender. There is also an added benefit to using OpenSim, if it is done on a server, and that is the chance to have fun with fellow workers when you need to film several people interacting.

Adobe Media Encoder

When I was talking about Second Life I was using Adobe’s CS3 suite and bringing my Fraps generated AVI files into Flash. Once in Flash, I could add ActionScripting, buttons, and even quiz objects to the Second Life video footage. Last year I upgraded to CS5 and along with it came a new way of importing AVI files. Adobe’s Media Encoder comes bundled with several CS5 packages and is worth its weight in gold. You have far greater control over the quality of your AVI clips and the compression yields nice results. I filmed some footage last week in Enclave Harbour and have been pleased with how well it can be compressed and still hold up quite well.

If you are an eLearning multimedia developer and think that 3D animation is out of reach, either from budget or skills, try OpenSim out – the Ener’s sim-on-a-stick version is a great way to try it. I was able to teach two hour workshop participants how to build in about an hour, so I maintain that the learning curve is very short (contrary to many eLearning Guild members), and how to film in a second hour.

Build something, film it with the free trial of Fraps, and import it into a Flash file using the Media Encoder and you may be surprised at how reasonable the resulting file size is and how the possibilities become far greater for your eLearning (and it looks good on your LinkedIn profile!).

originally posted at iliveisl

                          

Unity is very cool, no doubt about it and if I was working on a commercial game, Unity would be a good choice for a browser-enabled teaser version of that game. The posts by Ener in the last week showcasing Unity as a viable way to share OpenSim content are compelling for what the future may hold for OpenSim-based virtual worlds.

Mesh-based 3D graphics will always look “better” than primitive-based graphics and . . . will always take longer to create.

However, there are a large number of nicely made mesh models to satisfy many needs – just like Getty Images has a very large catalog of photos. If you only use stock models, you risk ending up with a vanilla virtual world. Using a mix of stock models with your own models can yield great results because many things in our real world are “stock” such as phones and cars.

Even with that possibility – I’ll stick with OpenSim for our current needs because of the rapid development it allows. The video below shows a hotel lobby I built in about eight hours which includes an hour creating textures. From the phone to the pens to a somewhat odd chandelier, almost everything was created in one work day. Exceptions are my use of Ener’s equisite Espresso machine, cafe sets, and Aeron chair.

The trade off between photo-realism, and development time and cost, makes OpenSim my choice for now.

originally posted at iliveisl

                          

A topic I have discussed in the past is in the use of virtual worlds for creating multimedia assets for eLearning and I have some old tutorials for doing this with Second Life. Creating video from Second Life or OpenSim is fairly easy to do and fairly inexpensive.

However, virtual worlds are also an easy way to create simpler graphics. In the past, I have used Second Life as my stock image library by taking snapshots of whatever I needed – be it a person or two, an office, or campus. Using such images means you have embraced the low detail look of Second Life (or OpenSim) and that can be hard for some to do. The lack of detail is from a low polygon count which is necessary so that virtual worlds can render in real-time. This is only something that you can decide is acceptable or not for use in your eLearning and is a balance is speed, details, and cost. Getty images are expensive and may not be exactly what you need – virtual world images are inexpensive and can be created to exactly what you need (to an extent). With http://simonastick, you have a free studio with which to create any scene you want. Creating content can be time consuming but there is a lot of free content available, including an entire pre-built and free campus.

I have shifted my personal focus from using virtual worlds for eLearning video (although I continue to do this in my day job) to creating a middle school workbook that uses virtual worlds for science field trips. That endeavor can be glimpsed at http://enclaveharbour.com. My “part” of this work is developing activities that go with the builds created by Ener Hax and defining what the final project will be. The Enclave Harbour link is for the virtual world component of this and the workbook has its own website (yes, I am guilty of over complicating things at times). In developing a temporary single page for that site I wanted to tie in the virtual world aspect since that is what, hopefully, makes this an interesting way to learn science.

In creating an image that reflected what Enclave Harbour is, I wanted it to be more iconic than simply an image. By iconic I mean showing features that define what this place is. Think of the Eiffel Tower or the Golden Gate Bridge, both can be represented with simple line drawings that many people will connect with immediately. Some city skylines can be silhouetted and be easily recognized (Toronto and Seattle, for example).

That is the perspective I wanted to create for this graphic and it was very easy to do.

I created large “full bright” backgrounds that I placed behind a dozen selected builds, took anti-aliased images of each, then treated each so that I would end up with a black silhouette. Some needed a little cleaning up and I did add two more images, plus the shape of the land, in which I did not use a white background. You can see that the process was very simple and I ended up with a stylized skyline that represents Enclave Harbour.

If you use virtual worlds, use them as 3D multimedia applications as well. It is easy to only think of them as collaborative and immersive virtual worlds, but in reality they are 3 D software applications and can often be used in the way one would used Autodesk 3ds Max or Blender.

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this post also appears on iliveisl

                          

I have been following a discussion in LinkedIn’s Virtual World group that has taken a shift into an area of interest to me. It will come to no surprise to the reader’s of Ener Hax’s iliveisl blog to learn that this shift was loudly accented by our own Ener.

Linda Rogers (Bread and Roses | Music Island), whom I have a deep respect for and who has a comprehensive knowledge of Second Life, started this shift and brings up a great point in a conversation with Ener.

With heavy editing below, here is part of the thread to set the stage for my two cents.

Linda: I frequently run into educators that are new to Second Life, because one of the places they tend to visit (if they are interested in the Arts) is my music series. It is amazing how frequently I meet educators in their first week who are just blown away by things they have visited, the virtual Dresden Museum, the virtual Sistine Chapel, historical sims, science sims, space and ocean sims. AND they want to bring their Grade 3 class to see something and explore. That’s when they find out with a shock that Second Life is not open to children.

These educators want a world with the quality and depth of content of SL available in a child-friendly environment.

Ener: well the good news is that educators can have that same experience in OpenSim! =)  because everything that was built in Second Life can be built in OpenSim. a teacher could build it themselves, create a consortium of like-minded teachers and do it as a project, or even hire others

Linda: Linden Lab has indicated clearly that they are disinterested in retaining Educators.There’s clearly room for someone else to take that ball and run with it.

Ener: if a group of teachers can organize, then a great number of things can be built. i think if all disparate OpenSim educational efforts could loosely come together, people would be surprised at the tremendous volume of educational material out there. Linda, you hit on a very good point and i believe that it is up to teachers to form this and not some corporate entity =)

Linda and Ener have hit upon a very good point indeed!

Second Life was the first “create anything you want” virtual world that saw mainstream media attention and attracted many people who did come and build fantastic places.

We all know what Linden Lab thinks of education – the layoff of many that dealt with education, such as Pathfinder Linden, the closure of the teen grid, and the cessation of the educational/not-for-profit discount.

Second Life does have a large amount of interesting builds and, unfortunately, many have disappeared due to a number of factors. However, there is no longer the need to pin all hopes on a corporate entity that will make choices to serve itself over that of education.

The advances and stability seen in OpenSimulator make it nearly as viable as Second Life. The one exception, in my opinion, is the physics engine.

The challenges in creating an educational consortium, which could be as simple as a list of Grid URIs and a sentence about each, include some of the following:

• semi-private grids, such as our Enclave Harbor
• grids existing on local servers, in the school or district
• classroom grids on local machines, such as Eric Nauman’s
• grids behind firewalls
• grids on teacher’s personal computers at home

There are further variations but even with hypergrid-enabled regions, not all grids will be able, nor necessarily want, to connect into a large consortium. With Second Life, we were all in this one single “walled garden” which invoked a community feel that made it more natural to want to share your work. Often, sims were paid for from school budgets and did not represent as deep a personal investment as some OpenSim grids do. To compound this, many Second Life builds were heavily comprised of “things” that were bought or found for free.

To use Enclave Harbour as an example, Ener has created every item we have in-world, even trees. This makes for a more personal investment into OpenSim than in Second Life. Buying a chair for fifty cents is easier to share with others than a chair you may have spent a few hours creating. Add to that the more “gritty” feel that running your own server has and its expense and somehow it feels more emotional than it did in Second Life (even though we pay what one educationally discounted sim cost and have 16 sims). This may simply be my own bias, but I am protective of Ener’s work and value it greatly. I confess to not seeing much value in being open to the public. It may sound callous, but I bet my feelings are not that different from others who have gone through the trouble to establish their own grid and have all of their content custom-made.

However, a consortium of educational OpenSim grids could have great value in the larger scheme of K-16 education.

I would like to see this consortium include linkages with community colleges and universities. The educational grids could serve as “feeders” to higher education institutions and this is something that would hold value to me. If students going through Enclave Harbour resulted in a higher number of students pursuing science studies in college (particularly STEM with emphasis on reducing its gender gap), then I would open our grid up because this meant that a real relationship existed between us and a college (or colleges). This would add value to our grid in a way that benefited us and the partnering college, in effect our program would have value to the students and to the college.

If you are interested in being part of a listing of educational grids, even if you are fully private, let me know. I would be glad to start a listing (perhaps even self-registration via public Google Docs). Private grids being listed may help others gauge the size and richness of OpenSim educational work in a way analogous to Second Life and spark new ways to look at OpenSim for education.

also posted at iliveisl