Category — blog

I’m at SXSW, and I want an ability to see the latest Tweets from the group of Twitterers that I follow who are here in the area. I also have a limited number of text messages on my phone (1500, but still).

I coded up a quick app that allows you to great a group of twitterers and see their latest tweet on a mobile-friend page. Check it out.

Comments are welcome!

My research group had some fun controlling SL with a Wii-mote a few weeks ago. It’s easier than you think! Several people have asked how we did it, so I hope these quick instructions might come in handy.

1. Download, install, and run DarwiinRemote.
2. Turn Bluetooth on on the Macbook. You can do this by opening the Bluetooth Preferences Pane (Apple menu, System Preferences and choose “Bluetooth” under Hardware) and clicking the big “Turn Bluetooth On” button. If Bluetooth is already on, you can skip this step!
3. Hold the Wii-mote in front of the Macbook and press buttons 1 and 2 simultaneously. The LEDs on the Wii-mote will flash.
4. As you move the Wii-mote, you’ll see your movement plotted on the screen, as you see below.
5. Drop down the option box and choose “Mouse Mode On (Motion)”.
6. Load up Second Life.
7. Fly! By default, you can control the direction with the direction keys at the end of the Wii-mote.
8. Laugh with glee, because this is cool.

Twitter rocks. It’s useful for all kinds of things, but especially for chronicling a live event as it happens, including the pre-event discussion and post-conference wrapup.

We’re very excited to be hosting NewB Camp here in Providence, RI on February 23rd. In preparation for the event, Sara created a NewBCamp Twitter account and I coded up this quick script to pull in all tweets related to the conference.

It examines all of your followers tweets for a particular phrase or tag, and then reposts those tweets containing the tag to its own timeline with the author’s name prepended. I’m running this as a cron job on my hosting account. You can see it in action here.

This is a quick hack. It has a couple of issue that I’m aware of:

• Someone has to log in and manually add followers.
• The Twitter API only returns the previous 20 friends posts, and it’s possible we might miss some if we have so many friends that the post rate exceeds 20/50 secs (our permitted API request rate).

I do hope that you find this useful for creating your own Twitter event monitor!

include("twitter.php"); // Twitter API class
// Available: http://twitter-development-talk.googlegroups.com/web/api_class.phps.txt
 
// configurable options
$twitter_user = "newbcamp"; // Twitter username
$twitter_pass = "passwordgoeshere"; // Twitter password
$tag = "newbcamp"; // tag for friends to use
 
$twitter = new Twitter($twitter_user, $twitter_pass);
 
$last_post = json_decode($twitter->getUserTimeline("json",$twitter_user,1), true);
$last_post = $last_post[0]['created_at']; // get the datetime stamp of the last post to the account
 
// get new posts from friends since last update
$friends_posts = json_decode($twitter->getFriendsTimeline("json",$twitter_user,$last_post), true);
 
foreach($friends_posts as $key => $post) {
 if (stripos($post['text'],$tag)) { // if the tag is present
  if ($post['user']['screen_name'] != $twitter_user) { // no infinite loops, please
   $new_post = $post['user']['screen_name'] . ": " . $post['text'];
   // post the new post to the newbcamp account with the user's name prepended
   $twitter->updateStatus($new_post);
  }
 }
}

Update 10.16.2009: This script is basically superseded by Twitter’s lists feature. Use that instead!

The vendor containing this hat was recently deleted from Virtual Morocco by an employee of Linden Lab without any notification to me. Why? Because an anonymous person complained that it is “broadly offensive”.

Virtual Morocco was created to be both a tourism promotion platform and a space for cultural exchange. It was built entirely by undergraduate students as an educational service-learning project.

We give space in the Marrakesh Marketplace to several Moroccan artisans with virtual goods for sale. Our only requirements are that they keep everything appropriate to the sim’s theme and to the educational context of the space. The vendor selling the hat was owned by a college student (not from our institution) who specializes in items appropriate for the Morocco of the 1940s.

This hat does appear to be in the Nazi style. Even if it is, it is historically and thematically appropriate for Virtual Morocco.

Managing a space for cultural communication is not always an easy task. We have dealt with anti-Muslim intolerance, anti-American intolerance, and other forms of inappropriate behavior. When an incident occurs, I try to use it as a learning opportunity and prompt for discussion for my students and the members the our Virtual Moroccan community.

This incident has implications far beyond one college student and an ambiguously offensive hat. How can we create an academic space – a space for the free exchange of ideas – if our content can be deleted arbitrarily, by a third party?

I’m posting this now because my support request has gone unanswered for several weeks. I will post updates as the situation develops.

I was immensely privileged to participate in the first ever Teen Second Life College Fair. The event was on the Eye4You Alliance TSL island. At least 18 institutions were represented (see some of the booths in the image to the left), and approximately 200 teens attended.

I gave a short presentation on my own educational experiences and the incredible possibilities for careers in technology, but my favorite part of the college fair was the casual conversations that took place outside of the sessions and in the booth area. We talked about everything from education in Europe vs the US to tagging to SL building and scripting to politics… you get the idea!

For educators and recruiters, this was a fantastic event for connecting with young people who are excited, passionate, and resourceful. The students were able to talk directly with representatives of various institutions, and were not shy about asking difficult questions and getting the answers that they were interested in. I’m looking forward to the next one!

The event has been written up:

• Daniel Voyager’s Review of the 1st Teen College Fair
• SLNN: Second Life Teen Grid hosts first virtual college fair
• Johnson & Wales Professor Recruits Second Life Teens (the uncredited video in this article was created by fantastic now-alum Kyle Pouliot)

I’m teaching a basic web design course this term that covers design concepts, XHTML, and CSS. The students are from a variety of backgrounds – some have knowledge of HTML, some are non-majors or non-credit students looking to pick up a useful skill, and many are complete beginners who are required to take the course as part of their degree programs.

Only a few students knew what a wiki (distinct from Wikipedia) was before beginning this project. The students were given a month to make their contributions to the wiki. They were each assigned primary responsibility for one page at random, but were graded both on the success of their page and their contributions to other pages.

43 students across two sections of the class participated in the project. Of those, five (or 11.6%) didn’t participate by the due date, which is a higher than normal percentage for a homework project. Eleven (or 25.6%) contributed only to their own pages. Another thirteen (30.2%) maintained their own pages and made meaningful contributions to other pages, while fourteen students (32.6%) made numerous contributions well in excess of the requirements.

I will be continuing the project for the second phase of the class – CSS – and I’ll see if participation increases as the usefulness of the wiki as a resource increases. I also plan a project postmortem survey at the end of the course to see what the students thought about it.

This week, I created autoscript, a simple LSL script generator for Second Life. The concept is to translate the way you think about interactive design – what should happen, and when – into functional code.

Scripting is one of the most creative parts of designing immersive spaces, and I hope this will make it accessible to more people. Please feel free to use this code however you like!

Writing a program like this requires a balance between simplicity and flexibility, and I’m erring on the side of the former. I do plan to add more functionality to it and would love your suggestions and ideas! Also, if you encounter anything that doesn’t work, please let me know in the comments here.

The link: autoscript

I just returned from the Second Life Community Convention in Chicago. I really appreciate all of the wonderful people that I had the chance to meet (or smeet) or just spend time with. There wasn’t nearly enough time for all of the conversations that I wanted to have!

There were a wide variety of presentations. We’ve come a long way since last year! The diversity of disciplines was astounding. I think the strongest work presented was in the sciences and medicine, and I was particularly impressed with the Second Health machinima.

Here are the slides from my presentation on Experiential Learning:

I’m hoping it inspires people to think about how we now have this capacity to create learning experiences that were simply never possible before. What do we do with it? How do we measure it?

This summer, I’ve been involved in the process of creating a new undergraduate curriculum essentially from scratch. I was reflecting back on this process, and I realized the development of a robust and relevant curriculum shares many attributes with the process of developing robust and functional software.

Modern software development is a largely modular process. Each component of a system interacts with every other component through a defined interface. I see this same behavior in a degree program – each course has certain incoming requires and defined outcomes. Students navigate through a narrative of courses that must fit together to equal a bachelor’s degree.

Unit testing is the practice of separating out each module in a software system and insuring that it functions correctly. The final system is will contain many modules interacting together in potentially unforeseen ways; by testing each piece repeatedly throughout the development process, we can reduce the number of problems that creep in when everything is integrated.

If we continue the metaphor of courses as modules and curriculum as software system, we find that students will create an arrangement of these sets of courses, based on simple rules given in the course prerequisites and degree requirements. The arrangement must function to make certain that a student doesn’t end up in a course that they aren’t prepared for, while also making certain that any given legal arrangement of courses provides a degree program that meets the program outcomes.

Just as we must assess students’ mastery of material, we must also evaluate the effectiveness of each course to make sure that it is actually supporting the written course outcomes. This process is required for a University to remain accredited, but can also yield useful “debugging” information to help refine course sequences.

The need for evaluation brings us to security. As odd as it may be to think of an educational program being “hacked”, we need to make certain that the rules are arranged such that any legal sequence of courses meets the degree program outcomes. It’s also important to make sure that a course taught by one faculty member has largely similar learning outcomes as the same course taught by another faculty member.

Finally, software and curriculum share the odd trait of generally being created by people who are not the typical audience. Creating usable software generally involves gathering data from the community and directing development and testing accordingly; we see the same thing in educational programs. The community of “users” can be roughly divided into three major constituencies: University administration, students (and parents), and employers or graduate schools, each of which have different priorities and different priorities than the faculty or administrators creating the course. It is impossible to satisfy them all without doing some usability research.

Thinking of curriculum design as software engineering is more than just a cute metaphor. Software engineering is the discipline of delivering complicated systems that function as designed. We can take some of the well-understood tools and processes of software engineering and apply them in curriculum design. For example, unit testing teaches us to define both incoming requirements and outgoing interfaces for each module in a system. If we define both outcomes and “incomes” for all courses, we can create a map of all legal sequences involving that course and, by matching the various sets of outcomes to incomes, make certain that students will be best prepared to perform in the course at the time that they take it.

By adapting the tools of software engineering to curriculum development, we can make the entire process easier and more likely to succeed, while providing more reliable objective data on the success of the degree program!

Will someone please invent a way to search for ideas?

Short on inspiration? Harvest ideas from the web by searching Google for “someone please invent” and see what people are wishing for. Using quotes around “someone please invent” insures that Google searches for that exact phrase only.

You can further refine the query by adding related terms at the end of the query. For example, try searching for “someone please invent” game* to see game-related results.