OpenSim as a Time Machine

 

my avatar stading before a brave new virtual world

I've managed to run a local OpenSim server and client in Ubuntu AMD64 Karmic.  OpenSim is a 3d application server that can be used to create a virtual environment just like Second Life.  The client applications I was able to run include the Open Metaverse (OMV) viewer and the Hippo OpenSim viewer.  The OMV viewer works better for me because it has a native amd64 package.

OMV can be installed in Ubuntu by adding the following to the repositories list then using synaptic to install omvviewer-x-xx.

 

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/openmetaverse/ppa/ubuntu karmic main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/openmetaverse/ppa/ubuntu karmic main 

I'm planning to develop islands of periods in Philippine History which students can explore.  Thus they can travel in time as represented by virtual spaces. If Freeciv can be used to study the world scale concepts of history, OpenSim can be used to look at history from an individual's perspective.  Freeciv may be for teaching the longue durée while OpenSim for l'histoire événementielle.

Game based learning

I've been reading Kurt Squire's (2004) dissertation Replaying history: Learning World History through Playing Civilization III and he has convinced me of the value of using games in teaching history.  His work should be required reading for history teachers today.

Before reading Squire's work almost all game-based learning (GBL) literature I've read applies to science and mathematics teaching.  His research imho points history teachers in the right direction.  I found the case reports engaging, and the treatment of learning with game play clear.  In other articles on GBL the learning is lost in the discussion of game design and technology.

The only thing wanting for me in his study is that it only deals with face-to-face education and not distance teaching.

I also went back to playing Freeciv, an opensource game compatible with Civilization 1 and 2. I've spent hours of game play in order to understand Squire's dissertation and I can personally confirm how engaging and useful it is for teaching conceptual history.  In face-to-face teaching I use to breakdown the analysis of events in terms of the four aspects: social, political, economic, and cultural.  But students do not seem to get their interrelation no matter how much emphasis I give it in my discussion and requirements.  I think playing Freeciv will remediate this misunderstanding in students.

AI vs. AI naval battle in Freeciv

In general I think this is a landmark work in history teaching, and it also opened an entirely new field of pedagogy for me.  I've never realized how advance and numerous GBL literature is now.

More on this later on as I am ravenously digesting GBL books and articles.

Doing online research with tomfox for tomboy notes

I always find it a drag to have to type in references for a web page while doing research over the Internet. Here's a tool that will make web page citation easier. Harry Coal's Tomfox for Firefox. After installing the extension simply highlight a text (an interesting quote, author's name, title, citation, etc.); right click, and select "Create Tomboy Note". It will create a note in tomboy notes in a notebook called Snippets. It will also add the url of the web page.

Stopmotion animation with a webcam in UbuntuStudio

This educational tool is probably for under K-6 education. I still can't think of an example for secondary and higher ed students.

The Stopmotion software for stop motion animation is included in the distribution of UbuntuStudio. The demo here was done with UbuntuStudio 8.04 based on Intrepid.

I used an A4Tech web cam which is v4l2. Stopmotion has a problem with these kind of web cameras so you'll need to follow Aearenda's solution here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=931208 . I do hope they've already solved this in Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04.

Create an mplayer video import device in Stopmotion


Start Stopmotion and in the menu find settings->configure stopmotion or ctrl-P.

Click add button.

Resize the dialog box to see the start deamon & stop deamon text boxes.

Click video import tab.

In the start deamon text box enter the following (change the ~/RENDER/stopmotion/ folder with your preference):

~/RENDER/stopmotion/startmplayer $VIDEODEVICE $IMAGEFILE 2 0.25s .tempjpgs &

In the stop deamon text box enter this code:

killall startmplayer && killall mplayer

Download my startmplayer file from: http://www.mediafire.com/file/zm2ytmnqa2j/startmplayer.zip.

Extract this startmplayer file in the ~/RENDER/stopmotion/ folder, you can change this folder.

Then follow this demo:



Finished product (a bit crude):

Paul Rosenbloom explains SOAR

If you can ignore the trial version text overlayed in this video, it is a good intro to SOAR.



And another video where John Laird talks about Soar's extensions e.g. declarative memory, emotions, and reinforcement learning.

Simulation of July 22, 2009 Solar Eclipse with Stellarium

I should have done this last July 22 but did not have the time. Since we in the Philippines was only going to see a partial eclipse I wanted to find out how Stellarium will simulate the solar eclipse.

I tried it on a Stellarium 0.9.1 on an Ubuntu Intrepid. (Stellarium 0.10.2 has an eclipse simulation! I should try that when I can find an ubuntu package.) The location setting is 89 degrees 40 minutes and 53 seconds east longitude, and 25 degrees 45 minutes north latitude. I could not change the seconds setting so this is an estimate of Kurigram, Bangladesh. It is where this Wikipedia photo of the solar eclipse is taken.



The time setting is between 7:00 A.M. and 11:00 A.M. Philippine time, because it was my locale.

Here are the videos captured with gtk-recordMyDesktop. I wanted to capture it until the moon separates from the sun but it seem to have gotten cut towards the end by gtk-recordMyDesktop.

without atmosphere


with atmosphere


Although I don't teach natural science I think this would be cool to use as an illustration since you can repeat it over and over again. You can also look at it from different locations.

Links

Solar eclipse scripts for Stellarium: http://www.stellarium.org/wiki/index.php/Scripts

How to use Tomboy Notes in Writing a Research Report

Tomboy notes is available at http://projects.gnome.org/tomboy/download.html.

Installation

Ubuntu Linux

It is included in Ubuntu Linux by default. Unfortunately the package is still base on version 0.14.0. What you need is version 0.14.2 for better performance. For Jaunty you could download and install with gdebi Chris Irwin's ppa here https://launchpad.net/~chrisirwin/+archive/ppa . Or Nick B.'s https://launchpad.net/~futurepilot/+archive/ppa (PPA means Personal Package Archives)

If your daring, you may want to test the development 0.15+ version with Mario Manno's ppa here https://launchpad.net/~manno/+archive/ppa or xpd259's https://launchpad.net/~xpd259/+archive/ppa

For intrepid, the best thing I could find is Antons Rebguns ppa here https://launchpad.net/~arebgun/+archive/ppa which is version 0.14.1

Windows

For windows follow the installation here http://live.gnome.org/Tomboy/Installing/Windows. You'll need gtk-sharp. I used this on a vista http://ftp.novell.com/pub/mono/gtk-sharp/gtk-sharp-2.12.9-2.win32.msi .

Demo

Once you have it installed follow my youtube demo here:




The cited text in the demo came from the IRRODL journal.

Have fun