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.

In loco parentis & distance education

There was a time when education was believed to have its roots from the family.  The relationship between the institution, its teachers and the students were like parent and child.  That is the principle of "in loco parentis" or "in place of a parent".  The values of educational institutions were familial.

Today, in higher education in particular, there had been a shift towards rooting those values and that relationship in business.  Wherein the student is no longer treated as a child but a customer.  Parents do not sell learning services to their children; they do not think of making profit from their children.  But businesses do to their customers.

It is in this context that I wish educational institutions will return to the concept of "in loco parentis".  But not with regards to its narrow emphasis on policing student's mores.  I would rather emphasize the values of parents in relation to how, why, and what they want their children to learn.  "In loco parentis" applies to the academic activities as well.  And those values can be summed up in terms of giving the best education to their children regardless of cost and sacrifices.

Of course parents cannot teach everything their children want to learn.  It is the reason "apprenticeship" had been the second best option but not better than parental guidance.  But I believe that in earlier times, the relation between master and apprentice was like parent and child.  This appears to be implied even with for instance the relation between Joshua and Moses.  When masters (craftsmen, artists, philosophers, prophets etc.) were accessible in villages,  candidate apprentices can just walk in and learn what they wish to learn.  With industrialization, the masters had disappeared inside the secured walls of factories and research laboratories.  The knowledge had been dispersed among so many people involved in the production process that eventually the masters had been diminished if not disappeared all together.

In the suburban community where I live, when one goes out you would not find any artists, craftsmen, or philosophers.  You'll find retail stores and malls.  Generations after generations had lost an opportunity to learn.  And so we go to schools that cannot teach us the knowledge that are locked away in the factories, ateliers, and research laboratories.  Schools cannot attain the totality of learning that a culture with learned parents and learned masters can provide, such that one achieve his/her highest potentiality.

Now with technology, I am hoping masters would again be accessible to would be apprentices.  But can this be achieved with distance education?  Is it really possible to connect to essential expert actors in a social network threaded by the Internet?  Are the masters even out there?

Two decades of distance education research

Zawacki-Richter, Baecker and Vogt recently published a review of distance education research from 2000 to 2008 in IRRODL.  Comparing their findings with Berge and Mrozowski's review of 1990-1999 research (2001) struck me that not much has changed in the state of research in distance education.  

What worries me more is that the least studied area is cost and benefit.  Are distance education institutions going the way of correspondence schools as presented by David Noble in Digital Diploma Mills, Rehearsal for the Revolution?   How can we refute or support his arguments if there is not enough research?

References:

Berge, Z.L., & Mrozowski, S. (2001). Review of research in distance education, 1990-99. The American Journal of Distance Education 15(3), pp. 5-9.  Full text available in Practitioner Research and Evaluation Skills Training (PREST) A1 module reading resources, http://www.col.org/SiteCollectionDocuments/A1%20resources.pdf.

Noble, D.F. (1999). Digital diploma mills, part IV. Rehearsal for the Revolution. Retrieved December 31, 2009, from http://communication.ucsd.edu/dl/ddm4.html.

Zawacki-Richter, O., Baecker, E., &; Vogt, S. (2009). Review of distance education research (2000 to 2008): Analysis of research areas, methods, and authorship patterns. The International Review Of Research In Open And Distance Learning, 10(6). Retrieved December 31, 2009, from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/741/1433

On PLE and walled gardens

Just like many of the terms in distance education (DE), I've come across the term Personal Learning Environment (PLE) a year or two ago.  But I did not get it.  I thought it was some kind of software that would glue together free services like Google tools and social software.  My DE thinking was still dominated by the Learning Management System.

It was only this year after retaking Connectivism and Connective Knowledge 2009 (CCK09) that I think I get it. My understanding is not merely one that is logical but actually explains a subjective experience I had with one of the online courses I was taking in my Masters of Distance Education.  The previous semester after I attended Connectivism and Connective Knowledge 2008 (CCK08) I had a course on Multimedia Educational Materials for DE. Both online courses encouraged the creation of the student's PLE. That was the first time I've attended such courses; online courses not centered in an LMS. I found them to be exhilarating, overwhelming and at times exasperating.  The following semester, the courses I've attended returned to the LMS, the walled garden learning environment.  I could not explain it, but I felt uncomfortable with a learning environment that I had been attending for the past three years.  It appeared bland compared to the PLE.  I didn't even use the word PLE, and I could not explain why I was feeling bored and limited with the LMS centered course. 

It's like the feeling you get when you have an older and slower computer.  As long as you have not used the newer and faster computers you don't really notice the speed difference.  But when you touch the newer computer, you find it difficult to work with the older computer.  You can't ignore the speed difference, and it irritates you.  You just can't go back to the old computer, similarly it was difficult going back to the LMS centered course.  Could it just have been the novelty.  But the fact is I continued creating my blog and other bits outside the course, even if they were not going to be evaluated.  I probably did half of my thinking aloud outside the course, in the parts of my PLE beyond the teachers' bounded learning environment.

I was recently reading Theo Hug and Norm Friesen's Outline of a Microlearning Agenda (2009), and they spoke of "technologically emancipated" education (Fiedler and Kieslinger as cited in Hug & Friesen).  That's what I feel at this moment about PLEs, they are technologically emancipating.  But at the same time I can't help but think that from the learner's perspective there could be "technologically emaciating" education as well.

Reference

Hug, T., & Friesen, N. (2009, September). Outline of a Microlearning Agenda. In eLearning Papers, 16. Retrieved December 13, 2009, from http://www.elearningeuropa.info/files/media/media20252.pdf.

Trying to create a PLE in Tagalog

I've been a bit quiet lately in this blog and I also failed to finish CCK09... again.  I only participated up to the 3rd forum in CCK08 and in CCK09, I only managed up to the 5th forum (I think).  It's because my mind wandered towards how to experience and communicate Connectivism in Tagalog.

I'm bilingual.  I speak Tagalog and English.  Tagalog is my first language, my language at home and in my community.  English is a language I use at work, at school, in business and in communicating online with an international English speaking community.  I cannot learn anything if it is only in one of these two languages.  For me to learn something there should be parallel subnetworks of new knowledge in my brain, otherwise I will forget it.  I have to translate in order to learn.

So what I've been doing lately is developing my Tagalog PLE at http://ugnay.blogspot.com.  The Tagalog word "ugnay" means connection.  Hopefully I would be able to share what I've learned about distance education, and connectivism with Tagalog speakers.

Training contributors to free software projects

With the release of Ubuntu Karmic Koala a few days ago, I think a lot of great software are being abandoned because there are not enough developers in the upstream or not enough packagers. This is the case with CinePaint which is an HDR image editor and an industry standard in film editing. eXe, a scorm authoring software appear to be heading in the same direction. If only newbies, mostly occasional bug hunters could be trained to become developers or packagers.

Moodle may be on the right track with courses such as Introduction to Moodle Programming. I wonder if other projects are looking at the possibility of offering free training for eager users to be contributor-developers in free software.