Real world Philippine terrain in OpenSim

Here is a video of my test of a 64 region Philippine terrain in OpenSim. The terrain data is from GIS data. Rezzing is slow because it was ran on a single core desktop PC. I'll post the method l used to convert GIS data to OpenSim terrain.



This is a part of my master's project for distance education.

On George Siemens' book, Knowing Knowledge (2006)

I've finally finished reading George Siemens' Knowing Knowledge (2006). I can't count the number of times I tried to read this book since I joined the CCK08 course, only to stop after the first few pages. Two things bug me about the book, the crazy typography and the graphics that reminds me of 1950's magazine graphics. My initial impression was that this book was about training in corporations. I was wrong.

This is my reading of Siemens work. In it he provided an analysis of the nature of knowledge in the light of the digital age. He then presents connectivism as learning theory that responds to the issues raised by that analysis. And in the final chapters he proposed approaches to implementing connectivism in organizations. This summary does not do justice to the work, you'll have to read it yourself :-).

It affirmed a lot of what I understood about connectivism and added a few more pragmatic stuff. Although I would have wanted an elaboration of the second domain of the AESI implementation i.e. Network and Ecology. Perhaps a case study of the implementation would have been instructive, especially in distance education. The tools of analysis in domain 1 would also need a manual of sorts. I also wonder how much had changed in Siemens' views since 2006?

All in all it is insightful. It's one of those books that feels like opening windows in a stuffy classroom in order to let the cool breeze and some sunshine in. I highly recommend this book to every educator.

P.S. I wished I could give a better review but I'm still reflecting on a lot of what was said in the book. A free copy of the book is available at http://www.elearnspace.org/KnowingKnowledge_LowRes.pdf.  George Siemens released it for free under a Creative Commons license. Unfortunately http://www.knowingknowledge.com/ appears to have been abandoned. I don't know what flavor of the CC license it is released in. You can also buy a copy of the book at http://www.amazon.ca/Knowing-Knowledge-George-Siemens/dp/1430302305.

A very brief visit to the Chibo Community Connectivism Reading Room

I'm working on a project for my masters degree in distance education, and I'm exploring the use of OpenSim as a central node in a history course.  I never participated in the Connectivism Cohort in Second Life facilitated by Fleep Tuque so I thought I'd visit the Connectivism Reading Room to get some ideas.

Here I am in this very brief visit.  It was quite homey (read cozy) despite the fact that no one was there.

Connectivism and axon guidance

After watching this video on neurite outgrowth from garlandscience, I cannot help but think that graphs are too clean and neutral as a visualizing tool for connectivist learning.

What I came to learn about growth cones and axon guidance is that first, axons has a synaptic target.  It means that they select what they connect to.  They don't just randomly connect to whatever neuron is nearby.

But then how do they establish a target in the first place? The axon guidance article in Wikipedia states that they "'sniff out' the extracellular environment for signals that instruct the axon which direction to grow" and that there are specific molecules in the extracellular environment that repel or attract the axon growth.

This doesn't answer my question.  It just says that the axon moves left or right etc. given some mollecules in the environment.  But the articles are silent in how the environment in the brain is regulated, that is, what increases a particular repulsive molecule in a certain area and an attractive molecule in another.  The lab experiments seem to be injecting these molecules in vitro rather than observing their production in their natural setting.

In connectivist learning, the role of a curator or someone who can guide another person towards a node/actor/vector is important.  It filters the environment, thereby playing the role of the unknown agent that produces repulsive and attractive cues.  A person may recommend a website as a resource for a particular research or dissuade others from reading another website.

An interesting idea to me is the fact that human beings can set targets or goals, and can change those as they sniff the environment.  Can neurons do the same, can they set themselves to targetting a another neuron that has a specific amount of molecules or other attributes?  The neurons that have outgrowths that connect to cells in the eyes, nose, ears etc. seems to have predetermined targets.  How do we separate this kind of connection with connection due to learning in the brain in relation to an analogy for the social and conceptual mode in connectivism?

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?