This was quite the week for me in terms of learning more about virtual worlds and education. In addition to my studies in ETEC 648D, I also had the fortunate opportunity to attend the Campus Technology 2009 conference where virtual worlds/immersive education was one of the hot topics.
In this week's course we continued to develop our building and script manipulation skills. While I've dabbled in SL for a few years now, I have never spent so much time building objects. Of course, it helps that we have full directions in this on how to build objects as it's a major pain to have to play with object settings to get the object to look like what you want it to. This week's focus was on animations and sounds and doing sound design in the virtual world environment. Manipulating ambient sound in SL is actually a new skill for me as it is something I never did previously so to see that it merely involves dropping a sound file in an objects content tab is kinda like one of those Hollywood, "Ah, that's how they did that!" moments for me.
In terms of my conference experience, I had the opportunity to see what a lot of the leading researchers in educational technology are doing. While Second Life did come up, two of the keynote speakers (when from Harvard, the other from somewhere in Australia) actually have gone ahead and developed their own virtual world platforms on various projects. A lot of the literature we've gone through about student engagement and increase in learning through "immersing" oneself in content was reaffirmed in both speakers experiences which was awesome. One thing I particular found interesting was the concept of "mixed reality" which our Wednesday keynote speaker discussed. Mixed Reality is basically the next evolutionary step from a virtual world. Instead of us interacting in a program via an Avatar, it involves our physical bodies interacting/manipulating objects in a virtual environment. Below is a sample video of "mixed reality" I found off of YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8yx5VpbQpA
Exciting stuff!
Till next week
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HI Jon
ReplyDeleteThat stuff on mixed reality is very cool! the YouTube video is a blast to watch and makes it easier to understand. It's easy enough to imagine both the strength of this in terms of what it could deliver, and just as importantly, the ease-of-use. Cool stuff