Still learning about this speaking thing

Sadly my time has been too divided to spend much time at the educational strand on the Second Life Community Convention, SLEDcc. I was somewhat mortified to see my name on the list of helpers on the RL programme, an honour I do not merit. Having said that, I did spend a fair amount of time in the cause of SLEDcc today, viz 3 hours at the Poster Gallery and then a 30 minute presentation under the guise of a Sparks session ("30 minutes?", I hear you say).

The poster session varied in intensity but after some of the technical glitches of the previous day it was good to see the prim-intensive Rockcliffe sim running smoothly with 40+ active avatars, not to mention StoryMachine. I had the good fortune to chat with a wide range of people, some of whom were new to SL, others most definitely not (anna in the image above being a case in point)! I have to thank in particular my neighbour Willow Shenlin for her tolerance of the chat leaking from StoryMachine despite my having stuck it in the least accessible corner.

Subsequently things went somewhat awry at the Sparks session. At the RL conference this was 20 slides in 2 minutes. My contribution was given 15 slides in 15 minutes. The best laid plans hit the buffers immediately when it turned out I was all set-up but in the wrong location for my talk with 10 minutes to go. I took this in my virtual stride reasonably well. Indeed, I even had time to layout the mini-cubes with the PowerPoint textures that were intended to reduce the rezzing time during the talk (remember this was against the clock, at least in theory).

There were in fact two sessions in parallel and I suspect mine, on panoramic images in SL, was by far the least well-attended but even so a few folk flew in after I got started and this may have created a burst of lag as they cached the images. I was using Dudeney Ge's speakEasy HUD, with the odd interjection in chat, so that I had a fighting chance of finishing 15 slides without voice problems. I asked the audience at the start whether they could read the chat and a couple raised their arms (they were using chairs with animations).

Subsequently, however, it turned out that many were straining to hear voice I wasn't using and not seeing the chat I was. Worse still, the chat was lagged and punch lines, such as they were, lost or arriving before the start of the, erm, quip. Feedback on this started about 5 minutes into the talk (of the perfectly reasonable "Has he started?" type) by which time I was fighting lag (how many times do I have to touch the speakEasy HUD to generate the chat???) and what looked like a failing internet connection.

Given the problems, I finished at about 23 minutes (it had been about 12 in practice -- so much for Sparks and thank goodness for the absence of a chairperson) with time for a few questions as, fortunately, my slot ran a full 30 minutes. Reaction in the audience was doubtless mixed: some really seemed to have enjoyed it, others I know saw no text at all (I've experienced the same issue as a listener with voice, mind you).

I guess one conclusion (which, no excuses, I should have anticipated) would be to use text and voice so you can fall back on one or the other. At the very least I should have announced more clearly which I was using at the start (though that wouldn't have helped with latecomers). The big dilemma in retrospect, of course, was whether to proceed on the basis of just two hand-shows or to stop and sort out communication issues when operating against the clock. The important aspect is to display somewhere the communication modes being used so that latecomers know what to expect.

The Lindens keep pushing voice and people are starting to expect it (as I also found at the Poster Gallery). On the other hand there were non-English speakers in the audience who probably valued the chat history they were able to keep. I can only imagine that the layout of the auditorium meant that avatars at the extremities, even some of those seated, were beyond the reach of standard text chat. Was it because I was off-centre to avoid obscuring the slides? I should go back and check this.

Despite the stress and rather variable levels of success, I still found the experience of public speaking in SL to be stimulating, not least because of the real-time challenges it poses. Others have commented on the underwhelming dependency of SL on PowerPoint-type presentations. I can only say in my defence that I had rezzed three illustrative panoramas but they had been unavoidably left behind in the flight from one auditorium to the next. The Sparks format is also somewhat attuned to PowerPoint, albeit in a mercifully condensed format.

Having the web links on a Google sites page was also a good idea. And no, I haven't added my slides to slideshare yet though I have added the text from speakEasy to the wiki.

StoryMachine, SLEDcc and CCK08

I was originally supposed to be running a SLEDcc workshop on StoryMachine but to my mind it looked out of kilter with the final programme so I asked to merge it with the poster gallery run by Desi Stockton. While I'm still slightly concerned about the "fit" as it is a noisy beast, it has been a good opportunity to revisit the concept, not least in identifying a few shortcomings.

I wanted to generate a demo that was reasonably subject-agnostic and my participation in CCK08 has given me the opportunity. My first step was to map the way the course works as seeing/understanding how this is useful to me as well. Doing the mapping showed that I didn't really understand the way the tagging was likely to work, especially given the potential volume. George's comment on my previous blog shows that it's working for him at least. It also shows the value of capturing an overhead view (second picture above).

I guess being on such a large course makes it imperative that one has a perspective and SL fulfills that role. I'm not sure whether I'm going to be able to make the Chilbo inworld meetings but it does at least give me a feel for what SL has to offer in this context and where it needs help.

I had a skim through the JISC paper which I had seen previously. It's a great read and worth revisiting though I wasn't quite sure whether I should be capturing anything at this stage for later use. Anyway, I can always go back. I should really add a notecard summary/reflection to a node but this actually raises an interesting question, viz how could I fire that out into the wider web as RSS?

While Twitter is a possibility, it does have limitations. I've been playing with a strategy whereby students can drag notecards onto a reader prim. This is stored as a database record on my server that in turn generates an RSS feed that can be read inworld (I'm using the QA reader as it handles up to 5 streams). Building the RSS functionality into the node menu, if only for demo purposes, is an interesting project for a rainy day.

In terms of a more scalable solution, I should probably also find out what the JISC M3 Twitter/SL project is doing.

Yay, it's the Connectivism course

As the start of term and, indeed, the start of teaching in SL beckon, I'm going to be blogging here less frequently (that's already started, I guess). When I do blog, it will probably be about the Connectivism course being run by George Siemens and Stephen Downes. I've signed up for that and the Chilbo inworld cohort organised by Fleep Tuque. Whether I'll be able to give the subject the attention it deserves is another question.

I have mentioned connectivism previously on this blog. Just over a year ago, I said:

However, I hope that what I do is grounded in the reality of current SL experience, the scepticism it evokes and the need to assist students in managing the complexity of 21st century biology. If I have a pedagogy driving this forward, it is probably just as much connectivism as constructionism; indeed, not so much pedagogy as tool development at this stage.

That view hasn't changed a great deal. Even though I'm contributing inworld in the SLEDcc 2008 meeting, all of this still feels very new and somewhat daunting.

To answer the questions posed by George:

1. I'm Peter Miller (SL: Graham Mills), a microbiologist from the University of Liverpool.
2. I'm interest in connectivism because the management of the complex, interwoven web of information that is modern biology is an important skill both to practise and pass on.
3. I'll consider the course a success if (i) I complete more than a quarter of it (which is why I'm starting early), (ii) I learn something I can factor into my own practice. Weeks 6 and 7 look to be especially interesting; I follow Gráinne Conole's blog and was peripherally involved in the LAMS trial in UK universities so I'm vaguely aware of the context for week 7.
4. This blog contains more than enough random information! However, one tool I have been developing intermittently is called StoryMachine and I'd like to take the opportunity to use it to chart my way through the course and possibly refine it a little for my final project.
   

Scratch4SL meets the scaffold

Not in this case the Liverpool band of my yoof but the peptidoglycan model. The Scratch script that generated the model is 22 lines long and contained in the plywood prim. In the background you can see a hand-built version. Neither is entirely to scale yet though the one on the platform is closer.

For novices there is some benefit in using Scratch, e.g. they can easily play with colour, size (i.e. number of monomers) and scale while learning a little about programming. At a pinch they could also perhaps modify the degree of cross-linking. The result can also be linked, cloned and resized manually if those skills are to be practised. It is also fun to see the prim whiz about in much the same way as Hiro's molecule rezzers.

In my case I will probably give the students a much simpler default prim, e.g. just the monomer, and then ask them to generate the LSL for the more complex model from a Scratch script I provide. They can then make minor modifications along the lines suggested to achieve a better fit with known dimensions given a specified scale.

That actually gives me something concrete to assess and the excuse to mention that assessment is a topic Clark Aldrich is addressing both generically and more concretely in terms of workbooks.

Generic sequence object

I'm looking at ways to get the 2D and 3D web to play nicely together, the idea being that you can exploit the 3D for collaborative and spatial purposes while leaving heavy-duty storage and processing to the 2D web. In that context, I wanted a means for students to annotate a DNA or protein sequence and the generic sequence object is my first (somewhat clumsily scripted) attempt.

It basically allows students to create a cut-down feature table on a notecard stored in the prism. The region of interest is then defined by a coloured linked prim and some hovertext. This works well enough for a maximum of five such features. The students can drag such prims around via the prism as the prim becomes physical during the dragging process.

Of course, the same effect could be obtained using textures and the forthcoming LSL function that allows detection of the touch coordinates.

Vaguely related to learning design

Rather more practice-oriented than the updated Bloom's (and an elaboration thereof), Clark Aldrich shares his thoughts on a taxonomy of interactivity. There are six levels if you exclude Level 0, no interactivity. Just in case you are short on ideas, Clark also references Thiagi's site which is a veritable cornucopia of learning activities.

If you want a more theory-based approach, try the guidance pages for the Phoebe pedagogic planner. The section on virtual worlds appears to represent a decent start so far as SL is concerned. The link to Pathfinder Linden's bookmarks on delicious is especially useful.

The Phoebe guidance has, however, the occasional snide reference: "'There' is similar to SecondLife but not so hyped". By (random) contrast, there is no allusion to the criticisms of interactive whiteboards. The guidance also missed an opportunity by not linking to the Educause 7 Things You Should Know briefings though the SL edition again manages to raise peripheral concerns rather than address core issues of pedagogy.

All of which at least gives me the opportunity to engage in some anti-hype and point out the present (inevitably dire) state of virtual worlds on the Gartner hype curve 2008.

Spherical panoramas

Via the SL DataViz wiki, I came across Paul Bourke's paper on the use of SL as a shared space for data visualization. The paper itself is a must-read for anyone interested in the topic, not least amateurs such as myself. Paul's website has a host of useful tools and techniques albeit, sadly for me, somewhat Mac-oriented (though there is useful LSL code for a number of applications). I was particularly intrgued by his panorama-to-sphere projection, something I have seen done very nicely elsewhere, e.g. from the CASA people on Second Nature, but not tried myself (while texturing a hollow sphere is easy enough, you tend to get distortion at the poles). Fortunately, Paul has kindly allowed others to implement some of his techniques. There is some interesting Lua code for such a mapping but of more immediate use is a Photoshop plugin called spheremap. I don't actually have Photoshop but the plugin can be used with the freeware IrfanView.

The end-result can be textured onto either the inside or the outside of a phantom sphere. Inevitably there is more distortion than with the VR Room but I think the overall effect is compact and aesthetically pleasing.

Goosh

Described as an unofficial Google shell, Goosh browser-based command line tool by Stefan Grothkopp gives rapid access to a range of Google services as well as the decidedly non-Google Wikipedia. It can be run as a full browser window but also as a search engine in Firefox. I raved previously about YubNub and I still use it for searching Google, Wikipedia and our university library. Although Goosh does not offer the same range of services and extensibility, it does have nice features of its own such as command line recall.

Once more around the cell

I have played with giant cells before. It's one of the attractions of Second Life that you can make the microscopic "life-sized" and bigger so when I wanted to try out Scratch for SL an obvious application was a cross-section of an Escherichia coli. In real life this bacterium is about 1 micrometre in diameter. I modelled it at 0.125 m to 1 nm, the latter being roughly the size of the disaccharide monomer that makes up the glycan backbone of the peptidoglycan layer. By my calculations, that is roughly 3000 monomers to get round a cell more than 100 metres high. It was pretty trivial to set Scratch (available for Windows and Mac) to script this, drop the LSL script into a prim (the black prism above) and then add the lineSegment prim that forms the glycan trail. The latter dies after 60 seconds so the trail (red in the picture) is quite short; it's actually very straightforward to modify this if you want to keep the hoop though 3000 prims is a fair chunk of the 15000 prims you get with a sim so you probably won't want to retain it forever.

This is interesting for three reasons. Firstly, the arrangement of the glycan backbone is pretty contentious. If I had wanted to create a hoop, it would not have been physiologically accurate: there appear to be two glycan sub-populations, one short (average 9 dimers) and one longer (average ~30 dimers) so cross-linking (via peptide sidechains) is necessary to circumnavigate the cell. This assumes that the glycan chains are in a planar arrangement, i.e. parallel to the cell surface, while such evidence as there is can also be interpreted in part to support a mesh-like scaffold where the (short) chains are perpendicular to the surface.

The second reason for being interested is that the circumnavigation takes about 20 minutes, a nice length of time perhaps to illustrate the major features of the cell wall, its structure, function and biosynthesis. It would probably be necessary to work at a range of scales as structural detail wouldn't be in great evidence otherwise (an interesting point in itself). Not quite as exciting as the London Eye (which takes 30 minutes per revolution) but, when time permits, I may try to model at least part of the journey.

The final reason for being interested is that the model is easy to setup and, I suspect, within the scope of a programming novice. Scratch in its SL guise looks to have its roots in Logo turtle graphics and this little mini-project could easily be combined with a guided literature search to uncover the necessary parameters. The fact that the glycan chains are deposited from a moving prim also feels vaguely enzymatic and poses additional questions about how such chains are synthesised and integrated for real. It also goes to show the limitations of the kind of "shorthand" that textbook illustrators (and lecturers!) sometimes adopt when representing this level of detail, the evolution of scientific theory, not to mention the role of computers (though not Scratch!) and techniques such as cryoelectron tomography in giving us a better handle on these questions.