My not-very-smart phone died and I needed to replace it PDQ. Not having time to comparison shop, I went with the market leader, Samsung, and the (just) sub-£100 "student-affordable" theme of the recent "tabloid" purchase. I'm not a major mobile user but I do recognise the need to familiarise myself with this area.
The eventual purchase was the new Samsung Galaxy Y. "Y" apparently stands for "Youth", i.e. budget-oriented. A quick web search suggests there is doubt as to whether this mobile is much of an advance hardware-wise but it does at least sport a recent Android mobile operating system, namely version 2.3 aka Gingerbread.
It has a low-res 3" capacitive screen and I'm using my mifi for web access which seems to work pretty well. Downsides thus far include the absence of Flash (odd unless I'm missing something) and Unity3D, most likely a consequence of the low-res screen (240x320).
It does, however, have GPS which was something missing from the Tabloid. That said, Wikitude has problems in that you can't interrogate the POIs (Points of Information) by touch (probably the low-res screen again) and Layar and Google Goggles don't want to know. That said, I was suitably intrigued by Wikitude and may explore further.
Pinch-zoom works as expected on the Map app and the web browser. Legibility in the latter is not great so being able to zoom is a necessity. Even so, I can't imagine reading a novel on it (as opposed to newspaper articles from the Guardian app). The phone comes with the Quickoffice document suite. The PDF reader did a competent job of reflowing one of my documents for reading on the mobile. I haven't gone further thus far.
It runs the new Blackboard Learn app and the beta AndTidWiki TiddlyWiki app works fine as does Notestorm, a TiddlyWiki "notebook", albeit with a bit of zooming (I've only tested on the web in read-only mode).
Likewise, I can't see my writing anything significant using the rather cramped virtual keyboard (it comes with Swype too but I'm dubious about that being much better). On the upside there is a radio as well as an MP3 player and YouTube app.
I haven't played much with the camera but, again, it's low-res (2 MP) but reads QR and 1D barcodes fine using the Barcode Scanner app.
The only software issue thus far was getting Google Calendar to sync -- that required clearing app data and cache.
If that all seems a little downbeat, I have to say that, as with the Tabloid, I'm reasonably pleased with the purchase in a bang-per-buck sense. I like the form factor, the phone is reasonably lag-free and its modus operandi is much as expected for Android so the learning curve has been swift. If it doesn't do everything, it does enough.
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Mesh-on-a-stick (again)
I have a student who is creating a learning activity for a local school. It's only a single lesson but we are investigating the possibility of using simonastick (SoaS) as it is single-user and there is no registration or connectivity required, i.e. reduced complexity, rapid startup. Accordingly, I wanted to know whether she might use mesh as it might save a lot of time if suitable content could be found. I've tried mesh previously but much has changed since then and Ener Hax has just updated SoaS to OpenSim 0.7.2 which supports SL-type mesh. Time to re-visit.
As an experiment I located a free DNA COLLADA model on TurboSquid (use sort by price to surface the freebies), downloaded it, simplified it a little in MeshLab and then uploaded it using Second Life Viewer 3.1, resizing as I went. As you can see, it works fine apart from my having lost the texture and some minor blemishes that I probably introduced in MeshLab.
I then repeated the process with the bison. This was low-poly to start with so all I did was export it in COLLADA format from MeshLab. I lost track of the texture again so I had to upload this separately but it was easy enough to apply in the usual way.
There are lots of issues to resolve but in principle mesh could be very useful. By no means all mesh are suitable for uploading so I'm keeping a record of the freebies I've managed to upload in Delicious under the tag mesh4opensim. That doesn't necessarily imply the models are free for unfettered redistribution as they typically come with their own terms of use. I'm hoping, however, that others might find it easier to start their explorations with something known to work, at least after a fashion. The more I use TurboSquid, the more I think I need a budget for content acquisition.
Monday, October 24, 2011
Is Second Life education "pining for the fjords"?
The blog title is, of course, a reference to the classic Python Dead Parrot sketch. The short answer is "no" or, possibly, "not yet", the response depending on whether you are a glass half-full or half-empty type of person.
Using Tyche Shepherd's wonderful gridsurvey.com I compiled a list of 275 regions that at some time in the past four years incorporated the title University or College in their name (and yes, the vast majority looked like legitimate institutions). Compare that with the highwater mark total of 600-ish institutions inworld last year owning, with the non-profits, an apocryphal 2000-ish regions and you can see that I've almost certainly missed a lot. That's expected as many colleges and universities use their familiar institutional abbreviations and hence would not show up in the search. That said, I suspect that this sample is broadly representative.
If I make the (admittedly unlikely) assumption that all these regions date back to 2008, then a surprisingly large number departed in the post-hype 2009 (35 or 13.3%), followed by a consolidation in 2010 (21 left or 9.2% of those remaining) and a not unexpected increase in departures in 2011 (39 or 18.8%) with the end of edu discounts (and despite the Lab extending the discount for those willing and able to pay in advance). If one assumes that this figure will reach 20% by year end, that figure of, say, 1750-ish edu regions last year will likely have declined to 1400 or thereabouts by the year end, equal roughly to a loss of 6 edu regions per week. That seems on the high side; I'd have estimated 3-4-ish from the weather eye I cast on gridsurvey.com, say 150+ per annum.
Of course, that does not necessarily mean that these educational institutions have left SL. They may have shed one sim among several or downsized to an unbadged shared or rented sim. Some will doubtless have withdrawn from virtual world education altogether, others migrated to OpenSim or similar, conceivably on a private grid, and no longer readily countable.
The number of subscribers on the new opensim-edu.org email list now totals in excess of 100 although that is small beer compared to the 6000-ish, albeit mostly inactive, on SLED. There are just 21 edu regions listed on the new site though that again is a major underestimate as few of the sims from the main OpenSim edu providers, ReactionGrid and jokaydiaGrid, are present. They alone currently have 117 and 90 public regions respectively, a total of 207 compared to 144 and 71 (total: 215) at the end of December 2010 (statistics courtesy of Hypergrid Business). It is hard to escape the conclusion, however, that those dropping sims in SL have not gone to the main commercial OpenSim edu providers nor conceivably to OpenSim at all.
In the grand scheme of things, the loss of, say, 150-350 regions from SL is not a huge number compared, for example, to a current total of 24260 private regions. Education notwithstanding, the SL grid lost and subsequently regained about 250-300 sims over the past month, the latter effected by the Lab foregoing setup fees on sales over last weekend.
The question, of course, is what happens next. In principal a focus in SL on gaming and creativity (as a stimulus to becoming economically active) is not necessarily anti-education though I suspect the environment will not be an easy sell to administrators on tight budgets. However, institutions with well-embedded content and courses will be reluctant to go elsewhere. I suspect the Norwegian Blue has some life in it yet.
Using Tyche Shepherd's wonderful gridsurvey.com I compiled a list of 275 regions that at some time in the past four years incorporated the title University or College in their name (and yes, the vast majority looked like legitimate institutions). Compare that with the highwater mark total of 600-ish institutions inworld last year owning, with the non-profits, an apocryphal 2000-ish regions and you can see that I've almost certainly missed a lot. That's expected as many colleges and universities use their familiar institutional abbreviations and hence would not show up in the search. That said, I suspect that this sample is broadly representative.
If I make the (admittedly unlikely) assumption that all these regions date back to 2008, then a surprisingly large number departed in the post-hype 2009 (35 or 13.3%), followed by a consolidation in 2010 (21 left or 9.2% of those remaining) and a not unexpected increase in departures in 2011 (39 or 18.8%) with the end of edu discounts (and despite the Lab extending the discount for those willing and able to pay in advance). If one assumes that this figure will reach 20% by year end, that figure of, say, 1750-ish edu regions last year will likely have declined to 1400 or thereabouts by the year end, equal roughly to a loss of 6 edu regions per week. That seems on the high side; I'd have estimated 3-4-ish from the weather eye I cast on gridsurvey.com, say 150+ per annum.
Of course, that does not necessarily mean that these educational institutions have left SL. They may have shed one sim among several or downsized to an unbadged shared or rented sim. Some will doubtless have withdrawn from virtual world education altogether, others migrated to OpenSim or similar, conceivably on a private grid, and no longer readily countable.
The number of subscribers on the new opensim-edu.org email list now totals in excess of 100 although that is small beer compared to the 6000-ish, albeit mostly inactive, on SLED. There are just 21 edu regions listed on the new site though that again is a major underestimate as few of the sims from the main OpenSim edu providers, ReactionGrid and jokaydiaGrid, are present. They alone currently have 117 and 90 public regions respectively, a total of 207 compared to 144 and 71 (total: 215) at the end of December 2010 (statistics courtesy of Hypergrid Business). It is hard to escape the conclusion, however, that those dropping sims in SL have not gone to the main commercial OpenSim edu providers nor conceivably to OpenSim at all.
In the grand scheme of things, the loss of, say, 150-350 regions from SL is not a huge number compared, for example, to a current total of 24260 private regions. Education notwithstanding, the SL grid lost and subsequently regained about 250-300 sims over the past month, the latter effected by the Lab foregoing setup fees on sales over last weekend.
The question, of course, is what happens next. In principal a focus in SL on gaming and creativity (as a stimulus to becoming economically active) is not necessarily anti-education though I suspect the environment will not be an easy sell to administrators on tight budgets. However, institutions with well-embedded content and courses will be reluctant to go elsewhere. I suspect the Norwegian Blue has some life in it yet.
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