I was intrigued by the course introductions and it gave me a change to bring out some of my interests, many of which have involved Internet collaboration on shared digital artworks and models. This kicked off some work on a personal “Life Wall” which was fun. Only a small number of Lifestream events were triggered by this work, but it was a fun exercise. I thought originally it would be a way to get ahead with a digital artifact for the course exercises… but eventually decided to do that on more interesting topics as the readings and discussions progressed.

I, Ai – Personal Identity, Avatar Identity

I have been a user of professional simulation environments and also multi-user immersive social games and virtual worlds for several decades, so I was in my element for some uses of such platforms in the MSc in e-Learning courses. This is reflected in my Digital Artifact entitled “AI – Avatar Identity” and the associated Lifestream events, and also in the contributions made in blogs, in my personal learning space.

I, Us – Community Participation

I enjoy collaborative projects and have had a number of long lived on-line groups I interact with. I chose to do the Digital Cultures course on-line community ethnographic study on the Gerry Anderson Model makers’ Alliance (GA-MMA) at http://atate.org/mscel/ethno/.

I, Robot – Think Like a Robot

The creation of the digital artifact “Think Like a …” and related blog posts led to a number of Lifestream events where I discuss the use of educational argumentation from an artificial intelligence agent viewpoint. And even beyond that to take a robot or alternative species viewpoint. This is a useful device to prevent a dominant human species position always being assumed.

Digital Cultures + Digital Artifacts

My other explorations on digital artifacts on and around the course themes have generated Lifestream events and include:

• bat Life Wall
• Another Planet – Experimental Digital Artifact
• Austin, Ai and the Personal Satellite Assistant – Blog Post
• Posthuman – Connected – Blog Post
• AI, Cyborgs and Robots – Blog Post
• By the Side of a Methane Lake on Titan – Blog Post
• Ai’s Home Page – Na’vi and Beyond (work prior to Digital Cultures Course and expanded during the studies)

WallWisher Walls

I have been an enthusiastic contributor to the Wallwisher walls set up at the start of Digital Cultures and IDEL11 for participant introductions, and used for a number of exercises through the course.

This was a new shared media and social tool to me, and it works very well. I have also used Wallwisher walls in a number of my own digital artifacts. The Lifesteam events do not reflect Wallwisher contributions very well, and only seem to post a single event for the initial post onto a wall.

Lifesteam Access

My Lifesteam is at http://edc11.education.ed.ac.uk/austint/my-lifestream/

Technically the Lifestream events for many types of feed from Delicious, some blogs, Wallwisher, etc., leave a lot to be desired and often only state the blog title as the source with little indication of the real content I am afraid.

A PDF format archival copy is available at http://atate.org/mscel/archive/EDC11-Lifestream-Austin-Tate.pdf though the printed version is not laid out as well as the original WordPress blog.

The majority of my work on the course finished last week, and I am now engaged mostly in reading over again selected papers that are relevant to my essays and final assignments on the EDC11, IDEL11 and ULOE11 courses. Some Lifestream events relate to tidying up and preparing extra screen shots for some of those assignments.

OpenVCE Developments

I have been busy on my main research project in the USA on the OpenVCE platform to provide virtual collaboration spaces for distributed teams engaged in emergency and medical responses. I established the OpenVCE group area on the US government’s non-classified “All Partners Access network” (APAN) which uses the ‘Telligent collaboration platform and provides the Adobe Connect services we need for observer access to virtual worlds meeting spaces. This burst of effort on my research project has also involved some further experimentation with the Unity3D platform, for example adding Tokbox VoIP. And also looking at the Collada conversion of the Second Life/OpenSimulator 3D build for the OpenVCE region. This allows the build to be taken directly into Unity3D for future use. These activities generated quite a number of Lifestream events.

Avatar to Avatar Chat

My earlier EDC11 digital artifact was “Ai – Avatar Identity” and one element of this involved an amusing chat bot to chat bot conversation transcript generated on the OpenSim region used for the artifact. It used MyCyberTwin technology for “Ai” and “Be” chatting together. The resulting transcript is at http://atate.org/ai/ai/res/2011-10-09-chat-log-ai-and-be.txt.

So, it was funny this week to see that MyCybertwin in Australia has announced a contest with cash prizes for the best chat bot to chat bot conversation (using though their own limited set of example entities), and indeed a “Turing Test” challenge too. See https://mycybertwin.com/ui/aivsai.jsp.

On my research project related to supporting the OpenVCE communities I was engaged in setting up a new group portal on the APAN (All Partners Access Network) hosted by the US Government for non-classified work between government agencies, NGOs, organisation and individuals across the world. This replaces the previous HarmonieWeb portal. the APAN network uses the Telligent Collaboration framework to provide the usual blogs, discussion forums, wikis, group chat, etc. And then provides an Adobe Connect service attached to that for the supported communities. We provide “web observer” meeting access to virtual words meeting spaces via Adobe Connect services through these portals. I was involved in a number of training programmes and setup exercises which led to a range of events in the Lifestream as I took on the group owner role on APAN.

I did some further experimentation with the Unity3D platform, and used a Collada mesh translation of the OpenVCE OpenSim region buildings created via a converter service from Tipodean technologies in the USA. We are further experimenting also with the OpenSim-based MOSES grid hosted by the US Government also for work with non-government agencies internationally.

We believe that a combination of the APAN OpenVCE Group for a community web portal and a simplified meeting space in either the OpenSim-based MOSES grid or on a Unity3D setup might offer a long term stable basis for continuing work in the OpenVCE.net community. Currently a Drupal server at Edinburgh is used for the community web portal, and the virtual words service is hosted on the VCE region in Second Life.

I got ahead with my contribution to the posthuman pedagogy and produced my input over the weekend, entitled “Think Like a Robot”. So I was able to provide it to the class at the very start of the week for discussion. Some commenting on this and other entries as they came in towards the end of the week formed events in my Lifestream.

Eye on the EDEDC Final Assignment

To create the story I wish to tell for my EDEDC final assignment, I have been pulling together a number of threads explored during the Digital Cultures course and on other MSc courses such as IDEL11 and ULOE11. This has led to extracting some of the elements on different social media and platforms, especially aggregating content into my personal learning and asset collection space at http://atate.org/space/

Uncanny Pedagogical Experiences – Joking Apart

I have kidded on a bit with Siân Bayne in some discussions over the use of what I treated as "cute" terms like the "uncanny" and "ghostly" or "zombie" experiences. I got the idea of the uncertain and mind challenging environments she was described as a learning opportunity. And I do appreciate its a term that has some history (see Uncanny). But the Bayne (2008) reading did start to make more sense to me as a coherent approach to some people’s experiences in virtual worlds. I think I have used teleconference, distance collaboration and other forms of multi-user environments for so long, and have had experience of MUDs and MOOs as they grew from their text beginnings, so that its a more natural experience for me… just like I would not call using the telephone uncanny because I can heard a disembodied voice from a distance. But I can certainly put myself into an avatar shape or type which I know I find unusual or that feels “wrong”.

I found a very nicely constructed site in Second Life this week which allowed for just such an experience, and I blogged about it to draw it to the attention of others on the IDEL11 and EDEDC courses. See "Meta Body – Try an Out of Your Body Experience" – http://edc11.education.ed.ac.uk/austint/2011/11/18/meta-body-try-an-out-of-your-body-experience/

Second Life Pic of the Day

I added a further RSS feed to my Lifestream… the Second Life official feed from the blog which selects a representative “pic of the day”. This is something I already follow on Twitter and find useful. I feel this reflects the continuing improvement of the visuals in Second Life and OpenSim, indicates new facilities as they come along and show cases top builds inworld.

Reference

Bayne, Siân (2008) "Uncanny spaces for higher education: teaching and learning in virtual worlds", ALT-J Research in Learning Technology, Vol. 16, No. 3., pp.197-205.

Uncanny – See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny

My own input to the Posthuman discussions came via my Digital Culture’s blog entry on Posthuman – Connected and a lot of very interesting commentary by classmates and Jeremy (as Tutor) along with notes by me on that. David has also been commenting and adding his thoughts as comments to this blog entry.

I have noticed that I seem to be a long weekend ahead of discussion on the forums on all my MSc in e-learning modules, not just Digital Cultures. I tend to use Friday to prepare the ground for the start of the next week, get the readings organised, file previous material, and I think of start of the weekend as the change over point. That seems to put my Lifestream entries a few days, and sometimes as much as a week, ahead of similar topic events from others. So I felt rather lonely on the WallWisher Walls where I was more than 4 days ahead of any other entry appearing. Then we had an episode where we had two wall accidentally for a while. All sorted now, and entries appearing. Unfortunately, these entries are not reflected in the LifeStream as noted before. I continued to comment on the new virtual community ethnographies as they appeared through the week.

Work on the Moodle/SLoodle experiments was at a lower level this week, though I did a blog post expressing my feelings about the labyrinthine complexity of roles and permissions in Moodle against how I felt it ought to appear. This image from the posting expresses how things seem to me:

Underground Activity

My on-line activity on one aspect of the Digital Cultures course has “gone underground” a little in that I am preparing elements of my final assignment in a web area of my Personal Learning Space and elements of this are not reflected in my lifestream yet.

Research and International Links

Some Lifestream events relate to my research with the OpenVCE.net community and its emergency response groups. There has been a build up of events that relate to a shift of one of the web portals from HarmonieWeb, which provided Adobe Connect services in particular for the OpenVCE.net community, to the All Partners Access Network (APAN). This could be interesting as APAN uses the Telligent Community Platform integrated with Adobe Connect and XMPP/Jabber text chat for synchronous meetings. Details of the transition, which I am managing, are being built at http://openvce.net/apan. More tweets and status messages will appear on this over the next few weeks as I keep the OpenVCE.net community informed of progress.

Another international community I am involved in is KSCO – the Knowledge Systems for Coalition Operations community. We are in the run up to the closing date for submission of papers for KSCO-2012 which I am an organiser for. It will be run in February 2012 this year in Florida. We have just had approval for a proposal we made for a KSCO special issue of the high quality journal IEEE Intelligent Systems, so some Lifestream events relate to communicating this to the KSCO community.

The week has been characterised by some preparatory work for assignments on the three MSc in e-Learning courses I am on. There is a lot to pull together, many interesting areas to explore, and readings to go back over. But I like to start such projects early, do an initial burst of activity to get some material in place, and then take a long time to reflect and refine.

I had a flurry of activity to create a new digital artifact along the style of “AI – Avatar Identity” under the theme “Are You on Another Planet?” at http://atate.org/another-planet/ picking up on the “Other Worlds” and utopian dreams elements in earlier blocks of EDEDC. This involved setting up and the populating a new WallWisher wall and dozens of entries on that – none of which showed in my Lifestream unfortunately due to a glitch in the way that Wallwisher RSS feeds seem to come to Lifestream. It also involved some experimentation with a “grammar” of “connectors” which are meant to give a visual typography based method to show links between themes, token, topics and readings on the course.

I did this originally to be a potential EDEDC final assignment topic. But as I explored, I widened out to try to take a more holistic and “posthuman” aggregating view of the work I had done on EDEDC on personal identity (Life Wall), projected identity (Another World) and community identity (GA-MMA and social networks). I have now proposed and had accepted a theme for my EDEDC final assignment in this area with working title “I, PI, with my little Eye”. My Lifesteam shows a trickle of contributing elements as I build assets and on-line materials for that.

My Lifestream also shows a number of entries reflecting my continuing discussions on the use of Personal Learning Environments, and experience I am gaining with setting up and using a VLE based on Moodle. A frustrating experience as there are so many labyrinthine paths through which roles and permissions seem to be set up.

The initial readings into “posthuman” literature on EDEDC are just starting to come through as events in my Lifestream. I also hope we might see comments from my EDEDC “bring a friend to class” David Richardson. I added a couple of entries on the PostHuman2011 WallWisher wall, but as noted before these do not show in my Lifestream even though I have the RSS feed set up for that wall too. I posted a blog entry giving some background on why I chose to put an image and information about my PSA avatar on the Posthuman 20011 wall. I will use some elements of this in trying to pull EDEDC themes together for the final assignment.

I see also some entries which reflect the interests I have in space exploration. My twitter feeds are often dominated by NASA and ESA related activities. But in a few week’s time, we are off to Mars again. To be more precise, the names of myself, my virtual worlds avatar (who gets the original invitation due to involvement in NASA’s CoLab in Second Life), my wife, and our elderly parents (who watch these missions with interest) are this time on a chip on the deck of the Opportunity Mars Science Lab.

It was also Halloween of course, so I could not resist a post or two that brought in my user name “bat”, one of my avatar outfits for Halloween provided to me last year in fact and a chance to wear it again, and a funny reference that came up as we had “Zombie” processes plaguing our Moodle service.

Good progress has been made in the last week on setting up a Moodle 2.1.2 (latest version) VLE for tests and connecting it via the SLoodle toolkit to a classroom in Second Life. Feedback is being given to the SLoodle development community as they move the current test systems from alpha code status to a first beta version that will work with Moodle 2.x versions. My Lifestream indicated a flurry of activity on this testing and interaction with the communities involved.

I was surprised that my Lifestream seemed to have a low number of events on a couple of days when I seemed to be very active on-line, and in areas I believed I had feeds in place. It turns out that all WallWisher feeds I have in place only received a single event, for the very first posting on each of my walls, and none since. Its not clear why. The event itself though is meaningless anyway as it does not contain the useful text posted on a WallWisher entry label, and the pointer does not go to the content of the entry, but just generically to the wall itself. As a snapshot today for my own walls (15+1+14) and some contributions to IDEL11 (2), EDC11 (3), and a new EDC11 “Post Human” (2) wall I have a total of 37 WallWisher “events” to date only a few of which show in my LifeStream unfortunately. [Mentioned at the suggestion of Jen Ross purely for assessment reasons ]

Only showing as a few hints in my on-line activity at present (deliberately) is a concept I am developing for work on “Another Planet”. This involves some new concepts I am developing with an exploration of a non-linear “Neo-Grammar” that uses a visual and typographical style with hyperlinks to present “Connectors”. A Wall Wisher wall that already contains 15 or so entries (not showing in my Lifestream) is being created in support of this experiment. More coming in next few weeks on this.

<Connector> ::= Token ⊃—⊂ Token

Finally, I set up a “Personal Learning Environment” web area and entry web page that brings together a lot of the scattered entry points, summary links pages and shortcuts I have to reach web sites, blogs, discussion forums, WallWisher walls, VLEs, etc for the MSc in e-Learning courses, as well as pointers to my own assignment contributions. Initially I created this as part of exploring VLEs vs. PLEs for the IDEL11 course, but it has quickly turned into my single point of entry at work, at home and on mobile devices for access to my educational resources and work areas. Since I cannot resist looking ahead, I also have the EDC11 “Post-Human” WallWisher board embedded on the page at present. This is a good example of how a PLE can reflect current focus for an individual learner. A more controlled VLE approach would definitely not have focused something for the following week on its front page. I have refined the style sheets a little to give a simple flexible width style that gives a maximum view of the core content and works well on a range of browsers and devices with large and small (e.g. mobile device) screens. This work space is at http://atate.org/space/.

So, I have now created a “Personal Work Space” which is acting as a PLE for now, but after the MSc it will be made more generally useful for my continuing life long learning and asset storage at stable URLs. This could be timely as I am within 5 years of likely retirement, and many of the assets I have built over the last 30 years will be ones I want to take into retirement for my continuing interests. I took the opportunity to put in place a new page format and underlying CSS stylesheet that would work more flexibly than my usual project spaces. It accommodates browser width much better, is easier to add content reliably without changing the appearance as my previous tabular layouts tended to, it works in multiple browsers, and it works well in very small windows and on mobile devices. It also uses only simple and standard CSS and uses no Javascript. I moved all the convenient links and a set of useful embedded elements like a course twitter feed as well.

The initial result is at http://atate.org/space/.

There was quite a flurry of activity in my blogs and hence my lifestream this week related to Moodle and the Second Life link up via the SLoodle module and in world classroom object “rezzer”. An updated web/PHP platform to let Moodle 2.1.2 (the latest version) run on one of our servers was put in place last week allowing proper experiments to begin. There is a SLoodle classroom on the VCE region of Second Life and I am blogging and tweeting to the SLoodle community about progress in testing. There are some small issues that are being addressed in the “alpha” grade code currently under review. It is a good time to give feedback to the SLoodle community as they are close to trying to create the first “beta” version of the Moodle module that will be able to run with the latest Moodle 2 versions. My PhD student, Punyanuch Borwarnginn, who is working on Intelligent Learning Environments also has a course set up. She also has her own I-Room/Classroom space on Vue North in Second Life, and is now a course creator in our Moodle system. See http://openvce.net/ile .

There was a flurry of lifestream events related to my completion of a “learning challenge” for the ULOE11 course. This was a fun challenge to learn one of the skills taught to junior hairdressers. I took this seriously and probably went a bit over the top with the effort put in on it. But it was very enjoyable, and I am pleased with the results. The lifestream events show my various blog postings as I went along. See http://atate.org/mscel/hair/ for a summary of the whole show. I have created a colour printable version to provide back to the good people at the hairdressing salon who helped me.

I notice that a lot of my activity on the “Digital Cultures” course does not appear in my lifestream as much of the discussion is now on a non-public Discussion Forum. The ethnography study also involves personal analysis of the corpus of messages from my virtual community… GA-MMA. The emerging results are being created at http://atate.org/mscel/ethno/.

Finally, this week we also heard that John McCarthy had died. He was a pioneer of AI, and the one who coined that term. He was a great visionary too. I made several postings and tweets about his life, and gave pointers to his fun and perceptive short story… “The Robot and the Baby”.

I had originally decided I could not afford the time to do a machinima of the digital artifact… but the moving imagery of a clone emerging as a cloud and rezzzing gradually really is one of the best parts. So I invested a couple of hours to produce a one minute machinima of this. The cutting and audio track mixing really does take time when you are not an expert at it. The result is on the blog, on YouTube and in the artifact itself at http://atate.org/ai/ai/ .

Everyone is putting in a lot of time on the course and the artifacts they are creating. But its fun to do so too. This opportunity brings out the thwarted (but not very capable) artist in me. I always feel I have more ideas than I can translate to artifacts I feel capture what I want to communicate. But the Digital Culture course offers a platform to release some of this.

I like to get ahead on tasks, so I have been preparing a good bit of the background and addressing technical aspects of gathering data for the ethnography study. I have chosen to address the Gerry Anderson Model Makers’ Alliance (GA-MMA). A start on the study is at http://atate.org/mscel/ethno/. Ethical issues of the study were addressed this week, and my lifestresams shows I engaged with the class on ethics issues. I blogged on it too. I am the School of Informatics ethics representative and look after our ethical processes.

There were a lot of entries in my lifestream from the activity in Second Life on IDEL11, which has been fun, and the start of my ULOE11 “Learning Task” to learn how to blow dry under a professional hairdresser. Lots more detail at http://atate.org/mscel/hair/.

There is the usual scattering of other lifestream entries, especially on Twittter, for some of my interests in world land speed record attempts which I have followed and supported since the 1960s. The next 2 years will see the most activity in this areas since the mid 1960s with attempts to take the record from just supersonic up to 1,000m.p.h.

VW Cloud Avatar

The Cyberchat between my two avatars equipped with MyCyberTwin chat bot via a web interface was interesting to observe. See http://atate.org/ai/ai/res/2011-10-09-chat-log-ai-and-be.txt. I was very surprised at how well they did with relatively little training, and no FAQ or tutorial sections in their repertoire.. which is possible with the technology provided. They seemed very civil. I tried to manually intervene a few times… but they seemed to chat on quite well, even changing the subject them,selves a couple of times.

IDEL11 in Second Life
The IDEL11 course moved some of its work and tutorials in Second life… which I am familiar with, so I was on home turf a bit there. I observed the other new users and their avatars to see how they got on, as part of my research and project work involves supporting new communities and simplifying the access experience for people collaborating using virtual worlds alongside other collaborative technologies.

The week was characterised for me by being on travel and working with mobile devices and a slow 3G connection. It is a time to remember that not all our students and distance learners are on fast broadband networks, and every item of content, image and thumbnail download and reload for trivial clicks must be paid for. I experienced blank white browsers screens for over a minute while typical content management systems like WordPress composed their page for rendering… made up of hundreds of images and user icons.. and then showed it all at once.. immediately followed by some click to get you really where you want to be (like login prompt) followed by a total reload of every one of the same content items. These systems are poorly designed for bandwidth limited connections, mobile devices and so on. The systems seem not to have provided fall back styles, and forgotten the art of low bandwidth images, progressive rendering of pages with image and tables sizes predefined, etc.

Twitter, Discussion Forums and Blogs

My life stream this week indicates I can continue to interact reasonably well with others I collaborate with via Twitter while on travel. Though not having a simple way to view new tweets to #tags is an issue… only supported in systems I have with TwitterDeck on my desktops. Threaded discussion Forums are easy to follow, keep up to date with and input to, they can be looked back over indefinitely, searched, and new posts can easily be seen. I would say should be a preferred mode of operations for distance educators. Skype is okay if permitted in your location, but is bandwidth hungry, needs a 100% time connection (3G can drop out frequently in low signal areas), but not ideal for some topics that do not require synconicity. Blog posting are possible, but massive over use of images, header images and so on make this an expensive and time consuming frustrating process for the distance learner or user.

Reading and Comments

I did manage to get on top of core readings for my MSc in e-Learning modules and do some of the secondary reading. That was useful to interact with other students. It allowed for a bit of fun on the Digital Cultures course Skye chat this week, where one of the core reading authors was present. I was half serious about my comment on “tabloid headlines” for phrases such as “uncanny” environments and “hierarchical violence”. But “strangely” and in “uncanny” way I find myself using those phrases as I start to look at a visual artifact for week 4.

Wordle Diagram for EDC11 as at 28-Sep-2011

My Life Wall at http://atate.org is now pretty much as I wanted it to be… though I have yet to work out how to properly add tags onto the Google map.

I had quite a few tweets and some blog entries about “Other Worlds” a theme of the film fest and tweeting events on EDEDC11 this week.  I drew attention to some highly detailed world and imaginative worlds developed in film (Avatar), Prose (Larry Niven’s Ringworld), Games (Gran Turismo) and Artworks (Vincent Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” reconstruction in Second Life).  It allowed for some enthusiastic exchanges between myself and other class members on these areas. I provided YouTube video links for these in SynchTube at http://www.synchtube.com/r/aiaustin.

1. Twitter feeds
2. Blog entry feeds on the Drupal-based OpenVCE.net – the Open Virtual Collaboration Environment – which I use for my technical blogging for much of my research on collaboration, virtual worlds and intelligent systems
3. Various MSc in e-Learning blog posting and comment feeds on the Holyrood Park Hub and Holyrood Park Blogs
4. WallWisher Wall feeds

Feeds on my LifeStream are being aggregated from myself and my virtual worlds avatar “Ai Austin”.  They initially include Twitter (@batate and @aiaiaustin), WellWisher walls and the OpenVCE.net Virtual Collaboration Environment where I frequently post content.