Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

I finally waited till the showing date of the newest X-Men movie: X-Men 4 Origins: Wolverine. The movie crew did a set at UBC back in January. The staged battle ground was literally right outside of my office in Buchanan! My colleague and I took quite a few pictures in front of the heavy armories at the set. However, I felt kind obligated not to post any descriptions or photos about the set until the movie starts. Here are some of shots I took back on January 14th.

The annual Chinese Spring Festival Gala on CCTV is probably one of the most popular TV program world wide. Considering a high percentage of the 1.4 billion Chinese in China and millions around the world have watched it on multiple media platforms in the past 24 hours. The following is one of the best performance from the gala. The name of the dance is "City Transactions" which describes the revolution of the Chinese cities and the people within. It's a dance well designed with multimedia displays and amazing stage technologies. Make sure you watch it at HD quality!

watch the original youtube clip for wide screen and full screen experience.

Oh, btw, Happy Chinese New Year, the year of OX!

Today is a Chinese festival that even many Chinese people are no longer familiar with: the Laba Festival. The Legend says over two thousands years ago, Sakyamuni (565 B. C.- 486 B. C. ), the founder of Buddhism, becomes Buddha on the 8th of the 12th lunar month, thanks to a bowl of porridge. This is why many temples in China has offered free porridge to the public. It seems Shaolin Temple's porridge stand attracted the most amount of people.

Well, according to CBC, the Beijing Olympics Closing Ceremony was SPECTACULAR! Combined with the 8 minutes show provided by London, the hosting city of the 2012 Olympics, it was a magnificent show bridging the east and the west! Here are some shots from the closing ceremony, credit to Xinhua Net. The ceremony started at 8:00 PM Beijing Time, 5:00AM Vancouver Time.

Three years ago, Henry Jenkins introduced Anime Cosplay at the NMC summer conference in Hawaii. It was my first chapter into participatory culture...

Today, August 22nd 2008, UBC is hosting one of the largest Animation convention in Canada - Anime Evolution 2008. The crazy thing is I didn't even know about this until this morning. It's kinda like the beginning of Harry Potter, all of the sudden, "strangely dressed" people popping up out side of my office windows...

Anime Evolution is an annual 3 days event celebrating Japanese animation and Asian popular culture. Many of the participants spend days and weeks preparing complex costume in order to appear as one of the heroes from the animations during the convention. Click here for more "official definition" of cosplay. There are interactive panel discussions, cultural demonstrations, video shows, costume contests and video game competitions! The event used to take place at SFU but due to record breaking number of attendees, this year's event is moved to UBC!

I wish I could know this a little earlier since I am a big fan of Japanese animations. From Dragon Ball to Naruto, you name it! Seeing hundreds of cosplayers walking by my office really made my day. Here are some shots I took over lunch...

I woke up at 5:00 AM Vancouver time to watch the 2008 Beijing Olympic Opening Ceremony and I am glad I did. It was a magnificent show! Hope the following images will encourage you to watch it later if you have missed it! I have recommended all of my friends to watch it tonight when NBC shows it again.

Watched this clip today on Youtube, kinda funny. Warning: the content is extremely anti-social, Viewer discretion is advised...

Talking about all the weird weathers around the world, Vancouver is getting a heavy snow (well, on UBC campus at the least) after the Easter holidays. I sincerely hope this has nothing to do with the global warming phenomena...



Too bad we don't have any Cherry Blossoms (Sakura)around Buchanan.

Kudos to Julian Lombardi and Mark P. McCahill and the rest of the team at Duke university. They just received the 2007 MATC (Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration) for leadership and development work on the OpenCroquet project. Julian and Mark were both among the original architects behind Open Croquet and they are currently dedicated to push the Croquet platform further into the open source community. Congratulations!

I suppose it's a good thing that Educause 2007 Seattle is "sold out". However, conference participants are often "shut out" from the sessions they want to join because of the room is "full" is a quite frustrating experience. I showed up 10 minutes before the early morning sessions started (8:00) and was told the room is full. There were obvious seats available at but the door lady was doing a count I suppose and she is not allowing anybody standing nor sitting on the floor! I think they should be a bit more considerate that people wakes up early in the morning to come to these sessions. They should at the least do their best to accommodate as many people in the room as possible. I just wish there have been more presentations in each track so the traffic can be averaged out a little better. Well, enough whining, I better run to the next session and line up now or I will be "shut out" again.

Jeff VanDrimmelen at Office of Arts and Sciences Information Services, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill recently wrote 7 ways Croquet is better than Second Life. Although I never put Croquet side by side with Second Life, I however, do agree with most of the points he wrote in the article. But please remember, Croquet is much more than a multi-user online social platform. (e.g. cross-platform, cross-device application sharing and much more...)

Just finished: Farcry
Currently Playing: Warcraft III TFT DOTA, Counter Strike Source and F.E.A.R.
Waiting for: Crysis, Unreal tournament 3 and Starcraft 2.

Thank God for pulling me away from WOW, so I still have time to read blogs...

Millions of us focused on preventing global warming over the weekend. But the numbers are still shocking: only 24 hours after the show, 21,400 acres of forests vanished, 2 billion polluted water was dumped into the ocean and 10,000 kids died due to lack of clean drinking water, 8500,000 gallons of gas burned...

Here is a shot of the cleanest ocean water found on earth, it's close to purple color, sun light can been seen over 100 meters deep!

Wow, I didn't know this existed, but it is true. The winners are out! Here you will find the "Most Creative", "Best Comedy", "Best Commentary", "Best Series", "Best Music Video", "Most Inspirational", and "Most Adorable" clips from millions of YouTube flicks. All winners are selected by YouTube member. How would you feel if you have 14,243,129 subscribers to your motion pictures?

My favorite of them all? the "Most Creative Award: Here It Goes Again". I love how they did the "roller blading moves". Oops, I just spoiled it... LOL. The Kiwi animation is well done too!

It's interesting to see YouTube is not just a playground for the copycats to violate copyrights and intellectual properties, but also a creative arena for talented media producers... So, I guess if you can't get to the "Idol" TV programs? Try YouTube!

Croquet SDK 1.0 is released! Kudos to the Croquet development team, and the Open Croquet Consortium. I first learned this from Julian's blog. It's great to see Croquet is finally out of it's beta series. This new release is more stable and easier to use. A lots of bugs I have experienced in the beta releases have disappeared (e.g. Single right click “teleport” you). I can't wait to generate collaborative working spaces in the new version for the Arts Mertaverse project.

Here are a few new functions would defenitley benefit the Arts Metaverse Project:

1). The “mini-world” object can serve as a “portal” to enter a new space. This would allow us generate “previews” of the ancient world and the students can “jump” into the world at any time by walk over the mini-world object.

2). Users can easily create light sources in the world. This will allow the visitors to light up a “torch” in a dark world. This way and the world creators can focus on more precise implementations of the settings. (e.g. I want to create a cave, but don't want to put any lights in there to mis-lead the visitors. It is important for the visitor to explore the dark space in their own manner...)
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3). Simple primitives like cube and sphere can be created inside of the Croquet world. But with the mesh import features, you don't really need to us this to build 3D objects inside of the Croquet World. I suppose this is for the people whom don't want fiddle around with Blender or 3D Max...
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4). Use “ctrl + A” to toggle the viewing perspectives. Thanks guys! How many times I heard the question “how do I get rid of the giant rabbit head so I can see the world better?!”
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5). Built-in camera and audio functions, use the KAT demo and goto new Video Camera Output and Microphone Output, you can instantly video conference with everyone in the world! I remember Julian was showing us this in UCLA. Unfortunately I don't have a camera installed on this machine, gonna try it out tomorrow with my co-workers
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6). “what is my location” instantly shows you network information of the terminal computer you are using, you can send “xml post card” like this:
where your friends can join your world instantly
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7). The “admin” menu gives you detailed system information about the world for debugging and traffic monitoring purposes.
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8). Last but not least, one can easily browse the world wide web from inside of the Croquet world by “new” -> “desktop” -> “the url to the web site” in the KAT Demo
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Two new features I would like to explore more but no time right now is: “Robot Play/Record” and “Remote Desktop Configuration”. I believe the “Robot Play/Record” function allows you to record in-world activities such as avatar gestures and much more...
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These are just the obvious functions I could pick up in the last couple of hours. But I am sure after going through the programming tools more thouroughly tomorrow, more exciting features will come out.

BTW, did I mention that I am blogging this from inside of Croquet?!
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An organization has its own shuttle bus and provide free transportation for their employees is a very common service in China. Workers in schools, government agencies or private businesses all enjoy some sort of "transportation tip" (free bus, taxi re-reimbursement etc.) on a monthly basis. However, it is quite rare here in North America. A recent article in New York Times exposed that Google is providing this service to the employees in the San Francisco region. I suppose it may be not as needed as in China since most people work in Google can afford cars but it is still a very thoughtful service due to high traffic in the cities. If you can hop onto a free ride and relax, surf on the Internet and get off right in front of your office, it's kinda nice isn't it? Anyway, the article says, Google owns 32 buses, their routes cover over 10 cities and 6 counties around SF area. The buses provide free transportation to over 25% of the employees (around 1200 people). They even have their own "department of transportation"! I googled “Google Bus”, but only could find the Korean version of “Google Bus”, but I have to say this is a great idea to keep their employees and great advertisement!

Beside free transportation, Google is doing the best to keep the employees: free cafeteria, free GYM, free rock climbing facilities, free swimming pool, free car wash, and free spa! I need to forward this to my Microsoft friends...

Korean Version of Google Bus

I am back from 2 months of holidays. And I feel great! Too bad this is not a travel blog otherwise I wouldn't mind to share some great "road trip" stories. Anyway, one thing I would like to mention is while Second Life is catching more media's attention in the western world, not too many people overseas knows what it is yet. I mentioned this to two of my best friends, one is a director of a well know Chinese university's distance learning division and the other is a owner of a game company in China who just launched a national wide game in December 2006. These two people had different thoughts over Second Life product. The elearning friend questioned:
1).the amount of interest from the academics. From his experience, there will be lack of interest from the professors, especially in China. Because the academics are pressured to produce research papers every year and therefore, they won't spend extra energy on the new technology which is aimed to enhance students' learning experiences.
2).the true value of the 3-D virtual class experience. He questioned other than the limited subjects he can think of such as: architecture, theater and engineering, what else can the platform do that the other existing platform won't. He means why would people use a much more complex platform like Second Life while they can easily use products like Breeze to have a synchronous online teaching experience.

My game developing friend (more like a professional business man) immediately smelled the money from the idea. But he challenged the technical difficulty of creating a “virtual world” that has no theme, no particular regulation, and most importantly – no guide lines. “the world will be swamped with hackers and people whom won't follow the rule”. He also questioned the players' interest. From his experience, the younger generation would rather play games like “The Sim” or “Desperate House Wives” where there is a theme and goal. Why would they spend time learning how to build houses and trade virtual merchandises that not making their avatar “more powerful”? But he does admit Second Life may catch a large crowd of female audiences where there are lack of games designed for them.

Anyway, both of them promised to look into this new phenomena and stay in touch with me with their new thoughts. I, on the other hand, agrees with D'Arcy Norman's thoughts on Second Life, it is too much involved with the $ sign. I am doubting it's sustainability for educational use in the long run.

A heavy snow hit Vancouver over the weekend. UBC area banked over 6 inches of snow. Yeah, D'Arcy is probably thinking what'ya talking about? Half of a foot?! That's probably the lowest record of snow fall in Calgary or Regina throughout the winter. Although the temperature is only -7 Celsius but my Vancouver grown up co-workers are complaining they are dropped into an ice cube! They wouldn't believe me about “delivering news papers in the -35 Celsius temperature”. UBC was shut down on Monday due to power outage caused by the “heavy” snow? The city engineers are spraying salt like crazy all over the city. Hope they didn't have to “burrow” road salt from Calgary! :)

Times just released their "best inventions 2006" collection. Very impressive stuff! Here is my shopping list, for the far future of course...

1. "Floating Bed", man, this ought to be the best one among them all! Imagine sleeping on a "magic carpet" that is floating in the air at all times?! Not to mention it supports up to 2000lbs of weights! You can imagine the "fun" on this bed!

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2.I have always wanted a “bike car” when I was a little kid in China. The very first vehicle I ever rode in (that I could remember) was a old looking 3 wheel moped when I was 5 years old. This one is definitely taking it up a notch.

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3.Laugh out loud when I saw this one, a “robotic body double”! Yeah, I would love to spend a few weekend program the “Tim Double” to learn how to type and cough. This way, all I need is keep my office door shut!

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4.Yep, this is a “Solid Espresso”, my coffee drinking co-workers, yeah, I am talking to you, John and Liang! Eat it with a spoon!

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5.Here is another funny one, under “The Military”, “Convert Straw into Building Material”! I feel like “the first little pig”, “please, don't blow at my house, it's made outa straw”. Hey, here is another idea, let's rebuild Baghdad using straws!

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6.The ultimate toy would be this one – the “Magic Mirror”. A mirror looking display panel being programmed and linked to the household surveillance system. The “mirror” can communicate with you through a talking head. Yes, a virtual butler in a magical mirror for twenty thousand dollars!

Yay, the host finally upgraded the blog system to Serenity! The process was generally painless according to the administrator. Except some parameters have been changed in the stub files.

It's been a crazy month at work, beginning of the school term... Will get back to the normal blogging in October.

Apologies to my blog subscribers for not being able to keep up with the postings lately. As approaching to September, works start to pile up. Anyway, August is a critical month for the Ancient Spaces project where the modelers are busy porting the precisely designed 3D models into the Ancient Spaces editor and rendering engine. Check out these wonderful pictures, the lighting and shadows really make a difference!

Nisga Village

Machu Picchu in the Editor!

More stories in Ancient Spaces' blog.

This great nation is 139 years old today! Happy birthday Canada!

Yep, it's true, macromedia.com is gone. The domain name will instantly point you to the adobe.com with a new look that some what retaining much of the styling from the old macromedia.com. Allow me to once more post a screen shot of the old macromedia.com. For the respect of the wonderful tools in the past and my best wishes to the new unified Adobe.

From Brent:

Version 0.15 of the eXe project has been released and includes the following changes:

- the ability to add a background image and/or a title to the Web Page export
- improved seamist style
- Slovenian wiki url to wiki iDevice
- Added Zulu translation
- Numerous bug fixes

Great work Brent's group has done. I recommend this to all educators who look for a platform independent solution in content publishing.

Since Google established it's Shanghai office in the year 2005, more online users in China start to learn the GOOGLE language. Baidu has taken the lead of the search engine market in China since 2003. According to a recent study by iResearch, there were 56.6% online users use Baidu vs. 32.8% Google users. The third place is held by Yahoo China. According to the study, there are over 97 million online users (87.4%) use search engines on the daily basis in China. This number may exceed 100 million this year.

The online shopping market exceeded 4 billion RMB last year where 3/4 of the sales were based on online ads and the other 1/4 of the sales were generated from online searches. From the data of the North American online market growth, we can expect this ratio (online ads. vs search ads.) will change gradually in China this year.

One challenge Goolge China is facing is that both Baidu and Yahoo support MP3 searches which some what is violating the copy right law of digital music distributions. However, there are dramatic amount of users are choosing the two search engines based on this service. Google needs to either join the game and offer similar MP3 search services or future enforce it's competitors - Baidu and Yahoo China to terminate the commercial MP3 search features.

Two students in MIT invented a pair of water glass for valentines. They used General Packet Radio Service to synchronize the LED built into the glass so that when one of the glass is used, the other one will glow at a distance. This way the two lovers can share the moment of drinking from remote locations. The technology can also be used by nurses in hospitals to monitor patients.

A wonderful event organized by e-Strategy and the Office of Learning Technology - UBC eLearning Open House 2006 was taken place yesterday at the beautiful West Atrium of the Life Sciences Centre. It is a key event for UBC colleagues to gather information about e-Learning and innovative projects and studies occurring on campus in an informal and relaxed setting. Each year UBC faculty members who are involved in nurturing and supporting learning technology demonstrate their innovative courses, applications, research, projects and tools to the UBC community.

The poster was created by two pretty ladies here at Arts ISIT: Liang and Angela. The message we are trying pass out is: no matter how limited our faculty members' resources are, we can provide them with support in delivering an interactive and exciting digital content package to their learners. On the poster, you may find learning tools we have created to be used by any educator at free of cost. You can also find works we have done with very limited resources by utilizing existing technologies such as Typo 3, Educational Games and other 3rd party software. There are also screen shots of the “Ferrari” courses we have designed in the past: English and Classic Study mixed mode courses etc.

Click here to zoom in on the poster, created using Pachyderm Zoom Screen.