Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

This is another back-dated blog post. I just got back from a month long vacation...

Uli delivered a successful keynote at the Diverse 2008 at Inholland University, Haarlem, NL on July 2nd, 2008. He covered a wide range of divergence in the media culture from an educational technologist’s point of view. The keynote was well received based on some of the participants’ comments in the party afterwards. Uli and I also delivered two workshops on Concept Maps and Rich Media tools before and after the conference. This great opportunity came to us through connections at Educause.

This is my first time attending the DIVERSE conference. I find the community has a great operational model. It’s very much like an open source community. There is no complicated administration or organizational structure. But yet members manage to share experience, insights and innovations efficiently using all the media tools available on the web: Facebook, Youtube, blogs, wikis, you name it. Everybody is so friendly and language wasn’t a barrier at all. In any case, this was a great conference! Oh, I forgot to mention it was a FUN conference too! Check out their after-conference sailing trip!!! (Uli and I unfortunately had to miss it due to other commitment... :()

This is another back-dated blog post, due to attending NMC 2008 conference at Princeton.

Flying to Princeton for this year's NMC summer conference with my colleagues from UBC: Cyprien Lomas, Joel Chauvin, Natasha Boskic and Negin Mirriahi. Diana Oblinger, President of Educause opened this conference with a powerful speech on her visions of e-Learning 3.0. All of the key note speaks can be found here. Stay tuned for further updates...

One of the most "exciting" conference took place in town last week - The CanSecWest conference 2008 (the world's most advanced conference focusing on applied digital security) was held in Vancouver, B.C. Canada. And of course, the most exciting event in the conference would be the "PWN2OWN 2008" contest, where three laptop computers each equipped with Mac OSX 10.5.2, MS. Windows Vista Ultimate SP1, and Ubuntu 7.10 (linux) are put to the stand to some brilliant "hackers" to break. The first person succeed take the laptop he/she breaks plus a cash prize. Specific rules applies to each day of the contest, regulations will be gradually relaxed over time, but the cash prize is also shrinking while the clock is ticking...

The first day, under the strict condition that only the default OS could be targeted, no security breach reported among all three machines. The second day (Thursday, Mar 27th, 2008), stand applications like email clients, browsers were allowed to be targeted and guess who was the first to go? The brand new MacBook Air with OSX 10.5.2 went down due to an undisclosed Safari (the default web browser for Mac) flaw. The Windows Vista held one more day and went down on the third day (Friday, Mar 28th, 2008). On that day, the contest rule was even more relaxed where more "popular applications" can be installed on the laptops. Thanks to an previously unknown flaw in Adobe's Flash software, thus the Windows Vista fell...

The Sony Vaio laptop running Ubuntu remained "un-compromised" at the end of the conference. The MacBook Air winners collected $10,000 and the Vista breakers collected $5,000. What a nerve wracking event!

Julian Lombardi showed us the first application build of Open Croquet - Cobalt on the first day of the "Harnessing Virtual Worlds for Arts and Humanities Scholarship Summit" at Menlo Park, CA. This is a really exciting milestone for the Croquet consortium in the sense that developers across the globe can now systematically build out virtual worlds using given Croquet functions. I will not spoil the launch of the application and leave the excitement till next week. Get ready to download it at opencroquet.org

There is a really exciting event coming up this weekend: Boston Digital Media Summit. Check out the program schedule. There are quite a few interesting sessions that I would love to follow up with: Larry Johnson (CEO of the New Media Consortium) on Game-changing Immersive Educaiton Paradigms. Julian Lombardi (Chairman of the Board of Directors, Croquet Consortium) on The Croquet Immersive Education Platform. The summit focuses on how can games and 3D simulations facilitate learning. This would be a wonderful opportunity to realize (or debate on) the true values of the technologies like Second Life and Croquet in education. Unfortunately, there are other commitment so I will miss this event. But I will share the web cast on this blog if there is any.

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.

Today is the first day of Educause 2007 with open tracks. It was a long day. Maybe due to the high attendance, two of the presentations I originally planned to attend were maxed out. The annoying thing is we didn’t even get the chance to stand at the back of the room. Instead, all people who couldn’t have a seat got kicked out of the room by the convention centre staff! A few participants were kinda pissed off right on spot. I heard someone argued that if he could sit on the floor, and got kicked out too. I think this is a bit harsh for an educational conference.

Anyway, I ended up in a few great sessions anyway. Mark P. McCahill and Bob Price gave a great session with some innovative ideas around tagging rich media elements on the web without boundary. The exhibition hall is (are) huge, much bigger than last year’s I think. I tried the relaxation stations (massage) in between the halls, it felt great.

At the end of the day I managed to rush to a bird of feather session on Open Source development after attending the poster session. I put in a few cents:
- Open source tools vs Free Services vs Traditional Shrink Wrapped software (Open Office Vs Google Doc Vs Microsoft Office)
- Declare Apache Licence instead GPL may help to build a larger user/developer community when creating Open Source tools.
It was nice to see Mike Reese there too.

Later at night, I had a chance to check out the music project space at the Seattle Science Fiction Museum with our Dutch friends. It’s right underneath the needle tower and an extremely funky building! The sky train ride straight into it on the SF side. I accidentally walked into the wrong entrance where Google was throwing Halloween Party. Let’s just say I got to see some “funky” Google characteristics…  A long but resourceful day!

Hello Sleepless Seattle! Well, it was a short ride from vancouver to Seattle. Much more comfortable than some short haul flights. This is actually my first time being in Seattle. We stumbled upon a film festival reception / party 20 minutes after we checked into the hotel. (We heard the Music from my hotel suite, just followed the beat.) It was an amazing party with some great 50/60 musics! Anyway, better get some sleep and need to get up early for a workshop planning meeting. Uli and I are giving a pre-conference workshop with our friends from SURFfoundation and INHOLLAND University of Professional Education. The title of the workshop is: Seminar 09P - Let's Get Visual! Integrating Concept Maps, Rich Media, Social Software, and the LMS into Teaching and Learning

Workshop Abstract: Today’s students favor visuals and social computing tools, while instructors want to foster the development of deep, expert knowledge. Using concept maps connects student desires and instructor objectives. INHOLLAND University of Professional Education and the University of British Columbia have innovatively linked concept maps, rich media, and Web-based content.

At INHOLLAND University students learn in a visual and social online environment, using concept maps to engage in argumentation, writing, reflection, and brainstorming. Combinations of concept maps and rich media with a learning management system, wikis, and blogs help students create a unique yet structured viewpoint that retains a bird’s-eye view of complex ideas and concepts.

Instructors and staff from INHOLLAND, SURFdiensten, and UBC will discuss the process of choosing, implementing, and piloting a new concept mapping tool; demonstrate 10-plus practices and templates; and present tools in a hands-on manner.

In order to celebrate the 10th year of the great technology Flash (Previously know as Macromedia Shockwave Flash), Adobe Flash developers are ready to push out Flash Player 10 and the Authoring tool. They demonstrated the new tool at Adobe MAX Chicago this week. It looks like the new authoring tool has more power in the video editing and animation manipulations. The authors can have the video clips playing in real time while editing the animation. The well known and overly used "tween" tool is apparently much more powerful. You can say "bye bye" to the confusing "path" tool which has been used since Flash 4. The manipulation of the path during the tween motion is much more intelligent and flexible. On top of the fancy UI editing features, Adobe also introduced a C/C++ to Actionscript 3 conversion process which allows Flash authors to easily integrate C++ code into swf files! They managed to show a demo of the famous FPS game Quake in Flash which are purely converted C++ code to AS3. I am anticipating Flash Player 10 will open a new horizon in 3D programming and UI designs. Really impressive.

Peter Elst managed to capture the exciting demo at the conference. Check them out!

Also check out this amazing video time line created for Flash 10 years on Adobe's site:

This is a indeed delayed posting for the 2007 NMC Summer Conference at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis. NMC summer conference has a great reputation as “the most entertaining learning technology conference” to attend each year. This year's event well defended it's reputation. It was a week of great community building, great knowledge exchange and most importantly, great fun!

Gaming and Education was the theme of this year's conference. While Second Life certainly made to the top of the list among all discussions, presentations and group sessions, the NMC community still managed to cover a wide range of technologies around the new media and education industry: motion graphic productions, web based rich media learning tools, open source 3D immersive platforms and a variety of commercial/educational games. What I find most valuable of this conference are the people, you will meet many instructional developers, technology innovators, hard-core gamers (not gonna mention u-all names), creative artists and brilliant media designers throughout the conference!

Ok, enough praise to the conference, here are the report from us UBC folks who attended the conference. Friday the 15th was a PACKED day for all of us. Uli and I did a presentation on Arts Metaverse and Open Croquet at 8:30 in the morning. Then a productive and exciting Pachyderm meeting at the lunch time. (It was great seeing the Pachy folks in person again!) Then in the afternoon we received the “NMC Center of Excellence Award” (YES, we are one of the three recipients this year! Thank you NMC!) and Joel did a 5 minutes of fame on the Language Pronunciation Tool. The morning session and the 5 minutes of fame session went extremely smooth (phew... not to mention we missed quite a few good “party opportunities” before Friday for the last minutes preparation...). I think we have raised a lots of interests in Open Croquet and Arts Metaverse throughout the conference. Following-up emails are flying in...

The Jam session was absolutely fabulous! No need to describe it in words, check out Alan Levine's flickr photos.

Oh, yes, one more thing, NMC made an announcement during the conference - "NMC Joins Immersive Education Initiative to Advance Virtual Learning", and Croquet is on the list!

Anyway, thank you NMC again for the award and see you all next summer at Princeton!

Next Tuesday, May 5th, I am invited to do a talk at the UBC Library’s TOTS - Tools for Outreach & Teaching Series, here is the outline of the meeting:

* Introduction and demonstration of some of current library applications in Second Life.
* Applications of virtual worlds at UBC: Buchanan Island, Ancient Spaces and the Arts Metaverse.
* Sandbox/ hands-on part where the group will be divided into small groups to try out Second Life with a Second Life guide – this is someone who currently has an avatar in Second Life. There will be set questions that the small groups can consider while they have a chance to navigate in Second Life, using an already created avatar. There will be recorders in each of the small groups and the thoughts collected in the small groups will be collected and posted to the blog or wiki.
* The group will reassemble for a group discussion and reflection on the small group experience. The emphasis will be on discussing concrete ways these new technologies may be useful to incorporate into the work and services we are providing in the library.

Then I am off to the NMC Summer Conference where Uli and I are co-presenting on "Arts Metaverse in Open Croquet: Exploring an Open Source 3D Online Digital World" at 8:30-9:45 am on Friday June 8th. Here is the summary of the presentation from the NMC 2007 Summer conference program book:

Many virtual worlds offer compelling UI and interactive functions that engage and even absorb the frequent or casual visitor and are, in a best case scenario, supported by a grid-based network. The freely-available Arts Metaverse open source technologies, in combination with the open Croquet platform, provide an immersive, real-time learning environment. Large numbers of students may navigate through virtual constructions, annotating, critiquing, and amending them in collaboration with one another.

Upon return, Liang and I are presenting Arts Metaverse and Immersive 3D Applications in Arts at UBC Townhall 2007. This explains a little on why I have not been blogging lately. But I promise, there are more exciting developments on Arts Metaverse and Learning Tools coming soon... So, stay tuned!

My colleague Liang and I are invited to attend this year's AVAH (School of Arts History, Visual Arts and Theory) faculty retreat. We will be giving a presentation on Incorporating Online Learning Resources Using Rich Media Tools. We will walk through the path of the online learning - from the traditional LMS to Social Networking to 3D online communities.

In a recent presentation Uli and I gave at the HASTAC conference, a slide was introduced where it clearly indicats how the online learning has been evolved from course centered design to learner centered design and now off to context centered design. It's really interesting to look back at how rich media been playing an important role in the paradigm shifts.

Here are a few slides from the presentation tomorrow...

I went into a blog silence in the last couple of days because I was attending the first HASTAC conference (Electronic Techtonics : Thinking at the Interface) at Durham, North Carolina. It was an unbelievably brilliant group of people from all over the world. You can imagine what happens when you put a couple of hundreds of humanist, artists, and scientists under the same roof and talk about technology! The creative thoughts just came left, right and center! The activities and information exchange went non stop from 6 AM to mid night each day. My brain cells just got completely exhausted at the end of the day. This ought be the most intensive yet knowledgeable conference I ever attended.

We arrived at Durham on Thursday afternoon and headed straight to the Nasher Meseum at Duke University for the opening keynote by John Seely Brown (JSB). JSB's talk was on “The Social Life of Learning in the Net Age”. I strongly recommend some of his recent papers on Digital Culture and Learning in the Digital Age:
- Growing Up Digital: How the Web Changes Work, Education, and the Ways People Learn, by John Seely Brown
- Learning, Working & Playing in the Digital Age, by John Seely Brown
- The University in the Digital Age by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid
In fact, I recommend all of the speakings from his website, a true learning experience.

Of course the key-note speakers' in first day are equally inspiring and informative. James Boyle on “Creative Commons, Science Commons, and Open Source” and Rebecca Allen on “Global Interfaces, Intimate Interfaces and the Interface between Art and Technology”. It was a valuable experience to learn about open learning being supported in both the content and technology aspect. I have to say, the 100 dollar laptop final look (green and white) looks really slick!

Aside from the brilliant keynote speakers, all of the panels went on nicely. Great discussions after each one of them. Our panel on Innerspace and Interface turned out well. The discussions at the end were very informative. It was an pleasure that the evening key note speaker Rebecca Allen to be in our session as well. Her experience from the gaming industry provided us a new perspective of the virtual simulation and knowledge building medium.

The second day of the conference took place at Duke university, the activities were even more exciting. It started with a good information session on The Future of Learning: Three Perspectives where focused on how the young generation learners are adopting the new digital technologies and how would us educators accommodate the new needs. The discussions were quite intriguing too. This followed with a great panel on “At the Interface of Everything”, indeed, it was “A rare conversation across domains among digital visionaries. The outcome will be a mind-map of the conference and a game-plan for unforeseeable futures.” This was a fun and engaging session where a little competition was designed for the 12 panelist and the room full of audiences.

Lunch took place with a heated panel on Arts and Technology. All I need to say is the panel started with a super controversial question, “what is arts?”

My favorite part came in the afternoon of the second day. A tour to the well-known “DiVE” (Duke Immersive Virtual Environment) site and a show case of the Open Croquet project. I had the honor to meet with 3 of the 6 key engineers of "Croquet”: David Smith, Mark McCahill, and our old friend - Julian Lombardi. The meeting helped me to further understand the architecture behind the amazing open source platform. We also had a chance to show some of the visitors the Arts Metaverse contents in Croquet world.

As many other conferences, the Electronic Techtonics ends with a nice reception at the Branch Gallery and an “extended dinner” where many participants voluntarily gathered in the restaurant next door to continue the exchange.

The philosophical, sociological and economical discussions really keep your brain swirling. But with the technology as a central piece, the ideas merge seamlessly. It's interesting that this is the first conference of HASTAC where all attendees had a very open mind and trying to get a sense of where does the conference position itself between theories and practices. My experience? This conference is a true collage of academics, technologists and foundations where you find both the true academic needs and technological solutions. I am looking forward to the next year's program on HASTAC.

Tectonic Shift Think Tank is held in Vancouver tomorrow. It aims to identify the transformation opportunities for Mediawiki and related FLOSS technologies (Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS)) for eLearning using free cultural works for Education. Here are some "brain teasers" from the dynamic agenda:

- All you need for the future of eLearning is free content, Mediawiki and Google
- It's better to have a poor quality educational resource that gives you the freedom to adapt and modify for ongoing quality enhancements than having access to a high quality closed resource.
- The conventional education model cannot deliver on the overwhelming demand for education in the developing world
- We can develop superior quality resources using open authoring models when compared to closed content authoring
- Digital mash-ups provide a glimpse of the future of digital learning in a Web 2.0 world - but with the corresponding risks of widening the divide.
- We will find innovative solutions to widen access to learning through digital content, especially for learners who do not have access to technology
- The most advanced technology should be deployed for the most disadvantaged learners
- Access to ICTs is a fundamental right of knowledge citizens - not an excuse for using old technologies.

I wish I can attend but other commitment at work ties me up. I will try to be among the remote participants. Good luck with the discussions!

Wow, what a conference. 2006 was held in Dallas last week and there were many high lights and some intense parties. All three keynote speakers were awesome. Met some great friends from Netherlands (SURF). Unlike my co-works from UBC, I didn't bring any "10.2 mega pixel" cameras therefore, I have to share other's flickr photo. Check them out, feel the party spirits:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/edutrip/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/educause2006

The 5th Saikai Conference is being held in Vancouver This week from Tuesday (May 30th) to Friday (June 2nd) in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The conference is being held in Sheraton Vancouver
Wall Centre, Downtown.

It is appropriately theme Sea to Sakai after the world-renowned Sea to Sky highway which runs from Vancouver to Whistler and is one of the most breathtaking drives in North America.

The Program looks pretty interesting with strong open source development themes and open knowledge initiatives.

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.

The EdTech Online Community is hosting a virtual conference where many courses and reusable learning resources built using the the BCcampus Online Program Development Fund (OPDF) will be showcased. All you need is your BCcampus community login name goto "What's New" section of the page. The presented topics include:

Shareable Online Learning Resources (SOL*R) repository (Scott Leslie)
Online Auto Collision Program
Learning Tools (I did this one today, you may find the recorded sessions on the page)
Web Content Accessibility
Health care related courses, programs and learning objects
Social Software Framework (Brian Lamb)
Interactive Dental Anatomy
Virtual Biology lab
Deep Space Astronomy course

Very exciting event!

I spent the whole morning at the Sheraton Vancouver Wall Centre Hotel for the E-Learn Conference 2005. Attended a few very interesting presentations. What I find valuable of this conference is that you will find the presenters are from all over the world. This is a perfect chance for us American online educators to find out what's the rest of the world (more specifically, Asia Pacific, African and East European nations)are researching on.

I learned some very interesting course design characteristics from Mr. Tik Chan, INTI College Malaysia and Yan Liu, School of Foreign Language and Literature of Beijing Normal University. Both of them have mentioned about lack of "Course Writers" meaning subject matter experts that are willing to "write" online courses in their institutes. To think about more closely, it does require a great effort to train and prepare a content expert to be an online course instructor. What's more unique about the courses they presented is that the students will heavily rely on the "pre-written" course materials and less on human interactions (synchronous / Asynchronous). This would require the content leader (instructor), instructional designer and editor (people who check and correct errors in the written content) to work closely together in order to produce the impressive "easy to understand" online contents. There are yet more to explore, going to get some sleep and wake up early to catch Curtis Bonk's OOPS keynote tomorrow morning at 8:30.

Educause 2005 Annual Conference kicks off in Orlando. It's funny that the statement of the conference "Transforming the Academy: Dreams and Reality" on the web page is using the Disneyland looking font. This year's topics are more interesting and attractive. It's too bad that I can't join this fest due to over loaded projects and work. I would love to see many old friends there although I have to say Orlando does not attracts me in any way due to the weather. Anyway, best wishes to the attendees and the conference!

What is bloggable?

I attended the Northern Voice Weblog Conference at UBC downtown campus today. Once again, the UBC wireless network held up pretty well and impressed many conference attendees. I learned that there were somewhat over 100 pictures being uploaded to flikr during the 45 minutes of opening session. Talking about real-time blogging eh? I wonder how many audio/video blog was created over the day. I did see quite a few people were recording audio and video during the sessions. I learned a lot from every session I have attended. Picked many useful tips from Tod Maffin’s audio blogging session, I appreciated all the geeky information about optimizing the audio quality for audio blogging.

Unfortunately, I could not attend the afternoon sessions and the post conference party, but I am sure they all went well. And the beauty is that I won’t be missing much because the 200+ bloggers will fill me in by text, pictures, sounds and video clips.