Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

June seems to be the conference month this year. Here's the line ups:
2009 NMC Summer Conference at Monterey June 9, 2009 - June 13, 2009
Canadian E-Learning Conference at UBC point grey campus, June 17-19, 2009
UBC eStrategy Townhall at UBC point grey campus, Jun 23rd, 2009
then in August, there is OpenEd conference:
OpenED conference at UBC Robson Square campus, August 12 - 14, 2009

So far I have attended the NMC and Canadian eLearning conferences, both are extremely inspirational. One of the most exciting thing is I got to see my decade long friend - Bonita Bray again at UBC. I would like to point out her session tomorrow: Bonita will be demonstrating successful ways of using social networking services such as blogs and twitters for learning purpose. If you would like to know some best ways of extending the CMS based learning methods, attend the session and learn from Bonita.

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.

We recently purchased two HP Touchsmart PCs for the Arts Learning centre. Our goal is to encourage our faculty members to experiment with new touch based user interface which would allow us to observe and develop new applications to enhance their teaching experiences. HP TouchSmart is an all-in-one computer, similar to an iMac. It has a touch-sensitive screen, allowing users to control the navigation using their fingers. With the built-in HP navigation software, users can scroll through menus and files using their hands very much like using an iPhone.

My colleagues and I got excited and opened up one to play around during our weekly staff meeting. We soon found some pros and cons about this new PC:
PROs:
- Relative accurate touch panel allows us to perform simple image manipulations and video editing easily using standard Windows software such as Photoshop and Premiere
- A very bright and large screen makes the viewing experience pleasant
- To many less-technical learners, touching the screen is much more comfortable and intuitive when learning new web applications and image databases
- Very straight forward to set up, took less than 10 minutes to initialize the PC, my grandma can do it without hassling me
- The built in microphone and camera makes it to be very convenient for video conferencing
- No wires other than the power cord, makes it essential to mount on the wall, saves desktop spaces. The wireless keyboard and mouse works instantly and pretty far ranged

CONs:
- No Ethernet connection, only wifi, this requires the users to have a decent speed wireless connection when using the SmartTouch
- No multi-touch function, it would be cool if one can manipulate images like using an iPhone, but can not do with this PC, don’t know if it’s the hardware limitation or the software limitation
- The unit is very heavy, my grandma won’t be able to move it
- The HP navigation platform is rather slow when it comes to high resolution images or video

We will present this to the general Arts faculty members, will see how they would react to the new UI and input method.

The Chinese State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping recently launched the project proposal on a Chinese version of “Google Earth” which is based on an existing program designed and implemented by Chinese scientists called “Geo Globe”. The project will focus on sharing the geographical data in order to blend in commercial and community services.

Google Earth fans would notice that the satellite view of all cities in North America, you can almost see the license plate on each automobile. But the satellite view of the Chinese cities on Google Earth is much fuzzier. To be precise, the image data used in Google Earth for the Chinese cities are only 240 meters / cm and 8000 meters / cm for rural areas. This is because Google fetches the data from commercial companies and there are many limitations and cost considerations.

The Chinese National Survey and Mapping database has high quality and accurate GIS data over China, they have great advantages in producing a more precise “Google Earth – China”. The data obtained by Chinese State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping are collected from a variety of geographical mapping methods including both ground-based GPS mapping and aerial mapping.

There are strict laws in each country on the precise scale of GIS data being published for commercial and civilian use. Most countries limit the scale to 30-50 meters / cm. The United States government requires special approval on using any data with a resolution higher than 0.5 m. This is why Google Earth generally use image data with a resolution of 0.6 meters.

I suppose it’s a positive thing for the Chinese government to recognize a higher resolution of satellite image data is appreciated by civilian. Knowing Google Earth is capable to generate over one billion U.S. dollars on ads, it’s not surprising to see local versions of similar applications in China and India with the support of the local government agencies.

At present, Geo Globe is in an internal testing stage. It is being used by Heilongjiang Geographic Information System, Hydro department in Fujian and the National Defense Department.

Ever seen 8000 people painting together? Here you go. There were 8000 students taking an entry exam for their admission to the Shandong University of Arts. During the exam, the 8000 applicants were requested to paint specific subjects using pre-defined techniques. The exam took place at a convention center in Jinnan, the capital city of the Shandong province.

Mobile learning has been around for a while; it refers to the idea of lifelong learning under the guidance of the use of mobile communications devices such as mobile phones, PDA, MP4 and handheld e-book reader devices. With the acceleration of the 3G technology, mobile learning really enables learners to learn at anytime they want and anywhere they want. From Twitter to iPhone, mobile learning has taken a giant step forward. Today on the bus I saw a student checking the discussion board in her WebCT course and posted comments right away. She might have just earned 1% of participation mark for that class! Of course not every student could afford a $500 iphone and $80 monthly cell phone plans with 3G mobile internet access. But I truly believe the yet expensive data plans will soon be lowered just like how the voice plans have been dropped for cell phone users.

What’s happening around the world on mobile learning?

In Europe:

There are government funded research projects on using the portable mobile devices to provide information and learning content to enable learning for those whom are unable to participate in school. The learning content focuses on the interesting topics of the young generation such as soccer, music, etc., as well as to develop their language ability and mathematical knowledge.

In the United States:

Stanford University Learning Lab (SLL) believes that by helping us to stay connected with each the web, the mobile devices today are helping us to fill up the "debris" time. They have developed mobile based language learning modules that involves vocabulary memorization, self tests, repeating excises and much more. They also studies how are these mobile content helping the learners to achieve a better mark in schools.

In Asia:

Mobile devices are much more popular in some Asian countries than in North America. Their 3G network is also more advanced than other part of the world. Asian learners are already using their mobile devices to access rich media based learning contents such as video, audio and flash based learning tools.

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.

UBC Student Services launched a virtual campus tour this month. The virtual tour is created using Adobe Flash. It highlights the students life on UBC campus. The presentation was well put together and delivers an interesting perspective about UBC. It covers topics like the beautiful UBC campus, student spaces, the city Vancouver, places to learn, life on campus, student residences, Athletics and much more. Check it out if you care to learn more about the university I am working for...

The computer graphic card producer NVIDIA released information on the Personal Supercomputer named "Tesla Personal Supercomputer". This computer is calculated to be 250 times faster than standard PCs today.

Weeks long calculations can be shortened to just a few hours with Tesla PSC (Personal SuperComputer:)) Thans to the GPUs used in the Tesla system is 3 or 4 Tesla C1060 computing processors with 4GB of dedicated memory per GPU. It offers the performance of a cluster in a desktop system, delivering close to 4 teraflops of performance.

Pretty much anything that you do on your PC that takes a lot of time can be accelerated with this. These supercomputers can improve the time it takes to process info by 1,000 times. If you imagine it takes a week to get a result (from running an experiment), you can only do it 52 times a year. If it takes you minutes, you can do it constantly, and learn just as much in a day. (Chief Scientist of NVIDIA - David Kirk)

Some of the comparisons and ideas on Tesla are remarkable:

Synchronize a movie to an iPod normally takes up to 6 hours now can be done by Tesla within 20 minutes

New computer applications/games can be written to optimize the multi-tasking graphic ability of Tesla so that motion graphics can be presented at much higher quality than the best computer graphics today.

Tesla would allow doctors who will be able to process results for brain and body scans within hours instead of the days taken on a regular PC.

With it's high computing speed, Tesla will also help scientists to run hundreds of thousands of simulations in order to shortlist drugs that may likely be a cure to diseases such as cancer and malaria.

The biggest question on this computer would be affordability. Unfortunately, it's still priced at the much higher end, well , it is a Super Computer after all. It's suggested marking price is at US$6,000 today. But this price will be lowered dramatically in no time just as all the other hardware on the market.

At first Tesla will be sold to the scientific and research institutes and organizations. Then Dell will later bring it to the consumer market.

There seems to be some debates around if this personal supercomputer is breaking the famous Moore's law in the technology world. A more thorough discussion on Tesla's computing power and technical specifications can be found here.

A friend of mine created a web site to promote Chinese language learning. She uses lots of multimedia components to make the learning experience more pleasant and straight forward. There are currently 21 free lessons where learners can learn the language at their own pace. There seems to be a total of 37 free lessons that covers many daily living subjects such as, "greetings in Chinese", "Chinese names", "shopping in Chinese", "rent an apartment in Chinese" etc... According to the owner of the web site, the remainder lessons will be completed by the beginning of 2009. Then a synchronized learning platform will be introduced so multiple learners can "meet" in a virtual classroom and learn directly from the content creator on each of these lessons. I am looking forward to see what they will come up with in the new year. In the meanwhile, I am recommending this site to my co-workers and friends whom have been bugging me on wanting to learn Chinese on their own...

Simple-chinese.com, Learn some Chinese online for free!

Starting this term (Winter term 1 2008-2009), all students evaluations at the end of the semester are being moved online here at UBC. Essentially a user based survey platform is being created and hosted centrally. Individual faculties, departments and faculty members are allowed to shape the evaluations to fit their need. The result will be reviewed by the Dean and Department Heads to inform decisions concerning reappointment, tenure, promotion and merit. What I am curious about is whether this move encourage more participation from the students compare to the paper based process. I will post the result here once I find it out.

Not that World of Warcraft needs more attention, but the new US leader Obama just announced Kevin Werbach to be one of the transition team members in January 2009. Kevin Werbach AKA "Supernovan Jenkins" in the World of Warcraft game, is a level 70 "Shaman". He is also a professor of legal studies and business ethics at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. A level 70 in the game WOW means Werbach has invested a huge amount of time and should be a pretty skilled and yet active player in the game.

In a blog post written by Werbach praised massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) for fostering a sense of community. Himself of course is a well known figure in the real world, but try to chat on "Supernovan Jenkins" in WOW! The following are some of his blog postings:

What (Warcraft) does is provide an incentive for people to develop new software and ideas for collaborative production," he wrote.

Many of those ideas will translate to other group activities, including those within the business world. I think MMOGs will be, at a minimum, a significant testbed for these new technologies, because users see a direct benefit and are willing to experiment with new things.

One thing you can bet on is his WOW experience will help the new administration to reshape the virtual worlds.

Remember how Tom Cruise navigated the "special computer interface" which would tell him the future crimes? Well, the future telling machine is not yet invented, but the hand/glove based navigation system is out. Mouse was the key to the computer revolution in the past century. However, more and more researchers are experimenting with finger navigation systems which turns the users' hands into a complex input device. G-Speak seems to be one of the pioneers in the field. John Underkoffler is the chief scientist behind the G-Speak OS development. Using special Input/Output bulbs, the computer may detect the movement from the specially made gloves hence execute certain command in the computer. I think this is going to emerge with the 3D virtual world project in the near future. Because once a new input device being widely adopted, new user interfaces will be followed. The current 2D based web simply won't cut it.

I have been approached by several friends in China asking me about smalltalk and Squeak. Due to my limited knowledge in the language, I pointed them to the Squeak Chinese community site on Google Code. There are a couple of well-translated learning materials to assist the beginners to learn about Squeak. Many thanks to the volunteers who initiated the page.

Microsoft launched the WGA (Windows Genuine Advantage) and OGA (Office Genuine Advantage) tools this month to examine the legitimacy of the MS Windows and MS Office software on all PCs in China. Those who failed the tests would see a black desktop on their Windows background or a permanent warning message of pirated Office software. This is yet the most harsh action taken by the software giant against software piracy in China.

Although the company repeated it would not collect personal information with the tools, which would not affect computer use, controversy over the move has escalated. Many Chinese users have questioned the legality of Microsoft's move. A question on many Chinese consumers' mind: Does Microsoft have the right to penalize pirated systems by intruding the system without permission of the computer owner? There have been several law suits filed against Microsoft based on their WGA and OGA movement in China since October 20th. I personally do think the act has breached the basic ethics of software manufacturers with the unsolicited remote control of computers. I don't believe any software companies would dare to this kind of "certification based penalization" here in Canada or US. In the meanwhile, I do support software developers to take legitimate legal actions against piracy.

What did I do over the long weekend? Touring in the Forbidden City, literally. Last Friday, IBM launched the first Chinese 3D virtual tourism platform - Beyond Space and Time (The Virtual Forbidden City). In partnership with the Forbidden Palace Museum, IBM invested 3 years of time and over 3 million dollars to re-construct a 3 dimensional replica of the world largest Imperial Palace standing today, the Forbidden City of China. The Forbidden City was built from 1406 to 1420, consists of 980 surviving buildings with 8,707 bays of rooms and covers 720,000 square metres. It is also the largest collection of preserved ancient wooden structures in the world.

Similar to the Great Wall of China, Forbidden City has been the one of the "must see" tourism places in China. I have been there a dozen of times since age of 3. The Virtual Forbidden City enables visitors to interact with others and with a growing knowledge base of the historical site. Learning materials are being generated by tourists, volunteers, staff and data collecting scripts. As they explore the Virtual Forbidden City, visitors can choose to simply observe the buzz of activity, participate in activities that provide insights into important aspects of the Chinese history, or even take guided tours that uncover new insights into the stories of the Forbidden City. It's a combination of 3D Simulation and Machinima experience in my opinion. There are also a few mini-games embedded in the exotic gardens and amazing architectures to keep the audiences entertained.

Registration

To get started, go to the Registration Page to get an account and an avatar icon. This will allow you to save, share your virtual tourism experience with others. Your avatar can take the form of any of several people dressed in Qing era clothing.

Download and Start the Tour!

Upon the completion of the simple registration process, you will be lead to a page that allows you to download the software which will run the Virtual Forbidden City tour on your computer. Please note, you don't have to have an registered account, you may visit it as a guest after install the software.

The following are some photos taken by the virtual tourists and shared over the web. There are much more to it than a simple walk through. I encourage you to try out the platform yourself. It's free, and best yet, no advertisement attached to it "yet" (other than the IBM trademark everywhere of course). It's a really effective way to refresh your memory or give you a sneak preview of the amazing palace!

Actually, the title isn't really accurate, this is not 2.5D any more, it's really 2.8D in my opinion. One of the current project my team is working on is to use Papervision 3D (an amazing Flash Actionscript based 3D engine) to create online simulation environment for the Residential School project. Along the way, we came across with Andy Zupko's "Dynamic 3D Rendering Effect".

This is a truly interesting application where 2D video clips are re-rendered per frame into m x n pixels and then using pixel brightness level and color scales to determine the z (height/depth) value. It's a truly smart implementation, check it out yourself! Make sure you click and hold on the re-rendered pixel image to the left and move your mouse!

Turning this:

to this, frame by frame:

For a while now, my World of Warcraft friends have been nagging me on one thing: Get ready for Warhammer, a new MMORG which is expected to be the new leader in the market of MMORGs. I had the chance to play with the beta version over the past weekend, at a friend's place. I have to say, this game is even more addictive than WOW, due to a couple of aspects. First of all, the graphics, are less of a cartoon style, but more realistic thanks to the advanced 3D engine of course. (Mind you WOW has been out for over 4 years now, it's about time for some graphical upgrades...) The other factors I find really attractive is that the game play focuses more on PVP (Player Vs. Player) while WOW was first made as a PVE (Player Vs. Environment) experience. For a player (moi) whom enjoyed all the FPS games and participated in many arena clans, Warhammer is certainly attractive enough.

The open beta test for the players whom pre-ordered the game started September 7th and ended mid night last night. According to to official game web site, there are 897,894 players participated in the beta test through last 7 days. The official launch of the game started today, to the people registered for the "collector's Edition" only. Then on Tuesday, the game is open for the Pre-ordered players, for real this time. Then on Thursday, you may find the shrink wrapped copies in the local electronic stores.

My biggest question now is of course how much sleeping time can I afford to lose in the coming months?

I have just surprisingly learned that the Chinese online education service provider – Cerbibo, has recently announced to sell 53% of their shares for the total of 10.3 million Yuan, which is only equivalent to 1.51 million US dollars. It seems the other 47% shares will also be given to the buyer for the completion of the transaction. Cerbibo is co-founded by Blackboard (the leading provider of e-Education enterprise software applications and services in America and Europe) and CERNET (China Education and Research Network, the largest Education network service provider in China). It was seen as the “dream marriage” in the Chinese e-Learning industry when the company was first formed back in October 2003. However they seems have tumbled upon some serious marketing difficulties in China.

According to the information published on the China Beijing Equity Exchange website, the total asset value of Cerbibo is 12.4 million Yuan (US $1.82 million), company debt exceed 8.8 million Yuan (US $1.29 million), the appraised value of the company is only 1.88 million Yuan (US $275,660). The annual income of Cerbibo in 2007 was 16.67 million Yuan (US $2.65 million), but the total profit was in the negatives: -1.75 million Yuan (US -$0.28 million), which means the company was operating at a loss.

I think Cerbibo’s down fall is the result of the philosophical and structural differences in the e-Learning industry between east and the west. For example, through the past exchanges with the Chinese institutions, I have observed that the Chinese online education industry focuses strongly on:
- synchronous teaching/learning methods
- heavy media components in all online courses
- mobile technology being used in eLearning
- learners appreciates flexible learning with a low cost operational infrastructure

However, the core software provider of Cerbibo, Blackboard in this case, has always focused on enterprise level solutions, self-study aspects and completely neglected the area in media and mobile technologies. Their synchronous teaching tools stay put with text chat! On the other hand, the back bone service provider CERNET is too big of a giant to provide the right marketing directions for Cerbibo. This also raise an alert to the mother company of Cerbibo - Blackboard Inc. Ever since they acquired WebCT, the company has grown so big and so fast. Can they keep their finger on the pulse of the global e-Learning marketplace? We shall wait and see...

PS. Neither Blackboard nor CERNET has publicly announced anything in regard to the share transfer, all information were collected through the China Beijing Equity Exchange office. The original source of this news is in Chinese which can be found here:
http://it.sohu.com/20080818/n258963630.shtml

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...

An exciting opportunity has come up for us here at the Faculty of Arts, UBC. The Vancouver Olympic Committee has contacted our faculty with a request to contribute expertise from the Language & Literature Departments to assess the linguistic skills of hundreds of multi-lingual volunteers to the Olympic Games in Vancouver-Whistler 2010. What's unique about this initiative is that the language assessment is carried out completely online, which means our support team here at Arts ISIT is responsible to develop an online environment to accommodate the language assessment needs.

I think this is the first time in the Olympics history that volunteers' language skills are being assessed via the web. Including 2008 Beijing Olympics, volunteers have been interviewed either in person or on the phone. Starting later 2008, the Vancouver Olympic committee will use the system we are putting together using voice board and learning management systems, to develop a pilot for the expected 900 volunteers to be assessed in Asian and European language skills.

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.

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... :()

Today at 4:00 PM EST, over 60 avatars gathered on the Sun's island in Secondlife, cuing up to get a "ticket" for the first experimentation of the Wonderland Project by Sun's Microsystems. The event was organized by the MediaGrid which is a computational grid platform that promotes 3D virtual learning environment. The event had a slow start, mainly due to the registration process. However, many of the crowds managed to download the newest edition of Wonderland and got onto the platform. The system seems to be stable and here are some screen shots from the event:

Everyone cued up in Second Life, getting ready for Wonderland...

Picture taken from The Princess of Yaximixche's Blog...

One of the highlights at this year's NMC summer conference is seeing how the consortium is moving towards the open source immersive 3D platform created by Suns Microsystems - Project Wonderland.

On June 12th, Kevin Roebuck and Jordan Slott showed a slick demo of the yet to come Wonderland version 1.0 at the 2008 NMC summer conference. The platform seemed to be very stable and efficient. Jordan also showed us a cool 2D tool which would make the 3D world build relatively easy. Since the entire project is done in java, tools can be "easily" embedded in web pages to provide precise control of the 3D world. Another word, a true bridge between the 2D web interface and 3D metaverse can be established. It seems there has been some serious re-development of the platform we were looking at. Jmonkey engine has been introduced in the newer version of project.

On June 13th, Larry Johnson and kevin Roebuck further explained the NMC Open Virtual World project. The 2 main reasons behind the open source initiative are exactly aligned with the Arts Metaverse project here at UBC:

1) Intelectual Property ownership need to be more flexible and better facilitated;
2) Complex 3D models and precise digital reconstructions bring the true meaning of 3D metaverse in the high education communities.

These two reasons drove us to drop Second Life and stared using Open Croquet for the Arts Metaverse project. I am happy to see NMC is moving forward with this initiative. According to Larry, we should see some serious collaboration between the Wonderland development team at Suns Microsystems and NMC members in the next six months.

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...