Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

blogchina.com adopted an existing technology (niu.la) and pushed out a new social bookmarking service. From the service, Chinese bloggers will be able to collect, organize, sort and exchange blog based information much more efficiently. It will accelerate the collaboration between the bloggers on the blogchina network. For those of you who have not used social book mark services, check out del.icio.us - a social bookmarks manager created by Joshua Schachter back in 2003. It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others. The current users of del.icio.us have exceeded 500,000.

I wanted to blog this innovative project for a while now. Ever since Brent Simpson (University of Auckland) visited UBC in January and introduced us the project, I have paid a close attention to it. Brent has released the first copy of eXe program on Jan 10th. I downloaded a copy and tried it out; the result seems to be pretty impressive. It works exactly the way Brent described it when he was in Vancouver. Here is my understanding of how the current version works: once you download the setup file, it will install a local web server on port 8081. The server comes with a web based WYSIWYG interface and a XML node based file management system. It enables the content experts to author web content without connecting to a CMS or becoming proficient in HTML or XML markup language. The content generated using eXe can be then ported to any LMS in standard XML based format. The application is developed in Python, a very realiable programming language.

When you use the tool, you may notice there are pre-defined behaviors and topic names assigned to each nodes in the application like objectives, case studies, preknowledge activies, reading activities etc. However the CSS section does not seem to be completed yet. Click HERE to goto the eXe download page, and navigate around to learn more about the project.

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.

Responding to the new development with HVD, Toshiba announced a new home entertainment product – RD-H1, a 250 GB hard drive based media player. The official marketing date of the new product is March 15th this year. This new media player can record (download) media content via both internet and daily TV programs. It can also be used in collaboration with DVD burners to archive the captured media programs. According to Toshiba, RD-H1 can also be used as an external hard drive assuming digital contents can be easily passed in and out of the device. One thing worth to mention about this product is its price. There have been other high volume hard disk based media players, but all of them are quite expensive. However, RD-H1 is only target for approximately CAD $450. A 250 GB PC external drive alone cost CAD $400 alone. So, this would be a great deal, especially for the non heavy computer users. The device also support EPG standard which allows customers to do pre-programmed TV program recording via the local TV programs.

A high school friend came by Vancouver today after 3 years of military services overseas. We had a quite interesting talk on navy elearning over the dinner. Apparently, Canadian Navy provides the soldiers on foreign services the option of taking navy elearning programs. Even though they are called “navy eLearning programs”, but most of the courses in the program are offered by public education institutions at a standard schedule. However, the difficulty lies in most of the online learning programs aren’t really “navy elearning program” since they are not designed for “flexible” learning experiences. Sometime, the unit needs to travel to remote locations with a very short notice and the new target zone may not have appropriate internet connections. It has been really hard to carry out formal studies terms while serving the country. nevertheless my friend mentioned he has developed good skills of self study over the internet and is ready to take some normal online courses to pursue a formal degree. I wonder if rapid e-learning will somehow help out navy elearning demands in the near future...

I started seeing these so called commonweal banners from Google on multiple Chinese web sites. This is one way for Google to establish its dominating image in the search engine industry in China. The banner is simply a white background with a question in the middle such as, “How deep is the ocean?”; “Where is the nearest planet?”; “What is largest numerical value?”; “What’s the temperature in sun?”; “How deep is the ocean?” etc. Following the question is a line “Google will help you to find the answer.” By clicking on the banner, you will reach the Google search page with results to the question which was on the banner. What I find these banners quite interesting is that it really catches kids’ attention. What’s the chance of having them read pages of encyclopedia? Imagine let them play some online games and toss them a banner like this, have them browse through the result sites and develop their own interests in learning. I have not yet encounter a banner like this in English, maybe Google feels no need to further establish it leading role in the Western world.

A sample banner, screen captured from a Chinese website, 1/2 of it's original size:

According to the newest statistics, there were over 275,880,000 text messages generated across the Shanghai mobile network on the Chinese New Year's eve (Feb. 8th). This number indicates the mobile communication service providers in Shanghai made over 30 million RMB (5 million CAD$) in cash just over instant messaging in one night! (Senders pay 10 cents per message in China.)

Xinhua news net indicates the total amount of text messages over mobile devices in China within the 7 days of new years holiday should reach 10 billion! The amount of text messages transmitted over the cell phones in the year 2004 is 217.7 billion, an increase of 21700% over the past 5 years. (Yes, 217 times more than the year 2000) The statistics also indicates in the year 2005, the amount of mobile phone users in China should reach 450 million, a new "Virtual Market on Thumbs" is being initiated in China.

Have not used Macromedia Director for formal project development since version 7. Played with version 8 very briefly when shockwave 3d was introduced. I was helping a colleague (John Bratlien) in the last few days to finish a project on delivering 3D models with photographic textures via web browsers. The project was initiated by an Adobe Atmosphere grant. Atmosphere was a new application by Adobe to implement interactive 3D applications on the web. The program and browser plug-in was quite solid except lack of cross-platform support. For unknown reasons, Adobe decided to discontinue the product in the New Year. My colleague then turned to Java to seek for further solutions in delivering 3D objects with OpenGL support through a web interface. Due to a tight deadline, we decided to give Director MX a try. Quite amazingly, Shockwave 3D and director lingo made the project development so simple and we successfully delivered the demo product to the faculty member on Thursday evening. Due to further development is needed for the project, I will leave the detailed descriptions to later posts, but for those of you who are still frustrated with the discontinuation of Atmosphere, give Macromedia Director MX (or Diector MX 2004) a try, it may just save you some time. [to be continued...]

To follow up with the US waste 21.6 billion dollars each year on spam emails posting, I came across this news today: Earthlink is ready to take actions fighting against spam email. EarthLink is going to sue multiple spam email service providers in US based on the law of federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. They are currently collecting evidence on how spam emails causes damages to individual and commercial organizations. EarthLink also announced that they will collaborate with yahoo to develop a new way to filter spam emails using digital signatures...

An article by CNN yesterday mentioned about a new program at University of Southern California - study of interactive entertainment. This program is in collaboration with EA where Bing Gordon, Chief Creative Officer and co-founder of Electronic Arts was appointed to be the faculty chair. There are many similar programs are offered globally. As far as I am concerned, there are some courses offered at SFU Surrey campus (Previously TechBC) on game theories and media design. There are no such course offered in UBC at the moment.

Facing the huge market potential in the game industry today, a game theory degree makes a whole lot sense for a university to offer. The challenge lies in what would be the balance in game theory and game development (Arts/Science); the overall work load for the students; relevancy with other university courses; commercial partnership and sponsorship etc. I personally think Game Design and Game Development are two separate subject, one can be offered as a specialized program in collaboration with the Computer Science department and the other one can be offered by the Faculty of arts as a Film Study or Creative Writing program. Just my two cents…

Here is the link to the USC interactive entertainment program:
http://www.uat.edu/multimedia/gamedesign/

Today is the New Year's eve, bye to the monkey year and hi to the year of Rooster! Here is my hand writing of the word "Rooster" in Chinese, check it out. It is using the learning tools created here at Arts ISIT, UBC for JSK language learnings. The tool will record the calligraphy and play it out as a flash movie. Check it out:

The first content sharing initiative for city wide (provincial wide considering the unique identity of Shanghai)education in China was launched today: “Shanghai Education Resources Center”. This is a resource sharing database for over 150,000 educators across Shanghai. This network took over a year to plan and build; it is one of the major milestones in the e-Learning plans initiated by Shanghai government.

The project involves Shanghai education television channel, Shanghai Electronic Education Department and ten other public/private vendors. This network covers topics from pre-school to adult continuing studies. It contains not only learning objects as sounds and images, but also whole packaged contents as courseware and sharable curriculums. The educators may use the network to train, inspire and communicate with others. Learners may also directly absorb knowledge from this network with many exciting educational games and over 7000 hours of audio/video learning objects. Some future plans about the network includes connecting to the national standard testing database, supplemental text books, teachers evaluations. There is a well built flash interface for this network, and an limited English introduction. So, check it out yourself.

http://www.sherc.net/sherc/english/index.jsp

According to a new source-code analysis from Coverity, MySQL has very little bugs according to the software bug standards. There were total of 97 bugs found over hundreds and thousands lines of codes. According to Coverity, normally you find one bug per 1000 lines of source code. For MySQL, there was an average of one bug per 4000 lines of source code, which is four times better than is typical with commercial software. According to Zack Urlocker, vice president of marketing for MySQL, open source developers seems to produce cleaner and better structured codes than commercial software developments. This is simply because the codes will be seen by other programmers.

At free of cost, a stable open source database seems to be the best solution in the e-Learning industry. At Arts ISIT, we use MySQL and PHP for many instructional developments such as the learning tools and mixed-mode course developments. We are happy about the stability of these open source server technologies.

Floppy (1.44 MB), CD (700 MB), DVD (4.7 GB)
1 CD = 486 Floppy Disk
1 DVD = 6.7 CD
What’s next? HVD (Holographic Versatile Disc)

1 HVD (Holographic Versatile Disc) = 200 DVD = 1 TB = 300 Hrs Video

HDV stands for HVD，Holographic Versatile Disc, it is a technology of a plastic disk that can hold over 200 DVD quality movies and transmitting data at 1GB/sec. This technology is currently under development by six world home entertainment and IT leading companies such as Fuji Photoand, CMC Magnentics and Optware.

Imagine the technology being used in the education industry, one subject has total of 40 hours face to fact teaching/learning time per term. A student can literally tape record the entire semester (4-5 subjects) class room experience into ONE HVD! While I am still struggling what to throw out from the piles of valuable/invaluable college class notes, my future alumni can fit their entire undergraduate class notes (video shot straight from classes) into 5 plastic disks! With this technology, I believe video based knolwedge archiving will be come more reliable and afordable.

According to a new statistic from University of Maryland, US companies spent over 21.6 billion dollars each year deleting spam emails. The statistic selected 1000 adult citizens in the US and came up with this amazing result. According to the research, there is over 75% of internet users received spam email and an average of spam email each day is 18.5 per user, to detect and delete them cost an average 2.8 minutes. The research also found that over 14% of spam email receivers actually wasted their time from reading them. I think this is a very fair figure since I probably spend an average of 1-2 min each day on deleting spam emails.

Another discussion on virtual properties

Just read some news on Chinese gamers’ network, a new profession is expanding rapidly – Professional Gamers. Here is a real story: 4 high school teenagers played several online games as a team to gather virtual properties like weapons, magic items and virtual cloths for one year, and they made over 80,000 RMB which is a lot of money for the Chinese teenagers. Here is a price list of some virtual items in a popular Chinese online game:
Ocean-Star Sword: 4,000 RMB
Golden Bo: 5,000 RMB
Black Magical Necklace: 6,000 RMB
Blue Magical Ring: 8,000 RMB
And mind you these are real money players need to play to obtain these virtual items. Some of these items are even more expensive than a real item in the real market. (e.g. a Pearl Necklace)

This tells us that there is a new generation of players/learners that us educators need to face in the immediate future. They are familiar, and some even addicted to a virtual environment – a world our generation created for them. They spend more time in learning, communicating and living in that virtual world than they do in the real world. We must adopt and study these behaviors and act accordingly or otherwise our traditional education will no longer be qualified in their world.