Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

This afternoon, my co-worker Liang implemented a new feature for the Pachyderm-VUE converter tool. Now you can double click on each of the node once you open up the concept map in VUE and it will take you to the individual Pachyderm screen. There was a little "reverse engineering" there, but it worked. One step closer to the "deep crawling" version.

Thanks to Lou Zweier, we realized there are multiple Pachyderm servers out there now. Therefore, we implemented a drop down menu on the first step screen. Pachyderm.org server is set as the default server. Please email us for additional servers you want us to include in the converter!

Related to our Educause 2007 workshop, we successfully launched a new learning tool today, Pachyderm to VUE converter. This simple web application converts a Pachyderm presentation package into a .vue file, which then can be viewed in the open source concept map tool-VUE developed by Tufts University.

Remember the Pachyderm presentation I was working on a few days ago? So, this is what the Pachyderm Presentation looks like

And this is what the concept map of the Pachyderm presentation looks like:

How to get from the Pachyderm presentation to VUE? Really simple. Go to the tool page, copy and paste the presentation ID to the first screen of the tool and just follow the 3 easy steps, you will have a .vue file ready for download. Download it and then open it in VUE, you will have your concept map of the exact Pachyderm presentation you tried to convert in front of your eyes.

What’s next? We are working on version 2 of this tool which will “deep crawl” the Pachyderm packages and provide you a true concept map of each individual screens and lay out all of the assets used on that screen.

Why do we need this? Well, Pachyderm authoring is quite object oriented and random. When you have a Pachyderm presentation constructed in multiple screens (15+ in the Arts Metaverse one), it’s really easy to get lost in the process. And note this is only from a designer’s point of view. We realized that many students don’t even get the chance to see the entire presentation simply because they are lost between the screens:

Not to mention the tedious authoring process of each individual screen:

Therefore, we created this tool to help you visualize the Pachyderm package in a concept mapping tool, for now.

What’s possible in the future? Well, if we can ever get there, we will do a reverse authoring feature where utilize the newest functionalities from VUE 2.0 which allows you “swap” assets and media inside of VUE! Of course, this is a big IF at the moment. Maybe someone from the Pachyderm community can help to contribute towards the idea.

There is an interesting trend we learned from the development of this new tool. In the early days, learners drove us to convert linear, static, and purely text-based learning resources into rich media components. Over the years, you see more and more rich media based learning resources are being built and published online. Then the learners are demanding for a clear way to browse through these resources (very often in a traditional linear way). We have just taken a baby step to help Pachyderm users to take a grasp of outlining the media rich contents generated by this fascinating tool.

This is an open source application developed by the First Nations Studies Program at the University of British Columbia which synchronizes the video/audio file with transcripts. You can also "virtually cut" the video clip into "sessions" and easily explore through the entire archive. Every "session" is well defined in the meta-data perspective thus users can easily search through the video collection. The search function will allow the user to locate a particular section of the video and watch the "virtually cut" version on the fly. Check out the demo video archives produced with the tool:
(click on the "open IVT" button on the left hand side)

Get the tool here.

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.

There is an official wiki page for Flash Player 10, code name Astro at Adobe Labs. The page has some detailed description and screen shots on the new features of the up coming Flash player. Some categories on the page: Advanced Text Layout of Flash 10, 3D Effects of Flash 10, Custom Filters, Blend Modes and Effects of Flash 10. Expecting more information being published here.

From Felix Turner, a true 3D image tilting effect in Flash with functions of dynamically drawing flickr images. Quite fancy. It uses Away3D, a branch of Papervision, an open source Flash 3D engine. These creative Flash developments really motivate me to get back to Flash coding. I need to squeeze some time out for actionscript 3!

It looks like my UTstarcom cell phone (with Windows Mobile 5) may enable me to edit my Google Documents now. Google blog also mentioned google docs now have a mobile device interface for iPhone, Blackberry and Windows Mobile devices. Just go to:

http://docs.google.com/m

According to New York Post, a German artist - Marcus Kison invented a ring that displays your "Google Ranking"! It displays a number which reflects how many web pages are mentioning you. (e.g. Paris Hilton would have a number of 17,500,000) Every time you plug the ring to the internet, it downloads the most recent "Google Ranking" and updates the number led. Guess who would have the highest ranked ring today? President George Bush - 40,100,000. The "Google Ring" will hit the market next year at approximately $700, according to Kison.

I wonder how would the ring separate Tim Wang A from Tim Wang B? And how easy is it to hack the number to 999,999,999? :) Anyway, this is what the prototype of the "Google Ring" looks like:

This is a work in progress. Uli and I are invited to do a pre-conference workshop in collaboration with friends from SURF, Netherlands at this year's Educause in Seattle a week from now. It is a continuing workshop from our last year's Educause pre-con workshop on Pachyderm. The workshop on our side will be covering concept mapping tools and rich media. We will introduce a new tool which will convert Pachyderm presentations into standard concept mapping XML and then one can use open source concept mapping tools such as VUE to outline the entire Pachyderm presentation or even browse through them screen by screen!

The simple reason behind this is because Pachyderm presentations are hardly linear, the object oriented designs can easily get the learners (even the designers themselves sometimes). Therefore, a tool to sketch out the package outline (like a site map for a site) is very much needed. In order to demonstrate the tool, we created a Pachyderm presentation on Arts Metaverse which we will be handing out to the workshop participants and ask them browse through the presentation. Then we will ask them to use the tool and convert the presentation into a concept map to see if it would help them to further understand the topic. As I said, it's a work in progress. But feel free to check out the Pachyderm presentation on Arts Metaverse and Ancient Spaces. Stay tuned for further information.

China recently introduced a new giant bus - "The Super Liner" with a capacity of 300 passengers and 25 meters long (13 meters longer than a regular bus). The first operational "super bus" was seen today in Hangzhou, a city very close to Shanghai. It looks like a train running off the track. The bus stations must be half block long as well. I really admire the driver of this one.

This is an impressive open source 3D library written in Actionscript 2 and 3! Check out their demo page. it takes a few minutes to download the flash file. But compare to the 50mb+ commercial 3D platforms, this one is quite tiny and fast! I give great hopes to browser based, high quality, true 3D applications written for future Flash players. Way to go guys!

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:

Sony recently pushed out their new product: OLED (Organic Light Emitting Display) TV XEL-1 (11 inch) which is only 3 millimeters thick! The marketing price is around $1700 which is in the same price range of a Sony 40 inch LCD. This is still too early to compare OLED vs LCD due to the high cost of this new technology. However, OLED is far more efficient in electricity consumption than traditional LCD. It's funny to say "traditional LCD" while many of our university labs are still using CRT monitors... In short, OLED is a thinner, more efficient in power, better graphics screen display technology than LCD. I have heard OLED has very obvious improvement on motion graphics with high frame sets (graphics with high speed motion) over LCD.

What's OLED's weakness? Low life expectancy. The current OLED technology is only going to last half as long as the LCDs. But it still should provide you 30000 hours of viewing. Another problem with OLED TV is Sony is only roducing 2000 per month world wide at the moment. They say they are losing money on selling every single OLED TV.

More on lcd tv and oled tvs.

Open Croquet 1.0 SDK kept on crashing when we tried to connect multiple world. Then I learned from a conversation with Mark McCahill that the fix to the crashing issue is available using Croquet's built-in update mechanism. Here's the step by step instruction of how to get to the update for the connection crash fix:

1. Left click somewhere in the Croquet desktop to open the World menu, and select the "open" item. (for mac, use the normal click)

2. Open a Monticello browser.

3. In the right pane of the Monticello browser, click on the line that says "http://hedgehog.software.umn.edu:8888/Contribution" then click on the "open" button at the top of the Monticello window. A new Monticello window appears listing the categories within that repository.

4. Click on the refresh button, then scroll the left pane of the window and look for a bolded category name. If you have never performed this update, you should see the category "Wisconsin" is bolded. Then click on the category "Wisconsin".

5. You will now see that the right pane has a list of "Wisconsin" packages on the right pane. They look like "Wisconsin-hrs.1XX.mcz". The most recent is at the top of the list and bolded if it is not installed. But you should start upgrade from the lowest BOLD package. Click on it to select it. You may have to wait a little for Croquet to download the package from the network, but once a local copy of the package exists, the "load" and "merge" buttons will be enabled.

6. Close the Contributions repository window, go back to the first Monticello browser window and close it too.

This should fix your crashing upon connection problem in Croquet. Try to apply other updates if you can, it's a good idea to keep your Croquet image up-to-date.