Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

My director, Dr. Ulrich Rauch was invited for one of the 2007 Educause Podcasting sessions where he talked about the Ancient Spaces project, Arts Metaverse project, Croquet, immersive 3D platforms and social networks.

He starts from how the Ancient Spaces project was initiated by the students and then being supported by the academics. He also explains how Croquet is perfectly connecting the projects. The podcast covers much of what we have learned from the Ancient Spaces project and what we are aiming for in the Arts Metaverse project. Sharing experiences of how to facilitate creativity and explaining the "object oriented" knowledge distributions with the "ARTS" point of view. It ends with a little insight of UBC's IT infrastructure - the "decentralized collaborations".

Listen to the podcast here. or download the mp3 file here.

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

You get Edusim, a powerful way to engage students by bringing a 3D virtual environment to their finger tips (literally). Edusim has successfully created a classroom tool to engage the young learners by combining Open Croquet and a very compact eBeam input device. The following video shows you the wonderful result.

More videos on Edusim3d's web site.

Our new learning center is exploring for a multi-media display + smart board system. The high-end smart board / screen overlay can cost as much as the LCD or data projector itself (up to $2000-$3000 easily). Then a much cheaper and yet more powerful solution came across (thanks to Ulrich Rauch), it seems one can convert a Wii remote into a multi-point infrared reader, with a few infrared sensors, you can turn any flat surface (Plasma TV, LCD, Projector Screens and even a coffee table) into a smart board! Too good to be true eh? Yeah, that's what I thought too, until I watched this video:

The guy who invented the "Wiimote interactive white board" is Johnny Lee, the software he mentioned in the video can be found here. Not yet impressed? Well, take a look at the next video where Johnny takes this Wii Remote hack up a notch - Minority Report technology in real life for less than $100!

I just can't miss the opportunity to share this amazing lecture with you. It's the last lecture given by Dr. Randy Pausch from Carnegie Mellon whom expects to die from cancer in a couple of weeks. he delivers this powerful 1 hr lecture to share his life journey, with a dark humor. Some may already watched it, but if you haven't, watch the following preview and decide for yourself if you want to watch the entire lecture on Google Video.

Click here to watch the entire lecture recording. [1hr25min]

Randy Pausch is the Director of Carnegie Mellon's Stage 3 research group, where he oversees the development of the open source 3D programming environment - Alice.

Some of my favorite quotes from Dr. Pausch:

Is that when you see yourself doing something badly and nobody’s bothering to tell you anymore, that’s a very bad place to be. Your critics are your ones telling you they still love you and care.

But remember, the brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough.

So. How do you get people to help you? You can’t get there alone. People have to help you and I do believe in karma. I believe in paybacks. You get people to help you by telling the truth. Being earnest. I’ll take an earnest person over a hip person every day, because hip is short term. Earnest is long term.

Show gratitude. When I got tenure I took all of my research team down to Disneyworld for a week. And one of the other professors at Virginia said, how can you do that? I said these people just busted their ass and got me the best job in the world for life. How could I not do that?

Don’t complain. Just work harder.

Be good at something, it makes you valuable.

Find the best in everybody. One of the things that Jon Snoddy as I said told me, is that you might have to wait a long time, sometimes years, but people will show you their good side. Just keep waiting no matter how long it takes. No one is all evil. Everybody has a good side, just keep waiting, it will come out.

And be prepared. Luck is truly where preparation meets opportunity.