Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

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.

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...

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.

*update* The sound recording of the session is here. It's in mp3 format.

It's happening right now... Join us at Sun Microsystems in Second Life: 123.23.63

This meeting is a follow-up to the Education Grid discussion that started at the Boston Summit a couple of weeks ago. Three platforms will be discussed: Second Life, Croquet and Wonderland. Discussion Guideline include:

1.0 PLATFORM ECOSYSTEM + EDUCATION GRID OVERVIEW
1.1 EDUCATION GRID KEY FEATURES AND CAPABILITIES
1.2 FIGURE: PLATFORM ECOSYSTEM + EDUCATION GRID
2.0 EDUCATION GRID BASELINE REQUIREMENTS UNDER CONSIDERATION
3.0 EDUCATION GRID TIMELINES
4.0 COMMUNICATION AND DEVELOPMENT PROCESSES

The full discussion outline is posted here.

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.

An old friend of mine, Wu came over to Vancouver for a business trip (with EA). He is a well known game producer in China whom owns a 400 people development team in the on-line gaming industry. We had a great conversation over a few beer on Saturday. I explained to him our initiatives of bring educational contents into immersive 3-D environments, to accommodate the interest of the young generation that grow up with video games. Wu asked me a simple question that made me think: “are you trying to create educational games or developing gaming education?” The two arguments sound very similar but they are different. The differences are the first one is to create a game around a focused educational goal while the second argument is to bring out the education knowledge from a fun game.

It has been years that academics tried to create “educational games” to let the learners learn from playing. But I have to say there have been very poor results from these attempts. There are merely none pure “educational games” out there in the market today. The gaming industry is flooded by games like World of Warcraft, Counter Strike Source, Battle Field 2, Age of Empires III... You may ask why? Well, one of the reasons would be these “educational games” were created from “narrowly focused educational contents” using “existing templates”. But are the players learning from playing the seemingly pure entertaining games? Of course they are! Games like The Sim, Civilization, Sim City are very educational to the players from various of angles.

The conversation extended to other entertainment industries like movies and music. I remembered a perfect example, right after enjoying the movie 300 two weeks ago, I researched and learned a whole lot about the Persian war, Spartan and Greek History, not from the movie, but from wikipedia and our university libraries. The movie was a trigger though.

What we came to realize is that a good entertainment piece can motivate people to do research, learn and create. Therefore, instead of focusing on creating “Educational Games”, why don't we take a look at what are the players learning from the popular games and work out a system to help them further understand and digest the knowledge from the game experiences?

The Chinese military recognizes there is a large crowd in the force are game players – young people who grew up with Nintendo, Play Station and Personal Computers. They are currently planning to use some of the well known multi-player video games such as Operation Flashpoint to train the soldiers for real time combat situations. Of course this type of Virtual Battlefield Systems has been widely adopted by military agencies round the world. The US Marine Corps has well adopted the technology based on the Operation Flashpoint-technology long ago.

Operation Flashpoint is a tactical shooter and battlefield simulator game released in 2001. It sets the background in the year 1985 on an fictitious island. The difference between this game and other first person shooter games is that it focus on weapon training, tactic training and strategy training. Operation Flashpoint even allows the players to design their own battlefield settings which can expand from deserts to city tunnels. The game is equipped with large database of various roles in a battle team. Properly design your team and apply realistic war tactics is the key to win the simulation.

Guess I was a little bored this afternoon and decided to give it a try to the Chinese game platform I found last night. I have to say I am impressed by the high quality media (sound, graphics and animation) components in the game. The entire game is done in Flash with dynamic data transfer. I can totaly see an 8 years old kid being amused by the interactive cartoon figure - "xiao tian tian" (the little girl on the screen capture). Three minutes into the game, it polled me on how do I learn new knowledge: A) Reading B)Browsing Internet C)Watching TV D)Ask Parents/Teacher. It then showed me what other kids have chosen, and realizing only 19% of them browse internet. Of course I don't know how many players have being polled, but this is a very interesting concept on collecting first hand data from the varies of group of learners out there. I then learned why people "flush" (how blood flow turn people's face red etc.), and answered an easy question, then got my 5 award cards! Yay! A few more minutes I am gonna be hooked to the platform... The game is free, but it does indicate that you may "upgrade" (buy their printed books) in order to get more "power cards" for credits... Anyway, great product! Gonna browse a bit more...

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/

Sim 2 University Expansion Pack will be out on Mar. 1st, and some sneak previews on this expansion really make me want to try out the popular computer game. I know it's gonna be addictive and time consuming but the idea of living through the college life one more time is just exciting, only this time I am aimed to have more fun.

Campus life involves studying, partying, and going to class. The Sim character will actually "study hard" to make the grade. According to the previews I have read, the character in the game will just "disappear" from the screen while "attending classes", but a real time clock is running to keep a track of the hours being spent in the classes. I am just wondering what if Maxis incorporates some real University course wares into the game? Name it "SIM Real College Expansion - Art History (or choose your own major)". Players can actually jump into real knowledge learning environment from the game and hop back into the game after 30 mins of class time. The score is no long based on a simple computational calculation of how many hours of class time the character "disappeared for class", but some actual marks from the knowledge tests in the game.

This may sounds really crazy, and Maxis will never get into this simply because the amount of extra costs to make the game and lack of interest from the games... Anyway, just some crazy thoughts to end the day...

Simulations and games are becoming powerful tools in e-Learning. But have you ever imagined of using a commercial game engine and turn it into a language learning platform?

"The Sim" has to be one of the most well known game was ever created. It is also the most popular girls' game in the gaming industry. An interesting research at U.S.C. and M.I.T. turned the simulated immersion within video games become an effective way of acquiring a foreign language. Check out the original article here: http://llt.msu.edu/vol9num1/purushotma/default.html