Some time ago, I described work on an Open Wonderland webcaster that had been undertaken by one of our students at the University of Essex. One of the motivations behind the Webcaster was to provide access to those users who merely want to observe (and listen to) the activities in an Open Wonderland (OWL) virtual world instead of actively participating. In particular, we wanted to enable access to a set of users in the +Spaces project, such as policy makers, who wish to watch a session in which a policy is debated or acted out in a role play simulation and not be able to influence the session.

Since the first video-only version of the Webcaster, we’ve experimented with several different approaches to extend the Webcaster to provide audio, one of which is described below. After several unsuccessful attempts, we now have a successful prototype implementation that combines the video broadcast functionality with an existing OWL virtual phone object to provide a unified audio-video webcast.

The video above shows the OWL webcaster being used by two clients.

• One client is a regular OWL webstart client, into which a Webcaster ‘object’ has been inserted.
• The other client is a Web Browser that has two standard plugins: Flash and Java. The Browser opens a URL (provided by the Webcaster) hosted on the OWL web server and downloads the HTML content. The content includes a Flash object and a Java applet. (The Java applet is provided by doddlephone–a web-based SIP client.)

The deployment requirements are as follows:

• The SIP client requires that authentication is enabled on the OWL server
• The following ports must be open on the server host (and accessible through a firewall): 5080 and 1935.

The Webcaster requires further testing with more concurrent users before release to the OWL module warehouse–we’ll post a message on the forum when it’s ready. However, as ever, the source code is available in the unstable directory of the wonderland-modules SVN repository.

Technical Details

In this section I’ll briefly describe the video-only webcaster, the failed experiment at combining audio and video, and an idea for how the current implementation could be improved.

1. Video-only Webcaster

The video functionality of the webcaster requires a full OWL client to capture the graphics rendered by the in-world webcaster ‘camera’. The captured graphics are transmitted to a Red5 RTMP Server that is likely running on the same host as the OWL server. From there, lightweight clients can connect to receive a Flash ‘stream’ to play in a Flash player (or Web browser plugin). In this case, the firewall has to be configured to enable the OWL client to transmit graphics to the Red5 server, as well as for Flash clients to stream from the Red5 server. This architecture is represented by Figure 1 below.

Figure 1

2. Combining Audio & Video on the OWL Client

The OWL Client receives audio from the voicebridge that it plays through the client’s audio-out drivers, such as its speakers or a headset. The audio it receives is attenuated/spatialised according to the location of the avatar that is associated with the user of the OWL client, but does not include the audio from the microphone connected to the hardware on which the OWL client is running.

Our attempt to combine audio and video on the client first required us to mix the audio from the voicebridge with the audio from the client microphone and then combine that with the captured graphics, before sending it on to the Red5 server. From that point, the Flash clients would be ignorant of the change in architecture and would receive a combined audio/video ‘stream’ to play. This architecture is represented in Figure 2 below.

Figure 2

However, this approach failed due to several problems, including:

• The audio was received from the perspective of the avatar of the user associated with the client, NOT from the perspective of the webcaster object in the virtual world.
• The frequency of the received audio could be changed by the user, which made mixing with the audio from the microphone unstable.
• The extra processing that was required on the OWL client to mix the audio and then combine with the graphics was significant.

Thus, this approach was abandoned as infeasible. An alternative approach: to mix the audio on the voicebridge before sending to the OWL client was also considered. This suffered from the drawback that there was no existing mechanism to send the mixed audio to the OWL client–it would have required an additional connection through a firewall. Again, this was abandoned due the problems of managing ad hoc connections.

3. An Alternative Approach?

The current approach works around the audio problem by using an existing virtual phone object. However, we recognise that it is less than an elegant solution–we would still like to be able to provide a combined audio and video Flash stream to Web Browser clients. Ideally, we’d like the architecture as illustrated in Figure 3. Here the  video is sent from an OWL client to the Red5 server where it is mixed with the spatialised audio that comes from the voicebridge, from the perspective of the webcaster. We have no idea if this would be possible, as it requires expertise in developing Red5 applications. However, if any readers would like to take this on as an experiment, please reply via a comment below. Or, if you have experience of Red5 and think this is a daft idea, let us know via the comments!

Figure 3

In earlier blog postings about the +Spaces project, Bernard described how we were using Open Wonderland (OWL) to host polls and debates, so that citizens could express their views on potential government policies. In this posting, we will describe another mechanism to encourage citizens to engage in the policy-making process: role-play simulations.

Role-play has been used for many purposes such as predicting outcomes, war-gaming, team building, and training. It has been particularly useful as a teaching tool in the classroom, allowing students to act out and experience some of the dynamics of a particular problem or issue, from different stakeholder perspectives. Aspects of role-play have also been used in online environments such as virtual theatre, gaming, and focused discussion forums. Role-play simulations in virtual worlds have often been labelled as ‘serious games’, often used where it would be too dangerous or too costly to attempt the activity in a real-world setting. Examples include safety training on oil rigs, and educating paramedics.

Many of the examples of role-play simulations are custom-built virtual worlds (such as the examples above). However, one of the requirements of the +Spaces project is to come up with an abstract description of role-play simulations that could be used in multiple policy domains, so that the +Spaces functionality could be used to address policies across a range of domains.

Building on the success of role-playing in the education, we have adapted resources from the Australian Flexible Learning Framework to develop two role-playing templates for use on the +Spaces platform. These are:

• Galactic wormhole: participants imagine themselves to be five years in the future and reflect on positive and negative outcomes of a particular policy
• Depolarizer: structured game based on the philosophy that many issues that we treat as problems to be solved are actually polarities to be managed

The idea is that users can consider the consequences of a proposed policy through a role-play simulation. An online moderator facilitates the session, assigning users to roles specific to the role-play. The users are then guided through the stages of the role-play simulation by the moderator. The template can be instantiated with a description of the policy, useful web links, descriptions of roles, and questions to be answered by the participants.

We implemented the two templates in OWL, and the video below shows a much-shortened version of the first trial that took place recently, using an instantiated Depolarizer template. You’ll see that the moderator (Michael) has a control panel from which he can step through the stages in the template, whereas participants (such as Bernard) do not have access to the control panel. The other users in the trial were students from the University of Essex.

(For brevity’s sake, the video focuses on the steps in the template and omits user participation. A fuller version of the trial is provided below.)

The purpose of the trial was twofold:

• to test the ‘process’–i.e. to ensure that the users felt that they understood how to participate
• to test the functionality of the modules we had developed for OWL

The results of the trial were broadly positive:

• The participants felt that the process worked very well. They thought that it was clear what they were meant to be doing at each stage.
• They particularly liked the icebreaker stage as a way of getting into the subject. The carpet vote also worked well.
• Some of them preferred the experience of the role-play to their experience of taking part in the previous OWL debate pilot. Because the process was much more structured they felt it was easier to follow than the debate – it was easier for the users to participate in the activities because they had a clear idea of what they should be doing at each stage – they felt that they could participate more easily.
• Although the Depolarizer is quite a simple role-play compared to the Galactic Wormhole, they all found the optimist/pessimist roles to be very easy to get into.
• The functionality of the simulation worked well, although there were some issues with the size of the statements on the “statement wall” and the location of some of the elements of the virtual world.

Videos are also available that provide an (edited) full-length version of the trial, as well as a (very short) video of the OWL features that we implemented. We’d be really interested in your responses to this approach to simulation and also other possible applications, such as directed learning.

By Mary Beth Ogulewicz, J.D.

Springfield Technical Community College and WonderBuilders have embarked on creating a 3D virtual college campus pursuant to a 3 year National Science Foundation grant.  WonderBuilders is working with the English as a Second Language (ESL) Department to enhance opportunities for students to practice conversation.  The virtual college campus will allow students who have limited opportunity to interact with native speakers and partake in campus activities to meet in-world with conversation buddies as well fellow students. Among the goals are increased conversational competence, higher levels of engagement with the college, and increased matriculation rates.  Curriculum activities for each level of English are being planned. Additionally, to assist students, various campus offices such as Financial Aid, Registrar and the Health Office will hold office hours in-world. Below are some of the activities we have created thus far.

Simon Says

ESL students gain technological proficiency by engaging in a game of Simon Says.  This fun introductory activity builds confidence for students who may have lower technology skills. It also embeds vocabulary and prepositions for Level 2 language students.

Conversation Buddies

Due to family and work obligations, ESL students often have limited time to engage in authentic conversation with native speakers. With many students working 2nd and 3rd shift, the virtual world provides an optimal platform for students to meet native speakers to engage in conversation at times that fit their busy lives.

Academic Advisor

Students often need assistance navigating the myriad of problems that arise with paperwork, registration, academic and campus life.  A student’s relationship with her/his academic advisor is critical to success.  Acting as a mentor and advisor, professors are a tremendous resource and often the only person on campus that a student will turn to for help.  The virtual world allows those conversations to occur at times convenient to the student and most importantly fosters the success of the student.

Health Office

Among the most daunting experiences for a second language speaker is a visit to a physician’s office.  In-world students can build a relationship with a campus physician’s assistant and practice the difficult medical language necessary to successfully interact with medical personnel, thereby ensuring the health of themselves and their family.

Brainstorming

Collaborative learning is essential to development of workforce skills. Students can meet in-world and collaboratively create written work and projects, as well as practice speaking the target language.

Multicultural Fair

This project highlights the confluence of students’ skills: technology, creativity and language.  Students research their native countries and then build their individual booths to display their research.  Students visit the event in-world, practice questions and then have the opportunity to record and practice their English.

Project Status

We will continue to work on software development and curriculum integration through the summer, testing the environment as we go along with current students. We will run our first pilot class with second level ESL students in September. We invite you to follow our progress on Facebook.

Brooke is an avid writer who strives to write about topics surrounding the rising emergence of online education and how it could effect the way that students of the future will learn, interact, and contribute to the world around them.  Brooke holds a graduate degree in business and is also currently considering further graduate work in the field of organizational behavior.

According to research cited in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, nearly one in three college students takes at least one online class. That figure presents an increase of 10 percent over the prior year and amounts to nearly 6 million students around the country who are enrolled in the virtual classroom. For older-aged working professionals looking to obtain an online graduate degree, the idea of a virtual classroom could appeal to them in that it carries the flexibility of online education but embodies the look-and-feel of the traditional classroom with which they are familiar.  Many researchers and students also cite the convenience of the online classroom, which allows students with non-traditional schedules to earn college credit on a more flexible schedule. Many education analysts, however, are wondering just how effective online education really is and what will happen if the virtual classroom becomes the paradigm of tomorrow’s university.

In some respects, online learning has definite advantages over the traditional classroom. A report issued by the U.S. Department of Education found that students taking online instruction performed better than their peers in the traditional classroom. When the online instruction was collaborative or instructor-directed, researchers noted a greater positive effect. Additionally, the most effective learning models involved manipulations that triggered learner activity, self-reflection and self-moderating of understanding.

The effective online classroom is influenced by the behavior of the instructor more than by any other factor.  If this factor of instructor excellence were to be combined with future virtual classroom concepts, such as those fostered by the virtual environment enabler Open Wonderland, there is no telling how effective a tool this could be. By having a medium where students can not only immerse themselves into one personable environment from anywhere in the world, but to do so with high-caliber teachers, the entire landscape of education could change drastically. In a study published in the Journal of Interactive Online Learning, John Savery of the University of Akron found that effective online instructors are highly visible through both public and private communications channels, including banner web pages, email, audio and video. Good instructors are also organized, compassionate and analytical, providing continuous assessment so that students can monitor both their progress and their understanding of course topics. Finally, the best online instructors lead by example, modeling appropriate online communication and meeting their own commitments in a timely manner.

The future university classroom will inevitably incorporate digital content. The same Department of Education study also found that students who took courses blending face-to-face and online instruction performed better than any other group. Savery suggests that online instructors set up proctored exams on campus when possible so that online students have a chance to meet their instructors face-to-face. Schools that continue to rely on traditional instruction can support in-class activities via online discussion or by posting course materials online.

When gathering in one location is not possible, social media, video conferencing, or virtual worlds help to provide the next best solution for face-to-face connection. For example, professors can use platforms like Twitter to post assignments or class updates, or students can participate in live Twitter discussions by using a designated hashtag. Instead of discussing via text only, students can also conduct video conferences with their professors or meet in a virtual world. Additionally, solutions like SavorChat can allow professors to schedule chat room discussions combining the use of both Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Online education cuts costs for universities, delivers flexibility for students and enhances the educational experience. With the proliferation of mobile devices, students can connect to their coursework anytime, anywhere. The traditional classroom may never entirely disappear; however, the virtual classroom will support, if not supplant, the face-to-face paradigm.

One of the great features of Open Wonderland is its telephony support. In this blog post, I provide a few examples of standard VOIP clients that use SIP to call into an Open Wonderland server. It may seem odd to use an impoverished audio connection to a rich immersive 3d environment, but there are many occasions when users wish to participate in meetings from locations or using devices that are not able to provide the full Open Wonderland experience.

In the video below, I show some examples of how to use two of the many SIP clients to call into an Open Wonderland server. The first of these, Jitsi, is an open-source Java-based client that can be used on a regular desktop/laptop. The second client, 3CX, is available for iPhone (iOS) and Android platforms. The video provides three examples:

1. Using Jitsi to connect, registrar-less, to an Open Wonderland server running on a local network
2. Using Jitsi to connect, authenticated, to an Open Wonderland server running on a host on the public internet
3. Using 3CX installed on an iPad to connect, authenticated, to the same server as in (2). (The settings for the 3CX client are provided at the end of this post.)

These examples augment the existing video that shows how to use a virtual phone to call out via a PBX. There is nothing special about the Open Wonderland installations that I’m using for the demonstrations. The only requirement before producing the examples was to insert a Virtual Phone into the virtual world using the standard ‘Insert Object…’ dialogue. In detail:

1. The first example uses a source build (rev 4820) of Open Wonderland, with no authentication enabled, running on my home local network.
2. The second and third examples both use a binary installation (rev 4816) of Open Wonderland, with authentication enabled. The installation is hosted on a public internet-facing server at the University of Essex that has its firewall configured according the the Open Wonderland firewall instructions.

Many thanks to Morris Ford for his guidance on using SIP.

For information about the settings I used to connect the 3CX client, see the figure below.

This month marks the 2nd anniversary of Open Wonderland. In the release meeting last week, the group brainstormed about some of the past year’s highlights.

Wonderland Wednesday Projects

Wonderland Wednesdays continue to be a great way for developers to both learn more about Wonderland development and contribute to the community. They are also an excellent testing ground for new features and bug fixes. In the past year, we have completed one Wonderland Wednesday project, EZMove, and are close to finishing the more recent Telepointer project.

New Monthly Release Cycle

Starting in January 2012, we put into a place a monthly release mechanism. The main goal was to ensure that when people download the Wonderland binary, they are running a recent stable version. With the previous system, someone could download a binary that was almost a half a year out of date, which was causing support issues.

The new system has had a number of unexpected positive consequences. We are now holding monthly release meetings to review which new features and bug fixes should be included in the release. In addition to being another venue for developers to meet and discuss issues, these meetings have provided us with a framework for reviewing bugs and feature enhancement requests (RFEs). During the meetings, we can also enlist volunteers to tackle problems or work on RFEs.  Developers are pushing to get code finished in order to have their code included in the next release. We never expected changing the release cycle would have an impact on progress, but it’s turning out that bugs are now getting fixed at a faster pace with more people participating in the process.

Immersive Education Participation

It has been particularly gratifying to see the number of Wonderland projects being presented at the Immersive Education (iED) conferences.  Community participation in my remote keynote “show-and-tell” session at the most recent European Immersive Education was amazing. If you haven’t seen it, you can watch the video, or read the blog post about the event.

Community members participating in the European iED conference

Although I’ll be attending in person, I have signed up to do another similar session at the upcoming Immersive Education Summit in Boston June 14-16. Please contact me if you cannot attend the summit in person, but would like to show off your Wonderland world or Wonderland feature in the Boston show-and-tell session.

Start-up Activity

This year there has also been some activity on the business front. The WonderHealth team from Vmersion is looking for funding from the Knight Foundation to create a social networking environment for people with common  health concerns. The new environment will allow participants to hear from doctors, share experiences with one another, and discuss educational media together.

Also in the healthcare space, WonderBuilders has entered their new VMed Learning Spaces product offering into the MassChallenge start-up competition. VMed Learning Spaces are a collection of simulated clinical settings such as a doctor’s office, an intensive care unit, an emergency room, a maternity ward, etc. that medical, nursing, and other allied health students can use to practice critical skills.

Example VMed Learning Space by WonderBuilders

Please cast your vote for both these projects on their respective competition web sites to help them gain momentum.

Press Coverage

In the past year, Hypergrid Business and other news outlets have picked up quite a few stories originally posted on WonderBlog. A search for Open Wonderland on Hypergrid Business reveals stories published about Wonderland’s use in Africa, in the +Spaces debating project, in the Singapore Games Village project, in an English as a Second Language project, and in the Virtual Cockpit. You will also find reports on new Wonderland features such as drag-and-drop of Microsoft Office documents, exporting of objects, and streaming a Wonderland world to a tablet.

Hypergrid Business Search Results Page

Final Thoughts

We are looking forward to another year of community projects, collaborations, and interesting activity around Open Wonderland. If you have a Wonderland project you would like to highlight on the blog, simply email a few paragraphs and a screenshot or video to me or to info@openwonderland.org and someone will work with you to edit the article and publish it as a guest post.

Last year on the Open Wonderland anniversary we ran a series of educational workshops to commemorate the event. We’re in discussion about how to commemorate it this year, so please keep your eye out for a discussion the forum on this topic.

Virtual Technology for Education Vision

By Juliana Momodu

This year’s International Women’s Day theme, “equal access to education, training, and science and technology,” is a powerful affirmation of what I am about and why I am blazing the trail of bringing Open Wonderland to bridge the educational, gender, economic, social, and technological divides in Africa and worldwide.

Background

The world, according to UNESCO Information Statistic (UIS), has  67 million “out of school” children. 30 million of these children are from sub-Saharan Africa and 60% of them are girls! Although the gender gap in education has been decreasing over the past decade, many girls continue to lag behind their male counterparts in equal access to schooling and acquisition of basic skills such as literacy. Reasons include girls marrying early, fathers seeing training a girl that will leave the  family to marry as a waste of resources, and girls needed to help to raise other children. In Sub-Saharan Africa, 17 million girls are still out of school; in South Asia, another 9.5 million are shut out.

Education empowers women by improving their living standard. It is the starting point for women’s advancement in different fields of human endeavor. It is the basic tool that should be given to women in order to fulfill their role as full members of the society

Nigeria’s Scenario

Nigeria is a federation of 36 states. The total population is 150+ million, making it the most populated country in Africa. There are 364 languages. English is the official language of business and is widely spoken. Nigeria’s  National Policy on Education segments the system into 6 years of primary education, allowing an exit point after 9 years of schooling to continue careers through apprenticeship or other vocational programs.

In 2010, a joint UNESCO-UNICEF report estimated over four million Nigerian girls between the ages of 6 and 11 having no access to primary education. Furthermore, the former Education Minister, Dr. Sam Egwu, once released worrisome and dismal statistics on Nigeria’s out-of-school children. In his ministry’s 2010 ministerial press briefing, Egwu revealed that 17 million Nigerian children had no access to education. This figure, he averred, was made of 11 million children who should be in primary school and six million who ought to be in Junior Secondary School (JSS).  He said the level of transition from JSS to Senior Secondary School (SSS) was put at 16 percent, while only six percent of applicants gain admission into universities, polytechnics and colleges of education, because of the crisis of access to the institute.

Problems include:

1. Lack of classroom space leading to open air classrooms subject to weather fluctuations, leading to class cancellation.
2. Quality of education offered is affected by poor attendance leading to low rate of educated students. Illness and hunger either of the children themselves or members of the family contribute to the attendance problem.
3. Teachers are inadequately prepared and morale is low due to basic condition of the work environment and poor salaries.
4. High cost of schooling includes the costs of books, stationery and basic equipment, uniforms, admission fees, registration and examination fees, contribution towards building and maintenance fund, construction fees, transportation, mid-day meals, Parents/Teachers Association (PTA) fees, sports fees, library fees (even where they are more or less  moribund) and extra tuition fees.
5. Opportunity costs for parents sending children to school is high. The children’s time is often of economic importance to the family either in terms of income generating activities or in supporting the functioning of the household.
6. Unemployment among school graduates dissuade people from going to school since they see limited economic benefits.
7. Finally, the low quality of schooling, particularly with regards to poor physical infrastructures, lack of motivated staff, poor utilization of resources, content of curriculum, nature of teaching methods and relationship of the school and teachers with the wider community negatively impact the education system.

Solution: Public/Private Partnerships in Education

It is not possible to grow a nation with uneducated people. Nigeria needs a well trained and motivated workforce to achieve her development objectives. The UNESCO has recommended 26% budgetary allocation to education. To correct the aforementioned problems and transfer the solution to other African countries, we see Open Wonderland as a solution of choice. With this open source technology and our focus on public schools regardless of the distance and level of income, we can be nearer to the Universal Basic Education portion of the Nigerian Millennium Development Goals by 2015, which has been looking unattainable. We need technologies that are simple to teach and learn for both teachers and students alike. They also need to be interactive and fun to encourage their interest, and increase student retention rates.

Using 3D virtual world technology as a catalyst to providing education for all in sub-Saharan Africa, 3D immersive education environments will offer significant improvements over the normal face-to-face, traditional teaching and learning styles. Their interactivity and capability for real-time collaboration across geographical distance, will raise the bar of excellence, promoting global peace through understanding and respecting of each other’s cultures.

To ensure that no child is left behind and education is truly global, Virtual Technology for Education (VT4E) will study, implement, operate and support 3D virtual world environments for schools in Nigeria and other regions of Africa, using collaborative, state-of-the-art platforms and toolkits. Within those worlds, users can communicate with fidelity and security using immersive audio, share live desktop applications, and collaborate in an educational context. Educators around the world are inventing Wonderland worlds for a vast array of topics and a wide range of student populations, which we will be able to take advantage of.

It has been said that to revolutionize the effectiveness of teaching, learning and communication, the workplace is the classroom and technologies are the tools for learning. Multimedia technology can help foster interactive group communication, which is a key to learning. Additionally, some studies have shown that people can absorb knowledge up to 40 percent faster with multimedia and improve retention by up to 50 percent. It is this result that led Yonkers (1195: Yonker, M., Executive Education and Leadership Development, New York; University Park, P.A. pg 20-23) and some other writers to agree that knowledge (K) equals the sum of the people (P), and information (I) multiplied by technology (T) or K = (P) +IT. The promising practice, therefore, is a combination of classroom and technology.

It would be unpardonably remiss if I don’t thank my business partner Michel M. Denis from Internet 3 Solutions for his invaluable belief in the VT4E project shown in his tenacious commitment and work ethic. Our team is just fabulous. He is detailed-oriented and in it for the long haul. He is an architect who is so committed that he even finds the school song of the Nigerian Pilot School without any help from me. Thank you Michel! We have a priceless collaboration in us.

“Technologies are enablers, and when put in the hands of good teachers, the students soar and excel”
-Unknown

“I never teach my pupils; I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn”
-Albert Einstein

In an earlier blog posting about the +Spaces project, I described how we were using Wonderland to host polls for users to express their opinions about proposed governmental policies. In the next stage of the project, we have taken a look at another way of engaging citizens: debates. The video below is a very shortened version of a test debate that took place in the middle of February 2012. The participants were students from the University of Essex in the UK, along with project partners from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) and the Hellenic Parliament. The debate is fairly formal: it has a fixed time slot, a moderator (in this case a researcher from NTUA) and participants who are asked to comment on a particular topic under discussion, suggested by someone taking the role of a policy maker (a representative of the Hellenic Parliament).

You can see from the video, that we’ve developed a couple of extra modules to enable the debate. These are:

• a ‘carpet’ in which participants can vote, by pressing a button,
• a ‘pigeon’ that displays messages arriving from other virtual ‘spaces’ (in our case Facebook and Twitter) that are also hosting the debate,
• a ‘list of links’ with URLs relevant to the topic under discussion.

The debate uses existing Wonderland modules such as the Sticky Note and the Audio Recorder. (Unfortunately, the audio at the beginning of the video is poor due to a high latency wireless connection, it improves once we were able to patch the recording from the audio recorder into the video.)

The feedback we received from the participants was positive. Generally, they really liked the ‘carpet’, but there was some discussion about whether or not users’ names should be displayed on the poles that represent votes. Some valued anonymity, and others wanted to know who had voted for or against.

In the next stage of the project, we are looking at using Wonderland to host role-play simulations of policies. We hope to complete that by Summer 2012.

I recently collaborated with Amy Cramer, an economics professor at Pima Community College in Tuscon, Arizona. Together, we made a video that demonstrates how Open Wonderland can be used to create a dynamic, interactive environment for teaching online economics classes.

This came about as a result of her school encouraging her to develop a distance education course. She resisted because she was not satisfied with current online course offerings.  She did not think they did a good job of engaging students or offering the type of explanatory power of live instruction. On top of that, they involved more work for the instructor because of the volume of discussion text that had to be read and responded to.

These problems led her to explore alternatives. Together, we made this video to illustrate how using Open Wonderland could overcome the issues with web-based courses, while retaining all of the benefits.

The main insight from the video is that live classes that integrate collaborative activities with opportunities to interact with the instructor are considerably more engaging than reading web pages or watching canned videos. Those students who are able to take advantage of the live class will have a superior experience, but students not able to attend can still follow the course by watching video recordings of the sessions.

I am working on a new module that is for building in-world. It differs from the standard Wonderland content creation flow since this module is used to construct complex models without the use of external modeling tools.

The use of this tool to create structures in Wonderland is not intended to replace the current workflow but to add a new way to create content. The workflow of this new module is to insert an instance of the module in world and then build up the desired structure starting from the cube that is initially created. The desired model is made up of many individual shapes that are created by clicking on a surface of an existing shape. For instance, one of the current shapes is a cube. A click on one of the six surfaces of the cube causes the module to add a new shape. The location of the new shape is attached to the shape that was clicked. Exactly where it is attached depends on what new shape is desired. If the click is on the surface of a cube and the new shape is a cube, the new cube will be attached to the clicked surface.

The module allows for the selection of the properties of the module in a HUD-based control panel. Properties such as the shape, texture and relative location among a number of others are configurable from the control panel.

The structure of the model is stored in an external database that is updated at the point of creation of each new shape. A structure stored in the database can be retrieved and created in world from the HUD control panel. Since the data stored in the database is in a form that describes the shape, texture(s), location, etc., any system that can access the database and create the 3D shapes could use the structures.