Eyefood

Kisa Naumova posted a moving image.

Markay Olinger: yay
Kisa Naumova: hahahaha
Kisa Naumova: show me your ruin though
Markay Olinger: hahaha
Kisa Naumova: hahaha
Kisa Naumova: Hahahahahahahahaha
Markay Olinger: splendid
Kisa Naumova: fortunately, I wasn’t filming that
Kisa Naumova: ooooh
Kisa Naumova: do you mind if I film this?
Markay Olinger: sure
Markay Olinger: i dont know why this panel has flipped round
Kisa Naumova: which one?
Markay Olinger: this one
Kisa Naumova: ah
Kisa Naumova: could it be in the texture tab?
Markay Olinger: the texture was right before
Kisa Naumova: you can flip textures in there
Kisa Naumova: sometimes, SL does weird things
Kisa Naumova: it’s been playing up a lot recently
Kisa Naumova: you’ve got a bit of z-clashing texture going on there
Kisa Naumova: I think there are two prims?
Markay Olinger: hmm that one isn’t right either
Kisa Naumova: z-clashing happens when two prims are at the same level
Kisa Naumova: try deleting one of them
Markay Olinger: yeah i must have duplicated one by accident or something
Kisa Naumova: what’s the plan for the ruin?
Markay Olinger: firsat i need more photos to use as backdrops
Kisa Naumova: aha
Kisa Naumova: ok
Markay Olinger: then I’m going to continue with the building
Markay Olinger: and put up the work I do inside the buildings
Kisa Naumova: I see
Markay Olinger: hmm i just fixed that floor and now its gone back to how it was
Kisa Naumova: may i?
Kisa Naumova: move that up a bit
Kisa Naumova: see?
Kisa Naumova: two of them
Kisa Naumova: yeah
Kisa Naumova: you had a duplicate
Markay Olinger: yeah, not sure why :/
Kisa Naumova: shift-drag by mistake
Cyrus Huffhines is Online
Kisa Naumova: maybe?
Kisa Naumova: I do that all the time
Markay Olinger: probably
Kisa Naumova: cool
Kisa Naumova: anyway, I’m being dragged away by CAP students
Kisa Naumova: haha
Kisa Naumova: catch you later
Markay Olinger: cya
Markay Olinger: is there a meeting here?
Markay Olinger: i think ian mentioned something
Kisa Naumova: um, not tonight I don’t think
Markay Olinger: ok
Kisa Naumova: he’ll have put a notice on the site in the Habitat group
Ordinal Howdah Pistol v0.43: Currently drawn and loaded with 2 rounds of .61 buckshot ammunition. ‘/11 draw’ to draw or holster, ‘/11 menu’ for further options.
Ordinal Howdah Pistol v0.43: Currently drawn and loaded with 2 rounds of .61 solid ammunition. ‘/11 draw’ to draw or holster, ‘/11 menu’ for further options.
Markay Olinger: dont wanna be on fire again
Kisa Naumova: hahaha
Kisa Naumova: cu

Kisa Naumova posted a moving image.

Kisa Naumova: hello
Illyria Rozen: Hi
Kisa Naumova: ]how are you doing?
Illyria Rozen: Alright I think, Not sure how I’m gona do the textures and stuff for the guitar though
Kisa Naumova: yeah, that could be tricky
Kisa Naumova: I think you might have to tile a large one across all the little pieces
Kisa Naumova: I have some formulas that can help
Illyria Rozen: Cool, I don’t know how I’d do that
Kisa Naumova: ah
Kisa Naumova: it might be easier to talk about that in RL
Illyria Rozen: Yeah, I’m not in uni though
Kisa Naumova: ok
Kisa Naumova: well,
Kisa Naumova: at whatever point you are
Kisa Naumova: I should have time
Kisa Naumova: Oh, did you friend me BTW?
Illyria Rozen: Ok, I’ll let you know if I’m around at any point
Illyria Rozen: yeah I did friend you
Kisa Naumova: ah
Kisa Naumova: sorry
Kisa Naumova: I get several requests a day, and I forget who people are
Kisa Naumova: haha
Kisa Naumova: LOL
You have offered friendship to Illyria Rozen
Illyria Rozen is Online
Illyria Rozen: That’s ok I thought that might be the case
Kisa Naumova: cool
Kisa Naumova: anyway
Kisa Naumova: best go…
Kisa Naumova: catch you later
Illyria Rozen: ok
Illyria Rozen: bye

A thought occurred to me earlier on, regarding the way we have created accounts for the students in the pilot on The Site. To make things simple, I rehashed a version of my ‘click to join the site’ box (which is the glowing orange doughnut in some of the snapshots that have been appearing), so that all they had to do was click and they’d automagically have a new account and be put into the right groups.

Which is all very well, but I’ve started wondering how this will work in relation to their existing accounts - will having two identities on the site be confusing? Will they flip backwards and forwards between the two? Will they spend more time devoted to one than the other?

I know that personally, having several identities online is something that I’ve struggled somewhat with for the past six years. Juggling which particular ‘persona’ I felt like on a particular day hasn’t always been easy - even though I’ve taken steps like having multiple browser installations (with their own separate cookies) to be able to do things like keeping three Flickr accounts and three Twitter accounts going at the same time.

Even then though, I’ve always noted that I seemed to shift emphasis from one persona to another depending on a host of different things.

…

Originally, when I was first playing around with the idea of having specific Second Life sections of the site, I introduced a category in the user database to store Second Life names. One thing that I think this pilot will show, is whether I should have pursued that idea, rather than relying on separate accounts.

We’ll see I guess

We had a lovely little moment yesterday. I’m a firm believer in trying things out, and pushing technology to do things that you don’t expect it to be able to (I once cobbled together a last-minute 10-way video distribution hub for a BBC shoot using pulled=apart mains cable and some match sticks - bodging is the way forward).

But I digress.

The original idea of using OpenSim as an introductory experience in the OpenHabitat Project was working surprisingly well. I am sure Ian or Dave will write something about how the students were introduced to this three-dimensional ‘world’ in a way that they were familiar - as if it was a PhotoShpo workshop - but one of the key things that I remember about the session was how we shifted our plans in response to a technological whim.

Part of the configuration of a stand-alone OpenSim installation involves telling the Second Life client to look for a region on the same machine as itself. It’s a really simple change to the arguments.txt file contained within the Second Life client package itself:

http://127.0.0.1:9000/

(/Applications/Second\ Life/Contents/Resources/arguments.txt)

(Or at least that’s what ours said)

127.0.0.1 is (obviously) ‘myself’ or “localhost”, and that line makes the client connect to the machine it’s running on, rather than trying to connect to the Second Life grid itself.

What struck me though, was that to ease-in the idea of the grid being a collaborative and social space, it would be rather fun to hook the iMacs that we were running in pairs - so that the students would be able to experience that sense of ’sharing’ the world with another person (albeit Ruth)

I changed the machines so that instead of referencing themselves as 127.0.0.1, they used their proper IP address, and tried to connect from one to another…

…without success. The login process kept hanging at “Waiting for region handshake”. A quick googling of the error messages that the host machine’s terminal logs were throwing up, brought me to a page that (amongst other things) suggested that the external IP address in OpenSim itself’s configuration needed to match.

...external_host_name="127.0.0.1"...

(/Applications/opensim/bin/Regions/default.xml)

As soon as I changed that to be the same as the machine’s assigned IP address, I was able to configure any number of the other iMacs (although I only paired them) to connect to each other.

</ramble>

The point of this is two-fold:

1. Sticking to lesson-plans is OK, but religiously sticking to them when you have a bright idea in the middle of the session is too dogmatic. It’s more fun to take a risk and try something out.

2. If something seems like it should work, but doesn’t, Google the error messages - chances are someone has had that problem before.

Introduction

I’ve been meaning to write this for ages. Mostly, whenever I make something I’m proud of online, I just link to it. But for reasons that I’ll elaborate on later in this series, I’ve deliberately made this piece of software a closed-community, and as a result, I haven’t been able to simply point some links at it.

I’ve been responsible for the web activities of the course that I teach on - BA (Hons) Contemporary Art Practices - for quite some time now. Longer than I’ve been a member of staff on the course in fact. Originally, the course website was a gallery-esque tool, there to show some of the student work generated in the course of the years, and to give information out about the course. But in recent years, there has been a desire for the site to actually do something.

Originally, most of the experiments I tried into student-driven site content were just that - experiments. I figured that it would give the students a sense of ‘partcipation’ if they were to actively upload their work to the site, and (frankly, sorry) would make my job of collating “Stuff” for it a lot easier.

We tried two specific things - first of all a simple account-bsaed gallery affair, which I tried to tack a few useful functions onto (like calendars and such). It had promise (and ironically, is almost exactly what we have today, just four years too early), but the time and resources weren’t there to develop it to an operational position.

The second approach I took was to try and set up individual blogs for every single student on the course. With limited resources (again), this involved a hasty decision about which software to choose (this was before the monolithic Wordpress and Typepad-like options were starting to be established as ’standards’), and a rapid installation of some open-source blogging tool on my own home server.

For all its faults, that version actually worked, and got picked up by one or two students. But “one or two” out of a cohort of one hundred and eighty isn’t really a decent adoption-rate.

During all that time though, I had obviously been looking into various web-based social networks as part of my own work - things like Flickr, and YouTube (and its precursors), so in 2005 when I was asked specifically to produce a tool for our students to catalogue their research, and for us to provide feedback to them, I had some influence that enabled me to think differently about how I might approach it.

…

The site that emerged did so partly by accident. The two specific ‘briefs’ - of a research database and student-specific feedback - meant that I had to develop ways in which (a) students could upload pieces of work and/or research to a web site, and (b) we as staff could send private messages to students. So in doing those two things, I developed pieces of code that would enable the areas that the site has excelled in - uploading various different pieces of work, and acting as a means of communication across the School.

…

Anyway. That’s all probably very boring. I could probably expand on this boringness by going into great detail about what version 1.0 of the site looked like.

But I won’t.

I may be speaking out of turn here, and basing the premise of this purely on wildly carefree speculation, but it strikes me that a lot of discussions that take place on the subject of implementing New! and Interesting! technologies, focus for a disproportionate amount of time on the question of “Which platform to go with?”

I’ve spent a small amount of time - small in comparison to a lot of the people I’m starting to meet, anyway - sat in meetings where Too Many People At Once™ try to exert influence on decisions as to which piece of software is going to satisfy the Institution’s e-quotas for the week; by romping out list after list of comparisons between A and B.

(Where A is a piece of software that does a million useful things, except the one thing that’s the focus of the project, and B is a piece of software that does do that one thing, but nobody likes it)

Everybody seems to have their favourites. Some people will tout the values of a Wiki (too much, IMHO). Some will have recently discovered an AJAX-laden podcasting supersite (2.0) that has pretty green header images, and will want to use that.

For every single problem that seems to exist, there seems to be exactly seven¹ different sites that everyone can’t agree on. And I dont know about anyone else, but the discussions that take place whenever issues like these crop up, irritate me.

They irritate me because they’re mostly redundant. It doesn’t really matter which particular flavour of software or site that you use. What matters is that the site generates content that complies to standards.

I recently watched a heated discussion based around the question of which podcasting software to choose. Voweless-words were bandied around, and pros and cons were debated. Someone even wanted to start talking about codecs. (For some reason that really escaped me. And trust me, I know about codecs)

What seemed to have been missed, was that a podcast is just a lovely name for an RSS feed with file enclosures. And as long as whatever piece of software creates the RSS feed complies to RSS standards, then it really doesn’t matter. The whole point (I feel) of the drive to infuse the current educational environment with the tools that are emerging (ha!) from the 2.0nd web bubble, is to enable users (and therefore students) to choose for themselves whatever pieces of software they happen to like.

“Do you have a blog? Cool. Let’s syndicate it into your pages within the university, based on a tag so that you can filter it if you want.”

“Fancy podcasting from your bedroom? OK, let’s feed your YouTube videos into a blog, and see what happens when we force the RSS through tumblr and into your Second Life profile”

All of the sites that are worth considering at all, use standard ways of communicating with all of the others. RSS is the language that enables one piece of my work to diseminate itself throughout every single place I happen to choose to exist on the internet. And it’s through RSS that anyone else can choose how they want to read what I make.

I find it amusing when people start worrying about how many people are using the site that they’ve created for their course - or whenever any new project forces its users to create more profiles in the ever-expanding world of social networking. Because I fell that websites are checked less and less (by me at least)

I dunno. I just think that if people worried less about which particular piece of software they were choosing, concentrating instead on the usefullness delivery technologies, and let their participants choose how they wanted to create content, then wed all spend a lot less time in meetings shouting WIKI!”, “NO! MOODLE!”, and could spend a bit more time assessing the content that our students were trying to make.

¹ I made that up

Ravenelle: Educators need to get real about their unrealistic expectations of Second Life

(Via http://twitter.com/Ravenelle.)