Learn 4 Life

Scratch in Open Sim

July 28, 2009 on 8:04 pm | In BSF, CLC, Continual Professional Development, Curriculum, Digital Literacy, Educational Change, IT support, Innovation, Learning Content, Learning Platforms, Learning Tools, Mediated Reality, Personalised Learning, Second Life, Virtual Worlds, Web 2.0, advisory, control, control_technology, hosting, mediascapes, metaverse, open source, pedagogy, sloodle, twitter, video | 0 Comments

Thanks to ReactionGrid and @dstrawberrygirl, Learn4Life now has a place on the Open Sim grid and I am officially a “Gridizen”.

Chris set me up an account in minutes and I was able to have a quick play with Scratch for Open Sim.

Here’s a very quick video of the basic process. I simply downloaded the Scratch for Open Sim application - written in Squeak here (courtesy of a link from Rich White’s excellent Greenbush Labs Blog - Rich tweaked Scratch for Second Life for Open Sim as a universal app for Windows, Mac and Linux) and then I was able to write code that could control a prim on the Open Grid in seconds.

I simply dragged and dropped the building blocks onto the interface and then copy and pasted the code into TextMate and from there into my prim on Reactiongrid and presto - it worked first time. (NB you don’t need to even copy to a Word Processor on a Windows machine - but do on a Mac)

So much more engaging than Scratch in 2D don’t you think ?

If you are a teacher in a  UK school thinking of a quick start in Virtual Worlds and want to explore Open Sim I’d thoroughly recommend ReactionGrid for their pricing and prompt service. They even have a virtual turn key solution Banbury and the educational apps they can offer and other services are well worth looking at http://outpost.reactiongrid.com/. They can make worlds secure and in my experience are still small enough to offer a very personalised service and what’s more their main developer is UK based - so what’s stopping you - get in touch with @dstrawberrygirl now.

Piglets, Pixels and People…Video/audio event magnification…Outside Broadcast comes of age…how to use it effectively - some ideas…

July 22, 2009 on 10:33 pm | In Adult Learning, Continual Professional Development, Digital Literacy, Digital Media, Educational Change, Innovation, Mediated Reality, Peer to Peer, Personalised Learning, Second Life, Virtual Worlds, Web 2.0, advisory, conferences, distributed networking, informal learning, mediascapes, metaverse, open source, pedagogy, training, twitter, vblog, video, video streaming | 0 Comments

HOW TO MAKE VIDEO AMPLIFY AND AUTHENTICATE COMMUNITY ACTIVITY

I have been live streaming video for about 6 years now in different guises. From the pre YouTube days when I needed the help of specialist media companies to live stream, and virtually a whole server to push the video out (with a massive bandwidth bill to boot) - to a few years back when I discovered Mogulus (now Livestream), Ustream, FlashMeeting, QIK et al.

It always struck me very forcibly how important it is to get both the mediums - (real time synchronous video with commenting from viewers on Twitter) and asynchronous (after the event more polished and post produced embedded in a series of good resources) to play to their various strengths.

One of my first video jobs was to build a website for the world’s first Virtual Opera in a girls secondary school in Kings Cross and show the daily rehearsals as they were performed as a series of flash movies then stream the finished opera in real time - twice!

Part of the deal - which was sponsored by Nesta/ Futurelab as it was then was to get match funding from Commercial companies to enable provisioning of kit and services for the event. But the Commercial companies, at first, couldn’t see the concept - they didn’t “get it” - remember this was pre YouTube.

So for weeks I shot digital video of rehearsals - then went home in the evening - edited and encoded the video and then renecoded it into flash uploaded them to my server and wrote the HTML for the flash movies and created the finished web pages. The videos then began to tell a story and people started to understand the filmed narrative.

As the site began to grow and the movies began to populate the website we got more and more sponsorship because the companies could see the narrative emerging and the community started to tune in and, in turn, bounce off of that content. But more than that the community was global so the opportunity to show sponsorship on a much wider platform riding on the tails of a very local story became an established model. So when YouTube came along later it wasn’t that unexpected to me.

Parents were able to see their children rehearsing and the countdown to the live stream of the performance. Companies could see their ROI grow day by day with the popularity of the site which was getting a lot of media attention as it grew - everyone’s attention was captured because of the community looking in on itself and responding.

So the asynchronous video helped to magnify interest in the event and the event drove the activity and buzz around the community. It was a virtuous circle but also a hell of a lot of hard work into the early hours of every morning for about three months…

LIVE STREAMING vs ASYNCHRONOUS VIDEO BROADCAST - how they are different

Fast forward seven years past many many jobs and contracts to the Open Source Schools UnConference this week where I was able to broadcast out live from the NCSL using a Mac laptop and a “dongle” - it’s nothing new I’ve been doing it for years.

Over the past two years I have perfected the use of a mini outside broadcast portable filming unit I carry everywhere with me - it easily enables me to film, stream and document the day for others who could not make it there physically. Six years ago this was my dream - today it’s a reality and the technology to produce live streaming is getting smaller and more powerful by the week…

Inside this case I have 2 tape DV cameras, 3 Flip cams, allied mini tripods, broadcast quality external mikes, ethernet cables, dongle, portable mini hard drive, 32GB USB stick, gaffer tape, pag lights, extension leads and many, many other things that are invaluable. These resources have been built up over time as a result of trial and error.

GETTING YOUR AUDIENCE TO FINE TUNE THEIR SIGNAL - the “human” part of broadcasting

Something always goes wrong and video streaming is an inexact art, so with the coming of Twitter it has been much easier to crowdsource “talkback” from your audience. This is something the mainstream media companies are only just beginning to get.

The people who are both viewing the stream and on Twitter, will give you instant feedback on the reception their end - allowing you to tweak the stream dynamically with others helping you all over the world (although you need to make educated guesses about the quality of some users’ client machines sometimes).

I guess the difference between myself and a “professional” outside broadcaster apart from the cost of the kit, is the fact that I know a fair number of people viewing remotely and I have a good professional knowledge of the people and exemplars I am filming. Sometimes it’s not unknown for me to ask a question on behalf of a remote viewer or myself because the mediated role between active broadcaster, participant and viewer being very much changed by such involvement. The broadcast is both local and global in that respect and authenticity underpins what I do. I don’t do generic video streaming of any event - only the ones with which I have a good professional knowledge of the practitioners and their communities. This helps give a more genuine context and more compelling narrative when broadcasting…

At the Open Source Schools UnConference at the NCSL this week - I managed to stream most of the main sessions (except my own as usual) and with the help of Drew Buddie (http://twitter.com/digitalmaverick), Joe Dale (http://twitter.com/joedale), Tony Sheppard (http://twitter.com/grumbledook) and Dai Barnes (http://twitter.com/daibarnes) most of the other sessions were captured on a series of Flipcams for asynchronous viewing later (I will badge and upload these day by day through August).

As I was filming to DV tape + live streaming I was also monitoring the Twitter hashtag for #osschools and various DM’s from various people about the quality of the stream. By quickly interacting with people I could get immediate feedback about broadcast quality and (try to) correct any dips in volume / picture quality. Plus I could feedback to some presenters in real time on the side…

Those asynchronous films will act as a repository, reminder and CPD resource for those people who were at the conference but couldn’t make the parallel sessions as well as an overview for those people who couldn’t make it there in person. They also act as an historical resource and downloadable archive for people interested in all aspects of Open Source software. Local authority advisors, teachers and others can also point to and embed those films in their local websites and blogs and build further localised CPD sessions around them if they wish.

MAGNIFYING SOCIAL INVOLVEMENT WITH LIVE VIDEO STREAMS BY USING SATELLITE EVENTS

Then, this morning, I was at a remote viewing of TEDGLOBAL OXFORD in Spitalfields London.

About 20 people turned up at 8 am and about 8.20 we were all led over to a viewing suite to see the TEDGLOBAL event streamed live. Nice to be part of a group of people who got access to tickets to view remotely.

So the event is held in Oxford and then broadcast out and what I would call “socially magnified” by being sent to a remote suite of viewers - however - there’s no interactivity between the remote viewers and the broadcast. In the breaks people network locally. It’s a good model but not ideal.

If I were to make a diagram of this experience of the event it would look like this :

Now this is a BIG simplification. But basically - apart from the peer to peer Twitter Channel between users there is no human interaction going on between the live audience and the remote one, between the presenter remotely and the socially magnified group of observers apart from introducing the morning and getting on with the stream. This is a very low level of media use - in fact the best social currency going on is the twitter stream around the media and both events.

SUPERCHARGING STREAMED MEDIA

I have recently been filming for the MirandaMod sessions - I  film for post production to produce a quality film like this - which will include people’s discussion, embedded Powerpoint Slides synchronised with talking heads etc (NB flash movie takes some time to load):

but I also film dynamically encorporating live streams with discussions face to face and remotely and  with the help of the amazing Theo Kuechel we would also use a FlashMeeting Stream to include participants in the discussion “virtually” for reflective workshop sessions that augmented the face to face ones:

Now FlashMeeting is traditionally a serial video conferencing application where everyone’s stream is visible in miniature and people take turns to broadcast out - a diagram of use might look like this:

It has some nice features built in like voting and polling and a text chat channel. But that “serial” model of video transmission or streaming can also be wasteful if you wish to amplify live streaming socially - all you have to do - and it is what people hit upon in the MirandaMod sessions - is add a DV camera on a tripod to a computer where a group of people are meeting + show the FlashMeeting on a whiteboard in that room as well. You then immediately magnify the social interactions and make them highly dynamic. So you end up with a modified Flashmeeting not unlike this:

SO WHAT HAVE PIGLETS GOT TO DO WITH IT? OUTSIDE BROADCAST MADE TRIVIAL - CONTENT STILL KING BUT SOCIAL INTERACTION EMPEROR

Today, after having returned from the TEDLIVE session in London I turned on Twitter to see a live broadcast of a Sow who had just given birth to her piglets from Saltmarsh Community School Animal Enclosure :

This was an amazing feat and reminded me of Mark Robinson’s BirdBox Cam back in the mists of time. But whereas in those days you had to hook up a video camera to a computer network and stream out from there today services like TwitCam, BlogTv and a host of others allow you to Stream out with a couple of clicks.

What then becomes important is the way that instant streaming can be organised to work for education by magnifying human interaction at distance and therefore amplifying the educational value of such experiences between schools and individuals.

So here are a couple of possible pointers to help that magnification happen.

1) If you have an exciting event coming up and you’d like a global audience use Doodle and Eventbrite to get people to agree on an optimum time when you could stream and then gather data on pre audience figures and demographics to help you contextualise the broadcast and create excitement for the event…Use programming tricks from traditional broadcast media…

2) Try to have remote audiences put up the stream on a whiteboard for a larger audience (locally) to see and have a teacher mediate with the broadcaster using Twitter taking questions from their pupils about the broadcast dynamically.

3) If you want to increase this capital, this magnification of rich but global social interaction through media - why not write a web page where two or more Twitcam streams are embedded in a HTML table or just bring up two browser windows and use that as an adhoc video conferencing mechanism between schools. Again putting up the streams on a whiteboard and having teachers or pupils mediate with questions and answers to magnify the social interactions and to model communications.

Now that Outside Broadcast is so easy and trivial to do people will have to consider battery life for cameras (or phones), connectivity and other issues - schools can build boxes of resources similar to the one I have outlined above - now there’s no bar to going anywhere to broadcast…obviously services like this will be available for mobile phones and so as equipment costs  become cheaper the ongoing miniaturisation of kit will ensure that the broadcasts will become ubiquitous.

But as always the most important considerations are the “human” issues surrounding ubiquity of video streaming and this will mean the emergence of a number of protocols and literacies as well as a host of other other issues arising from the “always on” video revolution.

Imagine total ubiquity of media streaming - YouTube live - what is worth watching, what not? What is appropriate and what not? How can you optimise human interaction blended with remote events? What is to remain private and what open? All these are digital literacy issues and will need to be addressed if they are not to be subject to ignorance and further moral panics as they evolve.

With the advent of Google Wave and Live Streaming the internet is going to be always on, totally dynamic and panoptic - what will we do then in terms of social interaction? These are important issues if we are not to just condemn and lock away these wonderful resources.

So to precis some of the issues I have outlined here in this blog here are some things to consider about the live and asynchronous video in the educational sphere:

Live streaming - what for - events? What are authentic narratives that can drive learning forward that bring value to community activity. How do you stage manage these scenarios and serendipities and how do you optimise, magnify and authenticate the human interactions- what are the risk factors and how can you minimise them. How do you write an ethical canon of use?

Transmissive streaming - how to make a simple transmission more compelling, appropriate and meaningful to teachers and learners. What mediation skills are needed - how can teachers or facilitators aggregate web 2.0 resources to create a buzz around learning - how can they archive, optimise and amplify social interaction using these skills.

On my way back from the TedGlobal transmission I came across a demonstration involving local community groups about usery and the national debt. After talking with a couple of the protesters I took out my iPhone and took an
AudioBoo recording of the core protest message. It was pure serendipity and I felt it worthwhile broadcasting this out to Twitter because I felt it was of interest :

It was simply a matter of holding the iPhone up and two clicks. The event held my attention because it involved a community of adults and children who felt strongly about a certain issue and I felt it worthwhile broadcasting. However this can be very decontectualised and one sided so…

The protesters have a web site http://www.londoncitizens.org.uk/ for context. If I were still teaching I would be tempted to use this as a case study in Citizenship - ask my pupils what the provenance for the ideas of the group was - yes - they are a charity what are their aims - do you agree with them? Were they exploiting young children or raising awareness and other similar issues? In effect it would be a wonderful resource to build a case study on. Of course I would need to clear that with my senior management and set in place a number of checks and balances to socially “skin” reflection about the protest and stimulate debate. But without those mediation skills it’s merely another transmission in a plethora of audio out there on the net. I might not even be able to access it from within the school network for starters. So the need for managing institutional interfacing with web 2.0 tools under an enlightened Web 2.0 policy would be vital. I could go on but I won’t labour the point.

These new highly dynamic video and audio media narratives need careful managing but many teachers and institutions are ill equipped to deal with, manage, elicit and mediate the grammar, syntax and protocols of such emergent theatres of activity and all the peripheral web 2.0 augmentations. It’s vital people start to think about this now rather than just have kneejerk reactions that will lock down a golden seam of learning opportunities and a host of new digital epistemologies that carefully managed can make learning far more meaningful and compelling.

MOVING FROM THE VIRTUAL TO THE REAL AND BACK AGAIN - VIRTUAL CPD IN ACTION

As part of this theory I am going to host a Virtual Conference about Digital Literacy in Second Life on Learn 4 Life Island to put these ideas into practice. The speakers I have for the conference so far are Carol Rainbow talking about E-Safety and Josie Fraser on Digital Literacy. I will be talking about the issues involved in this blog.

Ideal attendees will be Local Authorities, Senior Managers, Practitioners. In the first instance people who know how to navigate Second Life and operate an Avatar efficiently. They will also be prepared to buddy up with people who have never been in Second Life to model interactions on a screen or whiteboard to others in their physical space. They will be expected to mediate the experience for others locally and virtually.

It is intended to be a shot across the bows of how to run effective CPD virtually and intended to amplify that experience for others in an authentic and effective way. Tickets are now available from Eventbrite here:

http://learn4life.eventbrite.com/