I’ve hardly blogged at all recently (been on twitter lots) - There’s a debate raging about whether twitter kills blogging. We’ve been having the debate using cloudworks which is our very nice home grown system and I intend to give my opinions of that in another post, but suffice to say I love it.

…anyhow back to my point. By far the most traffic to my blog was generated from my post about Why Clowns are Dangerous. This has in fact also spawned a lot of quite vitriolic and IMHO (!) self opinionated comments, these tend to be light on research and factual evidence but heavily packed with personal insults.

From this I summise:-

1. Michael Wesch is spot on in his analysis about behaviours around anonymity and rage. Particularly people  think they know me from what is a very incomplete set of criteria by which to judge….and for the record my sister runs a circus troupe and regularly dresses in a clown costume. There is a recognised condition around clowns and their fear. Stephen Kings “IT” is directly playing on that association.

2. Clowns are not something to make fun of. Clowns take themselves very seriously.

3. My sister runs a circus troupe (performing arts and trapeze and the works) so there is a clown in my family

4. The more bizarre the blog post the more traffic it generates. My second most popular post is on silent vacuum cleaners. Therefore ridding the world of scary clowns and noisy vacuum cleaners is likely to make someone very popular.

5. Most people don’t get irony. Or humour. Going back to 1, this is probably to do with the other 55% non verbal communication. Or it could be that people only expect blogs to be ‘either’ comical or serious and not a mixture.

6. People make assumptions. All the time. We forget past things that don’t fit those assumptions and concentrate on the latest things that do. Derren Brown would have a field day. Or am I making assumptions?

We’ve just purchased a set of Bio feedback technology that has been used by other research to look specifically at emotional responses to gaming. The product is ProComp Biograph Infniti and we’ve bought it with a number of different sensors to pick up things such as  Surface Electromyography, Skin Conductivity and EKG heart rate monitoring.

This rich data can be provided alongside other types of data and we’re therefore going to use it with our purpose built Research Labs along with eye tracking technology and other video data that we capture during our testing work. This should allow us to get a much more detailed picture of the level of engagement and immersion within game play and indeed other forms of online interaction such as within virtual worlds and other online web environments. I’m really looking forward to trying it out. We’ve got plans to also extend this work beyond the labs themselves so we can look at monitoring people in their own social contexts and seeing if this makes a difference.

We are also considering developing a joint research bid with the Speckled Computing people again extending the work we do in the labs out into the real world and looking at how to use the ‘intant feedback’ that this technology provides to assist people in both how they work and in their personal and social lives. I’m very excited about the possibilities that these technologies provide.  

Some quick example or two to explain what I mean.

1. We can use Bio feedback to assist people in dealing with stressful situations and conflict. We can use VR or video simulations to mock up events and work through issues with individuals in a ‘controlled’ way, for example training social workers.

2. We can use Bio feedback and speckled computing at assist with rehabilitation, and with improving balance in people who have mobility issues, for example those who have had hip replacement surgery to learn to walk correctly again and improve freedom of movement.

3. We can assist with pandemic outbreaks by sending ’specks’ to affected people to gauge whether or not they have the illness and to monitor their recovery. This avoids having to involve expensive health care practitioners and it also allows us to accurately measure the spread of a pandemic.

There are many more, Sports Science, Gaming etc.. the possibilities are many and varied and the opportunity for using this technology to benefit our society is very much within our grasp.

We recently purchased Nvidia GeForce 3D Vision Stereoscopic Glasses to try them out for gaming to see if they offer a more truly immersive experience. They do, they are mind blowingly good!

I had almost given up hope because I’ve tried out the 3D glasses from two other providers (mentioning no names but I was expecting a lot and was hugely disappointed) and a set of gaming vests and found these to be annoying and actually get in the way of the gaming experience rather than promoting a more immersive experience.

Back to the Nvidia glasses. I can’t say enough about them. Here they are below (look quite cool and they are not not heavy or awkward to wear).

We used them with the 120Hz Samsung display and I tried out two games, the latest versions of Call of Duty and Burnout. Both were staggeringly good. The moment I went into CoD I felt like I was walking through the grass, seeing my team move past me and seeing people running at or away from me. I felt like I was moving in team formation. I was ducking to avoid obstacles and wincing as the bullets ripped past me. I’m not a first person shoot-em-up gamer but I thought that this experience could turn me into one it was completely mesmerizing and I had to wrench myself out.

I then tried out Burnout. Again fantastically realistic driving experience. In particular when going under low footbridges I (and others who tried it) couldn’t help ducking! – It’s great, the experience is enhanced for playing too because you get a more accurate measure of speed and distance of oncoming traffic through it which allows better reaction (at least we thought so). The downside for me if there was one was that after 45 minutes on it my brain felt a bit groggy and my eyes a bit tired, this may just be an acclimitization thing because I experienced much the same thing when I first played Super Mario Galaxy because I couldn’t get used to the ‘upside down’ worlds playing experience. I got over that after a couple of sessions though and I think it’s the same with this technology.

In conclusion this represents a huge leap forward in providing a more immersive and realistic experience for gamers. It’s relatively low cost now at £300 and likely to come down in price. I’ve have heard that Sony are going to put this technology (or similar) into the new Bravia’s and I’m just finally pleased to have tried a piece of gaming technology that lives up to the hype.

See you in VR land…

I’ve been the architect of two ‘hackfests’ this year and I wanted to share my experiences of these. The hackfest concept is probably well known but my interpretation of it is a short burst of creative programming and web service building from a relatively small group over a short period to achieve one or more goals. In the case of the two hackfests that I was responsible for orchestrating these were around “Building bespoke location based twitter feeds for Holographic screen display” (this was a one day hackday) and “Digital Scholarship”. Doug Clow has written an in depth review of the Digital Scholarship hackfest on his blog so I won’t go over that ground again, what I will do is say that I think hackfests present a way of quickly delivering relatively ’self contained’ services using a skunkworks project methodology.

So having done two of these I am now more convinced than ever that hackfests present a very powerful and substantial tool to allow academics and developers (or web services stakeholders and developers) to build sites within a short space of time and with a lot less pain and difficulty than more traditional methods. Hackfests also cut out a lot of the crap that you end up reverse engineering later because the short space of time means that everyone is totally focused on realising the most important aspects and ensuring that those get delivered.

The hackfests that I ran had a mix of people, in the second two day hackfest I booked a site off campus for the team to work, we had two academics (Doug Clow and Martin Weller)  two programmers (Nick Freear and Juliette Culver), myself (I guess I would probably be classed as a techy with some UI background for the purposes of this), a web designer (Anthony McAvoy) and an ICT manager with some programming experience (Kevin McLeod). This seemed like a good team to me and I picked the people rather than just throwing it together because I knew the group were both creative but also goal driven and self-managing.

What are the overall benefits?

1. Hackfests get services up and running relatively quickly.

2. Hackfests allow developers and stakeholders to work collaboratively and to brainstorm and feel part of the ‘inception’ and ideas forming process. This provides buy-in that is usually not in more traditional developments.

3. Hackfests develop bonding and foster team spirit.

4. Hackfests are cheap to run for the organisation (2 days x 7 people + cost of venue to develop + 14 days  x 1 person to launch service) compared to traditional bespoke web service delivery methods and offer good return on investment.

5. Hackfests get projects up and running fast (Vertical take-off and landing) – VTOL – produce quick wins.

6. You can have iterative hackfests over a period of time to accomplish a true release early and often model. You can do testing between hackfests to add a higher quality assurance process to the services.

What are the constraints?

1. You need to plan. Even though the work itself is relatively free you need to plan out the days for maximum advantage. I cut it into concept mapping and ideas forming (morning) then moving into planning and interface design (afternoon) and then moving to building (late afternoon and following day). You should also plan some technical aspects beforehand for example methods of coding and version control, network availability and host systems.

2. You need to have good people who are both engaged focused and not cynical! – You need to give people enough time to brainstorm but also manage to avoid getting bogged down in issues or details (for example authentication!)

3. You need to have a project that is not tightly integrated to other services or reliant on too many variables that can’t be delivered in a short hackfest.

4. You need to be willing to not fall back into the habit of thinking that it must be perfect first time.

5. You need to allow plenty of time after the hackfest for one of the developers to finish the final 20% to get it delivered. I underestimated this on both hackfests and so although you have the benefit of cheap delivery it still takes time to get the last 20% out the door.

Conclusion

We’re still experimenting with the concept but luckily I’ve got a good management team who are willing to explore this because they realise that I have very limited resources and therefore hackfests provide a way for them to grab some of the very limited resource. We are going to attempt a ‘hackfest’ competition – i.e. ask academics to come up with their most urgent service needs or research project prototype system requirements then we’ll judge these based on how much of a ‘big win they provide and how they fit with the units strategy, the winner gets the next programmer group for a hackfest in November. Watch this space.

I’ve been spending a lot of time recently on ‘institutional activity’ which I’m not supposed to blog about because it’s ‘business sensitive information’ and I’ve also been doing some work which is so sketchy that I’d feel a bit stupid putting it up for public scrutiny (example looking at and giving presentations on brain-gaming and future of mobiles in 2015 etc.) I have however finally got a bit of time to piece together some things which I think are useful reflections on recent work.

1. Mobile phones are starting to become the augmented reality devices I always wanted them to be. iPhone is accelerating this change and Android and other more open platforms are assisting. The technology is so ubiquotous (3.2 Billion in September ‘08) that it’s a real transformative technology. For a look at my talk visit http://kn.open.ac.uk/public/document.cfm?docid=12387 

2. I’ve started running ‘hackdays’ where a group in my team get together with a group of academics and web savvie people and build something to prototype stage within 24/48 hours in a skunkworks type way (lots of coffee involved). The first one we did was partially successful but the results are yet to be available publically, the second is on “Digital Scholarship” and we’re going to build a set of services around that working with Martin Weller. I really am going to push for this as a methodology to JFDI (Just F*ing Do It) as a release early and often kick-off model which may be something we do more of on JISC projects etc. where we don’t have lots of resource time but we could vertically slice and get small amounts of a lot of peoples time over a short period. I’ll keep you posted on outcomes

3. The “world class” Ambient Technology Labs are now in action and we’ve been promoting these externally, I have given tours of our facility to Maurice Heilblum (President of Elluminate), Diana Laurillard (Chair of Learning and Digital Technologies, LKL) , Mike Sharples (Director, LSRI) and Christine Borgman (Presidential Chair in Information Studies, UCLA) to name but a few. This is all very exciting and they all seem impressed with what we’ve got, the challenge now it to turn this into some active collaboration and build a profolio of active research projects using the facility. I also like the ambassodrial role but find that after sorting out ponies in the mornings I need to take a shower before meeting these people lest they get the wrong impression about my personal hygiene!

4. Lots of really cool web stuff that I’m playing with, huddle and twiddla and so forth, I’m going to post on these things in another blog cos it’s too much to cover now but I’ve got some great ideas of how to apply these in the learning and teaching area.

Happy St Paddys Day!

Last week I managed to go through the gateway and enter LilyPad and stole some pears which I’ve brought back to Dog Town and planted to become pear tress, they sell for 500 bells each which is five times what my native peaches sell for.

Animal Crossing Gang

What gibberish you say! – I’ve managed to get online and share stuff with a colleague (James) and his family through Wii speakand Animal Crossing. It was really the kids that did the stealing of fruit from the other village though so I can’t take the credit and it’s probably setting some kind of poor example but it was all done with the villagers permission and they did show us around the village and we met some odd characters. Great fun. The synchronisation is not perfect and sometimes the ‘host’ characters would appear to vanish then reappear, because they were moving much faster than the connection could cope with, but generally it was good enough to make a usable part of the game. The audio was fine quality but with about a 2 second delay I would guess (Two second going out and back so probably about a second end to end). In any case fairly good for audio conferencing given the amount of bandwidth the gaming aspect was taking up.

What else did I do this past week. Well I’ve got an HTC S740 smartphone which I’m trailling. It’s going to be configured to work with the R2 service ( from microsoft technet) – It allows the phone to pick up wifi networks inside campus buildings and auto route my internal phone extension to my mobile. I’m excited to try this out.

I’ve been asked to help develop a course using Nintendo DS. I’m considering developing a research proposal around this as I’ve got people from Computing department who want to develop apps for their students. I think that the DS is probably the most overtly learning focused console in the types of games it provides so it’s a natural choice and the the homebrew development environment is relative easy to pick up by the looks of it.

Question is does my team explore gaming tech or mobile tech as we’ve also been asked to produce some iPhone Apps. Patrick McAndrew and I have thought of some development ideas around good open viral apps for the platform (more on that soon).

Last night I got my Wii USB Ethernet adapter and connected my Wii to the ADSL router and configured the Wii for wired networking and voila! – I’ve found a world of fun exploring all the old school games from the online shoppe! – It’s absolutely superb. I had a real nostalgia rush when I started going through the catalogue. I’ve not got any points yet so I’m off to buy some (don’t have Visa so I’m going to have to go to a real shop to purchase my points) but then expect to not hear from me for a while as I’ve seen some from my distant past. If anyone has played “Secret of Mana” or the original Donkey Kong series, etc.

I’ve got WarioLand the Shake Dimension for the Wii and we’ve got Animal Crossing which the family are still aaddicted to. I can’t even get a look in! – The WarioLand game is OK and is reminiscent of older Mario fares but not quite as enjoyable, not sure why but I suspect it’s because of the ‘value’ of the prizes. i.e. the game has lots of bags of money scattered throughout and you collect it through many different mechanisms (mostly involving shaking the controller violently to get Wario to shake up the bags and spill the coins) but the pursuit of wealth was always secondary to the goal of completing levels and I think it’s too highly valued in WarioLand so I find I have to go back into levels to collect enough coins to get maps to the next worlds which for me is less fun than just tearing through the levels and getting on in the game.

Animal Crossing as I said is much fun, Nikki won the fishing competition last week and the kids are all obsessed by the latest fashions and hairstyles, it’s got a level of ’stickability’ that I find quite fascinating for a game that doesn’t really go anywhere. Having said that now that I’ve got the network sorted I’m looking forward to exploring other villages and using the Wii speech system (which we’ve got as well with the game) to try some virtual meetings. I want to particularly compare this to more conventional forms of video conferencing and to SecondLife and I’d be interested in hearing what other people think about it as a form of social interaction online. I’ll let you know how I get on.

I’ve come across Diddit.com which is suggested to be the next big thing for adventure junkies and others who like to brag. Those in the ‘know’ are claiming it’s going to be the next Facebook. Basically people can post up ’brags’ or diddits about things they’ve done and also about things they want to do (wanna dos). They can also write stories. I think it’s very appealing and I get the idea of it. I think it would be great to have a SocialLearn strand to this and it definitely has a nice social dimension to it.

I’ve read two articles recently about the perils of online environments. The most recent by Catherin Blythe  in the Independent. These things are interesting to read and interpret but the Indy in particular has been going on a bit of a facebook rant and I’m not sure I agree. I think that online interactions can add to the interactions you have in the real world and enhance peoples lives. They should replace those though and maybe that’s where the problems arise. Online interactions are less passive than watching TV, so you gain something over TV from them. Similarly face to face offer opportunities over those so again you gain a richer interaction. Telephony for example has been around for generations and so we’ve always have a level of remote connectivity.

I feel that the problems are not from technologies themselves but how we use them. I think that we need to develop the correct protocols for new technologies to embed them correctly into our (and others) lives. I can go for periods without using Twitter but when I do use it I value it. My followers number only 50 and are people I either know in real life or would expect to know in real life through work or other means. I don’t have any fantasies about having a huge following and making eclectic friendships online, mainly because I’m very happy with my real world friends and I feel ‘grounded’ with that group. but by virtual interactions enhance that experience and draw me closer to them.

I do however agree that abuse of TV and prolonged passive web browsing could damage peoples ability to correctly make inferences. I think over use of any single media is dangerous - but that’s not down to the media, it’s down to the people.

Two things caught my eye that may help with reducing the digital divide.

The first is called Sakshat, announced by the Indian government as the worlds cheapest laptop, which some predict to sell for £7. (by the way Sakshat apparently means “before your eyes”). I have been a slight sceptic when it comes to these schemes in the past, simply because I think that those that have saved up £7 and are in the lower socio-economic bands will not necessarily spend that £7 on a computer, they may still have other considerations, however it will undoubtedly bring the prospect of computing and education to larger group of people and that’s no bad thing.

I think I mentioned before in my blogs that when I met Martin Bean (formerly of Microsoft and soon to be the Open University’s  new Vice Chancellor) he was calling out to us to explore global education provision for the X million programmers in India who would like proper training and accreditation but who are not able to receive that through traditional Indian Universities because there is not enough capacity to meet the demand. So extending the hand of education to free or low cost resources to large number would be a fair way for a University to widen participation without hurting (because additional volume makes up for low margins).

The second thing to catch my eye was Google’s latest toys including Latitude their new phone/map social gadget. Google made several announcements recently including offline for gmail and docs (as part of Google Apps). perhaps I’m banging the Google drum too much these days, many say they’re in line to be the next Microsoft. I however think that creating services to allow for people with poor bandwidth or connectivity and to provide services for large groups and through ‘ubiquitous’ methods and devices. This can only be a good thing and reduce the digital divide.

I’m particular keen to try out Latitude as it’s got incredible potential in my opinion for education, both in terms of ‘contextual awareness and enhancement’ and also the social and peer group interaction (like mini twitter streams amongst people who are geographically or otherwise connected to each other).  I’ll try it out and let you know.

I’ve been in a few interesting discussions recently with people about the creation of viral learning environments or the development of more personalised, social and informal learning. Which happens anyway and which we (the OU) could be involved in wrt improving affordence.

 Martin Weller did a piece about Creating Virality in Education which brought up some interesting ideas.

We recently had a presentation by Samantha Peter, New Business Development Manager for Google Enterprise (Education) their education vision is not centred around advertising but rather bums on (virtual) seats, so it’s a more viral model and more adaptable. This means they evolve products quickly to meet demand and the Google Apps for Education suite shows this, the Spreadsheet and Forms components have been significantly improved over the past year (who said they couldn’t do pivot tables!). Microsoft are playing catchup in the cloud computing arena, and Googles products are much more fully formed than they were when I last explored them. This means that Universities are jumping into bed with Google, I recently met with reps from five UK Universities who have made the decision in the past twelve months to use Google Apps for their students and the number of institutions involved is growing rapidly. As the Director of IT at University of Westminster put it ..

“We had a bizarre conversation with Google where they were offering all these well tested, easy to use, fully supported, free products for us to use and our IT folks were trying to pick holes with them. In the end we asked the students and they we 95% in favour of going with Google”.