November Project Update

The Sky Oracle

Web Presence:

• All module pages, except for the language module, are complete.

Technical Design:

• Taxi Scenario completed through a scenario involving interaction with the driver (bot) and the ATM machine (to obtain the money necessary for travel)


• Stimuli drafted (with first implementation) for interaction (low and high levels) and immersion (low and high levels).
  
• The Sky Oracle development has started.
  The Sky Oracle is an innovative approach to representing an 'abstract' issue in the 3D environment. An issue is chosen (in this case, Tibet) and a flow chart is developed. The flow chart includes decision blocks and activity blocks. When entering the 3D flowchart, the user chooses a role and a perspective in decision blocks and proceeds throught the flow chart's activity receiving encounterting media that represents the issue as well as external input (the perspective) and internal input (the role).

There is more to come on the Sky Oracle - stay tuned!

Testing

• Blog created for reporting fixes needed in the Second China environment
• Students tasked with continued testing and reporting of necessary fixes

Quiz Development:

• Quiz question writing completed.
• Construction of learning module knowledge assessment quizzes via Adobe Captivate software is nearing completion.
• Entering the final stages of quiz question editing/grouping and the integration of such quizzes into the 2-D web-based earning modules.
• Approximately 25 distinct assessments to be incorporated into the web-based learning modules.

Evaluation Approaches

• Stimuli are being designed for the first scenario, completing the details to effectively manipulate the levels of immersion and interaction for testing purposes. Once these determinations are complete, they will be tested prior to designing parallel manipulations for the other three scenarios.
  
• Development has also begun this month on instruments to test for memory, cultural knowledge, and cultural sensitivity (empathy).

Reality and Virtuality

When we had our recent news release , not everyone was
thrilled. And some of these folks had good points. Here are
a couple of the responses to the above release: Dvice, Latesht.

We first need to look at the problem: learning another culture
by becoming familiar with the knowledge of that culture as
well as becoming sensitive to the culture. There will always
be controversy given a culture, and we are capturing some of this
in our Tibetan Sky Oracle (under development to be manifested
in Second Life toward the end of the year).

As far as cultural knowledge, real-life encounters are the
ultimate goal, but there are problems: the majority of folks need
money to travel to China and then even once you travel, there
are things you cannot do in reality: role-playing someone else
to better learn the language or culture, or obtaining contextualized
information as you do with web linking (the iPhone gets you
partway there). Also, once there, you may have to travel
extensively to find everything you can experience in a technology
such as Second Life.

A key thing to remember is that technologies, whether they are
the web or Second Life, are not replacements for real-world
experiences. They only augment our experiences to make up
for problems such as lack of resources. We should take advantage
of all possible routes to learning other cultures and use technologies
to reduce costs and in situations where real-world encounters may
be difficult.

Future Transitioning of Second China (OpenSim)

At nights or during the weekend, I have been testing OpenSim, which is a free, open source implementation of a multi-user virtual environment. This picture represents a grid containing four regions (currently, islands) that runs on my home computer.

OpenSim leverages the open source Linden Labs client code, but the server side code is all home grown -- using either SQLite or MySQL. Having the database is nice since one can use different queries and views to see what is going on in the island--the regions, the prims, users. OpenSim is very much alpha software in that only about 2/3 of the LSL scripting API has been written, and there are frequent bug reports that are handled by the developers. The relationship between OpenSim and the goals of our project is that eventually, we may be able thost our own virtual worlds to foster cultural knowledge and sensitivity acquisition. With OpenSim, I feel that I am back in the early 90s when very few people had web servers and web content. Instead of web servers and web pages, we are now dealing with a plethora of OpenSim servers and 3D shared, immersive content.

October Monthly Update

The period from September 15 - October 14 saw significant development in the Second China project.

The image depicts the taxi created this month. This taxi will feature in a guided learning scenario including interaction with one of our AI bots scripted to support learning in the environment.

Web-based Module Content

• Travel, Awareness, Politics and Foreign Relations, Government, and Society module pages are now complete

Technical Design

• Randomization of quiz questions in the Tea House completed


• Re-design of the taxi to perform as a Second Life physical vehicle - this involved creating a taxi with fewer prims to take advantage of the Havoc physics engine


• Problem solved: bots not appearing on the island, but also remaining as Unix tasks - the solution involves a periodic check on the “existence” status of the Second China bots. If the check results in one of the bots not being found, that Unix task is automatically restarted.


• Initial meetings held on the design approach for the Sky Oracle. The Oracle will represent an immersive and interactive approach. The following are being considered:Five stimuli representing different levels of representation, immersion, and interactionhe most complete stimuli to include a 3D representation of a flowchart capturing US vs. Chinese viewpoints on the Tibetan situation.


• Initial taxi scenario is complete (waiting on audio)
  Added several quiz questions into the taxi and bot
  Added the movement functions and route into the taxi, and avatar can select one of five destinations

Testing

• Blog created for reporting fixes needed in the Second China environment - students tasked with testing and reporting necessary fixes

Quiz Development

• Software purchased


• Quiz development commenced


• Quiz questions for Political Relations, Society, Awareness, Travel, Government, Facts, and Military completed

Evaluation Approaches

• Strategy and schedule for test and evaluation prepared


• Approval obtained approval for design in Second China


• Experiment approval rescheduled for December 2008


• Formal survey with plans for a publication on evaluation methodology initiated


• Meetings held weekly on strategy and approach for measuring impact of the Second China project on the acquisition of cultural knowledge, cultural sensitivity, recall, retention, and empathy

Check back with us next month to see further progress.

Second China Project Updates

Check here for monthy updates describing developments in the project. Comments and questions are welcome!

Find more information about the project here: University of Florida Second China Project