Nice piece on immersion in the Guardian – the Science of Immersion.

We have to be very careful with terms, because a game that’s very immersive is Tetris, but there’s no sense that you’re IN the experience.

Aside from illustrating how varied and elusive definitions of immersion can be, the article highlights the role of the personality of the user. This is a significant issue for education in virtual worlds. If we base benefits on some notion of how immersive the environment is, then what does this mean for students whose personalities limit their sense of immersion in digital 3D worlds?

(This post somewhat painfully prepared on a mobile phone)

I’ve mentioned e-Adventure before – an authoring toolkit for creating educational adventure games that can plug into web-based VLEs/CMS. While I was on vacation, version 1.2 was released, details below from the e-Adventure team:

New Release 1.2 Educational games and simulations with e-Adventure

Dear all,

We are pleased to announce the release of a new <e-Adventure> release (1.2 RC1) available through sourceforge.net, the <e-Adventure> website and the downloads section of the website.

e-Adventure is a research project aiming to facilitate the integration of educational games and game-like simulations in educational processes in general and Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) in particular. It has been developed by the e-learning research group (www.e-ucm.es) at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

With e-Adventure, any person can write an educational point & click adventure game. Also it is very simple to create first person simulations based on photos, which can be very useful for training or teaching procedural knowledge.

The platform includes special features targeting educational environments, such as built-in assessment and debriefing and the possibility of exporting the games as standards-compliant Learning Objects (packaged according to the IMS Content Packaging specification and marked with IEEE LOM metadata). The games can thus be deployed without effort in different VLEs and stored in content repositories. The tools, and a detailed tutorial, are here: http://e-adventure.e-ucm.es

New features have been added to this release, as well as many bugfixes found thanks to intense testing of the platform.

The main changes are:

- Better books: arrows can now be customized and bugs have been fixed

- Better trajectories: length of sections can be defined to simulate the depth of a scene and bugs have been fixed

- Improved performance (engine): performance is now be considerably better across all games, including the playback videos and animation of transitions

- Improved performance (editor): the editor should now use less memory and allow a more fluent creation experience

- Increased “action” flexibility: default actions are no longer forced upon games

- New “Drag to” action which allows the dragging and dropping of objects (both directly as an interaction and using a context button)

- Reduced size: the installer is now less than 20MB against the 40MB of previous releases

- Improved conversations: For instance, the last line in a conversation can remain in the screen while the answer choices are presented

- Better graphic resources: Default buttons and books have a new and improved look

- New licence agreement: is now pure LGPL software!

- Two new translations: Portuguese and German are now available (some errors are still to be found in the RC). This is thanks to the special effort of Adela Castillo and Enrique Lopez Mañas

Feel free to visit our website and test-drive the tools. . We would love to hear your comments and, if you create an interesting game and wish to give it some exposure, we can make it available through our website (properly credited, of course).

We hope you enjoy the impovements in this new version. Don’t forget to have fun!

Best regards,

The <e-Adventure> team

The latest report from VirtualWorldWatch will be out soon. In the mean time, the brief response I sent in has been featured on the VWW website, here.

I’m just back from vacation, trying hard to catch up on emails, but hopefully manage before too long.

I’ve known for a while about a data standard known as COinS.

This is publishing OpenURL data in an HTML format, and allows you to insert bibliographic metadata into web-pages. COinS data is normally hidden from human viewers – it exists to make it easier for other programs to extract relevant biblographic information from a web-page. If you are a Zotero (the fantastic free and open-source bibliographic software) user, you’ve almost certainly used COinS even if you don’t know what it is.

When browsing a the contents page of an issue of an academic journal or the search results from Google Scholar, a simple click of a button in Firefox allows you to instantly add all (or a selection) of the articles listed. It can do this because the webpage includes the COinS metadata for each of the papers and articles listed.

For an age I’ve been wanting to create COinS data for the papers on my own publications list – as well as for any articles I blog about. There is a COinS plug-in for WordPress – but this creates the COinS tag for each post on the blog, it’s not for creating COinS tags relating to the content of a post. Alternatively, COinS Generator will create tags for you – but requires laborious and tedious manual data entry. I just knew there had to be an easier way.

And indeed there was… and I’m kicking myself for not seeing it before.

Simply select the references you want want meta-data for, choose “Create bibliography from selected items…” – and “Save as HTML“. This will save the reference(s) as a web-page with COinS metadata included. Cut and paste from this file into your web-pages as required. With just a little work you can also paste references (and metadata) directly into WordPress or any other web-page.

First you need to tell Zotero which pages you want to paste metadata to (by default Zotero doesn’t include the metadata when you copy references to the clipboard). Open Zotero settings, then Preferences…, Export. Add a “site-specific setting” with the ‘+’ button. Enter the domain name (e.g. dlivingstone.com), choose an output format (e.g. APA, Harvard and so on), and check the Copy as HTML option.

Now, you can select references in Zotero, select your references, and simply drag into the text editor, like so (if you don’t have Zotero installed, view source to see the COinS metadata!):

Reinventing Ourselves: Contemporary Concepts of Identity in Virtual Worlds
Provisionally to be published in 2011 in Springer’s Human-Computer Interaction Series

Editors: Anna Peachey (Eygus Ltd / The Open University) and Mark Childs (Coventry University)

Invitation to Submit:
We invite abstracts of between 500 and 650 words describing the proposed chapter. Abstracts should be supported further by up to 500 words explaining the theoretical underpinning to the chapter, and a brief summary describing how this chapter will contribute to the book. If the work has been previously published in any format, or is under consideration elsewhere, please indicate details of this with your submission.

Submissions should be sent as a Word or RTF document attachment by email to virtualworlds@open.ac.uk, by 31 July 2010.
Authors will be notified of acceptance by 31 August 2010.
Final chapters, of between 8,000 and 10,000 words, will be due by 30 October 2010, before a double-blind review and revision period.
Completed manuscripts to be submitted on 15 December 2010.

Objectives:
We anticipate that this book will:
Explore how living, working and learning in virtual worlds is changing notions of who we are and how we mediate our identities;
Develop understanding and awareness about the diversity of identity issues in virtual worlds;
Contribute to the theory and development of good practice in identity management and research in virtual worlds;
Propose visions for future practice and research relating to identity management and research in virtual worlds;
Provide examples and case studies from key areas of professional practice.

Further details, including a more detailed guide to content, can be found at http://www.open.ac.uk/virtualworlds/p2_1.shtml

Special Issue of the International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning (IJTEL): Learning in 3D

Guest editors: Carlos Delgado Kloos and Daniel J. Livingstone

Download copy of call for special issue on 3D learning (pdf)

Journal Aims

IJTEL fosters multidisciplinary discussion and research on technology enhanced learning (TEL) approaches at the individual, organisational, national and global levels. Its key objective is to be the leading scholarly scientific journal for all those interested in, researching and contributing to the technology enhanced learning episteme. For this reason, IJTEL delivers research articles, position papers, surveys and case studies aiming:

• To provide a holistic and multidisciplinary discussion on technology enhanced learning research issues
• To promote the international collaboration and exchange of ideas and know how on technology enhanced learning
• To investigate strategies on how technology enhanced learning can promote sustainable development

Subject Coverage of Special Issue

This special issue seeks to bring together research, from different perspectives, on a range of 3D technologies that may be used to enhance or support learning.
Suitable topics may relate to, but are not limited to, the use of a range of 3D technologies in enhancing learning:

• Virtual Worlds
• Game-based Learning
• Immersive Simulation
• Augmented Reality
• Cross and mixed-reality
• Assessment in 3D environments
• Pedagogies for TEL in 3D environments
• Communities of Learners in 3D environments
• Standards and Interoperability

Submission

Prospective authors are invited to notify the intention to submit a paper by
sending a one-page abstract to the editors by 6th August 2010 and submit the full
paper by 6th September 2010.
Abstracts may be sent to the editors at cdk@it.uc3m.es or
daniel.livingstone@uws.ac.uk
Final papers should be submitted electronically via the InderScience online
submissions system at: http://bit.ly/ijtel

Important Dates

6th August 2010: Title and Abstract deadline (optional)
6th September 2010: Full paper submission deadline
15th October 2010: Decision notification
12th November 2010: Camera-ready version
Early 2011: Publication (tentative)

Guest Editors

Carlos Delgado Kloos, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, 28911 Leganés (Madrid, Spain), cdk@it.uc3m.es
Daniel J. Livingstone, University of the West of Scotland, Paisley PA1 2BE (Scotland, UK), Daniel.Livingstone@uws.ac.uk

Editorial Committee

Ignacio Aedo, UC3M, Spain
John Belcher, MIT, USA
Josep Blat, Universidad Pompeu Fabra, Spain
Darryl Charles, University of Ulster, UK
Thomas Connolly, University of the West of Scotland, UK
Abdulmotaleb El Saddik, University of Ottawa, Canada
Lesley Gourlay, Coventry University, UK
Miguel Lizondo, Deimos-Space, Spain
Judith Molka-Danielsen, Molde University College, Norway
Mariano Rico, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain
Pilar Sancho Thomas, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
Kath Trinder, Glasgow Caledonian University, UK

I’ve had my hands full the past few weeks – so when the earthquake happened (Linden Lab laid of 30% of their staff!) I didn’t get round to blogging it at all. It did give me a chance to see a number of other reactions on the blogosphere though. I think the most interesting analysis came from ex-Linden Rob Knop:

If Linden Lab had focused on helping make virtual worlds take off– make them more useful by providing functionality people wanted and needed, working on interoperability so that people could take their Second Life accounts to and from software that was developed not only by Linden engineers, but by everybody– I predict they would have done a whole lot better. Their already existing audience would have given them a leg up, and would have kept them a leader or at least a major player. Yes, they would have been helping “competitors”, but by raising the profile, utility, and popularity of virtual worlds in general, they would have helped themselves.

And now the other big news… Mark Kingdon, Linden Lab CEO, will himself be leaving the company – with co-founder Philip Rosedale returning to the fold to take over in his stead. Philip announced his return on the SL blog, here. The general perception is that Mark’s strategies for the Lab generally failed (for example, the cancelled SL Enterprise solution), and also managed to alienate many members of the community. Can Philip turn the ship around and regain some love for the lab? Time will tell… but his initial post is heavy on the technology and relatively weak on the community side:

Our thinking as a team is that my returning to the CEO job now can bring a product and technology focus that will help rapidly improve Second Life.  We need to simplify and focus our product priorities — concentrating all our capabilities on making Second Life easier to use and better for the core experiences that it is delivering today.  I think that I can be a great help and a strong leader in that process.

I’ve finally uploaded the screencast of my keynote from Games:EDU, back in May. Actually, the majority of this relates to any undergraduate teaching in a typical university. Inappropriate strategic goals, growing mountains of paperwork, innovation prevention, the bare pass student and traditional lectures all pop up as challenges – encouraging students to form effective communities of practice and exploiting technology to extend the reach of the university pop up as part of the solution.

See it here, or on screencast.com:

Like me, you’ve probably got used to calls for educators to think more like game designers, to consider how good games help players learn how to play, from James Gee and many others over the past few years.

In this months Edge (UK gaming magazine, Issue 216, July 2010), video-game design consultant N’gai Croal resets a cosmic balance when he suggests that game designers think like teachers…

the primary goal of the developer should be not to punish the player … the developer should be invested not in the player’s failure but in the player’s success

and

developers could probably learn a lot from talking to teachers

Bringing Gee and N’Gai together then tells us that educators can learn from how the best games teach their players – and game designers can learn from how the best teachers teach their students. The circle is complete!