Meeting with Magdi at Debney

Today Justin and myself went out to Debney Park to meet Magdi.
We will be doing Friday lunchtimes, working towards doing some machinima in the second half of the year with Magdis class.
I will be going in at 11am next Friday to do some Professional Development with him, showing how Second Life can be used across different subjects.
Other issues we discussed

The PCS in A27 - looking at equipping 15
- Graphics cards (PCI, need to test one for size)
- Modem router - the ADSL2 wasnt actually connected, only the phone line was. Justin spent an hour on the phone sorting this out with Optus.
- Wireless dongles

Running a film/machinima festival in Flemington as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival, the students are going to have a think about a name.
Keywords for the title Flemington, Debney Park, Film Festival, Machinima Festival, Youth.....
Perhaps get Gene, Magdi, Justin, myself on board as the organising group?
Contact the Flemington community centre, Moonee Valley council.

Make some new posters.



Justin also already has a contact for working with kids at the hospital, Greg W who we were meeting next Tuesday anyway.

I am typing this at Horse Bazaar, just about to head to Vic Uni to meet Stefan and chat some more.

I am writing this from Horse Bazaar.

Open Life Grid

A long awaited open source project using the SL engine has arrived, http://www.openlifegrid.com.
I was finally able to log on this morning, it feels like the old days (18 months ago!) in Second Life, and serves as a reminder of just how far Second Life has come in that time.
Crashing, freezing, no inventory, a female avatar which I cannot alter - it's all quite interesting once again!
The great thing about this is that we could have kids log into Second Life to see what is possible, then set up our own private sim to do lessons on. I will have a quick go at getting a stand alone server/sim up and running.

Creating a comic strips lesson

As we will be doing some machinima classes this year, I am designing a comic strip template and lesson which can be used as we work our way up to a short film.

Here are a couple of the templates from the demo I am writing up;

Report from Friday

One of those days....
I started off by going out to Debney Park to check on the graphics cards we will need as well as routers etc.
Because the existing system is hardwired, we cannot really put in a switch, so we will need a wireless router and 15 or so wireless usb sticks(we will need to check exact class sizes).
Secondly - the graphics cards we need are PCI-E not AGP as we originally thought.

I then went to meet the City of Melbourne with Grace and Stefan. The meeting was not what we expected, they wanted to get our ideas rather than having us get ideas from students.

I was then unable to get the laptops which need to be taken back to Fernando, so that's a task for next week.

Skoolaborate update

I have just sorted the inventory of Surfand Sands, I have attached an image of it so you can see easily how I have sorted things.
Basically there are two useful folders, the ones with full permissions, and the ones which can be copied and transferred.
A few of the full permission folders might have one or two 'no modify' items, but they are generally still useful, for example in a folder of 20 vehicles you might not be able to modify a few, but they are still good examples for the kids.

The next task is to go through the items in those two folders, and sort them into a few logical 'packs' which we can give to teachers and students. Ideally this is where I would like to get Peter Rocco in to help, as we can include a lot of these things in the mood ring. The main benefit of this will be that the sim won't be getting filled up with random objects as their vehicle veers into the water or underground etc, we can give the kids on good version of everything which cleans itself up.

For the mall, I would recommend we get an avatar loaded up with the following items(they are no transfer so it could be best to have one avatar dedicated to this purpose only, once that AV has set up the system it can give us permissions to admin it).
This is the same system I used to use on Festival Island without any hassles.
http://www.slexchange.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=89924
Web module
http://www.slexchange.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=335240
Door control module
http://www.slexchange.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=171935

Current developments, myself, Stefan and Grace will go to this meeting tomorrow to see how we can integrate our project with what the City of Melbourne is doing for their Future Melbourne Project.

What: working group for composing "Central Melbourne Connected" section of Knowledge Melbourne
When: Friday 15th February, 12.30-130pm
Where: CH2 building, corner of Little Collins and Swanson St

I also have to get into Skoolaborate tonight to work on sorting out some inventories.
Justin has another possible research lead which will be interesting to follow up.
Tomorrow(Friday) we will also drop into Debney Park with a graphics card to test.
Another thing I need to follow up there is the overall school network and whether it can be worked around.

Letter to Chris, Skoolaborate Japan Member

Hi Chris,
Thanks for such immediate feedback, I look forward to working with you.
At the moment one of the schools we are working with will be doing one machinima/sl class for this first semester, and rolling it out further in the second semester. I will also be working on a program which travels to various other schools assisting them in creating machinima using SL, all of which will feed back into Skoolaborate.
Our project website is at http://www.avatar-project.org which will be updated a lot over the coming months.
I am currently working on a small course which will take students through basic SL skills, into comic strip like machinima then finally a short film at the end. My initial idea for this is to have the kids playing out scenes from the future(of Melbourne or wherever) but I am sure this will evolve over time. The future theme works well with a lot of the mental health issues we are trying to address, but obviously so will many others, and what teachers and schools want will help shape it all further.
In terms of the building, I am happy to come in and meet you to help get some kind of structure up and running when we are both free. It would be great to have a few 'studios' that we could assign to kids and let them build their sets and props in, to let them set up their own virtual production companies and start building their own little creative groups, taking ownership of their creations.
I believe the best model for this kind of thing might be a theatre/hq/centre with a few studios attached(like hangars, or hollywood), all working seperately, to come together and compete in an online machinima festival(something our teachers/schools are already interested in). We could arrange prizes and sponsorship and use competition to get the kids making the machinima, and then collaboration to run the festival and machinima studios together. This way we can take time, find some good students to be heads of our 'studios' - then they could become part of some larger organisation which runs the Skoolaborate Machinima Studios (SMS, kinda catchy) and so on.
In this kind of scenario, I don't see language as an issue. We could all throw a great international film festival which all students attend and watch each others creations.
These are all just ideas, I tend to spew them out so feel free to take and leave what you choose.
Thanks again for getting in contact,
Chat soon,
Dale

>>>SENT IN REPLY TO THIS EMAIL

Hello, Dale. It was great meeting you at the VC today, and I hope to work with you on this machinima idea a bit more later in the year. I explained an idea to Jane that I'd like you to read and please tell me your thoughts as I would like to develop some type of project to do by this fall. Here's a copy of the email text I sent to her....

Hello, Jean. It was nice meeting you at the video conference today, and I appreciate the fact that you stayed awake despite the time and poor weather conditions back on the East Coast. I really like your ideas about the type of projects that you would like to do with your students, and I think some collaboration is definitely possible in the area of acting out plays or literary scenes through avatars. Machinima is just a term used to describe films created in virtual environments, and Second Life provides the best available toolset to create your own sets, costumes and gestures in the virtual world. One of my goals this year is to begin the process of making machinima on the Skoolaborate islands using a "studio area" and then filming scenes being performed by live avatars and editing them into some sort of movie. These movies can then be streamed in-world on video monitors placed on the Skoolaborate islands, or even posted to YouTube where the general public could watch them. I'd be very interested in finding a few others who would be willing to create a sub-group that will develop some sort of machinima collaboration on the island. What I envision is very similar to the way Lucasfilm (and just about every major studio these days) produces films from different locations around the globe. For example, you could have your students choose a scene, storyboard their shots, and do the live "acting" through their avatar while another school does the actual video capturing (filming) and editing, and yet another school designs the sets (or costumes if your kids don't have the time). I think this would be a great way to collaborate on a project from different areas around the globe and appeal to the different strengths and goals of each school involved in the project. It sounds like Dale is keen to the filming and editing aspects of machinima and has the equipment to do it. Since my kids are not very strong in their language ability, we could possible create sets and costumes leaving you to focus on your goal of getting your students to plan a scene, act it out, and reflect on the meaning of the language and context. Of course, this is just an example and we could find different combinations of duties to assign to each participating entity, but I think it may be an idea we can build from. I'm CCing this to Westley and Dale, so to anyone reading this, please tell me what your thoughts are...

Chris

Skoolaborate Meeting

Very interesting, Peter R, Grace, Justin and myself all attended, a strong turn out for our project.
The meeting format was much more effective than I thought it would be.

Meeting with Debbie and Stefan - New gallery on site

Monday I met Debbie and Stefan to chat about her joining the team as a researcher. I think it will all work very well, Debbie looks at Second Life from a totally new perspective and knows it well.
From my angle, I have provided her with the Activities and Outcomes framework I have started, hopefully we can work together on that to create some new activities.
Two things Debbie mentioned which I have to follow up are Grantswatch and the Terranova mailing list.
Yesterday I was introduced to a new gallery system called Piclens (http://www.cooliris.com/) (VERY WORTH VISITING AND DOWNLOADING)

It allows for some amazing gallery style 3d views of images online(using a small plugin and some publishing software.)
The idea behind using this is that it can be used during demonstrations/conferences, to flick through a wall of photos and snapshots from the project. The kids will also be shown this in class and encouraged to take snapshots from within SL to add to it.
The site is down today, which made me panic, but then Mdwebhosting.com.au is down as well, they are terrible.
Online conference for Skoolaborate at 4.20pm EST today, looking forward to seeing what's on the way this year.

Mood Ring Project

Inspired by the Inspire Foundation's ROC Game, we have decided to try a similar project within Second Life.
The concept we are using will be a mood ring which the students wear whilst within the virtual environment. They will then have a menu or HUD from which they can select how they are feeling at different points of their experience. The color of the ring on their hand will change as they select different emotions. They will also have the option of making a light source in their chosen color follow their head, and perhaps a particle trail and additional effects, so it's not just a 'ring.' It will be interesting to see how far we can take this.
This data will then be emailed to a web server for further analysis.
The basic concept behind this is that it will help young people to be more aware of their own emotions and to consider to why they are feeling that way.
The mood ring was chosen as something the kids will attach to their avatar and consider part of their identity and appearance, rather than an external kind of questionnaire.
Below is a basic chart for the emotions and colors based on some quick online research of mood rings, which can be adapted as we find more suitable ways to use this kind of tool.


Peter R (SL) will be assisting with the scripting and HUD/menu for this project.