Session Title: Free Land!
Presenter: Grant Potter, eLearning Coordinator, University of Northern British Columbia
Time & Date: 3:30 P.M. - 4:15 P.M., Thursday, August 13, 2009
Location: Rm. C180
Description: Interest in multi-user virtual environments seems to have peaked in 2008 and waned considerable since. Although the SecondLife client has been released as an open-source project, the server has remained proprietary until the emergence of the OpenSim Project.
OpenSim promises to offer new momentum to multiuser virtual environments as Apache did with web development. OpenSim allows users to establish their own standalone or networked virtual environment and customize the functionality of their server.
This session will profile the BCOpenSim project - a BCCampus funded project exploring the teaching and learning potential of OpenSim for BC post-secondary institutions. Customizations of the BCOpenSim project to be demonstrated will include: integration of simulation objects with Moodle, VOIP applications, and Wordpress integration.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
My presentation material is available here:
http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=d4js5kt_123g3t3qbqm
Hi Grant,
I am a fellow Canadian working out of the Province of Alberta, who also happens to have an interest in open source virtual worlds. I have examined and worked with 3; Opensim, OpenCobalt/Croquet and Sun’s Wonderland. At this point, I have thrown the majority of efforts behind Opensim although Sun’s Wonderland may develop into something useful when they shake the bugs out of the the new 0.5 version. I was a high school teacher (Math/Physics) and District Math/Tech consultant with Edmonton Public for nearly 20 years before taking a leap of faith into the exploration of Virtual Learning spaces. Like many, I started in SL, but as my focus was k-12 at the time, the teen grid/ adult grid separation made such exploration difficult, especially as an independent. I did however run into many key people in the various Ed groups I joined. The immersive education group proved to be the one that introduced me to the various open source platforms, and I quickly transitioned away from SL and into Opensim as my main platform of interest. I currently run several standalone stations at home for exploration purposes, but my main staging area is on Reactiongrid, a small Opensim hosting company. I currently maintain between 6-9 full Opensim regions there in a flexible arrangement that allows one to spread computing power around (more sims) or concentrate it (fewer more powerful sims-heavy scripting/more avatar concurrency). I happen to be working on many of the same things as you seem to be but with a more K-12 focus. Others on Reactiongrid have working Sloodle setups linked to moodle and the version of free-switch (Vivox arrangements are underway) provides decent VOIP capabilities. My own area of concentration has been on applications and tools that may be of benefit to educators working in world. I am well on the way to having an inworld HUD interface for the Opensim variation of Scratch4SL (MIT media labs) which will allow students/teachers to deploy this version of the Scratch visual programming environment completely inworld. (currently, there is a lot of cutting & pasting of scripts between a secondary Scratch4SL application and inworld objects.) I have also been exploring the use of various Web2.0 APIs to link inworld objects to their web-based counter parts. I have a fairly functional version of a spreadsheet tool based around the web-based spreadsheet Editgrid. http://www.editgrid.com Currently it is possible to load different spreadsheets in world, edit the same information from the web or inworld concurrently and link the data to object prim characteristics (3D bar-graph/line graph sort of thing) or spatial location, (a polyhedron rezzer that reads information related to vertex location from the spreadsheet, then rezzez point objects in those locations). I have also done some initial proof of concept with other APIs such as Mindmeister, Wolfram|Alpha(when its released) and various google APIs. A fairly recent blog post by a UK blogger http://www.l4l.co.uk/?p=592 has a fairly indepth overview of many opensource related virtual world projects (a brief mention of some my work is included near the end). Right now I am starting to pitch various gov branches and anyone who will listen for some small sponsorships/grants/R&D funding to continue the work while business case uses form up. Would be nice to connect to other Canadian projects so that I can demonstrate that I am not some crackpot working in isolation. If you wanted to get a free account/avatar at http://reactiongrid.com I happy to show you around and share what I have.
Upload files:
You can include images or files in your comment by selecting them below. Once you select a file, it will be uploaded and a link to it added to your comment. You can upload as many images or files as you like and they will all be added to your comment.