Make sure to check out my final project, the Fashion History Holodeck!

So now what? Not sure yet. I plan to relax, carry on what I learned at school and apply it in my 9-5 job, I really want to get OpenSim up and running there so I can really have some fun with it. But for now I want to spend time enjoying myself: maybe pick up the guitar again, learn ukelele, migrate this blog over to WordPress, and take care of everything I have been neglecting for the last two years, i.e. go to the gym more.

I learned first and foremost that being online student is just as hard as being the director of an online learning program. To succeed, you really need to work it in to your lifestyle and take it seriously! Here is my top five list for being an online student:

• 1. Start early in the week! If you have reading assignments, do them early so you aren’t jamming through them when assignments come due.
  2. If there are discussion forums, be one of the first to post up there so the rest of the students in your class can reply to them and you have more material to continue the conversation. This is especially true if you are mandated to reply to your classmates’ postings.
  3. Get to bed at a reasonable hour, or else the rest of your life will fall apart. Even if you schedule yourself wisely with assignments, make sure to sleep well and get to work refreshed, it helps everything else fall into place.
  4. Go the extra effort with group projects and fit in time to coordinate with your peers. If you live in another state, reach out first and let everyone know your are there. Pick a good system like a free PBWiki or Google Group to communicate and archive your conversations.
  5. Don’t let your personal life slip through the cracks. You will go crazy at times, but learn to take a day and cut loose a little bit, your friends and family will thank you.

Anyway, hope this helps. Check out my final project, the Fashion History Holodeck below!

My latest class has me in OpenSim a lot. It is a great opportunity to use this software since it is essentially a private, open source VLE. It looks and behaves mostly like Second Life since it uses the same viewer application. But there’s lots of land to play in. One of our assignments was to create a movie in a virtual environment we’ve covered in class, and I decided to make a presentation showing the capabilities of the software. So here it is, after the break.

Lots of fun this one was. I am going to explore the fashion design aspect of this more I think.

I have been playing with a new tool to create interactive fiction games. I was a big D&D fan, and played the Zork games and even the excellent Hitchhiker’s Guide Infocom game. This was about 25 years ago when my parents had to wrench me off the computer to keep me away from those dark rooms with lanterns and rusty birdcages in the corner. I have fond memories of those days (I was 10 or so-ish) but more visual media has pulled me into the career I have now.

That is, until my grad school program pulled me back. There is this really great tool out there called Inform that lets you generate interactive fiction games such as the ones I described above, all without too much drama coding it. The code is very legible, no crazy variables or other things to worry to create a simple game. Read on for a sample, and my first game!

Yeah, that’s it, easy huh? I highly recommend you try Inform. If you want to check out my cool little game, feel free. It is not very complex or anything, you mostly can go north, south, east, west, and talk to people and take items. But I had lots of fun writing it! I can’t wait to see where else this class takes me.

photo by caruba on Flickr

I had been meaning to throw up another update here but everything recently has been, as per my done-to-death saying, “all school-work and work-school.” I just finished my second to last graduate course in the CTER program at UIUC, Analysis of Advanced Instructional Technologies. If you are interested, the final report is a pbWiki page and we posted our final project preso on Slide.com. We discussed the future of education. Our group tried to tackle the question from a developmental/occupational point of view, from K through higher ed. Comments are welcome.

I used Slide.com since this was the only way I could get it to work on pbWiki, another great wiki tool by the way, if you can get around the coding restrictions. Slide.com seems to be more geared towards the photo slideshow/MySpace crowd but they did have a nice selection of transitions and controls.

Slideshare is a new favorite app 2.0 of mine since I also have been busy at work doing my presentations and such on teaching and learning with Sakai. Browse over and check them out if you like.

So, what did I get out of this class? I got a chance to step back and look around in order to evaluate the use of technology in teaching around me. It was a very cumulative experience for me since I am near the end of my M.Ed. program…just one more course to go!

Found this on Educause Review via Alan Levine’s blog (daily reading for me). It really is an excellent piece on how storytelling can evolve using web 2.0 technologies out there. I just posted the entry below, so I will link it up and let the experts speak for themselves.

Check it out: Web 2.0 Storytelling: Emergence of a New Genre by Bryan Alexander and Alan Levine.

YouTube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvORKwmk9Xo
TeacherTube link: http://tinyurl.com/66o9hv
PDF transcript
Quicktime download (57.7 MB)

Following my previously posted rant about content, I spent the evenings at my journey to Educause 2008 working on another content project for school: an instructional video. Since I didn’t have much to work with and I didn’t have my own machine…only iMovie and Jing, though TechSmith offered to help and tried to sell me a copy of Camtasia Studio on the Educause expo floor. But I got away with a free Camtasia manual for the team at work: SCHWAG! So, I decided to make a video geared toward teachers and the first time ed-tech conference goer.

I have been to many conferences in my career, and I wish someone told me these things a while ago. Educause is especially big, busy, and intimidating the frist time around; but careful prep, comfy shoes, extra business cards, and a willingness to meet people go a long way to making the conference experience a good one.

I sort of threw out the storyboard for this one as my time spent driving around and recording this was sort of dictated by my wife’s patience for me doing homework and how much access I had to these landmarks. Enjoy!

Oh yeah, check out the Flickr photostream of the trip.

Since this was done on location, I had to use what was available on my computer while disconnected…which meant using iMovie and Quicktime Pro to massage some of the audio portions. I found a great song “Little Menehune” that I bought for a song (get it?!) at BitMunk which was rights cleared. I took most of the photos myself. But the construction picks and the Menehune graphics I got from Flickr and are cited in the credits at the end. I hope you guys find it entertaining and educational.