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Archive for May, 2009
Computer Clubhouse is a model to replicate
Posted in: Blog, Uncategorized by James on May 29, 2009
We attended the first annual showcase for the Computer Clubhouse in Dublin’s Digital Hub yesterday and were blown away by what we saw. The people who came to support it, the projects on display, the energy of the space, the diligence of the mentors and most of all the contagious enthusiasm of the kids left a very strong, and no doubt lasting, impression on us.
In the video on their homepage Clubhouse Coordinator Ciaran McGuinness expresses the view that “ One of these should be attached to every school in the country, the enjoyment that kids get from it and the education they can take away from it“. Having seen what we saw yesterday we can only nod our heads in agreement. About one hundred children are coming through the doors each week, ranging in age from 10 to 18 where they learn about game design, animation, photography, tv and film production - informal education tapping into their own interests.
Ciaran believes strongly in the same constructivist approach as our friend Daithi O’Murchu at Gaelscoil O’Doghair. That’s why they use software such as Google Sketchup, Scratch and Second Life. Indeed, a number of the projects on display were Sketchup and Scratch centered. One of those - a boxing game - was particularly impressive, taking control signals from a custom input devices.
I’ve expressed my admiration for this visual programming language a number of times previously and it was great to meet another Scratch propoent at the Clubhouse - Joe Molloy. Joe, who writes the Slua blog, where he has now posted a podcast interview with Keith from Daynuv, by a very accomplished young journalist from the Computer Clubhouse called Emer.
Metameets 2010 to be held in Dublin
Posted in: Blog, Uncategorized by James on May 26, 2009
Metameets is a European conference about the present and the future of the 3D Web, which was held over the last few days in Amsterdam.
With an excellent speaker list including Ireland’s own John Mahon, founder of Dublin SL, we were very disappointed that we couldn’t make it. Following proceedings as best we could on Twitter (under the metatmeets tag) it was clear that we were missing out on a great event.
The good news however is that Metameets 2010 will be held in Dublin! So we’ve no excuse to miss it next year.
Sunday Business Post on Daynuv
Posted in: Blog, Uncategorized by James on May 25, 2009
We had a ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ mention in yesterday’s Sunday Business Post in an article about Gaelscoil O’Doghair under the Best Business 7-page report on technology in education.
Apart from completely mispelling our name as ‘Danu’ Ian Campbell had a pretty good take on some of the elements which make Gaelscoil special and made it an honour for us to work in collaboration with principal Daithi O’Murchu to build Virtual Europe.
He [Daithi] is also determined to push the boundaries of open source software. The school was recently involved in a project organized by the Department of Foreign Affairs to create a Virtual Europe of the future. Using Opensimulator software, pupils “terraformed” a virtual world peopled by avatars of themselves.
Simon Lewis at Anseo.net has published an in-depth analysis of the report with an extended criticism of the section on Interactive Whiteboards (IWBs) and and a more general discussion regarding the rest, including the Gaelscoil O’Doghair feature -
This school fascinates me as does its principal. Daithí Ó’Mhurchú is a pioneering teacher and principal in Ireland. He believes whole-heartedly in constructionist learning (read up about Seymour Papert) and he sees (like Papert) that technology is the perfect medium for it. Essentially, the article is all about the theory of learning rather than the technology itself and I was disapppointed not to have got any solid examples of how it works in the school. While I fully agree with Daithí’s ideas, I would love to see how they work, because I truly believe they do.
Well I’m delighted to extend Simon an invitation to visit the school on behalf of Daithi. We’d be delighted to show him around and exhibit some of those ’solid examples’ he’d like to see.
Learning and graduating in the virtual world
Posted in: Blog, Uncategorized by James on May 20, 2009
One of the better talks we attended at Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education was that given by Texas State Technical College’s virtual college (vTSTC). Texas State Technical College (TSTC) consists of four technical colleges with more than 13,000 students attending each year in credit programs alone.
TSTC purchased its first Second Life island in January 2007 and founded the college’s virtual learning environment in the fall of 2008, offering a Certificate of Completion and later an Associate’s degree in Digital Media. And since January 2009 vTSTC has been offering a Digital Media AAS program entirely online using virtual worlds as the primary delivery method.
And now vTSTC has announced the first known student to graduate from a certificate program taken entirely in a virtual environment. Julie Shannan graduated with a certificate in digital media on Wednesday, May 6, 2009.
Shannan, who has a bachelor of arts in biology from the University of Texas at Austin, now also holds the distinction of being the first graduate of the vTSTC digital media design program as well as the first student to take an entire college curriculum within the virtual world of Second Life. She plans to take the next step in the digital media design program, and obtain an Associate’s degree at vTSTC.
“This is a significant milestone for education not only because it is the first graduate from an environment of this nature, but due to the fact that this single event represents the validity of virtual world education as a real method for educational delivery,” said Chris Gibson, associate vice president of Educational Technology.
Additional vTSTC certificate and degree offerings are set for release in fall of 2009 so this is one college which is storming ahead in the area of virtual world education. An example to follow.
Virtual keynote, programming languages for kids and ICT in Education
Posted in: Blog, Education by James on May 18, 2009
On Saturday we attended the ICT in Education conference at Tipperary Institute in Thurles. Our primary role was to ‘beam in’ Daithi O’Murchu of Gaelscoil O’Doghair who delivered his keynote address virtually through a combination of videoconference and virtual presence. Daithi’s slideshow was projected in-world behind his suitably mustachioed avatar, which moved around a podium and gesticulated in time to the talk.
I’m sure this was a first in Ireland and we’re delighted with how smoothly it went. The feedback we’ve received is that it enhanced and enlivened the presentation, without distracting from the delivery.
Simon Lewis has a terrific report on the rest of the day’s proceedings but I’ll just add a few notes of my own from the workshops I attended - “What’s the story Alice?: Making animated movies using a cross curricular computer programming tool”, “A model computer studies curriculum” and “Learn Scratch: An introduction to Scratch Programming”.
First, some background on the choice to attend those talks. Our next challenge here at Daynuv is to take our Virutal Europe sim to another level of sophistication by adding interactivity to the landmarks and objects therein. That is; make them do something. In other words it’s time to start programming. But with Linden Scripting Language (LSL)? Is it an appropriate language to introduce primary school children to programming? I think not.
Case in point, I wanted to take a static door on one of our buildings and make it rotate on touch. So I used various Google searches to find any alternative I could to LSL coding by hand and luckily came across Scratch4SL (which was my first exposure to Scratch)
So I downloaded the free sofftware, read the brief instructions and within 15 minutes had programmed a sprite to rotate around it’s center. Now I haven’t programmed since leaving college (14 years ago) so the ease with which I accomplished this task was entirely down to the software and interface.
Next step was to convert the Scratch script to LSL, a one-click process which spat out 480 lines of complex code! Imagine how long it would have taken to learn, compose and debug that LSL by hand, from a standing start. More like 10 days than 10 minutes. Finally, I attached the code to my in-world door, re-compiled and voila - I had a nifty revolving door.
Thus my interest in attending two Scratch workshops at ICT in Education. The first, delivered by Eamon McQuade and Muireannn O’Brien, was really about desiging a computer studies curriculum but took the example of Scratch, followed by Visual Basic, as the most appropriate route to presenting software design concepts and pricinples to second level students. They believe that, for schools, computer language code should be readable, and development interfaces visual.
The second Scratch workshop, presented by John Hartery of CBS Tramore, was a real eye-opener. It was clear after 5 minutes that John is a gifted teacher as he had every attendee happily programming the cutesy Scratch mascot to jump and dance across the screen in response to various keyboard and mouse inputs. I was genuinely blown away by the capabilities of this application and started day-dreaming about the difference it could have made to my path through 3rd level education.
In CBS Tramore John uses Scratch as in introduction to programming and then progresses to Alice followed by BlueJ, the common denominator again being the emphasis on visual development environments. For anyone wishing to investigate further John has kindly published his course notes on Moodle.
The other workshop I attended was on Storytelling Alice. Jessie Bryne took us through the simple steps to create an animated 3D cartoon and again I was hugely impressed by what I saw. She explained how girls in particular are attracted by the storyboard driven interface and emphasis on creativity rather than programming. I don’t know if there’s any way to output LSL but it’s definitely something to follow up on.
All-in-all ICT in Education was a really excellent conference and tremendous credit is due to the organizers. Here’s looking forward to next year’s event.
Virtual Europe Screenshots!
Posted in: Blog, Uncategorized by Keith on May 16, 2009
Daynuv and Tipperary Institute to deliver first Virtual Keynote in Ireland!
Posted in: Blog, Uncategorized by Keith on May 12, 2009
Daynuv is currently working with Tipperary Institute to create a virtual keynote environment for their ICT in Education Conference being held on Saturday May 16th. A full audio visual experience will be in place on the day as the keynote explores digital literacies and 21st century learning. The full keynote will be streamed in sim as well as in Tipperary Institute.
For more details on this event please click here: ICT IN EDUCATION CONFERENCE 2009
Press Release: Brian Crowley M.E.P. Launches Virtual Europe at Gaelscoil O’Doghair
Posted in: Blog, Uncategorized by James on May 6, 2009
NEWCASTLEWEST, CO. LIMERICK - MAY 4, 2009: Brian Crowley M.E.P. visited Gaelscoil O’Doghair in Newcastlewest last Friday to launch the Virtual Europe project developed in the school to celebrate Europe Day 2009. Virtual Europe is an online learning environment where students express and simulate their own vision of Europe and the European Union.
“We’re immensely honoured that for the second year running Gaelscoil O’Doghair has been awarded assistance from the Department of Foreign Affairs to develop an EU themed project”, said principal Daithi O’Murchu. “Virtual Europe is unique in that our students are constructing their own encultured model of what Europe is and can be”.
The online simulation was developed for the school by Virtual Worlds specialist Daynuv.com, also based in Newcastlewest. “What sets the project apart”, said Keith Kennedy, Daynuv co-founder, “is that the children are the architects, designers and knowledge managers of their own, ever evolving Virtual Europe.
Kennedy’s business partner James Corbett remarked, “What delighted me most was the response of the kids to what was, initially, a blank slate. They just jumped right in and thoroughly enjoyed collaborating in the construction of their own model of Europe. A model perhaps in more ways than one!”
Senator Crowley marked the launch by planting a virtual tree beside an in-world model of the school itself, before planting a real tree outside the real school. Next Friday 8th will see the students formally engage in a full range of educational activities within their new online virtual world in commemoration of Europe Day.
About Daynuv: