- FAS: 62 year-old, non-profit research group that works to apply practical solutions drawn from science and technology to some of the world’s most pressing issues.
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- Learning Technologies: a project within FAS that aims to create a major national R&D program for using information technology to improve how we teach and learn
Typical Model of an Instructional Technology Project Some Statistics - Average age of a web page is 75 days
- 0.5% of web pages disappeared each week
- 3% of the objects in digital libraries are no longer accessible after one year
Transformative Potential - A revolution in the way knowledge and expertise acquired and measured
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- A revolution in the way learning is delivered
- A revolution in the way learning systems are created
Our working definition of a VW - Online, [3D], shared environments that allow multiple users to create content and experiences, collaborate, and communicate with other users [through the use of an avatar].
- Can model elements from both the real and imagined worlds, including physically and historically accurate topography and natural phenomena such as gravity, motion, and climate.
Goals: - Goals:
- Engage learners, ages 8 – 14, in challenges and mysteries that can only be solved by understanding
- Demonstrate new ways to reassemble artifacts and knowledge about them now spread across many different museum and library collections
- Features:
- Accurate historical and scientific information
- 3D photorealistic simulations of cities & temple complexes that allow open-ended exploration and discovery
- Contextualization of museum artifacts used by characters in virtual environments
- Question & answer management tools to stimulate learning
- Compelling, age-appropriate challenges and assignments
Digital Assets from Project Post Babylon: New Objectives - Greater flexibility in visitor experiences
- “Outsource” vendor support and connectivity
- Cater to research activities, in addition to learning
- Increase participation: create Open-to-all Contribution Model
- Provide annotations facility
- Add Intelligent & autonomous agents
- Interactive spoken dialogs
- Reusable data & metadata
- Common architecture for multiple worlds
Extending concept of Discover Babylon to online collaborative and visualization spaces - Create and integrating tools, frameworks and communication protocols to:
- Support and display multiple types of sources and perspectives
- Link and move easily between related texts, images, objects, sound and products of the mind (test predictions)
- Serve interdisciplinary and international audiences
- (Re)construct objects and spaces, layered to provide:
- Interoperable and reusable content
- Rigorous academic standards
- New academic findings
- Varying layers of complexity
- Multiple interpretations
- Lower the barrier for participation
- Collaborative building
- Production facilities for content creation
- Peer Review
- Communication facilities for meaningful conversation & debate
A New Publication Dimension - Possible replacement: link and make accessible findings, ideas and “lab workbooks” and raw material of scholarship often lost after article is published
- How it would work:
- Select a theme (location/period)
- Create a framework to accept inputs
- Architecture
- Material Culture
- Arts (musical performances, dance, theatre)
- Economic activity (behaviors)
- Provide services allowing new publications to be converted to observables in the VW and linked to other forms of publication (e.g. provide modeling/scripting services to subject experts as publication staff services)
- Provide peer review
- Provide indexing and permanence
Is this for real?? Virtual Worlds and Engines | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | - Metaverse Roadmap Project
| | | | - Microsoft Flight Simulator
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Raw Numbers - Estimated VW population to reach 50 million (8 out of 10 Internet users) by 2011. Currently:
- Second Life:
- 10th most popular MMO
- Estimated number of users: 9.6 million
- Estimated monthly uniques: 187,000
- Target audience: 18+ yrs old
- Neopets:
- Estimated number of users: 147 million
- Estimated monthly uniques: 4.2 million
- Target audience: 5+ yrs old
- Club Penguin:
- Estimated number of users: 12 million
- Estimated monthly uniques: 4.7 million
- Target audience: 6-14 yrs old
- Data based on http://gigaom.com/2007/05/20/virtual-world-population-50-million-by-2011/ , Sentient Service, A Quick Guide to Virtual Worlds and online data
User generated content: an important and economic phenomenon - Only the 10th largest MMO
- Monthly averages for time spent in world: 2.3 million hours
- 100 terabytes of data have been created by “residents” since the world’s inception.*
- *about five times as large as the Library of Congress, with its 20 million books.
Functional requirements for creating & continuously improving worlds: - Project management tools
- identifying team leaders, contributors, reviewers
- scheduling and notification
- managing payments for services as needed
- commenting, rating, upgrading
- APIs for object creation and adding metadata
- 3D formats
- Text, images, video, sound, textures, VOIP
- Scripts, motion capture
- Metadata (including SCORM)
- Converters to push standard formats into virtual world viewers/platforms (Croquet, Wonderland, Active Worlds, Second Life)
- Data-base structure
- Input/Output
- Searching
- Version Control
- Links to large digital repositories
- Assessment modules
- Managing payments for services as needed
- Connecting to object repositories
- APIs for scripts, AI, physics engines, simulations, character motion & emotion
- Version control
- Storing and rating experiences
Functional Requirements for Using the Virtual Worlds to Learn - Design tools for projects, games, assignments, performance tests
- Search capabilities
- Storing and rating these experiences
- identifying students and connecting to student records (including private records)
- Identity and trust management (access, privacy)
- instructors, tutors, counselors, guides, role players, scheduling and notification
- students and connecting to student records (including private records)
- Storing and rating experiences
- Management of cash assets
- Payments to instructors, counselors, others
- Payments to IP holders
- Payments from students
- Management of abusive behavior
- Non-Virtual World Databases
- Reference Data & Metadata
- Link/Relation to VW Assets
- User Data
- Reference Data & Metadata
Reference Data | | | | | | | - Jpeg, gif, bmp, tif, png, tga,
| - Title, Description, Subject, Resource Type, Origin/Owner (Author/Creator), Political Era, Age, Date of creation, etc.
| - Self-created, Proprietary Repositories, Online
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | - Title, Subject, Activity/Content Description, etc.
| - Self-recorded, Proprietary Clips, Online, Movie Clips, Songs Clips
| | | | | | | | | - Title, Subject, Content Description, Author, etc.
| | | | | | | | | - Txt, doc, pdf, rtf, ps, html
| - Title, Description, Subject, Resource Type,Owner,etc.
| - Articles, Novel, Poems, Essays, Wiki, Encyclopedia
| | | | | | - Foreign Language Material
| | | | - Users view Reference material.
- How do you wish to Contribute?
Annotation - Federation of American Scientists
- www.FAS.org
Technical Challenges - High Latency
- Third Party Plug-ins (Server & Client Side)
- Single Sign On
- Modular Architecture
- Open Standards
- Third-Party 3D File Formats
- Inter-Database Connectivity
- Survivability of Content
- Multiple Avatars
- Inter-Virtual World Communication & Content Synchronization
- Jargon
Policy Challenges - How much is Open Source, under what license?
- How to link in proprietary systems
- Financial models to ensure sustainability
- Operating highly secure sites
- Managing Change in educational institutions (experimenting with dramatically new approaches to curriculum design, assessment, role of humans in the loop, where & when learning takes place)
Key Points - Lowers barrier for content creation
- joins scholars and experts
- provides project management tools
- Enables review and editing (like a wiki) with attribution and citation (not like a wiki)
Current Project - History of Racism in the Western World
- Discover Babylon (3200 BCE)
- City of Gilgamesh (2200 BCE)
- Algebra I
- AI project
Current VW Work - Virtual Worlds wiki: Vworld.fas.org
- To tour our island and the Medulla framework, contact:
- mroper@fas.org
Next Steps - Recruit additional federal, academic, philanthropic and corporate groups
- Develop a set of performance criteria (system requirements) for a broadly interoperable platform
- Charge a team of experts to begin to develop middleware tools that will allow the community to begin working together
- Begin to build new instructional systems or convert existing instructional systems so that they operate on the selected platform or platforms.
Open Questions - Is this technology on your radar?
- What disciplines are most suited?
- Who else should be included?
- Successful models or suggestions for bringing the faculty to the promised land?
- What evidence do we need to convince you/your cohort that this technology is important?
- What kinds of benefits should VWs offer?
- Concerns?
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- For further information, comments, questions, (or complaints!) please contact me:
- Michelle Roper
- mroper@fas.org
- 202.454.4683
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