Second Life rant

I recently caught a few minutes of a BBC special on Second Life and other virtual environments and felt compelled to write a post. The episode featured interviews from experts on the subject, including Second Life's CEO, Philip Rosedale. The bit that caught my attention was concerning virtual sex. I was initially shocked to hear that people actually pay REAL money converted into Second Life currency (Linden dollars) for virtual intercourse. Apparently this is one of the biggest industries within Second Life. I started to wonder how people get pleasure out of making their avatar have intercourse with another. Not long after, Philip Rosedale told me that avatars can now skydive in Second Life. Assuming this costs money as well, oddly enough I began to develop a relationship between these two examples.

Both intercourse and skydiving are things that not everybody gets to enjoy in real life as much as they'd like to. It is possible that someone who skydives everyday in Second Life will never in their lifetime skydive in real life. These two things people can do on command within this world. Without laws, without restrictions, without any training, and without anybody telling them otherwise. To many people, this is the beauty of this virtual space. They are absolutely free to do (almost) whatever they please whenever they like...and it's really quite harmless. We already know that people glorify themselves in the physical characteristics of their personal avatar. With virtual sex, we now know that people express themselves and interact differently within the space. In theory, this has a sort of Big Brother type reflection on what real life is like. We are so accustomed to the laws and cultural expectations that surround our world that people turn to Second Life for some breathing room.

Personally, I don't take pleasure in interacting within a virtual world like Second Life, but I fully and completely understand why others might. Although if i was to interact in Second Life, I'm confident I wouldn't be spending my money on virtual intercourse...maybe something more like skydiving...

Google Phone: Interface Issues

Well here it is folks: the Google phone. Looks cool! It could be the first phone to manage internet access in a much more user-friendly fashion - at least compared to the one's that exist today. There is no question that Google is one of the leaders in Internet communications, so why wouldn't their phone be a great product? It is even being predicted as a potential iPhone killer.

This all sounds great, but there is one COLOSSAL problem. It is built off the LG Chocolate platform. I know this is a problem and not an advantage because I happen to own a Chocolate. I have not spoken to one person who owns a Chocolate and claims to be happy with their phone. The Telus interface is bad. The Rogers interface is worse. The touch buttons don't respond to cold fingers or hands covered by gloves necessary in this Canadian climate. I could go on all night. So why would Google be so silly when choosing a cellular phone platform? I really don't see it coming close to competing with the iPhone. Please post your thoughts.

Gaming = Learning

While I was reading Henry Jenkins' paper, "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century", in particular the example he uses of SimLife, I started thinking about why the series of Sim games are so attractive to young people even though they are highly educational. Typically speaking, for the most part kids don't enjoy schooling as much as, say, playing basketball with their friends. I am no expert on parenting or teaching, but I would say it's hard to get younger kids enthused about learning.

I remember when I was younger I wanted to be like my hero, my Dad. I would always try to do whatever I could to be like him; buy candy cell phones and pretend to be on conference calls, fix my bike with Fisher Price toolkits, and so on. In sort of the same way, my sister loved to play dress up and Barbies. My point is, kids want to be part of the real "grown-up" life; SimLife and other similar strategy games allow them to do this on their computers. The cool part is, its really educational.

Although I never really got into this particular game series, I was for a period a fan of Roller Coaster Tycoon. Now it's a little bit different from SimCity or SimLife, but it still provides many valuable lessons for kids that can be applied to the real world later on in life. For example, financial management. Before you buy any new roller coasters, you need to know that you have enough funds to make this purchase and still manage the rest of the park. Who knew an Amusement Park themed computer game could help teach the basics of personal finance?

Toyota...you thought that's all they had? Think again.

Although they have recently fallen to second in sales behind GM, Toyota is still undeniably one of the fastest growing car manufacturers in the world. I had never viewed this company as one that excelled in the marketing of their product, though. Well, all this has changed. Three of my favourite commercials right now have come from the automotive giant. The campaign to sell their truck, the Tacoma is brilliant and hilarious! Enjoy.

Uncovering the first wiki?

In class today we looked at an early pedagogical website called "The Victorian Web". This site explores Victorian literature, history and culture in a web-based setting. The version that exists today was developed in 1987 and was used in courses at Brown University, but the initial site was in fact quite different and in some ways much more interactive. The original design allowed students to edit and save the pages freely as they discovered further information on a sub-topic. Sound like a tool you might have used yourself on the web? Maybe a little something like Wikipedia? To me, this site was unknowingly an early prototype of a wiki. As early as 1987, when the first web pages were being launched, we saw one of the first versions of what we now commonly know to be wiki's. So why did it take until at least 1994 for wiki's to finally catch on with mainstream users?

If you think about it, computer-based pedagogy is fairly new. Heck, personal computers are fairly new. There is still so much to learn when we look at computing and using it as a tool for education. Like this particular example shows, maybe if we look to the past we can uncover a future for computers and education.

Brilliant Lego ad

I hate to take up a whole lot of space but this is worth posting for. This recent Lego ad really caught my attention and made me think back on my childhood, which I expect is exactly what the company wanted from mine and older generations. Not to mention, I can't see kids not loving them too.
Once again, an example of print ads using blank real estate very effectively.

Buy the new Radiohead album!...for free?

The band Radiohead has undergone some major changes fairly recently. Their record contract with EMI Records expired in 2004 and since have been working independently without rules and restraints of any sort but their own. Their last record release was with EMI, called "Hail to the Thief", and just released their newest entitled "In Rainbows".

There are a number of cool things that came along with this album. For one, the band's site design is entirely based around the album. The background is this sort of psychedelic moving tie-dye design with a sans-serif block text outlining (very few) details about the album. Really neat; grabs and keeps the users attention quickly.

Secondly, and most importantly (...and shockingly), the album has no set price tag. You choose what you want to pay for it. You can download it or order a CD copy on the spot for whatever price you like. I wanted to discover if there was a catch, so I chose to pay 0 pounds for the download.

While I am waiting for my free download, I get a message telling me "We value your custom. You are currently in a queue." This message was up for about 2 minutes, and really made me think about things. I started asking myself a number of questions. For one, how hard did these guys work to produce something for me to listen to and hopefully enjoy? To answer this question, I did what a large number of people do when they seek information about something they don't know a lot about; I turned to Wikipedia to see what they had on the subject. I discovered it took them just over two years to produce. That's a lot of sweat and blood for some music. In between songwriting and recording, they contributed a song to the official War Child charity album: Help - A Day in the Life. I started to wonder, am I a bad person for paying nothing even if the band clearly gave me the option? This message seemed like an obvious guilt trip at the time, but in a good way.

This post is by no means meant to preach to you in any way, but if you've ever listened to any Radiohead and like what you hear, I encourage you to check out their site. Download or order a copy of the album. Decide for yourself what to pay for it. While you do this, think about the massive decline in album sales in the past decade. What I believe Radiohead is trying to do with this is almost like their own form of quantitative and qualitative research. Everybody in the music world is talking about In Rainbows in blogs, comment posts, newspapers and more. There's your basis for qualitative analysis. The band also has the records of how much people have paid for it. Here we have the quantitative.

Before you go ahead and buy the album, think about these things. Ask yourself what you think a reasonable price for any full-length album would be. What would you like to see as a standard sticker price on CD shelves in HMV?

Is there a need for VLE standardization?

Without any research, I can confidently say that most professors at McMaster University put course material online. The problem is, there are a whole slew of options they have for doing this. For example, Virtual Learning Environments. There are at least 4 that are actively used at Mac: WebCT, Moodle, Blackboard, LearnLink. If profs either don't like any of these options, or don't know about them, they can just use ordinary webspace.

Is there a way to standardize the way prof's post online course material? Would it even be completely necessary?

There is one obvious issue. It's a pain in the ass to manage all of these different sources of information, but is it worth spending so much time/effort/money on this problem that can potentially never be solved?

Prof. Rockwell discusses the issue of tenure status. In the simplest of terms, the University can't tell prof's what to do. Maybe what we need is to come up with a form of incentive to get prof's to use one standardized VLE.

Any ideas?

CEO or X5?

I was reading the Globe Auto section from Thursday and came across a really interesting article. A few random car manufacturers from China (even I have never heard of) have stirred up some controversy in Europe lately concerning models that look identical to the likes of BMW's, Toyota's, Mercedes-Benz's and more. The image above compares a BMW X5 (right) to a Shuanghuan "CEO" (left). Look similar? Despite accusations of "blatant copying", only one car, the Shuanghuan Noble, was kicked out of the Frankfurt Motor Show for looking identical to the Smart car.

But the fun doesn't stop there. They're also cheaper...WAY cheaper. A BMW X5 starts at somewhere in the neighborhood of $50,000-$60,000. The Shuanghuan won't even ask for half that for their CEO. Sounds great, right? Wrong! Wanna know why? Cheaper materials! Check out the Chery Amulet crash-test on YouTube (Another Chinese American/European replica). The thing practically disintegrates. I would never be caught dead in one of these things.

This new trend of knock-off cars has already hit Europe, and will soon be introduced in Canada. Watch out...

Online quizzing and claims of 'instant feedback'

I was reading another course article for my Computers and Education class this week entitled Emerging Technologies by a professor at Viginia Commonwealth University called Bob Godwin-Jones. At one point he talks about a U of Victoria based online quiz editor called Hot Potatoes. It allows users to construct short quizzes in the form of multiple-choice, fill-in-the-gap and even short answers and in class I actually went in and explored this tool a little bit. The idea is really neat, simple and completely user-friendly (as setting up a quiz doesn't require knowledge of HTML code, JavaScript, etc.).

With that said, I still had one concern. In his article, Godwin-Jones explains how one of the most valuable features of these types of online testing systems is that the student gets instant feedback after answers are entered in. This was somewhat misleading to me. Aren't short answer questions often times subjective? If this is the case, then how could there possibly be programmed instant feedback? I decided that the short answer questions are limited to a certain type of question, like, for instance:

"What two provinces border Ontario?"

This type of question would work because the program would be able to detect if the correct answers were typed into the text box, as there are only two. A question that would not work as well and would be impossible (in my eyes) to program appropriate feedback is something like:

"Using termonology and concepts you learned in class, name your favourite 17th Century painting, its artist, and why you like it."

There are an infinite number of possible answers to this question, so how could there be instant feedback? The teacher needs time to read this answer and assess it appropriately; this is where we can visibly see the limits that exist in terms of computer capabilities. My question is this; will computers ever be able to grade an entire essay, puncuation, sentence structure, content and all?

171 foot gap...in a rally car

You've got to be kidding me. I was speechless when I saw the first backflip in motocross in 2000 by Carey Hart, and then a double backflip last year by Travis Pastrana, but this is out of control. A 171 foot gap in a Subaru? What's next? Backflips in racecars?

VW commercials

Another fine example of why I love Volkswagen advertisements so much. Some of my other favourite VW commercials include: the "Vee-Dub" series with Peter Stormare, safety dance, and the "Safe Happens" series ("stuff doesn't, like, happen"). Check them out if you get the chance! No question, one of the best marketing teams in the industry.

Wikipedia: good source for information or not?

In our Computers and Education class this week we started a discussion on wikis, but more specifically we looked into the controversy over the most well known wiki on the net, Wikipedia. The biggest question we concocted was, 'why is this encyclopedia accepted as a reliable source by some professors and teachers, and not by others?' The problem lies with ambiguity surrounding the sources of the research that is gathered for the information writtin in the wiki entries themselves. In other words, who writes this stuff, and who gets to tell us its truth or fiction? Well, one of the issues is that people don't know if John Smith, the McMaster page head administer has a PhD in English or if he is in fact unemployed and living off KD. But on the contrary, maybe it doesn't matter! If you or I go in and edit Jesse Lumsden's profile in the McMaster wikipedia entry to say he is and always was a nobody instead of the best player to come out of the McMaster Football Program, within seconds this will be undone by somebody. But who is this person? Is he Lumsden's personal assistant? Probably not. Is it Lumsden himself? Just as unlikely.

The point is this: these editors have a passion for either the subject they supervise, and/or keeping the entries clean and accurate. The truth is, Wikipedia pages are more accurate than a lot of other encyclopedias. Prof. Geoffrey Rockwell stated it best when he said that although the information can at times be politically biased and not as well written as published encyclopedias, studies have shown that the information is slightly more up-to-date on Wikipedia.

So a conclusion can be drawn from this. Wikipedia has some solid information to use as a starting ground for your own research. My advice although is this: if you're looking into the subject of something like Mac computers as an example, poke around on the site and read up on what is posted. Get a general idea of what it is that you are trying to learn about, and then look for more resources that are academically accepted that will find you the information that you need. Look at Wikipedia as a slightly more accurate version of the newspaper, but with the same sort of purpose: to provide bare facts. Both can be biased and inaccurate, but often times hold pretty valuable information.