David Perry at TED, sharing perspective in the role of video games.

I swam competitively for many years, and usually had little regard for synchronized swimming. With all of the other sports and entertainment around me, I just wondered what’s the big deal in all of that frilly water dancing?

Well, last week, as I watched the Olympic team synchronized swimming competition it occurred to me that I had not really watched synchro for a long, long time. The duration of the event, the often-impeccable display of synchrony in movement, the creativity in the performances, all amounted to amazement.

Synchro swimmers have certainly been just as artistic and athletic during all of those previous years; so, why is it that synchro just never did it for me before. What kept me from seeing the artistry and athleticism?I have a hunch…

That was then, this is now.

In a comment posted to a group discussion about collaboration in education, Birdie Newcomb (SL) wrote

“…almost every day, I’m learning…how to find out what I need to know, how to work with people, find out their stories, marvel at ingenuity or originality. It refreshes me. Why doesn’t it refresh students the same way?”

I have a hunch about this, too; but, will take a long way ’round…

In a recent post, Hamlet reveals an overall shrinking in the proportion of echo boomers in Second Life®. He goes on to present Feldspar Epstein’s notion that

Generation X’ers know how to play in the freeform manner that Second Life requires, whereas Millennials typically do not display that skill

My emphasis is on the word “display” here, because I have no doubt that the Gen-Y users of SL will show us all a thing or two about using this new technology.  These are smart kids.  But, with all of the technology and virtual world games around, maybe they look at the state of the technology and think “what’s the big deal?”

The advent of the World Wide Web also found many people wondering what is the big deal?, especially amongst the oldest of us. That was then. Now, it is a rare thing for me to meet someone who does not regularly use the Internet for something (and I spend most of my time in a retirement community).

Perhaps, in the same way that it took a long time for me to appreciate synchronized swimming—by seeing how far the sport has come— the echo boomers will only begin to invest themselves in virtual world building after the technology ripens a bit.

I have been skirting the forest of Artificial Intelligence for quite some time; peeking through the foliage, occasionally pulling back a limb to examine the tangled shadows. Lately I have been darting under the branches to look for signs of a path; and, as this weblog is my trail of breadcrumbs, then I will pause to crumble up an entire loaf…

Eliezer Yudkowsky, co-founder of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, is sorting out the user requirements for a friendly artificial intelligence. A recent post in the SIAI weblog points to “Coherent Extrapolated Volition”, Yudkowsky ’s paper discussing the logical mechanisms of humanely ethical behavior.

Read: Nice robot.

Coherent extrapolated volition:

“As of May 2004, my take on Friendliness is that the initial dynamic should implement the coherent extrapolated volition of humankind.”

“In poetic terms, our coherent extrapolated volition is our wish if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together; where the extrapolation converges rather than diverges, where our wishes cohere rather than interfere; extrapolated as we wish that extrapolated, interpreted as we wish that interpreted.”

Yudkowsky apparently contributes to the weblog at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, which is directed by Nick Bostrom, an Oxford philosopher known for his work on the anthropic principle. Bostrom chairs the World Transhumanist Association and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (whose front page sports a link to a video of Ray Kurzweil’s acceptance speech on being awarded the World Transhumanist Association’s H.G. Wells award as transhumanist of the year, bringing one nearly full circle).

Bostrom is Director of the newly created Oxford Future of Humanity Institute. According to the current Wikipedia entry, Bostrom suggests

“… if it is possible to simulate entire inhabited planets or even entire universes on a computer, and that such simulated people can be fully conscious, that the sheer number of such simulations likely to be produced by any sufficiently advanced civilization (taken together with his Strong Self-Sampling Assumption) makes it extremely likely that we are in fact currently living in such a simulation.”

Have you never stopped to wonder who made the rules?

With many brilliant folks juggling these ideas, there is some possibility of surviving the emergence of a superior AI, some hope of seeing the other side of the singularity. The question for me is…

Will we even know when it awakens?

3pointD points to an article at ComputerworldUK describing a virtual world summit…

IBM is set to debate these issues on Friday at a virtual worlds event it is co-hosting with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge.

Among others, academics and companies including Toyota and PepsiCo are meeting, perhaps to explore a path toward interoperability standards according to Bob Sutor. In his series of posts describing his virtual world requirements, Sutor explains some of what is necessary for interconnected VR grids to allow for a user to travel between.
In Second Life there is EduIsland, what would EduPlanet be like?

The installation of the ManyQuest activity at the SL Best Practices conference was a mild success. Only one bot was ready at the opening of the 24 hour event, with two others being completed as the day progressed. Several strange, inconsistent glitches occured throughout the morning. Heavy server load due to traffic may have created some of the problems.
The main feature of the scripted objects in this activity is the flexibility of the content. All dialog presented by the bot is read from a single notecard by the script. The idea is that anyone can write the dialog, and the bot handles the rest. So, if you wanted to have students respond to questions…then receive another assignment (notecard), the bot would handle the interactivity
Data was captured for the activity, sent via server script to a text file, and will be reviewed soon.
One ManyQuest participant mentioned plans to develop similar quests in SL. One theme that could be developed would be a survey of virtual cities that have been re-created in SL. An post at Metaversed, titled
“Virtual Cities Streaming into Second Life, could provide a start for developing such content.

Wandering the NCI pavilion in Second Life early in my Second Life resulted in a chance to get to know an interesting young chap. I had just sat my avatar down to process some of the inventory I had gathered, when another avatar with that half-baked newbie look approached and took a chair across from me.

Creven Alonzo had recently registered in SL Mature Grid (MG), having reached his real life (RL) eighteenth birthday. He mentioned his recent transfer out of TG, and soon commented that he was bored. I did the math: newly emigrated TG user plus bored MG resident equals…

opportunity.

We chatted about and avatars, freebies and virtual hang-man games. A curious complacency was obvious in his chatter. Previously, and without exception, all of my conversations had been with folks of two types: New like myself and so excited about all there was to explore and learn, or more experienced and in a hurry to move on because there was so much to be done.

This guy was unimpressed.

It grew late, so I asked if I could add him to my friends list (he accepted). Waiting several weeks before contacting him, I saw Creven pop up in the grid once in a while (entry and exit of any “friend” is announced to every user).

The wait gave Creven time to explore, and afforded me time to learn about the metaverse and more importantly, to come up with a project. The iDP needs content, how about a content set for the teen transfers? Maybe Creven could help to fill out a list of SL locations, capture snapshots, get landmarks and even write the descriptions for locations that would interest new immigrants.

That is no joke. The young people who have been removed from their adventure in the TG apparently experience emotions familiar to any who have moved from one town to another, leaving the life they came to know—and the friends made—behind. He had been deported.

Creven has since remained in contact, has submitted over a dozen snapshots from the grid, and even created a weblog. We have had several conversations about image composition and resolution. I suggested he start a weblog, because I—for one—would be interested to read his observations of this, his second second life, the one in the MG (hopefully sprinkled with anecdotes from the TG). Occasionally seems like a teacher-student interaction.

What he may not know is that I may be learning more than him in the process.

Cheers, Creven.

A multi-user dungeon (domain), object oriented (MOO) interface stares back from my browser with READMEs and Intro button eyes. A few weeks into my Second Life, and real life (”RL”, to an avatar) is moving at the speed of light. I received my demonstration Moodle account (with accompanying class to create) only last night; yet, the need to test drive that interface has been nudged right off the list, maybe tomorrow I’ll Moodle.

Connected.

I am connected to people with an efficiency and productivity that is astounding. Case in point: That last sentence was punctuated by the appearance of w0nk0, the educator in Australia who invited mooved me into this MOO environment as a SysAdmin. Ten minutes later, and I have already traveled through three or four rooms in the sim, learned a bit about interacting, and now “see” a haggard cabinboy as water lasps lazily and an Albatross calls from above. w0nk0 logged in, saw that was idle in his virtual reality, and offered instruction.

Nice.

w0nk0 explains that “a MOO requires you to use imagination a little more” [than a 3D sim], and offers this excerpt:

It is substantially easier for players to give themselves vivid, detailed, and interesting descriptions… in a text-based system than in a graphics based one. In McLuhan’s terminology, this is because MUDs are a ‘cold’ medium, while more graphically-based media are ‘hot’; that is, the sensorial parsimony of plain text tends to entice users into engaging their imaginations to fill in missing details while, comparatively speaking, the richness of stimuli in fancy virtual realities has an opposite tendency, pushing users’ imaginations into a more passive role. I also find it difficult to believe that a graphics-based system will be able to compete with text for average users on the metric of believable detail per unit of effort expended; this is certainly the case now and I see little reason to believe it will change in the near future.

Pavel Curtis, Mudding: Social Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Realities
(Submission to the 1992 conference on Directions and Implications of Advanced Computing, 1992)

“Believable detail per unit of effort expended”. Interesting, indeed.

But I digress (at light speed, these days)…One educator has formed a group of educators and educational gaming professionals withing the SL community, called Gaming and Learning. He also had the foresight to create a companion Google Group, “Gaming and Learning in Second Life” (GaLiSL), as a hub for communicating within the group “out of world” (in RL). Seeing the potential for edge-seekers in education [Azwaldo Villota avoids temptation to juggle a cute play on words], I test the water with a few comments, edit a Page, and even open a free wiki.
The number, even the variety of experiences (and, more importantly to me, the number of ideas now percolating in me wee brain), have me wondering…

What have I brought to the dance?

Quick post: Too much to do in Second Life, too much to learn actually, to spend time dropping breadcrumbs here lately. Here is a link to a promotional video made by NMC (an educational consultancy) about the 3-Dimensional Virtual Reality called “Second Life” (SL):

NMC Campus: Seriously Engaging

And, a link to one from Ohio University:

Ohio University Second Life Campus

And one of the most intriguing videos I have surfed into lately:

3D morphable model face animation (remarkable technology)

Now, it’s back to the grid…

Interesting how a current mode of thinking can permeate every moment, every random action, completely affecting one’s view. Currently absorbed by the topic of online curriculum development and the collaborative communities forming around this effort (particularly the way in which learning objects can be found, cataloged, sorted and indexed), I see simple mention of a video presentation about some random technology, and immediately see significance for my current obsession.

Could symmetric and asymmetric verification games be used to index online educational content?

Check out the episode of Google TechTalks titled “Human Computation: Games With A Purpose” (July 26, 2006; approx. 50 min, 35 min presentation plus Q&A). Featuring Luis von Ahn (site) – assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University; Microsoft Research Fellowship recipient.

“Tasks like image recognition are trivial for humans, but continue to challenge even the most sophisticated computer programs. This talk introduces a paradigm for utilizing human processing power to solve problems that computers cannot yet solve. Traditional approaches to solving such problems focus on improving software. [von Ahn advocates] a novel approach: constructively channel human brainpower using computer games. For example, the ESP Game, described in this talk, is an enjoyable online game — many people play over 40 hours a week — and when people play, they help label images on the Web with descriptive keywords. These keywords can be used to significantly improve the accuracy of image search. People play the game not because they want to help, but because they enjoy it.

“Von Ahn describes other examples of ‘games with a purpose’: Peekaboom, which helps determine the location of objects in images, and Verbosity, which collects common-sense knowledge. Von Ahn also explains a general approach for constructing games with a purpose.”

I blogGoogled “games with purpose” and found 74 links. This will make 75, I reckon. Here’s an excerpt from Tim O’Reilly’s take on this video:

“As the symbiosis between humans and computers becomes deeper, and at a larger scale, we’re going to see problems that were formerly construed as ‘hard AI’ suddenly broken, not because computers themselves have become intelligent, but because humans and computers have gotten better at working together.“

Excellent summary, and a thought-provoking prognosis. O’Reilly’s article then led me to Creating Passionate Users , which may also hold some clues for online curriculum development communities, such as the Curriki project.

The segments on PeekaBoom and Verbosity showed how the ESP game data has been extended. Noteworthy is that the project is “funded in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF)”.

Fascinating.

Note to Luis von Ahn: Where is the data now? Has it been made public?

We absorb technology into our lifestyles and culture in unpredictable ways…

“British shopkeepers tired of teenage loiterers have turned to the Mosquito teen repellent, which emits a high-pitch frequency that most teenagers can hear — but not most adults.
But now teens have struck back against the Mosquito: They are using the same sound to communicate without adults’ knowledge. At issue is a text-message ringtone that emits the same pitch as the Mosquito. Using it, students can learn about a new message while they’re in class — where they’re not supposed to be using their cellphones. Most of their teachers can’t hear the alert.”

- NPR : Teens Turn ‘Repeller’ into Adult-Proof Ringtone