kevin roebuck's blog: My Almost Daily News

First, be sure to join the Immersive Education Initiative for login-password, then <click here> to enter the Wonderland servers on the Education Grid. (Listen to the audiocast from the opening day session for background to the project)

The press release for the Education Grid launch hit the wire today. Thanks to Rebecca, Matt and the Sun PR team for all their help.

Well, we a great day last friday launching the Education Grid with over 150+ attendees vying for access to the new Wonderland sites. Many thanks to all who participated. I hope you had as much fun as I did. Sorry for any frustration for folks wanting to participate and couldnt get in. We learned a lot and the next events will be even better. Our next meetings are being planned now for Europe, Asia and South America. Here are some blog posts from the event including many with photos.

Wonderland: Education Grid Launched
VirtuEd: Virtual Education
June 22, 2008

Wonderland Works!
Katherine W. Prawl
New Media On the Go
June 21, 2008

Immersive Education Initiative Launches Education Grid on Wonderland
Virtual Worlds News
June 20, 2008

Writer's Blox
Project Virtual Northstar
June 21, 2008

First Educational Gathering in Wonderland
Tim Wang’s eLearning Blog
June 20, 2008

Sun Microsystems’ Project Wonderland and The Immersive Education Grid
It is Time to Tweak eLearning
June 20, 2008

Sun’s Wonderland & Education Grid Demo
Fleep’s Deep Thoughts
June 20, 2008

The Princess visits Wonderland : The Education Grid
The Princess of Yaximixche
June 20, 2008

On Friday June 20th at 4pm EST the Immersive Education Initiative will
launch the Education Grid with an array of Sun Wonderland virtual world
servers ("nodes" hosted by Essex University (United Kingdom),
University of Oregon, St. Paul College, New Media Consortium (NMC), and
Sun Microsystems. Faculty and staff from each host organization will
join faculty from the Woods College of Advancing Studies at Boston
College to guide visitors through the Wonderland virtual worlds that
debut on the Education Grid this Friday.

The Education Grid is provided free of charge to the general public and
Immersive Education Initiative members. Starting this Friday, Immersive
Education Initiative members can conduct classes and meetings within
Wonderland virtual worlds on the Education Grid. Initiative members can
also use the Education Grid to build custom Wonderland virtual learning
worlds, simulations, and learning games.


Immersive Education's virtual world Platform Ecosystem and corresponding
Education Grid provide educators with an open and comprehensive
end-to-end infrastructure for a new generation of learning worlds,
interactive learning games, and simulations. Sun Microsystems
Laboratory's Project Wonderland is an official Immersive Education
virtual world platform. Wonderland is now being enhanced to utilize the
Education Grid, which is being designed to deliver a rich library of
learning objects, digital media assets, learning games and collaboration
services from which a wide variety of Immersive Education experiences
can be assembled. Friday's event will give educators an early preview of
the emerging Wonderland client-side platform and corresponding
server-side Education Grid.


This event starts at 4pm EST (1pm pacific / Second Life time) in Second
Life and then moves into the Education Grid's Wonderland virtual worlds


WHAT: Education Grid launches with Project Wonderland

WHEN: Friday June 20th, 2008 at 4pm EST

WHERE: Sun island
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Sun%20Microsystems%201/127/165/71

The Wonderland server at Merlot's Center for Learning Innovation in Virtual Environments at the University of Oregon has just gone live at sunspark.uoregon.edu. Thanks to Warren and his team at Saint Paul College for all their kind help and support. Next up is the University of Zurich.

Here in New Jersey on the campus of Princeton University for the NMC annual conference and launch of our new Open Virtual Worlds Project collaboration around Project Wonderland. The SunLabs team of Jon, Karl and Jordan did an absolutely awesome live demo with Nicole and Joe joining in-world from Burlington including mixed reality phone, world builder, mpk20 and music world scenarios for the pre-conference workshop. Today is another breakout session along with conference opening, then breakout again tomorrow with Larry, then home to SF on the 6:10 flight from Newark. Here are some quick snapshots from the iphone (why Apple didn't put a better camera in the new iphone i will never understand, but I will still get one for )

Jordan in action during his part of the demo after Jon set the stage

Our enthusiastic, knowledgeable and fun audience

Chris and Jordan setting up the new NMC Wonderland servers in the lobby of the Hyatt

The long-awaited Moodlerooms & Sun Reference Architecture for scaling Moodle up to a million users or down to a small school at a price-point of $1 per student per year is out.And, it's got it all: Solaris 10, Coolstack, MySQL, killer servers, storage array and all performance tested in Sun MDE labs using the Tsung open source load-generator framework written in Erlang running on Niagara. Get one today!

Meet the first business to set-up shop in Wonderland

Tim is a PhD student over at the University of Notre Dame whose dissertation proposal was just approved around access control models for avatars, media, security and data protection in Wonderland in a project called WonderDAC. We caught up yesterday to see how Sun can help his efforts which mostly center for now on possible travel support for conferences and promotion of his work in the community.
Here's a draft Tim wrote about the work for an idea of where it's going and why we support is efforts.

Congratulations on a great first year and a promising future that includes both Wonderland and Darkstar. Super job Aaron.

It looks like June 20th is the now set for the public launch in Wonderland of our first nodes on the Education Grid launch with the Immersive Education community as our guests. We have two confirmed sites, three more in set-up and anyone else on the planet who can get their open source virtual world site spun up and running can also join in the fun for this historic event. Here's all you need to plug-in to the Education Grid event:

Download the MPK20 sample virtual world and Project Wonderland software tool-set, power it up on top of Darkstar, get it on the net and then get ready to welcome your new avatar guests and participate in future 3-D collaborative sessions in a variety of topics.

For interested parties we only need a Java Webstart URL or (ideally) the IP address of your Wonderland server, and we can include them in the launch and corresponding news announcement. Here's a snapshot of the nodes for today:

WONDERLAND EDUCATION GRID - CURRENT NODES FOR 2008-06-18 LAUNCH AND ANNOUNCEMENT:

• Essex University    [READY]


• Clive/U.Oregon     [pending; URL IP ADDRESS NEEDED]


• NMC/CommonNeed     [pending; URL or IP ADDRESS NEEDED]


• Sun Microsystems     [READY]


• Virtual Northstar/St Paul College [pending; URL or IP ADDRESS NEEDED]



 

The Immersive Education Initiative is going international with events coming up in South America in both Colombia and Brazil. On August 22nd will be the first event with an Immersive
Education Day at Fundación Universitaria Sanitas in Bogota. Stay tuned for more and ping us if you'd like an event at your school.

Elluminate's award winning Fire & Ice online events on climate change sponsored by Sun have two events coming up to be sure to take note of and participate in if possible. Four schools from three continents will present the results of their projects in two live events scheduled for May 29th and June 5th.

• May 29, 2008 at 9:00am MST:  Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso and Calgary, Canada

• June 5, 2008 at 9:00am MST:  Medellin, Colombia and Eureka, Kansas
  

Guests may attend either event online, by clicking on the following link at least 15 minutes prior to the start time (a computer headset and minimum 28.8 kbps internet connection are required to participate): https://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?sid=7&password=M.FE2A0E224D3804EA06F55F04DE764D

Leadership Award Ceremony in Medellin: You are also invited to attend, in person, the Fire and Ice Leadership Award Ceremony to be presented Institucion Gabriel Garcia Márquez of Medellín.

Date: June 5, 2008
Time: Event: 10:00am CST; Ceremony: 11:30 am CST
Place: Institución Gabriel García Márquez
Address: CRA 8A #57A-93 CAICEDO VILLALIAM, Medellín, Colombia

Great job Gang.
 

From the BBC: Virtual worlds can be valuable places where children rehearse what they will do in real life reveals research

Just reporting in on a snowy mountain morning from our cabin in Truckee in advance for the start of the long Memorial Day weekend. After yesterday's low of seeing several close co-workers walked out the door and then high of a great discussion about Wonderland with the nice folks from Chicago Public Schools .Today is mostly a day of vacation other than a quick call with BCU and then Aaron later today. Thanks to Open Work and my iPhone it seems like life is pretty much "always on" which is fine because I love my job at Sun and the people I am fortunate enough to work with in a global role. That's why it was cool to see the note arrive from Alexis and Adrien at Darkworks in Paris mentioning news about the Project Darkstar and the Edutain@Grid project. And now, the sun is starting to come out.... send my last emails out.....grab a guitar on the deck, peace.

Unfortunately the news is not so good today as one of the star performers for Sun in Education has been let go by the company. This guy made an enormous contribution to our efforts in the support of both open source and commercial applications, conferences and initiatives to advance the state of technology for campus information systems. He will be missed. Best of luck to him and thanks for all your efforts and friendship. Stay in touch Dude. We know who you are and will help out any way we can in the future

Congratulazioni Sun Italia. The Forum PA 2008 in Rome showcased the cool work in Wonderland that Corrado, Giusseppe and Rafaella are doing with their customer Postecom. Molto Bene!

My colleague and friend Art runs what I think is one of the best and coolest communities at Sun. It's called the PASIG for the Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group. He and Mike Keller, Chief Cybrarian at Stanford, have brought together what amounts to the world's best and brightest minds in the digital library community to discuss strategies for preserving access to the world's collective digital culture. I'm jazzed to be giving a talk on Wonderland and our Immersive Education community work at the upcoming meeting this month in San Francisco. Join us if you can for what is sure to be another great event.

The good folks at Saint Paul College and the University of Oregon are now well underway on their art path project between the two sites for Merlot/Cate and Virtual Northstar in Wonderland. They are going to use a new collaborative social bookmarking service called Diigo to build of a kind of collaborative space around the Sun platform. It is a much different and far more open development path than the AOL-like lock-in of Second Life. So, check out Diigo as a service or visit the Virtual Northstar Project site to see it in action as they build out their part of the Open Content Metaverse

The archived audio transcript is now available from last friday's Immersive Education group meeting. The focus of the discussion included sections on high-resolution avatars, photo-based modeling, graphics, game engines and cinematic 3-D. The session ended with a discussion on key open file formats that will be adopted for the Education Grid including X3D and Collada making Wonderland content creation conform to the spec with the .5 release this fall. The community goal for content, "Create Once, Experience Everywhere".

High-Resolution Avatars

Cinematic 3-D 

Here's kind of cool new way to think about net access for kids. WiHood has a "virtual
laptop" that is loaded on a USB bracelet and worn on your wrist,
carried in a pocket or in a school bag. They are inserted into any internet connected PC launching the WiHood
virtual laptop service (running on a Solaris datacenter) that provides each child with their own personal
virtual desktop. WiHood's web filtering service is integrated into the
WiHood desktop that provides games and office applications, all while
protecting children online. WiHood was founded to bridge the
digital-divide amongst children while protecting them online using Web
2.0 thinking (web services and cloud computing technologies).

After a brief but enjoyable trip to Cincinatti to visit with University of Cincinnati and seminar event with Cinci Bell for the K12 community, preparation is on now for upcoming New Media Consortium Annual Conference held this year at Princeton University. With the Open Virtual Worlds Project now underway and hosted at CommonNeed, we'll be featuring a pre-conference workshop on Project Wonderland, a breakout session summary and closing session discussing OVW and getting folks started in creating and building their own playgrounds. It should be a blast so sign up and join Sun and the NMC on this exploration of open source, virtual worlds and creativity.

Everyone interested in K12 and open education should keep an eye on Stan and his team's efforts. We are going to do everything possible to see them succeed.

The video archive is now available from the US House Subcommittee meeting on Telecommunications and the Internet session on Online Virtual Worlds: Applications and Avatars in a User-Generated Medium. Thanks Larry for mentioning Wonderland in your excellent remarks to the group.

Another great Fire & Ice event today from Stace and the gang at Elluminate. This time the event focus is on kids affected by war around the world. As described, "The Machinto project is based on a Japanese picture book about a little girl who is killed in the Hiroshima bomb in 1945. The girl comes back to life as a dove who spreads peace and hope to children in the world who are affected by war. Over the past several months, students from various countries have leveraged the internet to communicate their feelings and thoughts about this topic by engaging in online forums, sharing photographs and artwork, and developing their own picture book about peace and friendship. As a token of friendship, Machinto classes will distribute these books to children who live in war-affected areas including Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan". The books and poems can be seen on the project website at www.machinto.org.

Stan and his team came down for a really enjoyable day during the Sun Labs Open House. We've kicked off the new project with Modesto City Schools and Stanislaus County . More news will be coming soon as we get the server on-line and initial test experiences underway for our first K12 pilot in Wonderland. MiRTLE will give us an ability for traditional instructional delivery which is hopefully comfortable and not a steep learning curve at all for the teachers. Plus,  the kids can take classes still in areas where the states financial woes have cut local programs, but a virtual teacher can extend their class to include other kids in the district. After seeing World Builder in action, it's hard to imagine kids not jumping in full force on collaborative building of team spaces to engage, play and learn. Thanks to the whole team from MSC, Stanislaus and Sylvan for spending the day with us. We are jazzed about the journey ahead.

The latest video update on the MiRTLE Project with Essex University and SunLabs creating an open source mixed reality classroom on top of Project Wonderland. We're showing it at the SunLabs Open House today too which is too cool to qualify. Michael presents the project next at the Sun Education Conference in Shanghai in April.

Paul over in the UK sent a note off describing the first phase of possibly the largest CAVE immersive reality environment in the world at Salford University with a very sophisticated video capture/tele-immersion system. According to Paul, "The octagonal Cave (8 to 10 pipes) will run on Scalable Visualisation Software 1.1. They are using SunFIRE X4600s as the master node and Ultra 40 M2/FX-5600 as render nodes. Eventually Salford hope to tie their research into the BBC's Tele-Immersion project. They will use the marching cube algorithm with CUDA to sculpt virtual models of real world objects, such as people, operating theatres, football matches, etc. The oCtAVE is reconfigurable into many types of CAVEs, powerwalls, etc." Cool. I sent Paul a note to see if we can arrange a public presentation on the project and it's direction and where it fits perhaps with our efforts in Project Wonderland. Here's a video demo for now. Stay tuned.