Eloise's thoughts and fancies

Well, quite a lot actually as I get more used to it.

Warhammer, at almost all levels (I don't have a top level character, but one getting close) has things you can do, usefully, alone and things that might best be done in groups. But they have a very flexible and usable grouping system so it's easy to join up into a group. The grouping system also extends to scenarios, which I hadn't really discovered last time I blogged about WAR. Scenarios are basically mini-RVR adventures. There are a few at each tier - about 3-5, more at tier 4 - where you are set up automatically in groups (although you can join as a group if you wish) and battle against similarly ranked other players. These battles typically take 10 minutes or so (they're set to time out as a draw after 15 minutes).

These scenarios are good - they let you practise your skills in an allegedly fair fight. In practise I'm not sure that the fights really are fair at most points, although a few certainly are. Certain of the scenarios play to the strengths of one side or the other and if you're on the weaker side you're basically stuffed. That said, you can still crank up some interesting rewards and excellent drops, as well as some renown points and advance towards your bigger goal. Some of the fights are, absolutely, fair too - I've played a number of them a high number of times and they're close enough to 50:50 that you'd have to say they're basically fair. I've played others a similar number of times and they can be 90:10 in favour of one side or the other.

And, to make it more fun, you can more or less advance solely through the scenarios, get good gear, possibly great gear. My first character (in the picture, although that's rather out of date now) largely ignored these and is now trying to catch up. My second character is spending much more time in scenarios and is mostly using renown gear rather than normal gear. I think you'd struggle to play 100% in scenarios but you could probably get close.

The scenario system is not perfect. For example, you're split by tier levels 1-11, 10-21, 20-31, 30-40 (yes there's a bit of overlap). To try and make the characters less extremely biased if you're under some level (8, 18, 28 and 36 I think) you get a brevet rank for the scenario. Problem with this? I'm currently 32nd level and a 36th level character is just better than me. If I look at a 36th level monster the rating says "deadly" - that might not be true for a single monster if I can prepare and ambush it alone because monsters are stupider than players usually - but for a character it's definitely true. Up against 40th level characters I basically can't hurt them and if I sneeze at the wrong time, I'm dead. I've been hit by a 40th level wizard with a staff harder than I can hit him with a sword - and he's meant to be the wimpy one in that exchange. Of course, when it works, it's great, and I can rake in the renown points and help my friends a bit - healer guard and annoy and knock the guys trying to kill them down for example, and later on I'll be able to do the hammer their back line method instead. A few more divisions (say every 5 levels) might make it work better.

The other thing that they do nicely is they make it possible to log in briefly. I finished some work this morning, logged in and played for 45 minutes. I'm now getting ready for lunch. My memory of EVE and WoW was that as the levels went up, the experience went up, the necessary time went up too. Sure, I can achieve more if I log in for 3 hours than for 45 minutes, but I can achieve more or less as much logging in for 45 minutes, 4 times a day as 3 hours all at once.

THAT's well worth it and might make it a game I play for a while longer - because I can fit it around work without feeling guilty that I'm letting people down, chewing up time etc.

I'm not normally nervous about teaching. In fact one person commented that they didn't know I did nervous: I do but not that often. I'm usually confident in my work and confident in my ability to cope with the unexpected.

So I'm blogging this reflection because I'm teaching a blended learning course, primarily online with a few help and support classes, and having taught the first class yesterday I knew before hand that I was nervous and afterwards I'm even more nervous about it.

I'm reasonably confident that the materials I've provided cover the content that is required and prior to this week I would have said that I'm reasonably confident that they are accessible and the learners can learn from them and practise and extend their skills as required. So why am I nervous?

Well I think the pre-start nerves were because it feels like it's out of my hands now. The phrase that springs most readily to mind is "It's out of my control" but for me that control isn't the control of seeing bums on seats and giving them chunks of my expertise in 'chalk and talk' style, rather it is the loss of that ability to assess how well the class is going, if they're getting the points and ideas, and to amend my presentation and teaching to suit the needs of the group. Words written on a page can't do that and although the educational aims and outcomes haven't really changed in this course (I've taught it face-to-face for the last 9 years) the style of each class has changed in response to the nature of the class. (I'm teaching numerical reasoning to non-mathematicians, the materials they need to cover haven't really changed in the last decade - they're still bad at percentages, at mental arithmetic and the like, which is why the content hasn't changed.)

My nerves after the first class are partially still based in that loss of adaptability. I guess I was hoping that the first class would allay those fears but it wasn't the case. If anything it made them flare up. I decided, as a matter of policy, to make use of a course blog as the main route of communication. I have done this before quite successfully on a number of occasions, although always with professional training rather than undergraduates. It didn't fill me with confidence when only half of the class knew what a blog was and how to use one, and only one person knew about RSS feeds. Not in the sense of "Oh, this is how you generate the XML" but in the sense of what you use them for and their strengths and weaknesses.

And that, I think, is why I'm more nervous now. Was expecting the students to use a blog to communicate a mistake? It's certainly not, apparently, a comfortable and familiar technology for them. If I'm wrong about that, have I misjudged the style of the presentation? Suddenly the reason I'm more nervous now is really obvious, as is the fact that there's not much I can do about it any more.

Only time will tell. It will be interesting to see how the marks and retention compare to previous years.

On 14 Jan 2010 I hosted a roundtable discussion for Bluesky Larkham at the University of Worcester sim.

The theme of the discussion was immersion and immersive environments. As you might imagine, this was a fairly wide ranging and a very fast discussion with a lot of topics raised and discussed across each other. With the permission of the contributors I am reproducing a notes version of the discussion here.

The discussion was nudged by a few questions from me at various points. These are used to separate the threads somewhat. Because many of the notes are combinations from several contributors they are unattributed.

Those present: Eloise Pasteur, Mari Asturias, Kattan Hurnung, Christal Chrome, Kali Pizzaro, Gann McGann, Mustbe Thursday, LadyJane Plympton and Nonny Writer.

What is an immersive environment? What is immersion?

Immersion is a sense of “being there” of being “in the world” but it is not restricted to virtual worlds - for example people can immerse themselves in film worlds or books too.

Embodiment is a sense of being physically present, able to touch and move, to affect the the world around you.

These two are often connected but not identical.

Not everyone can immerse themselves easily, possibly not at all. Most people agreed that it became easier to immerse yourself as you gained expertise with the viewer/technology/interface.

Being immersed in an educational setting often requires context and purpose. Generally we, as educators, are used to creating both purpose and context for our classes and did not think that doing so for Second Life was particularly different in that sense. However, there was a strong element that felt that it was important to give students time to explore, to play, to shop: a virtual acclimatisation period.

Classes that are not given this time to explore and work tend (in several people’s experience) to be less productive than those that get the opportunity. However, it is also possible to give too much time to play and have the class lose focus and cohesion. There isn’t a single answer and we don’t really have the experience to judge that blending yet.

It was noted, several times and in different ways, that just about everyone tweaks their avatar’s appearance. Some considered the time and attention spent in creating your avatar’s appearance might be a strong indicator of how well you are adapting to Second Life. Often those who are the best students for this course seem to initially spend an inordinate amount of time playing with the environment.

What would you teach them to help them immerse more easily?

There is no clear answer here. People generally felt that teaching “click on things” (something only gamers tend to have learnt to do) as well as how to get around and communicate was good. Camera controls were definitely mentioned. Some start their class off with reflective and/or emotional journals and discuss their hopes, fears, anxieties as part of the class.

There was support for the idea of a distinct “Second Life Basic Skills” course to allow students to learn the basics and explore without the pressure of exams and the like. That is obviously not necessarily currently practical at most places (although presumably the University of Texas is doing something similar). People have used activities such as treasure hunts, spending 10 minutes playing on bumper cars and the like to give a fun setting in which to practise Second Life skills. All the suggestions (save shopping) tended to promote a sense of playful competition - something to consider for future times.

Students require individuated avatars to feel immersed according to most. It’s not only students - no one attending the meeting was in any way close to appearing as Ruth, in any of her current or historical variations. You can tell when people are immersed - they refer to their avatar as I. Those resistant to this maintain a sense of their avatar as character. However, many people have multiple avatars and usually (not always) only one of them is “I” the remainder are characters or tools for specific activities. (Banker alts, a “character” that is a patient for role-play with students etc.)

Many people (possibly non-gamers as a generalisation) become concerned that their avatar will suffer while they are not in Second Life. One person recalled how she had always sat her avatar on a bench before logging off so she wouldn’t fall over. A fair number of people joined in with this reminiscence.

Steven Warburton (King’s College, London) presented a paper about this.

Even if the class also meets face-to-face, Second Life allows for a degree of anonymity that enables some to immerse more easily and can help the class integrate better.

We didn’t discuss this fully - it would easily have been a topic for another several hours of discussion - but we touched on the sense of social presence that Second Life gives. We weren’t sure if this is only true for those that immerse comfortably but many of us feel a sense of having met someone through Second Life that is not present in webinars, IM chats and the like.

Tied in with presence - one group of students found the most immersive thing was taking visitors around their builds in Second Life.

There was support for students being encouraged to create communities - set up a home or similar in their space.

What are the pros and cons of setting up immersive educational environments?
Cons:
Time;
It probably requires immersion before you can learn well and some students just “don’t get” immersion (about 25%?);
Requiring students to build in-world takes longer than the teachers expect and allow for.

Pros:
Flexible learning with multi-modal communication;
It is often easier to get the students to do something, drawing on their knowledge and adding to the environment - which we all hope encourages deeper learning;
There was division about the need for a tutor to be present - either SL or RL or both. Some felt this was essential, some felt it added to certain situations, some felt it was unnecessary. VLEs such as Blackboard were mentioned as alternatives for 100% asynchronous learning - whilst they can be used in this way it was generally felt that they do not have the richness of environment to replicate asynchronous learning in Second Life - although for some things it may be easier to learn in a VLE.

Not clear which side this is on but it was generally thought that students might need a bit of extra support to handle the new modes of learning that they are expected to use in Second Life. This prompted a reminiscence about resistance to reflective journalling until a mode or voice that sat comfortably was discovered. How can we help students discover their “voice” for articulating their learning in Second Life? What does that mean? However, we universally (unsurprisingly given the setting) felt that there was value to the students in learning in this way.

What are the features of an immersive educational environment?

This was an attempt to uncover common features rather than specific tools, things that worked for a given class etc.

An engaging and appropriate environment came out strongly. Some felt this had to be attractive but a large number of counter-examples were produced and we didn’t finally settle but we were heading towards well-designed, appropriate, well-built and emotionally engaging.

Things that stand out and are unusual tended to score well and stick in the memory.

Being able to explore was important.

Generally having things that react when you click on them or otherwise interact was felt to be important (although there are counter-examples such as Virtual Hallucinations).

It was suggested that “interactive” should be broadened to include “engaging emotions” which VH certainly manages.

Other bits
Will the Habbo Hotel generation grow up more comfortable with immersing in virtual worlds than the current generation of students?
If 25% don’t immerse in VWs is that worse than the proportion that don’t immerse in lectures?
Although this was clearly set up as a discussion group rather than a social meeting many of those in attendance also attend social events. How much did having a discussion topic and a moderator lead to a more focussed discussion? How much did the literal (virtual) roundtable aid this?


Further reading:
Warburton levels of engagement chart
Steve Warburton on slideshare
Heeter, C. (1995) Communication research on consumer VR. Biocca, F. and Levy, & M. R. (eds.), Communication in the age of virtual reality (pp. 191-218)
ReLIVE08 Conference report
The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media like Real People and Places (CSLI Lecture Notes) by Byron Reeves (1996)

Some (unspecified) disaster has wiped out most life on Earth. Trees are dead and gone, most humans, essentially all other animal life. Grasses and things seem to be OK.

In this lovely world The Man and The Boy, father and son, are travelling to find the sea and their last hope.

And, in essence, that's the movie. Therein lie its strength and its flaws. It's a character study of the two leads, with their occasional interactions with other survivors.

It could be a story of human hope in the face of adversity and the grim reality leaching that hope from The Man even as he tries to keep it alive in his son. I think that's what it's meant to be. The trouble is, this is also a world in which cannibalism is rife. It is a world in which a mother decides her best gift to her son and husband is to walk out into the blizzard dressed only in a T-shirt so there will be two bullets left when the right time comes. It is a world in which, despite his son's distress, The Man teaches his son the best way to commit suicide with a pistol.

However, because the plot and the level of activity are low, non-existent isn't quite fair but close, there's plenty of time left for you wonder. What disaster kills trees and animals globally but leaves enough humans alive enough years later that the story can work? Since the world is this grim, why are you inflicting this dragging, slow, death by starvation in a world that is actually going to be without humans soon enough; the wife/mother character is actually making the sane choice for the world they live in.

And that's a shame. It had the feel of good, if slow, movie trying to get out but the world was just so bleak, so hopeless that I came away feeling "Why did they bother?" And that seems a suitable note on which to end - Why did we bother going to see it?

I'm torn between "not bad" and "disappointing" as my ultra-short review of Sherlock Holmes.

It has moments of what I initially described as brilliance. Whilst brilliant might be over-stating it, certainly it had some good moments. In particular the opening scene really establishes Holmes' character that sense of hyper-acute observation, his pugilistic skills and his disguise skills, and there is a scene towards the end of the movie where there is a wonderfully observed bit of acting of two British men being understated and unemotional that is truly excellent.

There were also several times where the film played it for laughs and delivered to the delight of all present. Poor Lestrade is often (but not always) the butt of these jokes but they are nicely done.

And then there's the bad bits. Way too many of them. None of them are truly terrible but there are scenes that are just a waste of time and literally add nothing to the story AND it's pretty evident that this is the case from the time of the next scene.

As someone else commented, overall it's not clearly better than any of the various Sunday afternoon TV versions you could watch. That's true but it's not clearly worse either.

Overall it's not bad but there's that lingering sense that it could have been much better and should have been much better. And as an aside for devoted fans of the books (not me), one of the people I went with is a Holmes nerd and he was impressed that it was so clearly based on the books. Holmes' femme fatal is Irene Adler and she outwits him twice in the books: all well handled here. Watson marries in the books, this story is mostly set as he's about to leave 221b to marry and move into his new house with his wife.

I heard that the next movie is meant to play up the gay subtext even more strongly. I'm not entirely sure they'll be able to do that - it remains subtextual enough that it gets away with its 12A rating but to make it any more overt will be at least the pair of them snogging and, as I commented on hearing the news, more likely the pair of them shagging.

Warhammer Online, abbreviated to WAR (for Age of Reckoning and to avoid the WHO issues with Dr. Who presumably) is another MMORPG.

It is absolutely nowhere near as massive as World of Warcraft but it's not small either. And it now has a mac port!

It is tempting, and not obviously wrong at first glance, to say WAR is very similar to WoW. There are some races and some careers. Once you get up some levels you get some points to spend on "Career Mastery" from a choice of 3 paths per profession to let you tweak your character to suit your style of play. You level up and get some new skills or improvements to existing skills at certain levels and you level by killing monsters and doing quests - usually more than by killing the monsters you need for those quests although there are a few "go see X quests" too.

Those initial glances would be somewhat misguided though for several reasons:

• WAR has a clear story: the forces of destruction have just invaded and the forces of order are trying to repel them. That gives the quests a very clear story line and one that actually means they make more sense. Whether it's kill more marauders or kill defenders, it's part of that bigger story and that helps the quests make more sense. There is an older story line that is basically the set-up to the invasion rather than just after the invasion.
  
• There are, after about 8 levels or so, 3 different types of quest (I don't think there are more variations to come) and different types of reward:
  
  1. Standard XP quest - kill monsters, deliver items, find people etc.
     
  2. Public Quests - a limited space several-stage quest that usually requires a group, for example burn 10 wagons, then defeat a group of 10 soldiers, then defeat their lord (who is very hard!). You gain some XP but you also gain influence that can be traded in, in chunks, to get fancy gear.
     
  3. RvR quests - essentially PVP in the quest, but you often hunt and play in groups, defend the flag style, and you gain renown which gives you access to some fancy gear and tactics and the like.
  
  
• The player base is smaller (much smaller) and older. Few if any teens, and players discuss tactics sensibly with each other!
  
• All the races have a tank, a melee attack monster, a ranged attacker (mage or archer type), and a healer/support time - usually one that has to fight a bit. They all have different flavours but they're close so there isn't a huge advantage to any single race.

As with all these games I'm not sure how long this game will grab my attention but it is different enough that I'm enjoying it at the moment. I'm particularly enjoying the fact that mostly you have groups and tactics that make sense and the players generally work together. Very different from how I remember WoW. I'm also liking the multiple different types of things to do, they make for a more interesting build up to the character and keep some variety alive.

We, in the UK, are coming up to almost 3 weeks with snow and ice more or less continuously on the ground. There are parts, mountainous parts like the Snake Pass and the Highlands, where this is relatively common but I've never lived in or near either of those areas.

People in the mountainous areas of the US, in Canada, in Scandinavia and the like laugh when they hear what a few centimetres of snow does to us - large parts of the country grind to a halt with 5cm of snow (that's 2" in old money) so considering yesterday we had 10cm, today is predicted at 10-15, tomorrow about the same and Thursday and Friday more... you can imagine we're in a mess.

They ask, quite reasonably, why we don't have shovels and rock salt to clear the snow off the pavements, why we don't have snow tires on our cars and so on.

What they don't seem to realise is how unusual this weather is for us. I remember one other white Christmas in my life - that just scraped in as a wafer-thin layer of snow fell. I don't ever remember three weeks of snow and ice in a year. In fact, this is winter has given me the memory of more snow and ice (in the UK) during the rest of my life added together. (Odd things like glaciers in New Zealand make for a bigger chunk of ice.) I've lived in my current home for just over 15 years. I'm not 100% sure of this, but I think in that time there have been fewer than 5 days with snow remaining on the ground for longer than an hour. It might be a day or two out, one way or the other, but it's a nice round number and it's reasonably accurate.

So, let's use that number. Once in every 3 years (5 days/15years) there's more than a hour's worth of snow on the ground. Let's say, for the sake of argument that's a whole day - occasionally it might be 2 days but more often it's less than a day. How much preparation would you make?

That's on a personal level as well as a local and national governmental level. I don't drive... but snow tires cost a lot and changing them takes more. Our main roads have been more or less kept clear - so I wouldn't be doing that. I can see warmer gloves, thermal long johns and other things becoming sensible. Rock salt to clear the path becomes sensible at some point but I'm not sure when. Do I buy some tomorrow (assuming I can actually find any) and then hope I can find it again in three years time?

All that said, large parts of the UK have had two significant snow-falls in the last 12 months. If that trend continues... increases even... then all of those options become more and more viable, more and more important. It's easy to be complacent about the weather when you've got the experiences I have of it. Climate change though... climate change is real and although we're talking global warming that might result in colder winters for the UK. Interesting times.

For those of us in the UK (and probably on a YouTube near you), yesterday marked the end of the tenth Doctor as played by David Tennant and the end of the reintroduced Doctor Who as helmed by Russell T. Davies.

Tennant as the Doctor seemed to live the role in a way Christopher Ecceleston never quite did. There are reasons built in that sort of make sense of that but Tennant was one of the great Doctor incarnations. I hope that the new boy, Matt Smith, lives up to that - a challenge I'm sure - but one that I wish him every luck with. I want Dr. Who to remain as the one real piece of appointment TV in my life. I will miss Tennant but being old enough to remember the change from Pertwee into Baker I know that the change can be from great to great and hope that's the case this time.

This is also the end of the Russell T. Davies era, the man that drove the BBC into reintroducing the Doctor to the schedules and in some ways made for some really compelling TV over the last five years. Without RTD we wouldn't have Doctor Who in prime-time TV, those of us who are old enough would have our memories, probably reruns on one of the obscure satellite channels and the fanfic (properly published and otherwise if you're a more serious fan than me). However, looking at the episodes from the new era of Who, all the ones that stand out in my memory for the right reasons were penned by other people, usually by the new maestro, Steven Moffatt.

The final episode was, to my mind, a wonderful example of the problem. (No spoilers, honest.) We have a story that has an inevitable and quite magnificent climax on the cards. And the story really did have that. This would have been an OK place to have the Doctor "die" and regenerate. There was, after that big plot climax a much smaller (plot-wise) secondary climax that could have been, absolutely magnificently and slightly surprisingly, the emotional ending, separated a little from the story to let you savour the two parts separately. And then there was the 20 minutes of, in my opinion, maudlin, self-indulgent, ham-fisted garbage stuck on the end. RTD seems to be one doesn't believe the audience can have an emotional release from seeing the story completed, the world saved, the bad guy defeated; no, he has to go and shove it down our throats and make sure that we see it and that he attempts to tug on our heartstrings when he actually tramples roughshod over the story to try and do it.

I, at least, don't watch the show for the emotion that he thinks I should have. I watch it for great stories. Those great stories usually have great emotional arcs too, although not always (Blink for example doesn't really have an emotional arc, while The Girl in the Fireplace certainly does, Genesis of the Daleks (to go back to Tom Baker) certainly had its emotional impact too). But it feels like RTD is trying to force us to feel how he wants us to feel rather than letting us decide for ourselves. To add insult to that injury he wants to break the characters and the stories because his emotional payoff seems to be more important to him than the storytelling, at least in the stories he writes for himself.

So whilst it's a somewhat tearful farewell to David Tennant and a hope that Matt Smith will step up and give us a good incarnation too. It's a sigh of relief that RTD is finally gone and a hope that we get a higher level of storytelling with far less self-indulgence under the new guardian of the stories.

An extra one.

I've been thinking about the teen grid quite a bit.

My guess is that numbers of regular teen users will continue to fall and numbers of schools trying to use will continue to grow slowly, in part thanks to the problem of mixing 17 and 18 year olds.

This will lead to the closing of the Teen Grid in its current form. Educators will be able to designate certain sims as "teen" in a new setting which will offer a variety of (hopefully moderately easy to arrange elements). There will be a special "student edition" of RegAPI to let school-children be registered and bound to their home continent/island (this technology already exists because teachers are bound to their islands on the teen grid, although currently this can't be accessed directly by users but it should be doable). LL will add an ability to permit the educators to create an access list for adults that they vouch for - which already exists too, you can hide your island and allow only a few people or a group access.

These two tools will allow teachers to classes of 17 and 18 (and older) year old students in one place, and will help increase the uptake of the new format "teen grid" by educators.

People will bitch and moan but, like it or not, schools ARE in a privileged position here: they already have staff who are vetted for contact with children and approved and they do teach classes across that divide every day in legal and usually safe circumstances. Linden Lab would be changing the onus so that the school takes responsibility for the contact being suitable, they are merely providing the tools (or highlighting them) to create the ability of the school to do this.

Following the success of this process some corporate and legislative process will be looked into to create a smaller teen continent on the main grid but I expect this will not be successful in the next year, although maybe by the end of 2011.