digital lyceum

As part of the grant requirements, the tools we use to build the web application must all be open source. There was a bit of a discussion about whether or not to develop the site using Flex. The first thing that Flex had going for it is that it, in fact, actively supports open source, as evidenced by Adobe’s support of the Open Source Flex Project. On that front, Flex definitely made sense. Craig raised the concern of forward compatibility. With the rate at which software–even languages–go obsolete, we need to be sure that our web app is written in something that isn’t ‘on its way out.’ Flex is built on Adobe Flash (oh, remember when that used to be Macromedia, and there was actually competition?), it’s more like an editor for Flash in much the same way that Dreamweaver is an editor for HTML. Flash has saturated web design to the point that it is supported by virtually every browser and platform. As Cyle put it, “Flash isn’t going away anytime soon.”

With those two factors (open source and forward compatibility) addressed, we took one last thing into account in supporting Flex for the DL web app: Our programmers have already used it. Cyle and John put Flex to task developing Emerson’s Median Project this past year. The benefit is two-fold; 1. That makes for a very short learning curve; and, 2. We already have a solid pile of our own written code on which to build. That will make using Flex very efficient, the final important consideration in choosing our programming platform. Flex it is!

Ideally a participant attending an event should be able to have all of the tools we’re proposing on one screen. To plan for this we are planning the event webpage to be suitable for laptop screens as small as 12 inches. (I’ll be a bit out of luck with my 7 inch Asus.) I’m working right now on a 24″ iMac, and barely have enough room to run the three apps I’m tending, and we need to design a site for a 12″ screen accommodating chat, a news feed, a photo feed, a video stream, a spot for the user to take notes, and the question tool. That’s a lot to manage.

The first obvious move was to change the video stream to a pop up window. Logically, someone participating in the room would not need the stream when the events were happening right in front of them - without a delay, no less. Optimally someone attending virtually would be seated at a larger screen, where the smaller-sized event page would leave room for a window with a video stream. Organizing the rest is going to be tough. We’re considering many issues, for instance how to manage involved chat conversations using either a standard threading or a system of little drop downs so the participant can expand only the topics in which they are interested. On the upside our lead project coordinator Nick Bonadies has considerable experience with UI design, as demonstrated by his work in Emerson’s Median Project. I worry a little bit that we’re asking him to plant the Imperial Gardens in something the size of the Boston Common, but know that if anyone can do it, he can!

We’ve been assembling a list of features for the Digital Lyceum Website on our project wiki. Project collaborators are adding to the list and offering clarifications where necessary. The result is a more thorough list (for instance, we originally neglected to ask users for their organization’s website during the registration process), and one that is very well organized. Craig Freeman proposed the structure which breaks the project into 4 distinct phases: Developing the web portal (this page); Event organization and publicity; Event “instance” and facilitation; and, Event archive (which we are considering addressing as a separate project).

In another section of the wiki I’m starting a conversation around the language we use when discussing the site. For instance, there are many types of ‘users,’ each needs to be more clearly defined. We’re also trying to demarcate terms for the word “participant.” For instance, what are the names for the roles the ‘participant’ is playing when a person is: using the event application; participating in the event in real-life/virtually; accessing the event database at a later date? Having this conversation on the same page means that the visionaries and programmers can be looking at the same set of user roles, using the same language, which should help identify any potential conflicts or issues ahead of time.

We pulled off a successful symposium a few weeks back on the topic of mixed realities. At this symposium, we incorporated several digital backchannels to augment the physical audience’s experience, while opening up access to those not physically present. We adapted the backchan.nl tool developed by Drew Harry at the MIT Media Lab as the centerpiece of our backchannel suite. This tool provided audience members with the capability of asking questions and voting on others’ questions. We surrounded the backchan.nl with a flickr and del.icio.us feed as well as a video feed for those not present. In addition, the event was broadcast into Second Life. There were about fifty people present at the physical site at Emerson College, with the same amount present in Second Life. Both the physical and virtual participants were using elements of the backchannel suite provided.

So, the big question is: was this augmentation valuable? Did audience members, physical and virtual, enhance their experience in any way? Did they engage meaningfully with the content, while parsing their attention between “realities?” We conducted some preliminary surveys with audience members, but didn’t do anything approaching exhaustive. What we learned from user feedback was that people appreciated the opportunity to engage in this setting, but they also felt that it was distracting. This ambivalence seemed to be universal. And yet, coupled with that ambivalence was an enthusiasm for a new level of engagement. This enthusiasm has led us to conclude that further work in this area is important, primarily to parse out whether or not that enthusiasm stems only from novelty.

Continuous Partial Attention: this is a phrase often used to describe the experience of backchannel conversations in real space. For the entire time, participants are engaged partially in their laptop and in the live conversation. Does this partial attention take away from knowledge creation in any one area? Are they being spread too thin? Or does the partial attention allow them to stay engaged for longer periods of time? It is unlikely that someone can stay totally focused on a conversation for two straight hours anyway - does the ability to drift in and out actually serve to focus participants’ attention on related matters? The comments posted were surprisingly on topic. Of course, people were likely doing other things - email, Facebook, IM, etc. - but based on the number and frequency of the comments posted, there was considerable focus on the backchannel tools provided.

By providing the appropriate tools, is it possible to stave off the inevitable scattering of attention that will happen as digital technologies increasingly seep into physical interactions (mobile phones, wifi, etc.)? One way of understanding these efforts is an attempt at harm reduction. Distraction is happening: can we devise tools and practices to mitigate the effects of that distraction and even harness it for academic purposes? Let’s face it, there is a lot going on in our heads as we “focus” on a talk - formulating a question in our heads, trying to remember a reference long forgotten, thinking about what we did over the weekend. These tools provide opportunities to externalize that internal distraction - in most cases, towards productive ends.

Wisdom of Crowds: The audience has knowledge about what the speakers are saying. Backchannels provide an opportunity not simply to express oneself individually, but for the audience to express its collective wisdom. A collection of individual questions does not reflect the wisdom of the crowd, that happens in the kind of deliberation and resource sharing possible in backchannels. Distraction goes to produce a different kind of knowledge - one not possible with absolute focus.

We are in the process of writing a paper about these ideas - essentially rescuing distraction from the reject bin of academic life.

Last Friday, November 30, we assembled a great group of people at Emerson College to discuss the future of the Digital Lyceum project. The group includedDavid Bogen, Rebecca Nesson, Bill Seaman, Joshua Green, Drew Harry, Helen Thorington, Jo-Anne Green, Phil Long and Paul Stacey.   The day began with extended introductions from all the participants, which actually served to introduce the major discussion points to which we returned throughout the day. Those included: the intellectual work of barroom chatter, virtual people as active participants, and social interaction as spatial design. We concluded that there is a lot of experimentation taking place in the implementation of network technology in the live event (our conversation tended to focus on the conference or symposium), but little in the way of research. There is a need for some kind of relatively systematic document and analysis of this work. Do audiences gain anything from the technological addition? Does it change the nature of the event or the way knowledge is acquired? The day-long conversation, even though it meandered a bit through various topics, gave us some focus for the short-term goals of this project. As I understand them now, they are as follows:

• Create a site (blog, wiki) for people or institutions working on the production of mixed reality events to share experiences and learn from others.
• Design guidelines and train RAs to execute a qualitative study on ‘mixed reality’ events.
• Host open source tools for people to use in their own events (these will be freely available on the condition that they let our research team study their use).

That gives us more than enough to do over the next several months. We will continue to use this blog to report on project development and the interesting work of others.

This is the third in a series of posts surveying the people and projects involved in producing lecture-style mixed reality events. If you are involved in this work, we’d love to hear from you! Please visit our contact page for more information or leave a comment below.

On March 15-26 2006, Workspace Unlimited convened a mixed-reality symposium, titled Breaking the Game, using a number of live virtual event technologies “to debate and reflect on virtual worlds, computer gaming, immersive technologies, and new possibilities for artistic practice and experience.” The project is of particular interest not only because of the mixed-reality nature of the symposium, but also because of how these technologies were employed to extend participation before, during and following the event.

In the early stages of the project, participants were asked to submit their proposals to the website around three main themes: Hybridity, Overclocking the City, and The Virtual as Interface to Self and Society. The website’s moderator then followed up with these participants to conduct and record a series of “online conversations” using Skype and iChat. The website explains, “In some instances we visited 3D worlds together to discuss work while maintaining audio links to one another.” These conversations were then posted to the site.

During the event, the website explains

“The symposium’s success depends upon participants’ commitment to ongoing interaction during the course of the event, responding to one another in a timely way, and actively uploading media in response to one another (texts, video, sound, demos, etc.).”

Video available on the website features the use of iChat and other teleconference technologies to engage remote participation during the live event.

Following the event,

“All of the symposium’s text dialogues, recorded video chats, phone interviews, and other media will eventually be ported to a 3D navigable space. Breaking the Game asks: How might the symposium itself become re-mediated as a 3D networked virtual world? How can we play with, think about, and continue to debate the workshops’ themes inside this space, using the language, tools, protocols, software, and interactive possibilities of gaming culture and technology?”

Similarly, our project seeks to understand how remote participation through mixed-reality technologies can contribute to shaping the content and experience of a live event before, during, and following its launch. Breaking the Game is an exciting example of the possibilities that mixed-reality technologies provide in exploring new forms of physical and virtual engagement in live humanities events.

This is the first in a series of posts surveying the people and projects involved in producing lecture-style mixed reality events. If you are involved in this work, we’d love to hear from you! Please visit our contact page for more information or leave a comment below.Over at the NMC Campus Observer blog, Alan Levine(aka, CDB Barkley) has posted a number of useful tidbits on the technical aspects of producing lecture-style events across virtual and physical spaces. In this post, I’ll point to a couple of these examples at this intersection of mixed-reality event production.Last month, Alan blogged about his experience streaming a video ofLarry Johnson’s talk in the Second Life during a Unesco conference in Barcelona. He wrote

“How truly flat-worldish it was to watch my NMC colleague, who lives in Texas, present in Spain, as I viewed it from a hotel room in Sydney, Australia. I missed out the last bits of the discussion, which I understood had a mixed reaction from the Barcelona audience on the potential of SL for education.” 

Earlier this year, Alan wrote about another mixed-reality event with Sarah Robbins, of Ball State University, presenting at the SLCC 07 conference.

“Sadly, with hotel internet connectivity issues plaguing the conference, the live audio stream into Second Life did not make it. We understood that as pluck in world residents that we have, people gathered in NMC Campus to tune into SLCC improvised and generated their own discussions.” 

I also found this Flickr pic uploaded by cambodia4kidsorg. It is a diagram of the technical set-up from a New Media Consortium event. The description includes an email response from Alan Levine about the set-up. In it, he writes:

“You could do some amount of streaming using an Apple XServe and QuickTime broadcasting– these are limited since each avatar accessing content in SL needs a sepearat connection, so you can run into bandwidth limitations– this is why we use a outside streaming service for audio– requests hit their network, not ours.” 

While we’re interested in learning more about the technical aspects of this style of production, we’re also seeking to learn more from those participants, and their experiences, attending these types of events. In particular, we’re interested to know if these types of technologies benefited, or distracted from, the participation of attendees. In addition, we’re looking at how this type of involvement “can help shape the tone and content of an event.” If you are one of these people, please consider sharing your experiences by leaving a comment on this post.In my next post, I’ll talk about a recent study conducted by the Mixed Reality Laboratory at the University of Nottingham and what was learned about the participants involved in a mixed-reality lecture style event.

This blog is where we’re going to think through all the permutations of what we’re calling augmented place.  But primarily, this space will be used to collect thoughts and resources that relate to the Digital Lyceum project.   The goal of that project, in short, is to research best practices and propose a sustainable model for creating and facilitating “mixed reality” lecture-style events.  This can include public lectures or everyday classroom activities.   When I explain this project to people, often their first reaction is shudder at the possibility of giving audiences and/or students more media by which to be distracted.  But then when I explain that this sort of distraction is already a part of most interactions (alainfomania), and we’re just trying to funnel those distractions towards the most productive / interesting end, they begin to understand a little bit more about what we’re trying to do.

Consider the contemporary television game show.  Audiences are encouraged to go online during a broadcast to chat, interact, and participate.  In a sense, audiences are asked to be in two places at once, and they do a pretty darn good job of it.  They produce while consuming - of course, in the context of network television that production is funneled towards more consumption.  In the classroom, or the lecture hall, that kind of participation might be directed towards helping to construct the event.  In other words, students or participants can help shape the tone and content of an event by participating in back-channels that seep into the main channel - either in real time or at the moment of archiving.   The record of a lecture can include student commentary (recorded in real-time); the record of a lecture might include useful web links that flesh out ideas or expose contradictions.  While the content continues to be authored by the speaker, the event is authored by the group.

We are going to use this space to collect examples of best practices.  How are universities using this technology to foster the group authoring of events?  Is it being used at conferences?  Is it being used in the classroom?  Are people using simple text back channels, or more involved systems like Second Life or There.com.  What is the future of this practice?  And by documenting what is going on, can we help shape that future?

If you, or anyone you know, is actively engaged in the production of group authored, mixed-reality events, please respond to this post.  We’re looking to understand the wide range of practices that are out there.

Originally posted by egordon 2007-09-28, 7:24:01 am

This is the working space for the Digital Lyceum  - a project funded by the NEH digital start-up initiative.  The goal of this project, in simple terms, is to discover the most productive means of orchestrating “mixed-reality” live events.  I’ve blogged about this project in some detail here.

We are currently researching best practices in Universities for staging these events, including lectures, performances, and conferences.

We are currently assembling a tool-kit that would make it easy for any interested party to set-up the technology for one of these events.

We are currently assembling an advisory board to convene at Emerson College to discuss what is needed in this arena, and what the most productive directions for research and experimentation will be.