TALL blog

Twitter particle systems using HTML5

Also see:  Die IE6.

Via Schneier: The terrorism-obsessed U.S. is running project Reynard – a study of massive multiplayer online games looking for “baseline normative behaviors” with the intent to “determine the feasibility of automatically detecting suspicious behavior and actions in the virtual world”.

Terrorism aside, the research is unclassified – so it might be possible to see their results eventually.

Areae want to reinvent virtual worlds, using open standards and protocols. It sounds pretty good:

“Right now, there are lots of people who want to use virtual worlds for research, or education, or business, but it’s just too darn hard to get one going. Now [with Metaplace] you can create a world in just a few minutes and start tailoring it to your needs.”

Definitely worth looking into, when they recover from the Slashdotting…

I wonder how much Areae’s announcment influenced Linden Labs to announce their plans for the future of Second Life (or vice-versa).

I have just got back from JISCs latest pedagogy experts meeting. Always a good place to find out more about things that are going on in eLearning (from a pedagogy perspective) either JISC funded or otherwise.

Had a very interesting discussion about the future of (e)assessment – I am looking forward to seeing some of the stuff coming out of this area, as whatever about massed mcq question banks I think that social software is going to completely change this space, but this presents a lot of challenges for the institution.

Also an interesting update on the SIMPLE project which looks like a really interesting example of simulations for learning.