Doing Things the Right Way
Most of my posts on this site have been journalistic in nature, and that’s the intent during this time in my education and work. However I do want to explore the new and exciting technologies that educational software development has to offer. That’s why I’m posting as part of the contribution to the Flex community.
I’m also about to finish up my final paper for my EDT591 class, and I need some typing to get in the writer’s mood.
As part of my experience being away from MCC for the semester, I was somewhat worried that I would have too much time on my hands. Quite the contrary; it has been just the right amount of time and every day there was something new to learn.
One of the things I did was contribute to an e-learning project using an Adobe Flex project, in a way that I wouldn’t have thought at the start of it. Dr. Brian Nelson’s area of focus is interactive multi-user virtual educational environments or MUVEE’s. Many of people who are practitioners in Ed Tech seem to always going for the latest tactic or invention. Given past experience, I’m always willing to try things out for the sake of trying, but I don’t always agree with how effective they are in the end. I’m speaking about SecondLife by Linden Labs. Many universities are opening up virtual campuses and allowing users to participate in those environment for a slew of educational experiences. The value of learning this way has merits, but as for myself I refuse to go in there and prefer to watch others. Reality as far as education is concerned as challenging as it is, is my best friend.
What I do like about Dr. Nelson’s MUVEE’s project(s) is that they are actually lab-tested and verified means of whether or not learning is achieved by way of learner participation using a virtual environment as a tool.
When I was picking the classes I would need to graduate, one of them fell through. I was already pursuing the idea of a graduate assistantship since I thought I would need to fill up the time. In the end, Dr. Nelson was able to get me to work on his project as a volunteer and have it count towards my final credit for graduation, so I got involved with his Simlandia project, which is using the ActiveWorlds browser retooled as an educational environment.
What this environment does is allow participants to collaboratively work together to solve a scientific problem. Other graduate students have been running sessions where participants involved are observed while they interact in small teams and communicate with each other using several modes. This semeseter, the mode of communication was VoIP using Skype.
Where I got to really help out was the way that the participants interact with the Bots (non player computer controlled characters) who gave out clues and hints to solving the problem. Dr. Nelson and the other grad students want to investigate the proximity effect with learning, buy putting all relevant learning content in one browser pane window. Right now the only way to interact with a bot character is to right-click on them using your mouse, and choosing from a menu of possible interactions.
What is better in our eyes is single left clicking on the bot character in question and you get a new page designed solely for interacting with the Bot.
In the end you get a page with a Flex application (which I built from scratch), and provides a learner with a new interface to interact with the bot.
In the process of doing so, (I was teaching myself the ins and outs of Flex integration using a proprietary environment) I learned some good do’s and dont’s when it comes to writing Flex code. For the sake of containment and usability, my next post will contain the common procedures that will be of most use to other people learning Flex.
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