Welcome!
The biggest challenge to gizmo-makers is behavior. If Ricci Street were a static one-way communication, it would simply be a virtual textbook. If it were to use simple interactivity -- clicking -- it would simply be slow TV (Microsoft's browser only; not Netscape's).
What makes Ricci Street a classroom is its dynamic two-way potential. The pages behave. They look and feel differently at different times often depending partly on the students' choice and input. For example, check out the Wonderful World of Interactivity.
How will the virtual store behave? How will customers affect it? How will salespeople and customer service reps ply their trades?
In addition to some tentative theorizing, Playroom will introduce the techniques of building and maintaining online communities such as classrooms, stores, offices, and libraries. The techniques include:
discussions
chats
simulations
tutorials
workgroups
presentations
Temple University's Syllabus for Interactive Web Programming
If Ricci Street were only an online textbook -- digitized old media -- it might be worth doing if only for the low price and distribution efficiencies.
What makes it worth doing beyond a doubt is what makes it different from a textbook. As new media, it is many-to-many or distributed where old media is one-to-many or broadcast.
Because it's new, we don't know much about using it yet. Some models I find helpful are USENET newsgroups, Geocities, Amazon, theglobe.com, and ArsDigita, whose creator, Philip Greenspun, notes:
Until the advent of the telephone, the largest manageable companies had only a few hundred employees and had to be more or less in one building. Truly effective technology to support on-line communities will change assumptions that we don't even realize we've been making for the last 100 years.
My biggest challenge to make Ricci Street useful comes from programming interactivity that promotes learning communities.
Microsoft's telepresence research
telepresence: being present at an event while physically
being some other place (space-shifting), or at some other time (time-shifting).
The key to successful telepresence is emotional: that you feel present, and
others feel you are present. Therefore, we focus on presence and communication,
instead of the more task-oriented collaboration which telepresence enables.
We believe that telepresence will be central to the future of ubiquitous digital
media. Low-cost and easy to use software and hardware must emerge to enable the
capture, storage, editing, and transmission of digital media such as video,
audio, images, and animations. Telepresence may be synchronous (at the same
time) or asynchronous (at a different time).
National Tele-immersion Initiative - NTII
Tele-Immersion will enable users at geographically distributed sites to collaborate in real time in a shared, simulated environment as if they were in the same physical room. This new paradigm for human-computer interaction is the ultimate synthesis of networking and media technologies and, as such, it is the greatest technical challenge for Internet2.
From the Web as better paper to the Web as not-so-good theater and shop and classroom. Turn on your speakers, please.
play with Andy Foulds -- don't forget to turn your sound on!
3D web browsing with CubicEye
The browser interface built for interaction with multiple websites and software applications in a 3D environment
An efficient new way to quickly find, organize, save and share web-based content in 3D rooms. As shown below, our three-walled-room design displays your current web page on the center wall, images of forward links from that page on the right wall, and a graphical history of your browsing session on the left wall. Pan the room, zoom on web pages or flip a wall to see more web pages all within the Browse3D scene. When you pan the room, the left and right walls are fully viewable, displaying up to sixteen web pages on a standard monitor.
Schuiten and Peeters' The Obscure Cities
Erik Loyer's The Lair Of The Marrow Monkey
An experimental Web art site, featuring interactive poetry, animation, and music.
The Mesoamerican Ballgame and the company that made it: Interactive Knowledge
Balthaser design studio
Ferry Halim designer
Eyeblaster ads play in a layer atop the current Web page that the browser has loaded.
LifeFX's facemail - a talking avatar will read your email aloud -- in your voice.
Viewpoint. 3-D modeling and manipulation software for Web pages
Artificial Life - Bots answer questions in real time or deliver a scripted lesson with supporting visuals
3D Slicer - visualization, registration, segmentation, and quantification of medical data, like brain tumors during surgery or just a plain old foot
Sandia's MicroElectroMechanical Systems - Check out the movie gallery.
Le Lourve | Art and Collections
TrueSpectra (try demo 1)
Tour the Getty Center from RealNetworks
webtop -- things to do on the Web
Prt 80's Boardwalk -- interesting sites categorized by industry and field of study, especially the Net Culture page.
I don't want to do it. Other than computer scientists, and God bless them, few learners and teachers want to do it. I call it the Geek Line, over which I will not cross. Nor should you. If someone tells you that you have to learn Unix, for example, and type in the commands, they're blowing fairy dust -- trying to exclude you, discourage you, and protect their high-priest mumbo-jumbo. If that someone also has the boss buffaloed, I recommend getting your own IP number and server, such as Ricci Steet's at AIT.
People willing to program in languages such as C++ become valuable. They need expertise in content and process, too, for those they have to meet more than halfway. The ideal programmer to team with Terry Wilson would also know more about statistics and instructional design than Terry would ever know about programming.
That's a very rare bird, so the question becomes, how much programming does Terry have to learn?
All right, scripting is still programming in the sense that you have to keep track of variables and functions. But scripting is simpler and it is modular, so at least you can use others' scripts and reuse parts of your own scripts. For an example, check out the Wonderful World of Interactivity. Writing the scripts is easy compared to a teacher's job of using them to help students learn.
The most common scripting languages are JavaScript and VBscript. I chose the former because it's free, it's pervasive, and its huge developer community is willing to help newbies like me. They make thousands of modular scripts available online, also for free. To make Ricci Street interactive, someone has to toe the Geek Line: read JavaScript, cut and paste it, change the variables.
Hooking Ricci Street to a database is my next challenge.
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