We are using Google Sketchup for CAD work at our college. In the past we use a package called TriCAD but I think that development work on this has long halted. All can export their files to our Roland digital mill to visualise 3D objects.

When I touched base with a family friend who regularly does CAD work for clients regarding this this issue, he noted that there were some clear standards and conventions for sharing CAD files and that was probably more important to engage and interest students than scare them off with command line level CAD coding and programming using an expensive power package.

Of greater concern in Victoria is the devaluing and erosion of Technology as a stand-alone teaching domain in the school curriculum. No longer does it seem to be the equal of the arts, health or science with individual technology subjects rolling on without a head

Some people are reading some strange things into the VELS or curriculum standard documents. All up, it is kind of humiliating when the technology staff are schmoozed into an obscure and dusty corner of the curriculum, only because we do not know they should fit in.

We have installed a suite of different programming tools on all the college computers.

• Alice has some GUI tools to move images around a screen in order to create a 3D story.
• Ren'Py supports the creation of visual novels. 

Alice and Ren'Py both use Python scripting to make things 'work' both come with a built-in tutorial to get the students started. They include some sample activities and an interactive tutorial to get students started.

These seem to be very engaging tools for my middle school students. I have not done an extensive literature review but from what I have read so far, presenting programming in a storytelling context is a great way to engage and motivate girls. Lindy McKeown mentioned something along this line at the 2008 VITTA conference keynote address. Oddly enough, some of the boys related to these games from their use of Adventure Quest, an online flash based game.

David from PAA dropped me this link to a demonstration of Photosynth. It includes a good demonstration of grabbing a set of photographs from flicker to morph into a virtual and interactive 3D environment. Using a ZUI or Zooming User Interface to tag your photographs and swim about the metaverse or fully immersive 3D virtual space is a fascinating idea and distracting activity.

I have already seen this with my students flying through a 3D landscape with Google Earth and more rarely, navigate space with the tag visualisation tools that I have shared.  Flying through clouds wont teach us about weather. It is one thing to zoom into the globe from space, it is another to understand the environmental and social issues are tearing us apart then mobilise us to do something about it.

Blogging helps me to filter my thoughts, often building upon a single image and idea from a larger gallery and perhaps a new discussion thread. Tagging helps me to organise and align my thoughts. It will be good if these electronic tools can help us to see our world with new perspectives although I will admit to being worried that they will just distract us with a smooth-zooming gallery of multi-dimensional trash. Is this eye candy more trash for the soul?

Whilst we dont lack electronic tools to help us synthesise a new idea, build upon a new concept or ask some hard questions, we increasingly lack the opportunity or motivation to do so. I dont need more e-mail, more software features, more hardware grunt or more web pages. I do need more time to think and ask the hard questions.

Decka and Plakboek planning, learning and thinking whilst sitting on a dragon at the virtual environment called SecondLife.

In this image we are working out how to contact somebody from the ABC who was interested in purchasing one of the water tanks that I had built for QUT. YOu can see one near my knees in this screenshot. I wonder if they are still interested in one for the ABC online Eco House.
     http://www.abc.net.au/services/secondlife/

I also took another screenshot image that shows some of our conversation and my early efforts to come to understand how the different control buttons and information windows work.

I am not sure what model I have in my head when I chat using other, more traditional online collaboration tools such as ICQ, Gaim etc. It felt kind of strange doing this in a virtual 3D environment. Decka was very patient with me as I fumble about with the settings and features.

This is screenshot of an Ubuntu Linux desktop that we are running on a school computer. We built this on a partition as part of our new dual boot setup for deployment on the wider school computers. Seems to be working very nicely so far. We included many standard applications  that are already on the other computer, even managed to add printing to a network printer.

This desktop is also using Beryl, a cute 3D screen tool with some nice eye candy and effects as windows are moved about.  As a test I ran a remote console session to access a nearby Windows server.

The odd shape here is from quickly moving the Windows console window by moving the menu bar with the mouse and pressing the printscreen button. It does make me wonder what other interesting and creative shapes I can make by giving the desktop windows a flick with my mouse.

Full credit for this exciting new project goes to the collective, cooperative and open skills provided by Peter and Daniel.

Better luck tonight with more Internet bandwidth. It was tricky managing all the different shapes but I got the hang of it after fiddling about with different objects for an hour or so.

All the practice with Google Sketchup had paid off and the ground was littered with an assortment of wooden shapes that would have put a smile onto the face of Pythagoras. It was then time to try my hand at something bigger, something meaningful that would make the world (albeit this one) a better place to live in.

After some thought and more experiments, I managed to create this water tank next to the Island Visitor's centre. Lindy dropped past and gave me some textures to try out. I was delighted this afternoon on the drive home to hear her talk on ABC Radio National about SecondLife.

A moment when RL crossed paths with SL.

I am pretty sure that I found a light blue Ventura coach on route 747 on a Satellite image. Attached is a picture of what I am looking at on my computer running Google Earth on Ubuntu, a free Linux desktop distribution. You can also view a copy that I uploaded to the Google Earth Community at this location.

Google Earth enables users to virtually go anywhere on the planet and see places in photographic detail with a 3D model of the world based on real satellite images (I have a suspicion that this one is a year or two old). Users can zoom from space to street level instantly and then pan or jump from place to place, city to city, even country to country.

To get it working required me to install the 3D Nvidia graphics card driver setup and Google Earth release for the Ubuntu Edgy distribution that I am using. All the instructions are on the web although you should do your homework before fiddling about with X-Windows and commercial graphics drivers.

It would be fun to see if we can find some other buses. :-)

Last month, I had my senior students pen some words about the kind of educational schooling that they thought we would be would be teaching students in a dozen years time. They presented a fantastic collection of creative stories ranging from disembodied brains in bottles to virtual classrooms connected by networked sneakers. On the GIL list, Lindy McKeown posted this interesting bit of news.

The idea is to blending the technologies of the 3D game world of Second Life with the VLE platform Moodle to create SLoodle.  A Moodle course that, if you wanted, could turn into a proper 3D interactive classroom with all your Moodle resources available to your students in the virtual world. It is a fascinating idea about what we might perhaps expect Moodle to fork.

http://www.sloodle.com