Since this class is about Environment and the Psychology of Behavior, and so much of our understanding of our environments comes from visual stimuli, we can use the media sharing opportunities of the on-line environment to let others in the class see representations of the real-life environments we are exploring (or screen and video captures of any artificial environments we explore).
To help get you started if you are not already well versed in these techniques, I will share what I have done (along with my frustrations) to become media savvy.
First off, the very simplest way to do a static screen capture off of your computer is to follow the instructions given here.
For video capture on your PC or Mac, the simplest solution that I have discovered, particularly if you work with laptops and try to carry your world with you around the world in a backpack, is to get a little analog to digital converter such as the Typhoon DVD Maker converter that I picked up in Germany (at Conrad Electronics for 51 Euro (see here for techical specs) but you can also find it at Saturn) . It is lightweight and fits in your pocket, plugs into your USB 2.0 port, and you can plug an SVHS or composite signal (Video yellow jack and Audio Left and Right red and white jacks) into it from a VCR or non-fire-wire camcorder. It comes with software to digitize and record and edit. The U.S. equivalent is probably the KWorld Xpert DVD Maker USB 2.0 Video Capture Device which can be purchased for about 40 bucks (everything is cheaper in the U.S.!) Of course you aren't going to get super high resolution from a composite or SVHS signal, but it is great for converting old VHS tapes to DVDs, and for using old video cameras that don't have fire wire. Since many of you may have computers that don't have firewire, it is also the ideal solution there. Keep in mind, however, that if you are using a PC laptop THE AUDIO WILL NOT WORK WELL IN THE MICROPHONE PORT OF YOUR LAPTOP! It will distort horribly. To get audio into the PC laptop, you will need to use some other audio input device, such as a Fast Track USB recording device from M-Audio (I bought mine at Guitar Center) for about $130 that has line in and microphone jacks and plugs into your second USB port. You will need an adaptor to either go from your dual RCA jacks into the stereo quarter inch line-in jack or from the video capture devices 1/8 jack into the M-Audio quarter inch line-in jack. These audio adaptors can all be found at Radio Shack. Here is an article on audio capture.
I decided to switch over to using my MacBook Pro laptop with its Intel Chip for everything, and installed Bootcamp so that I could put Windows XP on the system and take advantage of doing everything on one laptop. But I had problems with the MacDrivers for Bootcamp (they caused the mouse cursor to disappear when running Windows), so I now run Windows XP on my Mac without the mac drivers. It works fine for programs like Microsoft Office, but as a result I can't get on-line with the wireless airport, nor use bluetooth, and Typhoon DVD makers software will not work with the USB ports.
Consequently I found I had to use my Video capture device with Mac OSX. The problem is that Typhoon and KWorld Expert Video capture devices (and all the others I have seen) have no Mac Drivers. That meant hunting around for a good Mac driver that would support the input device. The one I settled on was Videoglide from EchoFX. The Videoglide software can be downloaded quickly and demoed. It works with my Typhoon videocapture unit from Germany, and is known to work with the KWorld and many others. For USB 1.1 devices EchoFX sells USBVision. Both sell for $30. When you demo them they put the words "EchoFX" in white letters across the top of the screen and they limit you to 10 minutes of capture. When you purchase the software on-line they send you an email within 10 minutes containing the serial number you can use with one device. Then it all works fine.
The advantage of using a Mac laptop, even if you have invested in a PC based USB video capture device, is that you CAN record audio directly from the 1/8th microphone/line-in jack. Then you don't need to buy a separate audio capture device.
Once you have captured your video, you can edit your stuff together, then save as an MP4 file and post it to your Youtube account. You can embed your youtube videos in your blog and we can all see the environments you are discussing.
CAPTURING SECOND LIFE
Second Life has its own easy video capture function. Under "File" you slect "Start/Stop Movie to Disk" (or hit Cmd-Shift-S), set the compression quality you want (for web stuff Mpeg-4 is probably the most parsimonious), and then walk or fly around until you have captured enough, then hit cmd-shift-s again to stop capturing. You will find the file stored on your computer. Second life also has a "Take Snapshot" feature under "File" (command-shift-s) and a "snapshot to disk" command (command-'). The art of making movies from virtual reality game engines is called "Machinima" and there is a good website with tutorials on how to do so here.
For capturing movies from your PC computer screen the program of choice is FRAPS. It is available for free download. Unfortunately is not Mac compatible.
For the Mac I've tried Citrus Software's Screentool 2.0 and found it always turns on my isight camera while it is doing screen capture, so I have video of me looking at my screen while capturing the screen! Annoying and impossible to work with. It has no way to change the preferences, and it doesn't record at a good frame rate, suffering from lots of distortion.
I also tried Movie Grab, but it didn't create smooth clear video. It also doesn't support audio capture.
A MUCH BETTER Mac OSX option seems to be SnapZ Pro from AmbrosiaSW.com . You can try it out for 30 days. After that it costs $69. It has a nice ability to resize or customize the area for screen capture, it records audio, it runs in the background and can be called up whenever you want by clicking on command-shift-3 (this is customizable to whatever keystrokes you want) and you can save in many formats. The hardest thing is controlling the avatar (I use a logitech game controller with USB overdrive and am still figuring out how to program the buttons! Below is my first attempt to capture a movie with it in Second Life and save as an MP4.
By combining SnapZ Pro and the VideoGlide software with the USB video capture device I can now hook up my Sony Playstation 2 or my XBox video and audio outputs to my laptop and capture motion video of my explorations in those environments. In a future post I will show you around the undersea world environment of Ecco the dolphin -- you can decide for yourself if Bell's statements in chapter 4 of our text "We can also show that viewing scenes of natural environments reduces disturbingly high levels of physiological arousal" (p. 105) holds water (so to speak!). Our text says, "The notion of overload is particularly germane to the study of leisure environments and other settings we have called restorative environments" (P. 107). We can now share simulations of these environments and see what their effect is!
Showing posts with label second life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label second life. Show all posts
Thursday, January 11, 2007
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
Environmental Psychology Chapter I: The Why, What, and How of Environmental Psychology
Chapter 1:
On page 2 of Bell's Environmental Psychology text, the authors compare "the environment" to the stage and scenery of a play. Shakespeare's adage "all the worlds a stage, and we are merely players in it" comes to mind.
The environment is the place where our stories unfold. Unlike the setting on a stage, the authors caution, the real life environment provides more than context or meaning, it provides the basic needs essential for life -- food, water, air, shelter, resources -- and it is modified by our actions.
A question came to my mind as I was reading the text: Now that we humans have created evolving on-line virtual environments, such as SecondLife (http://secondlife.com), are we blurring the lines between "play" environments and "real" environments? In what way is the metaverse environment of "Second Life" (or "There" or "World of WarCraft" or Active Worlds or the Open Source Metaverse Project) analagous to a true ecosystem? In what way are the contextual elements in Real Life (henceforth to be referred to as "RL") different from those found in Second Life ("SL", which I will use in this course to refer to all metaverse environments)?
The authors define "affordances" as "possibilities allowed or provided by an environment" that are "strong determinants of behavior". In this sense, we can view the constraints and limitations as well as the possibilities provided by the on-line virtual environments of the metaverse as "affordances". SL permits us to play with the way in which affordances affect our behavior.
Since we will be exploring SL throughout our journey into environmental psychology, my recommendation for this course is that you pop down to Best Buy and get yourself a Logitech Dual Action GamePad Controller for your PC or Mac. It plugs into a USB port and enables you to navigate within the metaverse exactly as if you were in an XBox or Playstation game. It will set you back about 20 bucks (I got mine on sale at Best Buy for $16) and it comes with driver software for the PC. To use it on the Mac you need to download USB Overdrive and configure the buttons. This is not difficult at all.
We can consider the presence or absence of a gamepad (or joystick) as enhancing the affordances that the virtual environment provides, and it will be interesting to see if students who must interact with their environment via a keyboard experience it differently and thus behave differently than those with gamepads or joysticks. This would be an environmental psychology study in and of itself! People entering the metaverse with only a keyboard might feel "handicapped", just as if they were forced to enter the real world on crutches or in a wheelchair.
One can go even further and integrate the new Nintendo Wii wireless controller into SL (if you are a Mac user you can download DarwiinRemote, a program from sourceforge.net, that will enable your Mac to talk to the Wii and vice versa; the Wii controller will set you back about 40 bucks). Some people are already using the Wii (pronounced "We") as a virtual light saber!
Down the pike we will see full body suits that enable us to merge with our avatars and control them by walking, jumping, dancing, turning our heads, swinging our arms and pointing, grasping and holding. At that level of interface technology, the affordances of the virtual environment will appear very real, and we should be able to conduct better empirical experimental research on environmental psychology!
Recall from pages 10 and 11 of Chapter 1 that one of the biggest problems in conducting research is the presence of "confounds". Confounds are "variables other than the ones being tudied that also vary across different conditions." In experimental research we need two forms of control. One is the random assignment of participants into experimental treatments. The other is that "only the independent variable is allowed to differ between experimental conditions." When "the effect on the independent variable is due to differences in the independent variable and not due to any other factors" the experiment can be said to be high in "internal validity". But experiments with high "internal validity" usually do not have high "external validity", meaning that the results are not generalizable to the real world.
The real world is messy. Our text states, "The degree of control required [to conduct experiments with high internal validity] often creates an artificial situation, which destroys the integrity of the setting... any artificiality reduces experiential realism, defined as the extent to which the research experience resembs that of the real world and impacts the participants as intended."
ENTER SECOND LIFE
To get around this problem, "some researchers have responded by using simulation methods -- introducing components of a real environment into an artificial setting. By simulating the essential elements of a naturalistic setting in a laboratory, experiential realism and external validity are increased, and some experimental rigor is retained... simulation techniques are useful for studying numerous aspects of human-environment behavior." (Bell et al. 2001 p. 11)
ASSIGNMENT #1
Your first task in this course is to start exploring the metaverse, get familiar with its affordances and with the limitations of your interaction with it, and start thinking of an experimental design that has high internal validity and approaches a higher external validity.
The final project in this course will be to create an environmental psychology experiment and run it on no fewer than 10 subjects. Since this is an on-line course, I offer you the option to do this on-line, and invite you to use the metaverse as your environment. Once you have become familiar with ways of interacting with others in virtual reality you will have a better handle on how this might be done. So for starters, to get prepared, get familiar with virtual reality, and write on your blog the experiences you've had and the similarities and differences you have found between RL and SL.
You are free to use any virtual reality environment you like for this first assignment. XBox, Playstation, Gamecube and other such interactive environments are welcome. Does that sound like child's play? In fact, serious environmental psychologists are using these types of environments for real research!
Read the top of page 12 where we learn that Ellison-Potter, Bell and Deffenbacher (2000) created a simulated drive down a roadway using a computerized driving simulator to study the situational factors that increase aggressive driving, and where we learn that Parsons, Tassinary, Ulrich, Hebl and Grossman-Alexander (1998) studied how a simulatied drive through nature dominated scenery reduced stress. Does that sound like a fun and productive way to use a driving simulator? Real pilots and astronauts train in flight simulators, and environmental psychologists study the stresses they undergo before sending them into the stratosphere or into space. The authors of our textbook state, "with the increased sophistication of computers and computer-aided design systems, sophisticated computer-graphic simulations can aid research on various environments (e.g. homes, offices, and parks)."
That world is now available to all of us and we should use it in this course. My own professors from the UCLA school of Urban Planning (where I am a doctoral candidate) have been building simulated environments since the mid 1990s. Professors Robin Liggett and Donald Shoup showed me how they have been working with Professor Bill Jepson on the Urban Simulation Laboratory wherein they have created almost all of the city of Los Angeles in a 3D fly-through/walk through interactive environment that has a level of resolution so high you can read grafitti on the walls. Don Shoup used this VR urban simulation to convince city hall of the value of planting street trees by having the mayor's office look out their virtual window and walk down the virtual street with various species of trees at different stages of growth. When the politicians complained that they were worried about thieves lurking in low lying branches of one species of tree, Don simply changed the vegetation lining the boulevard to palm trees.
This kind of manipulation of the virtual environment is improving by the hour, and is now available to all of us, not just to people with access to the UCLA servers. As Bell et al. say on page 17, "Finally, engineers, architects and designers have developed techniques to measure the full range of ambient conditions, such as the amount of light, noise, temperature, humidity and air motion (see Fraser, 1989 for a description of these measures)." Second Life has rainfall, snow and wind, and the sun sets and rises.
ETHICAL CONSIDERATION IN ENVIRONMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY RESEARCH
Whether you design your research protocol for your first assignment in an off-line environment (such as stand-alone Playstation, XBox or Nintendo boxes) where you are interacting with AI's (Artificial Intelligences) or an on-line environment (such as Second Life) where you interact with avatars (real intelligent human beings controlling animated meshes) you will have to consider the ethical implications of your research.
All research is a form of manipulation. You will need to think about how intrusive, unobtrusive or obtrusive your research methods are. On page 18 our text says "many measures are obtrusive -- their use means that participants are aware of being measured (as well as of what is being measured). " While obtrusive methods are easier to use, it can affect the behavior of the person being observed. On the other hand, unobtrusive measures often require informed consent, or might be construed as invasions of privacy. One of the ways around this, according to page 20, is to observe people in "public settings." It is for you to decide how to deal with ethical issues in the new public and private environments of the metaverse.
Summary
The major thrust of this course is captured by the "Preview of the Content Areas of Environmental Psychology" where the authors state,
"...we will discuss environmental perception and cognition, examining the ways in which environments are percieved, how these perceptions are retained and altered by situational factors, and how we negotiate through environments... we will then look at ways in which the environment influences behavior, beginning with theoretical perspectives on environment-behavior relationships... we will examine the behavioral relationships involved in defined settings... in doing so, we will see how knowledge of environment-behavior relationships can be used to design environments for maximum human utility [and] conclude with intervention strategies for modifying environmentally destructive behavior and improving our relationship with the environment."
For the first time in history YOU are invited by the new technological environment that surrounds us to actually begin designing your own eutopia -- your own "perfect environment", and see what affect it has on others!
Enjoy!
PS: For those who are interested in getting into the nuts and bolts of designing their own 3D interactive world, the open source design program Blender 3D can be downloaded for free here! Blender for Architects can be found here.
On page 2 of Bell's Environmental Psychology text, the authors compare "the environment" to the stage and scenery of a play. Shakespeare's adage "all the worlds a stage, and we are merely players in it" comes to mind.
The environment is the place where our stories unfold. Unlike the setting on a stage, the authors caution, the real life environment provides more than context or meaning, it provides the basic needs essential for life -- food, water, air, shelter, resources -- and it is modified by our actions.
A question came to my mind as I was reading the text: Now that we humans have created evolving on-line virtual environments, such as SecondLife (http://secondlife.com), are we blurring the lines between "play" environments and "real" environments? In what way is the metaverse environment of "Second Life" (or "There" or "World of WarCraft" or Active Worlds or the Open Source Metaverse Project) analagous to a true ecosystem? In what way are the contextual elements in Real Life (henceforth to be referred to as "RL") different from those found in Second Life ("SL", which I will use in this course to refer to all metaverse environments)?
The authors define "affordances" as "possibilities allowed or provided by an environment" that are "strong determinants of behavior". In this sense, we can view the constraints and limitations as well as the possibilities provided by the on-line virtual environments of the metaverse as "affordances". SL permits us to play with the way in which affordances affect our behavior.
Since we will be exploring SL throughout our journey into environmental psychology, my recommendation for this course is that you pop down to Best Buy and get yourself a Logitech Dual Action GamePad Controller for your PC or Mac. It plugs into a USB port and enables you to navigate within the metaverse exactly as if you were in an XBox or Playstation game. It will set you back about 20 bucks (I got mine on sale at Best Buy for $16) and it comes with driver software for the PC. To use it on the Mac you need to download USB Overdrive and configure the buttons. This is not difficult at all.
We can consider the presence or absence of a gamepad (or joystick) as enhancing the affordances that the virtual environment provides, and it will be interesting to see if students who must interact with their environment via a keyboard experience it differently and thus behave differently than those with gamepads or joysticks. This would be an environmental psychology study in and of itself! People entering the metaverse with only a keyboard might feel "handicapped", just as if they were forced to enter the real world on crutches or in a wheelchair.
One can go even further and integrate the new Nintendo Wii wireless controller into SL (if you are a Mac user you can download DarwiinRemote, a program from sourceforge.net, that will enable your Mac to talk to the Wii and vice versa; the Wii controller will set you back about 40 bucks). Some people are already using the Wii (pronounced "We") as a virtual light saber!
Down the pike we will see full body suits that enable us to merge with our avatars and control them by walking, jumping, dancing, turning our heads, swinging our arms and pointing, grasping and holding. At that level of interface technology, the affordances of the virtual environment will appear very real, and we should be able to conduct better empirical experimental research on environmental psychology!
Recall from pages 10 and 11 of Chapter 1 that one of the biggest problems in conducting research is the presence of "confounds". Confounds are "variables other than the ones being tudied that also vary across different conditions." In experimental research we need two forms of control. One is the random assignment of participants into experimental treatments. The other is that "only the independent variable is allowed to differ between experimental conditions." When "the effect on the independent variable is due to differences in the independent variable and not due to any other factors" the experiment can be said to be high in "internal validity". But experiments with high "internal validity" usually do not have high "external validity", meaning that the results are not generalizable to the real world.
The real world is messy. Our text states, "The degree of control required [to conduct experiments with high internal validity] often creates an artificial situation, which destroys the integrity of the setting... any artificiality reduces experiential realism, defined as the extent to which the research experience resembs that of the real world and impacts the participants as intended."
ENTER SECOND LIFE
To get around this problem, "some researchers have responded by using simulation methods -- introducing components of a real environment into an artificial setting. By simulating the essential elements of a naturalistic setting in a laboratory, experiential realism and external validity are increased, and some experimental rigor is retained... simulation techniques are useful for studying numerous aspects of human-environment behavior." (Bell et al. 2001 p. 11)
ASSIGNMENT #1
Your first task in this course is to start exploring the metaverse, get familiar with its affordances and with the limitations of your interaction with it, and start thinking of an experimental design that has high internal validity and approaches a higher external validity.
The final project in this course will be to create an environmental psychology experiment and run it on no fewer than 10 subjects. Since this is an on-line course, I offer you the option to do this on-line, and invite you to use the metaverse as your environment. Once you have become familiar with ways of interacting with others in virtual reality you will have a better handle on how this might be done. So for starters, to get prepared, get familiar with virtual reality, and write on your blog the experiences you've had and the similarities and differences you have found between RL and SL.
You are free to use any virtual reality environment you like for this first assignment. XBox, Playstation, Gamecube and other such interactive environments are welcome. Does that sound like child's play? In fact, serious environmental psychologists are using these types of environments for real research!
Read the top of page 12 where we learn that Ellison-Potter, Bell and Deffenbacher (2000) created a simulated drive down a roadway using a computerized driving simulator to study the situational factors that increase aggressive driving, and where we learn that Parsons, Tassinary, Ulrich, Hebl and Grossman-Alexander (1998) studied how a simulatied drive through nature dominated scenery reduced stress. Does that sound like a fun and productive way to use a driving simulator? Real pilots and astronauts train in flight simulators, and environmental psychologists study the stresses they undergo before sending them into the stratosphere or into space. The authors of our textbook state, "with the increased sophistication of computers and computer-aided design systems, sophisticated computer-graphic simulations can aid research on various environments (e.g. homes, offices, and parks)."
That world is now available to all of us and we should use it in this course. My own professors from the UCLA school of Urban Planning (where I am a doctoral candidate) have been building simulated environments since the mid 1990s. Professors Robin Liggett and Donald Shoup showed me how they have been working with Professor Bill Jepson on the Urban Simulation Laboratory wherein they have created almost all of the city of Los Angeles in a 3D fly-through/walk through interactive environment that has a level of resolution so high you can read grafitti on the walls. Don Shoup used this VR urban simulation to convince city hall of the value of planting street trees by having the mayor's office look out their virtual window and walk down the virtual street with various species of trees at different stages of growth. When the politicians complained that they were worried about thieves lurking in low lying branches of one species of tree, Don simply changed the vegetation lining the boulevard to palm trees.
This kind of manipulation of the virtual environment is improving by the hour, and is now available to all of us, not just to people with access to the UCLA servers. As Bell et al. say on page 17, "Finally, engineers, architects and designers have developed techniques to measure the full range of ambient conditions, such as the amount of light, noise, temperature, humidity and air motion (see Fraser, 1989 for a description of these measures)." Second Life has rainfall, snow and wind, and the sun sets and rises.
ETHICAL CONSIDERATION IN ENVIRONMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY RESEARCH
Whether you design your research protocol for your first assignment in an off-line environment (such as stand-alone Playstation, XBox or Nintendo boxes) where you are interacting with AI's (Artificial Intelligences) or an on-line environment (such as Second Life) where you interact with avatars (real intelligent human beings controlling animated meshes) you will have to consider the ethical implications of your research.
All research is a form of manipulation. You will need to think about how intrusive, unobtrusive or obtrusive your research methods are. On page 18 our text says "many measures are obtrusive -- their use means that participants are aware of being measured (as well as of what is being measured). " While obtrusive methods are easier to use, it can affect the behavior of the person being observed. On the other hand, unobtrusive measures often require informed consent, or might be construed as invasions of privacy. One of the ways around this, according to page 20, is to observe people in "public settings." It is for you to decide how to deal with ethical issues in the new public and private environments of the metaverse.
Summary
The major thrust of this course is captured by the "Preview of the Content Areas of Environmental Psychology" where the authors state,
"...we will discuss environmental perception and cognition, examining the ways in which environments are percieved, how these perceptions are retained and altered by situational factors, and how we negotiate through environments... we will then look at ways in which the environment influences behavior, beginning with theoretical perspectives on environment-behavior relationships... we will examine the behavioral relationships involved in defined settings... in doing so, we will see how knowledge of environment-behavior relationships can be used to design environments for maximum human utility [and] conclude with intervention strategies for modifying environmentally destructive behavior and improving our relationship with the environment."
For the first time in history YOU are invited by the new technological environment that surrounds us to actually begin designing your own eutopia -- your own "perfect environment", and see what affect it has on others!
Enjoy!
PS: For those who are interested in getting into the nuts and bolts of designing their own 3D interactive world, the open source design program Blender 3D can be downloaded for free here! Blender for Architects can be found here.
Environmental Psychology Intro
Environment and the Psychology of Behavior
Course # BHSC295DLB 3 credits Call #13116
Instructor: T.H. Culhane
Greetings! This blog is intended to help us explore the field of Environmental Psychology, and provides a feedback space for students enrolled in our on-line course in "Environment and the Psychology of Behavior" offered for credit through Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry New York.
As the instructor of the course I invite comments from non-enrolled students and visitors (on-line auditors are welcome!) and hope that collectively we can use the insights gleaned from this course to improve the worlds that surround us.
The basic text we are using in the course is "Environmental Psychology - Fifth Edition" by Paul A. Bell, Thomas C. Greene, Jeffery D. Fisher and Andrew Baum (2001, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, New Jersey, London.) The link to purchasing it on Amazon.com is here.
Beyond this text, we will be doing alot of exploring and discussing what is known as "the metaverse" - a virtual environment or simulation of the world residing in the "mind" of internet linked computer servers. The most popular of these -- a place called "Second Life" is where we will focus most of our efforts. For you to get familiar with Second Life before plunging into it, read the following websites:
The SimTeaching Wiki (a wikipedia of many great Second Life educational sites)
Second Life: The Educational Possibilities of a Massively Multiplayer Virtual World (MMVW)
Articles on Education in Second Life
Second Life as a Virtual Learning Environment
SLOODLE
We will set the Sloodle location in Hyperborea as our primary meeting place. It's "SLURL" (Second Life URL, or address coordinates, are Sloodleville, Hyperborea (7, 161, 23).
T.H. Culhane's other blogs of interest to those exploring environmental psychology are:
http://thculhane.blogspot.com, http://solarcities.blogspot.com and http://culbrain.blogspot.com
Course # BHSC295DLB 3 credits Call #13116
Instructor: T.H. Culhane
Greetings! This blog is intended to help us explore the field of Environmental Psychology, and provides a feedback space for students enrolled in our on-line course in "Environment and the Psychology of Behavior" offered for credit through Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry New York.
As the instructor of the course I invite comments from non-enrolled students and visitors (on-line auditors are welcome!) and hope that collectively we can use the insights gleaned from this course to improve the worlds that surround us.
The basic text we are using in the course is "Environmental Psychology - Fifth Edition" by Paul A. Bell, Thomas C. Greene, Jeffery D. Fisher and Andrew Baum (2001, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, New Jersey, London.) The link to purchasing it on Amazon.com is here.
Beyond this text, we will be doing alot of exploring and discussing what is known as "the metaverse" - a virtual environment or simulation of the world residing in the "mind" of internet linked computer servers. The most popular of these -- a place called "Second Life" is where we will focus most of our efforts. For you to get familiar with Second Life before plunging into it, read the following websites:
The SimTeaching Wiki (a wikipedia of many great Second Life educational sites)
Second Life: The Educational Possibilities of a Massively Multiplayer Virtual World (MMVW)
Articles on Education in Second Life
Second Life as a Virtual Learning Environment
SLOODLE
We will set the Sloodle location in Hyperborea as our primary meeting place. It's "SLURL" (Second Life URL, or address coordinates, are Sloodleville, Hyperborea (7, 161, 23).
T.H. Culhane's other blogs of interest to those exploring environmental psychology are:
http://thculhane.blogspot.com, http://solarcities.blogspot.com and http://culbrain.blogspot.com
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