 I'm ready to roll. So hello everyone and welcome to the first breakout session of the first OpenSim Community Conference 2013. That's just amazing to me and I'm just so excited to be here. As a reminder to our in-world and web audiences, you can view the full conference schedule on our website at conference.opensimulator.org and you can post your questions in local chat on the Ustream chat or tweet your comments using the hashtag OSCC13. Let's see that light up that OSCC13 today, shall we? So for this hour, we're happy to introduce Nick Swart who will be presenting the TILA Project Telecollaboration for Intercultural Language Acquisition. The TILA project is a project that is funded by the European Commission within the Lifelong Learning Program. This project aims to improve the quality of foreign language teaching and learning processes by means of meaningful telecollaboration among peers. Five universities, wow, that's impressive. Five universities and five secondary schools from different European countries team up to work with OpenSim. In real life, Nick holds the position of CEO of 3DLES, I don't know how you say that, but Nick will tell us. A company that has specialized in 3D learning experience services with a focus on education and OpenSim. He is a researcher for the University of El Qaeda-Henares and consortium partner in the TILA project. Nick, I'm sorry if I didn't pronounce your university correctly, you know, I'm a Canadian, what do I know, eh? Okay, so please join me in welcoming Nick. There you go, Nick, take it away. Okay, thank you very much. Good evening, good evening or good morning, but it's evening here in Holland in the Netherlands. I hope you are all as excited about these two days as I am. This is really a great event and already now I want to thank all people that made this possible. The staff, the greeters, the volunteers, the streamers, the builders, all of you. It's really great what you have accomplished. And I want to thank the moderator, Buffy, for the short introduction. I can add to that that I live and work in the Netherlands in Europe. And you all know Amsterdam, of course, I was born there, but now I'm living in the countryside close to Utrecht in the Netherlands. In the past, I studied information technology and education, but also electronics, music and theology. And I started working with computers about 30 years ago, which is a long time ago on a small computer called Commodore 64, connected to my television. Maybe some of you still know this computer. And things have really changed since then. I have been an IT teacher at the Fontes University in Amsterdam for several years. And now I am CEO, as Buffy already told, of a company called 3D LES, which is short for 3D learning experience services. And we focus on the use of open simulator for education, mainly here in Europe. And Buffy, yes, I love Amsterdam too. And the Commodore 64 was really a great computer. Today, I will tell you something about the use of open simulator within the T-LOU project, T-I-L-A. And our company is a consortium partner for this project. But before I start, I would like to mention that you can ask questions during this session by typing your question in the text chat. I'm not sure if all questions will be answered because I also have to tell my story within 40 minutes. And at the end, if I have some time left, there is room for some more questions. Later on, you can always talk to me on the 3D LES stand at the ExpoZone 7 region, or you can email me. All info will be at the last slide. So I forget to slide myself here. This is a picture of me. It's not so very important, of course. And I see Buffy already told the URL of the website. So that's okay. So I'll go on to the next slide, which shows you the T-LOU logo. So let me first explain what this TILA project is. First, as Buffy already told, TILA is short for Taylor Collaboration for Intercultural Language Acquisition. This project aims to improve the quality of foreign language teaching and learning processes by means of meaningful Taylor collaboration among peers. The project is funded by the European Commission within the lifelong learning program and runs from January 2013 until mid-2015. And two words of the title are important, Taylor Collaboration and Intercultural. Why? Because this project goes across borders in Europe and lets kids from different cultures within Europe cooperate through Taylor Collaboration tools. Six countries are represented in the TILA consortium. France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. And each country collaborates with a secondary school and almost all countries also have a university. Only the Czech Republic doesn't have a university connected to this project. So we have five universities and six secondary schools. And for those who have slightly forgotten where these countries are in Europe, I placed some red dots on the map of Europe. All of these countries have their own language. English in the UK, Dutch in the Netherlands, French in France, German in Germany, Czech in the Czech Republic and Spain even has more languages. We work with a school in Spain that uses Catalan besides the normal Spanish which also called Castilian. As you can see, the Netherlands, which is the second red dot at the top, is the smallest country, situated between the UK and Germany. So we have to learn other languages to survive in this world because our country is too small. And at the age of 12, I started learning English, French and German. And if you want, we can also learn Spanish at secondary schools. Language education is very important for all these countries in Europe. We aim to use open source software in the project. And the main three of this project are Moodle, big blue button and Open Simulator of course. Moodle is a course management system which is the heart of the project. It holds all the courses and we do asynchronous teaching through Moodle. It is also linked to the Open Simulator grid through the Sleutel tools so we can use some functionality of Moodle within the virtual world. And Moodle is also linked to the big blue button software which is software that enables teachers to give online classes with a webcam interface, a whiteboard, a pre-center, a chat and all sessions can be recorded. For this purpose, we rented two Linux, Linux server, North of France and installed Open Simulator, Moodle and big blue button on it and the website. And the schools and universities from the countries all communicate through these two servers. As you can see, I placed some arrows and the place where these servers are situated. In January of this year, so last January, we had a first initial meeting at the University of Valencia in Spain where we decided to use the open source software which I already mentioned. Also, all consortium partners had a training that we can work with Open Simulator on the 3D LES grid of my company because we didn't have a TILA grid at that moment. And because only a few of them had worked in virtual worlds in the past, so for most of them was a totally new experience. And we found that for most of the schools in Europe, it's Open Simulator and booking in 3D is very, very new. Okay, next slide. And after installing the Open Simulator grid, a month later we all joined for our first virtual meeting on the Arcadia region of the TILA grid. So that was really exciting to see everybody log in and everybody could talk through the voice system which we have from VVox, which is running quite good. And VVox has been very, they were very grateful to give us this voice for free. All educational institutes can have VVox voice for free. As long as, and we found even with, when we have meetings with 25 people, it works great. Okay, the TILA grid has no hypergrid capabilities. That is because we will work with kids in the age of 12 to 16. So you cannot visit it. And, but we, I found a solution for that. Most of the regions that are there can also be found at the demonstration grid of 3D LES and which is hypergrid enabled. So you can jump there whenever you like. We have eight regions on the TILA grid which includes Chatterdale and Parolei, the two language villages of Digi school. We have an asterisk village and a virtual Valencia and a welcoming area and also Arcadia, the orientation island where we also have the meetings every now and then. On this Arcadia region, I created a castle which is for a first orientation. The kids can choose their own language at the first sign which you see in the middle and go on an adventure into the castle and its surroundings. And during this adventure, they learn how to walk, how to fly, talk, dress, take objects, watch movies, all skills that we think are necessary for them to work in a virtual environment. And at the end, they are, of course, rewarded with extra closing and a game they can play. Is it all clear until so far? I see no questions, that's good. So now the grid is ready to have the kids over. We created a kid-save environment, no one can come in, that is not known by us. So all accounts that are created are passing by my eyes. We've reached the point within the project that we are doing teachers training at the moment. I did several trainings here at the University in Utrecht and also the other countries did similar trainings for the teachers of the secondary schools that will use the grid. Oh yeah, Inic already played the game, that's true. And Henk maybe played a game also, I don't know. Next slide, the problems at the schools. At the moment, we still have some small problems, but the problems that we encountered at these schools, I listed here, the school firewall is the first problem we met. All schools had their ports closed and not all schools have a technician running around in the school building. So some school had a technician technically operated from some central place and it really took months to get these ports open for some schools. We're now in say month eight or month nine and just last week, one of the schools finally got the ports open. That's good. Some schools just started with having all kids on laptops connected through Wi-Fi. And the problem there is that lots of laptops running on Wi-Fi on one Wi-Fi spot in the classroom gives too much trouble. Not all graphical data can be loaded and the users will get stuck or logged out. So they have to use the computer lab where all computers are connected to the school network. We also found that this network in the schools can be very slow because there are many more things that run on this network and open simulators, just one of all the other things that runs there. Some of the schools had to get new computers because the old ones couldn't run 3D applications and the schools that could run the software only could run the version one viewer like in Prudence. So we are not able to use meshes on the T-LA grid and no Moab media on a prim. That's because Prudence doesn't show them and so we had to work around that. And bad sound cards as a last on the list and bad headsets on the last problem. We have our voice jets. I already told you from V-Fox which is working fine for now but it takes a properly working sound card and a good headset to really use the voice jet which is quite crucial in this project. Okay, next slide. So now starting September, we will have teachers stills on the teacher trainings and we will have kids of five schools or six schools of these different countries running around and working together on assignments, testing and hopefully come up with new fresh ideas because we need ideas, we need and we will create with this project also manuals and instructions and new lessons material. In the picture, you already see some kids behind the computer running around in Chatterdale which I took at a pilot which we did with the digital school and we hope to have the kids of the Tila in the future. I want to point out two books because talking about ideas, it's great to have these two big books on my bookshelf, real books. One great author on education and 3D environments is Carl Kapp and these two books are really helpful in creating new ideas for this new dimension in education and you all have to buy these books, they are great. Oh, yeah, Hank Mussing already loves these books. He probably has them. For the future, we are looking to stretch the possibilities of Open Simulator and we will look at all the things that Open Simulator offers. Maybe we will do something with the NPC possibilities in Open Simulator to have a non-player character, a robot as a teacher would be great. There are always there when you need them but at the moment we are trying with the University of Olocala de Heranárez which Buffy already tried to pronounce. It's very good, Buffy. In near Madrid, in Spain, this university, they asked me to investigate the use of non-player characters or robots as language teacher for Spanish students. And we're still working on that until the end of this year but it's not a TILA project, it's a different project. But all outcome of this project will also be used in the TILA project, of course. The next slide shows you SLUDOL and we also have to see how we can make use of the available SLUDOL tools, how we can integrate them in some fun assignments which then can be registered or in the Moodle environment. Now, why did we choose Open Simulator? Because there are some great features and the best features of Open Simulator for educators. In my point, I just made a list of five but maybe there are a lot more, maybe you can come up with more. We can work from anywhere and the TILA collaboration will be across borders in this project. Most kids have the feeling that they're really there in this virtual world and meeting kids from other countries is really, really great. I already had a pilot on my 3D LES grid with a school from the US, from Cincinnati. And they did some German assignments with their class and then I jumped in and they were really, really surprised that somebody from a totally different country could get in this same environment and they could really talk to me and try their German language on it. It was really fun. So this TILA collaboration across borders is one of the best features that I can think of in Open Simulator. Also that it's open source is great. We all know how great that is. It's an all-in-one package. You can build and you can script your own objects. You can show videos. It's fun to teach and for the kids, it looks like you're running around in a game and that's why Open Simulator is so great. We are very happy that we can close the environment and only have people on it that we know. So that's good. It's also good if you can open the environment through Hypergrid and jump from one grid to the other but in this project, of course, we won't use that. And it's also great that there are so many free things. Several archives of Linda Kelly or from the Fleetgrid and many more offer interesting objects and even whole islands for education. All outcome of the TILA project, of course, will be available in the future for all of you, for all educators to use. Because the TILA grid is not Hypergrid enabled, you are not able to visit the grid but most of the regions can also be found at the 3D LES demonstration grid so you can have a look at it yourself. You can visit the 3D LES stand here on this conference grid at the Expo Zone 7. It's the red stand. And from there, you can make a Hypergrid jump to some of the TILA regions. They are all on this 3D LES grid. Now, for the Dutch among you, I have this slide because 3D LES is a member of the ADUSIM NL and some of these members are also here in the room in Kmaasink and Inneke Verheuil are also a member of this group. In the Netherlands, we have a special community for virtual education that focuses on the use of open simulator for education. At the left, you see the list of all participants at the moment and what we do is promote the use of open simulator for education. We give free seminars. We do trainings at school. We created a central grid where all institute grids are connected or can be connected if some of them still are working on having a grid running. So, but when it's done, they will also be connected to this central grid. We share content and scripts and develop new ideas and we have annual meetings and we also have real world meetings throughout the year. So we really meet every now and then in Utrecht and sometimes we even have dinner which is impossible of course in open simulator but maybe we have to find a feature to do that. Okay, all and we have a built a Dutch wiki about open simulator which explains it all from scratch. So people who want to build their own grid can go to this wiki and they find all the explanation about how to build it. Yes, also drinks and if you want to be a member of this, I see Lester, you can also be a member of it and talk with us about it, no problem. But we can also speak English of course but most information on the websites are in Dutch and all the Dutch information can be found through one portal which is opensimulator.nl. If you go there, you will find all connections and well, that's it about this group. It's not actually Tila, but I had to mention it because this, we want to make it, which now a Dutch group but we actually want to have it worldwide, worldwide, okay. My last slide, that's it for now. It's time for the questions, it's quite fast. Maybe I talk too fast, I should talk a little slower. Was I talking too fast or not? It's time for some questions, if you have questions and later on, and maybe tomorrow also, I will be at the stand at the expo zone seven. So if you want some more information or your pop-up question that you still don't have now, you can, you can always go there or contact me through our website. Good, are there any questions? You can type them, I see Henk already typing. Yes, I think Lester has always been good to stop early. And, but I'm still very happy that I'm one of the first one because the last one, everybody will have very tired ears. Ling-ling, oh, it's nice to see you here also. Henk, can I tell something about how students act as avatars? No, not yet, because the avatars, we have no, we didn't have any students on it or kids on it. We did have some students on it already and we have a very good video of that on our website, which is of the students of the American class who already did the German things. And you can find the video on my 3D less website or you can find it also at the stand. There is a video block at the stand where you could click on and then see the interview I did with David Parrott and Barbara Simpson of the schools there. Buffy's, I have a question. What do I see as the biggest challenge for the future? The biggest challenge actually is to create material which can really get open simulator on the map for education. Because now lots of teachers say, okay, I want to do it. I want to work with it, but I have to think and create all my material, all my lessons myself. And what we hope to achieve is that we have very good lesson material that they can use directly without getting, without preparing actually. So that's a big challenge. And we also have some technically, technical challenges for the future because I hope that we can get all these old viewers, these imprudence viewers out of the way and in the future work with better viewers like Singularity. And I'm working now with Singularity and I think Singularity is working great and you can even set this Singularity viewer that it looks like the imprudence viewer, but the big advantage is that you can see messages and you can have media on a print. So that is my biggest challenge for the future. I see a question from Steven. Do you have a lot of reluctant participants but have to be on board anyway? We don't know yet. That's something that we have to find out. That's something that will happen from September now. We will have kids on the grid that probably maybe girls don't want to go on there because they say, I don't want to play games. I want to do something else. But also for girls who want to change their appearance and have lots of dresses, it's also fun to go on the island because we have, so I'm not sure how we're gonna deal with that. Ling Ling, does the TILA project only for languages in the EU area? Well, we only at the moment, we work with these five universities in Europe and six schools in Europe. And this is funded by the EU. So we also work with these schools in the EU but if you want to be a associate partner, that's no problem that can be from anywhere in the world. But the big advantage of working in Europe is that we have the same time space or how do you call that? So we can all work, let's say, yeah. It's the same timeframe. Henk says, open team should work on tablets. Well, that's not happening yet. It's, well, there is one for the tablet on my tablet. I have it working on my Samsung but it has no voice yet. So, Innecon, ADCIM hopes to promote some projects in OpenSim is used for different subjects. Yes, so ADCIM doesn't do only this, they do a lot of things. Lester, I used to use improvements for years, switched to singularity just a couple of months ago. I think it's great. I think it's great too, but I hope it can run on slower computers. Ellie, do you have any suggestions for overcoming the firewall problem? Thinking about places like Canada where it would be great to connect northern schools but they are all isolated and no technical people to help. Well, that's a big problem because I can have a question back, Ellie. Who closed the firewall for these people? And whoever closed these firewalls for these people maybe can open it also for the schools. But we had schools in one of the six countries that had very big problems because they had no technical staff at the school itself and they had to go abroad to some overall institute that controls all firewall settings. So, Ellie, that's a big problem. You have to find out first if that really works. Lester, singularity now also lets you export print-based things as mesh files. Yes, I've seen that, which means you can then reuse your content in other mesh-based platforms like Unity. Yes, that's very good. And the big advantage then also, of course, is that you can use OpenSimulator as a first start on how to build 3D content and use it also in other things. The only thing that's not exported yet is the textures that are on the objects. And also Lester comments here on Ellie. I'm based in Canada. So feel free to point any folks in Canada my way if I can help them. I'd be happy to do. Thank you very much, Lester. That's very generous of you. Steven, singularity is great, works pretty well in all the ones I haven't seen how far down the computer chain it will still work well. We will find out soon enough because I will ask the schools that now install the imprudence to test also the singularity if it's really going well then we will all change over to singularity. Well, that's all the questions, I think. And all within time, that's great. No more questions? No. Well, Buffy, I thank you for introducing me and helping me. Oh, there's one more question from Buffy itself. Do you think virtual words will continue to rise in popularity? Yes. It's a yes or no questions. I hope so. And I think OpenSim will be very, very big. Thank you, thank you. Buffy, but why? Buffy, I think it's, we all have to work on that. We have to work on use virtual words especially for secondary education because secondary education, these kids really like to play games. They want to go and to do all kinds of stuff. And the big advantage is that you can do things within OpenSimulator in education that you can't do in real life. You can have your kids step into a dangerous situation which you don't want to have them to do them in real life. You can have them walk around in buildings that don't exist anymore. You can have them walking around in Rome, in no engine room or in a Nazi concentration camp and you can go to the moon, whatever you like. Everything is possible. So I think it's a very good addition to education. It won't change education that much but it will add some extra very interesting stuff. And we have to work on that. But yes, Buffy, so many think virtual worlds are just a silly game how to get around that attitude. Well, it's very simple. If you integrate it into a lesson system they have to go online and then they find out that it's not really a game. It's something different than a game. It's an environment, it's an extra world. We expanded the world virtually and so we can have extra things which we can use and it's not a silly game. Who told you that? Lester tells me I should remind people to visit my public grid this weekend. He did, yes, Lester already did. I have a high brigade somewhere around here. Yes, it's on the stand, the 3D LES stand, expo zone seven, you will find it on the map. And if you are there, you can just click on the project sign that's there or one of the others and you can automatically jump there to my 3D LES grid. It's no problem. Here it will rather go to the one. Buffy is thinking of the people who approved the project's funding. Oh yes, they didn't know what they were up to. And so I will thank you all for attending this first presentation. I hope you will all have a very great two days here. I'll be around also. I have to go offline sometimes to go do some personal stuff, but most of the time I'll be online. And I hope we'll meet somewhere virtually or maybe in real life also. It would be great if we all should meet one day in real life, somewhere in the world. Just so I can see if Lester really has a beard and so on. I thank you all for your time. Well, that was great. Thank you very much. Really, it's so interesting, all this real-time, real-world use for virtual worlds. And I'm just really appreciative of all the information that you've presented with us today. I just wanted to remind our audience, once again, you can view the conference at, the conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org. And also, I hope everyone who dropped into their landing zones, you were able to find our swag. It's all about swag at these conferences and we've put together a really nice package for you. You'll see the gift in your landing zones. Next up we have in about 20 minutes, starting at 9.30 is Buddy Sprocket and he'll be presenting virtual cultural heritage projects for teaching collaborative virtual environments. Boy, I need to have a drink of water after saying all that. All right, well, thank you very much, everyone. Enjoy the conference. Please do Twitter for us and the hashtag again for that is O-S-C-C-1-3. So enjoy your day and please ask anyone in the red shirts if you need any help and have fun. Okay, bye.