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WP4-1 Repository for 2D and 3D object

Page history last edited by klaus 13 years, 7 months ago

 

 


 

This document is licensed under a "Creative Commons Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Austria“ Licence (“Creative Commons Namensnennung-Keine kommerzielle Nutzung-Weitergabe unter gleichen Bedingungen 3.0 Österreich”). Further details see: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/at/

 

Author: Klaus Hammermüller, talkademy.org

 

 

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

 

 

Introduction

 

This creation of the repository for 2D and 3D objects is closely linked to the other deliverables in work-package 4 of the AVALON project and shares some components with other deliverables in this work-package. This work-package constitutes the operational infrastructure which is used in the execution of action learning events (as defined in WP2 and executed in WP3).

 

Audience

 

The special focus of this deliverable, different to other deliverables in this work-package, is to serve IT system administrators who would have to run such an infrastructure. Thus the intended audience of this deliverables are IT system administrators.

 

Motivation

 

The motivation for this work-package is to establish an infrastructure which serves educators facilitating formal classes in a 3D environment. Of course, one could use the social features of a 3D environment to conduct informal education without any additional components. However, to support a more formal and structured educational approach, as well as improving efficiency and the economic productivity of the used 3D environment, we will introduce the use of additional infrastructure components that can be integrated into the action learning experience.

 

Improving efficiency and the economic productivity:

It is possible to operate a 3D environment with the functionality offered by that environment, however, limiting the educational experience to this functionality has several drawbacks:

 

  • The setup time to prepare for a class is not automated  and therefore labor intensive for the educator. As educators are a scare resource, the setup of an 3D environment needs to provide some automation usually not provided by the 3D environment;

 

  • We assume, that in most cases the use of an 3D environment will be one of the media used to deliver the educational experience, but not the only one. By adding e.g. streaming media or assigning e.g. offline tasks other systems need to be integrated – at least to consistently track the participant's identity and authentication.

 

Support a more formal and structured educational approach:

Once an action learning event has started, structured content can be provided during the event and new information can be collected produced through the participant's interaction. Hence there is the need for:

 

  • A system providing structured content in a managed way during the action learning event; and

 

  • A system capturing, storing and, ideally, assisting by assessing the captured information.

 

By the nature of a 3D environment the information and content can have very different forms and can be more varied than that used in other media. E.g. the managed provision of 3D content is a speciality to 3D environments, lacking in other systems. We will see, that this has consequences in the system architecture used in this deliverable.

 

 

 

Methodology

 

The methodology used in this deliverable is based on the “Rational Unified Process” and the IBM Global Service Method. Similar methodologies but different names are used by different software engineering vendors, with similar results. As the “Rational Unified Process” is widely used in the academic and commercial software engineering domain, we will use the relevant naming and structuring without an additional reference.

 

 

Architectural Decisions

 

 

Selection of Components to use

 

In respect of already existing and established system components we have selected those relevant by the following criteria:

 

  • already known in the community of educators (preferable);

  • available on basis of an open source licence (preferable);

  • exclusion (K.O.) criteria is a continued support / an active supporting community is existing;

  • K.O. criteria is the provision of open standards and interfaces;

  • K.O. criteria is the availability at reasonable cost in respect to the defined AVALON budget.

 

Only the gaps without existing components meeting the above criteria have been addressed with open source patches or other solutions.

 

Legal Disclaimer

 

Second Life permissions, terms & conditions of Linden Labs and American and European Intellectual property rights define different levels of usage rights. The AVALON team has tried hard to make created content available as freely as possible. Anyhow as some contents are created by third parties, bought, deeded or user created different legal situations apply. Therefore all contents used are available, but not all contents are available in all components of the repository. E.g. some items could not be exported from Secondlife but remain bound to the platform. Anyhow all key scenarios which are useful for reuse in educational application have been made available to the public.

 

Streaming Media

 

During the planning phase of the AVALON project we thought that streaming media would be a challenging issue. Therefore we outlined streaming media integration specifically in the proposal. However with the introduction of a better media integration in the "Viewer 2" software of Second Life these issues where resolved. We decided to drop the special focus on streaming media by broadening the focus to all types of media. Nevertheless streaming media is addressed and supported by the virtual environment platform (WP4).

 

 

Implementation of the Repository

 

During the execution of the AVALON project it became obvious that there are different kinds of content, which need to be treated differently because they address different audiences. The assumed available skills of these audiences make it necessary to use different repository components:

 

 

Contents
Audience
Skills Requirements
Repository Component
The written reports and documentation produced by the AVALON project Wider public Easy and convenient accessability, collaboration support, human readable pbworks.com was chosen, because its wiki-style supports efficient collaboration and therefore is time-saving. Its contents are accessible both through the official project pages as well as a snapshot copy for  long term archive.
Live 3D learning content Educators, Content Creators and Students Immediately usable during live class-room action
secondlife.com was chosen because the community involved was already using it (see also WP4-4). Learning Content when exported to an XML format is placed for long term archive.
2D and 3D learning content IT Administratiors Recreation of learning content in different environments; long term archive code.google.com (subversion protocol) was chosen as an open repository access protocol. It can be easyly accessed / moved / transcoded and is well known by IT professionals.
Live community content, e.g. event announcements, discussions, etc. typically content which loose relevance after a certain time e.g. after the event is over
Project members, associated partners, educators, researcher
Easy and convenient accessability, time-saving, human readable
ning.com was chosen, because many community members were already active in that system. Because of the dynamic nature of the content, these are not systematically exported to the subversion protocil, but remain online available on ning.com
Live 2D learning content
Educators, Content Creators and Students
Immediately usable during live classroom action
moodle.org was chosen, because it was already known by most educators involved (see also WP4-4). Learning Content were exported using moodle's ZIP format for long term storage

 

 

 

Deliverable Overview

 

This is the translation of the deliverable-description as provided in the AVALON proposal (included on the first page of this document) and the reference to the place where one can find the related component.

 

Component

Description

Reference

WP4-1-1

Operational Handbook

AVALON-WP4-1-operational-handbook

printable: pdf version

WP4-1-2

Content Repository

  1. 2D text document repository avalonlearning.pbworks.com
  2. 3D content repository in Second Life
  3. 2D an 3D subversion protocol repository code.google.com/p/avalon-learning 
not part of the repository, but available content:

WP4-1-3

Open Source Web Portal

part of the official project pages

WP4-1-4

Operations and maintenance

n / a (see below)

 

 

If any of the above urls cannot be accessed after the end of the project, please refer to http://avalonlearning.eu or contact klaus(at)talkademy.org

 

 

 

WP4-1-1 Operational Handbook

 

This is a living document during the project, see AVALON-WP4-1-operational-handbook 

 

 

WP4-1-2 Content Repository

 

 

2D text document repository

The text document repository is found in avalonlearning.pbworks.com. It is a wiki and consists of all historic versions of all text documents created by the AVALON project, including all working versions and comments.

 

Its main results, the reports and documentation marked as AVALON project deliverables are made accessible trough the official project pages; see also WP 4-1-1 below.

 

A long term archive version is extracted and put into the subversion protocol repository (see chapter below)

 

 

 

3D content repository in Second Life

"Ready to use"; content can be found in Second Life, accessible without cost

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/AVALON%20Learning/23/223/58 .

 

As this place is populated by an active community, its creation is similar to the ning.com community, content is changing and updating, but is available to a wider audience. The 3D content created by the AVALON will be maintained to be accessible to a wider public under an open source licence there. The content can be retrieved by a simple vending machine placed at the url above for immediate use.

 

Disclaimer: Only those contents have been put into the vending machine where permitted by Second Life permissions, terms & conditions of Linden Labs and American and European Intellectual property rights. Thus the vending machine holds not all contents available.

 

Learning content, created by the AVALON projects have also been exported to the subversion protocol repository (see next chapter), as a long term archive and to be available for migration to other platforms (e.g. opensimulator.org)

 

 

2D an 3D subversion protocol (SVN) repository

 

Access to the SVN repository

This is actually an instance of a subversion repository (“SVN”), a standard tool to manage documents and files provided in different formats by different authors. It is a file based system allowing the management of all kind of content. Access code for read-only user is http://code.google.com/p/avalon-learning For users wanting to contribute, please send an email to klaus@talkademy.org

 

Instructions how to access the SVN repository can be found here http://code.google.com/p/avalon-learning/source/checkout  

 

Users registered to commit have to use this url

 

svn checkout https://avalon-learning.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ avalon-learning --username <your-username>

 

guests for read-only access use

svn checkout http://avalon-learning.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ avalon-learning-read-only

 

pre-packaged contents are available for download here http://code.google.com/p/avalon-learning/downloads/list 

 

 

 

Repository contents and functionality

Different to a Learning Content Management System (“LMS”, see next chapter) the repository does not have a pre-defined metadata structure, thus it is more flexible. The SVN also adresses the functionality expected by IT professionals rather than educators (as an LMS does). It also includes the 3D learning content from Second Life which was produced by the AVALON project, which do not ";fit into"; the LMS structure.

 

The contents are:

 

  • a long term archive version of the pbworks wiki (see 2D text document repository above); 

  • 3D content which has been captured and exported from the 3D environment in XML format (see 3D content repository in Second Life above);

  • Textures, Scripts, Sounds, Animations, assigned to 3D content used to create 3D content;

  • 2D learning content in moodle ZIP format as used in the LMS;

  • Source code patches;

  • Some other files from the deliverables produced in the AVALON project.

 

 

This SVN system provides the functionality to:

  • Move 3D content to different places in 3D environments (also see “3D content publishing process”);

  • Guarantee, that content used in the AVALON project stays available after the end of the funding;

  • Provide an long term maintained archive once parts of the AVALON system may be offline;

  • Helps the people involved in implementing to collaborate more efficiently.

 

 

Commented Repository Content Excerpt

 

 

 

 

Long term archive

 

The SVN system will be maintained by talkademy.org beyond the end of the AVALON funded project.

 

 

Disclaimer

Only those contents have been exported to the SVN system where permitted by Second Life permissions, terms & conditions of Linden Labs and American and European Intellectual property rights. Thus this part of the repository holds not all contents available.

 

If any of the above urls cannot be accessed after the end of the project, please refer to http://avalonlearning.eu or contact klaus(at)talkademy.org

 

 

 

 

 

WP4-1-3 Open Source Web Portal

 

 

The Open Source Web Portal is part of the official web-site of the AVALON project, http://avalonlearning.eu

(direct link to An open-source webportal to download 2D and 3D content)

 

The purpose of the open source portal is to make all the content, which is published under an open source license, accessible to a wider public. It is basically a structured directory which links to the places in the repository where the contents can be retrieved.

 

 

 

WP4-1-4 Operations and Maintenance

 

The efforts taken out to establish, fill and maintain the repository are concluded here. Obviously there is no formal deliverable but the documentation, which is included in WP4-1-1 the operational handbook. WP4-1-4 serves mainly as a token for responsibility to take care of keeping the repository up and running.

 

These tasks have been subcontracted (SC 5) to pinguin-systeme.net

 

Comments (4)

Gary Motteram said

at 4:40 pm on Oct 21, 2009

I have read this one in detail -- GM (for my own later reference)

klaus said

at 11:58 am on Feb 5, 2010

update Links

klaus said

at 1:03 pm on Nov 2, 2010

This document is complete.
Please check the links in "Deliverable Overview" about the status of sub-documents.
A spell-check and a QA review would be appreciated

Gary Motteram said

at 5:10 pm on Nov 10, 2010

I've edited this and associated 'docs'.

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