Exotic is probably not a good choice of term. Maybe we should call these advanced, or specialized, tools. The reality is that the numbers of tools available in online environments has mushroomed in the last five years.

Interactive Environments
The proliferation of games like EverQuest and World of Warcraft have gotten people involved in immersive 3d spaces for gaming. SecondLife and There.com are examples of social environments which have also taken the idea of virtual space in new directions. SecondLife, in particular, has gotten a lot of press lately as more and more organizations are opening virtual offices in cyberspace. But even before those spaces we had ActiveWorlds and Oddessey. The interest in 3d spaces is at least as old as the web. All these spaces have the idea of 3d people in 3d spaces. The level and degree that the avatars can interact with each other and with the environment varies, but there are reportedly people who make a living playing World of Warcraft and other games online. These can be highly immersive — even addictive. EverQuest is no-so-affectionately referred to as EverCrack because of the highly addictive nature of the game. The downside to these spaces is that they require high bandwidth connections and relatively sophisticated computers/graphics to run effectively. Some are commercial activities were you buy the game and then pay-per-month to access the servers.

One step back from 3d environments are the text-based interactive environments like MUDs, MUSHes, and MOOs. MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) have been around since the early days of the internet and are not based on web technology at all. MUDs tend to be games where the social environment revolves around solving puzzled, beating monsters, and the associated game play. MUSHes and MOOs tend to be social environments where the interaction is more like play acting. The engagement in those environments is more construction than combat. See the Mud Connector for a list of some of the current flavors of MUDs available on the net today. Some places are based on fantasy fiction — ArcticMUD is loosely based on the DragonLance series, PernMUSH on Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern books. Some are based on board games — like BattleTech:Frontierlands based on a FASA board game.

Voice and Audio Tools
A cheap headset with microphone makes “talking on the computer” pretty easy these days. Most of the IM tools have a voice component, at least on the PC platform. For better quality, there are also tools like Skype — which permit up to 5 people on a conference call — and the Gizmo Project which has great sound quality and the ability to record the conversation built in.

For audio editing, I really like Audacity. It’s free, cross-platform, has all the features of the high-priced-spread, and — did I mention? Free.

For playback, you can use the Windows Media Player if you like, but there are some good alternatives as well, particularly for listening to internet radio and/or podcasts on your PC. WinAMP has been around for a long time and it works very well. A new tool that I’ve had very nice results with is JetAudio.

Tagging and Directories
One of the key elements of the “new web” is the ability for individuals to tag content with identifiers that mean something to them. As more and more people identify content, the identifiers tend to cluster around key elements and those key elements can be used to find and evaluate content. For web content, the defacto ‘book mark’ tool is del.icio.us. People from around the world identify all kinds of content found on the web and you can use their coding to identify resources you might want to use.

A difficulty we’ve all faced is “link rot” because the Internet is a dynamic space and web pages are sometimes taken down. Furl has an answer to that by allowing you to tag a web page, and make a copy of it into your own folder. If the owner takes the content down, then at least you have your own copy. Moreover, your material can be made available to others with some simple tools. See the sidebar on the main page of this blog and you’ll see a list of documents from the web that I found and marked for use in this class. As I add new ones, they automatically get added to my web pages just by virtue of their being tagged and included in my archive.

Blogs present a different problem. It’s sometimes difficult to find blogs on a certain topic or about a certain discipline. Technorati is a kind of blog index where blogs and posts are tagged and indexed. You can find a lot of good blogs by searching for the correct tags there.

For pictures, there’s Flickr. I have a Flickr account that lets me have a basically unlimited number of digital photos online. And each one can be tagged so that my pictures taken in the Rocky Mountain National Park can be combined with those taken by other people. This makes for a rich collection of graphical imagery — some of which is licensed under Creative Commons for use in, say, a classroom. This is a very useful tool for those who are looking for photos of — say — the Eiffel Tower, or the Grand Canyon.

That’s it for today. It’s taken almost half the day to get this much written up so I’ll leave you to explore these for now.

References:
3d Spaces
EverQuest (Commercial)
World of Warcraft (Commercial)
Active Worlds (Free trial)
Oddessey (Free)

MUDs, MUSHes, MUSEs
Mud Connector
ArcticMUD
PernMUSH
BattleTech:Frontierlands
LambdaMOO
Last Outpost

Voice and Audio
Skype
Gizmo Project
Audacity
WinAMP
JetAudio

Tagging and Directories
del.icio.us
Furl
Technorati
Flickr

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 19th, 2006 at 3:04 PM and is filed under Education, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.