Have you used the Google Chrome internet browser yet? I know it's fairly new, but it has been highly publicized (and just about as highly criticized) for being the brain-child of one of the biggest corporations in America.

If you're interested in trying out a new way to browse the internet, you can download the installer for Google Chrome from the Google Chrome website. In Firefox, you can just type the word "chrome" into the address bar and it will take you to the right page. (Even when I have the links, I think that's so cool that I often look up pages in Firefox just to test where the keywords take me.) If you don't have Mozilla Firefox either... you should break out of the square mold and try something new.

Google Chrome is fast, free, easily set up, and full of fun surprises. With only a tab bar and a address bar, the interface uses far less screen real estate than any other browser that I've seen. It works on Windows, Mac (Intel), AND Linux (Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/openSUSE), perfectly replacing the bulky bars and borders of each window manager with it's own sleek and customizable set. There's only one menu to deal with, hidden under a little wrench icon on one side, where the most used options are directly shown and the lesser used options are in submenus. The address bar automatically searches Google if you don't put in a DNS-recognized web address (example.com) and can search some other sites directly. But what sold me is the speed. When you have to boot an older laptop, open your web browser, email your professor, and shut down the laptop on a battery with 5 minutes remaining, you need a browser that reduces your stress and gets the job done. Hey, among college students, that kind of thing happens all the time.

Speaking of college, wouldn't it be nice if your web browser alerted you to the fact you have a class in five minutes? I don't know how many times I've gotten zoned (doing my calculus homework on the Pearson website, OF COURSE!) only to look up at the clock and realize that I needed to have rushed out the door in a great big hurry... five minutes ago.

Well, Google Chrome uses what's known as "extensions" to extend the usability of the browser. And guess what - there's an extension for alerting you to appointments and classes and all sorts of things, suggested by the Google Chrome Team themselves, called RemindMe. You can get it from the Google Chrome Extension Library.

But don't just listen to me - there's a Google blog full of useful knowledge for students. Just look for the Google Student Blog. You can even find a pile of interesting extensions by looking at all the posts tagged "Chrome Extensions". Try a few out! If you don't like them, just type chrome://extensions/ in your address bar, hit enter, and disable or delete the ones you hate.

Have you ever heard of the Choose Your Own Adventure books? They were a group of books that pioneered the idea of a branching story. As you read the book you would come to a point of decision. If the main character came to a cave it would give you the choice to A. Enter the cave or B. Run away. If you chose to Enter the cave you would turn to page 37 or if you chose to Run away then you would choose page 96. The branching storylines made the book engaging and greatly increased the amount of times one could read it before losing interest. Now imagine taking that concept and interweaving it into an online lecture. That is what the Moodle Lesson Module is.

In the Moodle Lesson Module you create an interactive lesson where the students responses guide his/her path through the lesson. If they make a wrong choice or wrong answer you can have them repeat the question or branch off into a more intensive discussion of the subject. This by far is only the tip of the iceberg though. If you would like to learn more about using the Moodle Lesson Module visit http://docs.moodle.org/en/Lessons where it will give you an in depth look at the Lesson Module.

If you would like to get up and running quickly, check out this video tutorial on using the Lesson Module in Moodle:

Do you ever wonder if your students are really engaging their minds while they watch the videos you post in moodle? Or, have you ever wanted to comment to your online students about portions of a video while they watch it? This week's Web App Spotlight focuses on VideoANT, a new web 2.0 application that could address these questions and change the way you think about using videos in online courses.

Created by Brad Hosak, the New Media Developer for the University of Minnesota, VideoANT combines streaming video with time synchronized text annotations. As a video plays in the application window, annotations are seen to the right of the video and a timeline is shown below the video, marking where each of the annotations start. Once the video playhead reaches a mark in the timeline, the corresponding annotation on the right is highlighted.



Here is an example of the embedded version of VideoANT (one you could place in your moodle shell!):


Interested? Getting started is easy.  You start by going here and entering the link of a streaming video (youtube, or other streaming servers/services), your email, and the title of the project you want to create into these fields:

After you complete those steps, you will receive an email that contains links to a strictly viewable version of the project, an editable version of the project (where you create the annotations), a link that will give you the embed HTML code (so that you can place it in moodle or wherever else you are able to post HTML code like I did above), and a link to an RSS feed created specifically for the project (the RSS feed can be used to alert you to any changes made to the annotations of a project). The possibilities of what to use it for are up to you.

 For instance, if you wanted them to watch a video segment on the civil war, you could place annotations throughout the video that would help them see how a certain portion of the video relates to what they have been learning in class.  Or you could require your students to create their own VideoANT project where they are the ones that have to perform the annotating.The video they use could even be a video that you used in a previous VideoANT project.

There are some limiting factors to VideoANT:

• The video has to already by streaming from somewhere on the internet. 
• Videos have to be a .flv, .mov, or a youtube video.
• If you hand out the editing url of a project, then anyone who has access to it can edit or delete any annotations.

If you've been wandering around the COL lab sometime in the last couple of weeks, you'll have noticed that we've been spending some time building things on a grid we set up using Diva Canto's distribution of OSGrid. You can find more information about it on Diva's blog post, Standalone but Join the Party!

Some ideas I'm currently working on include: a system of teleporters using the campus map connecting the "entrance area" to locations that represent the different schools/groups of FPU (project code MAP); recreating the levels of Dante's Inferno, using teleporters at logical breaks in the text and scripting conversations between the characters like a ride at Disneyland (project code INFERNO); a space shuttle that takes you to the moon and drops you off, allowing you to bounce around while wearing a space suit (project code MOON); guided tour of the solar system/galaxy/universe (project code SPACE); developing the land around the "entrance area" (project code LAND).

Currently, we have this done:

MAP:

I'm finished with the basic build of the map, but I'd still like to texture it with photos of the school, and of course we need to add teleport scripts to the buildings. That will wait until we have builds for the different things. I put lights over the map so you can see it at night, and they fade on shortly before the sun sets and fade off shortly after the sun rises. At least, that's how they are meant to work. The lights are also a warm color that reduces how blue the map looks at night.

INFERNO:

I built a cave (and JUST realized I forgot to texture the rocks, so they are probably still the default wood texture...) around a teleporter sign that takes you up to a "halfway point" island where I will have a scripted Virgil who explains what's going on to a lost and confused... you. When I have a "circle" built, you will be able to use Virgil to teleport to the beginning of it. Right now he doesn't talk, he just sits there with a broken teleport script.

MOON:

Scott likes the idea, so we'll move forward on it. Inferno comes first though.

SPACE:

I haven't mentioned this to Scott yet.

LAND:

Scott has a couple buildings in mind to the Northwest, where he built a simple "house" with a "white board", a clock, and a teleport back to the "entrance area". He's also planning something much larger in the mountains, and I built a cave underneath it. But what the cave leads to is something he's planning as well.

At the "entrance area" I built a sidewalk around the 3d FPU Campus Map (the MAP), and a little "lounge area" with a low wall that has picture on it, a couple tables, some chairs, the scripted, not-super-useful, time-telling clock which reads in hours after midnight and isn't really accurate anyway, and a canopy with scarves that are supposed to flutter with the wind. I'm still working on the "flutter" part. Currently they like to "wag" wildly side to side. And I am working on the clock... It was an adaptation of a single lsl command that I learned. I'm trying to keep all the scripts I put on the sim to ones I wrote.

All of Torley Linden's textures I uploaded and put into "freebie boxes" near the lounge area, along with a box of t-shirts someone made using a T-shirt Template from Robin Wood, which you can use in GIMP as well as Photoshop. You can see Robin Wood's tutorial here, and download the file to make your own T-shirts for SecondLife, OSGrid, and anything else running OpenSim: How to Use the Robin (Sojourner) Wood T-shirt Template. And the last "box", a cylinder, contains a couple gestures for people to add to their inventories, made using Legend of Zelda sound effects. Hehe.

Did you know about the incredible literary resource of books.google.com? Search for a title, and you can see previews of any book that Google has scanned into their databases, and download the full text of any book under a creative commons license or in the public domain. That means, for instance, you can find high quality scans of books from the 2nd edition of Das Kapital by Karl Marx, to the whole story of Peter and Wendy: Margaret Ogilvy by J. M. Barrie, that is, Peter Pan and a biography of Barrie's mother. It's a great way to get the feel of a book, or a version of a book, before you commit to it. I always suggest using creative commons resources, so you might also consider using a site like Creative Commons: Books , which is a list of books released under a creative commons resources. Another source of public domain books is Project Gutenburg, and LibriVox that reads Project Gutenburg books aloud.

Happy Pi Approximation Day! Pi is 3.141592654 for the purposes of this discussion.

Pi Day and Pi Approximation Day are two holidays held to celebrate the mathematical constant π (pi). Pi Day is celebrated on March 14, which, in America, is 3/14. March 14 is also the birthday of Albert Einstein and the two events are sometimes celebrated together. Pi Approximation Day is held on July 22, which, in Europe, is 22/7. The fraction 22/7 is an approximate (and slightly more accurate) value of π. However, on 12 March 2009, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a non-binding resolution (HRES 224), recognizing March 14, 2009 as National Pi Day.

If you wanted to get really geeky, you could also celebrate the Pi Minute on March 14 at 1:59 am, and Pi Second at 26 seconds. In 2015, a Pi Second with an accuracy of 10 digits will be held on 3/14/15 at 9:26:54 in the morning. Pi Day in 2016 will be special as well, since 3/14/16 equates to a rounded version of pi.

The first Pi Day celebration was held at the San Francisco Exploratorium in 1988, with staff and public marching around one of its circular spaces, then consuming fruit pies. The museum has since added pizza to its Pi Day menu. The founder of Pi Day was Larry Shaw, a now-retired physicist at the Exploratorium who still helps out with the celebrations. Here at Fresno Pacific University, the mathletes celebrate Pi Day with a pie fundraiser. They buy pies from Marie Callendar's and set up tables in front of the cafeteria and on the first floor of AIMS Hall of Math and Science.

Of course, I don't think we'll be getting quite as into the spirit of Pi Day as MIT Admissions, who releases decisions at 1:59 pm on Pi Day, or MIT students who in 1994 put a campus police car, number pi, on top of their Great Dome. Or did they?

To learn more, visit these cool sites:

Pi Day at the Exploratorium
Pi Day .org

Some entertaining videos to watch:

The Pi Song - singing Pi to 50 places.
Say that Funky Number, Math Guy - a video by Al G. Bra and Cal Q. Lus that you have to see to believe.
Pi Pi Mathematical Pi Song (Full Version) - "Pi, pi, mathematical pi" is the first line of the chorus. ((The first time I heard this song was in Academic Decathlon... I believe a guy named Marcus Cope was singing it. Hey, Marcus, what's up? Happy Pi Approximation Day!))
The Tales of Fort Lego: Pi Day - Silliness with Legos and pies.
Pi Day - cute pi day short in preparation for Pi Day 2010... which has passed, but it's still cute.

Second Life (SL) is a virtual world developed by Linden Lab. "Residents" can explore, meet other residents, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, and create and trade virtual property and services with one another. Built into the software is a 3d modeling tool where users combine basic shapes ("primitives", or "prims") to build virtual objects. They then use the Linden Scripting Language to add more functionality, even animations, to their objects. "Sculpted prims" (or "sculpties"), textures for clothing or other objects, sounds, and animations can be created using external software. SL has it's own economy and residents can use real world currency to purchase "Linden Dollars" for buying higher quality items and renting land.

There is also an open source simulator (called "OpenSim") similar to Linden Labs' Second Life, and this is the basis for a variety of open source "grids". The most popular of the grids would be OSGrid, which works by having server users connect "regions" to the main grid. Another option for the tech-savvy is to connect "standalone" configurations (like the "Diva Distro") through what's known as "hypergrid technology". Almost everything created for Second Life can be used in OpenSim.

Second Life and OpenSim are currently available for Windows, Mac and Linux; both PCs and servers.

Read more about Second Life on Wikipedia!

Read more about OpenSim on Wikipedia!

Learn about Second Life, OSGrid and OpenSim by visiting these sites:

Second Life Official Site
OSGrid - the open metaverse

Open Sim

List of Grids (and standalones) running Open Sim software

Metaverse Ink - Standalone But Join the Party