Second Life

The state of North Carolina has gotten involved with a virtual learning grant that has allowed for the following:
http://ncvirtual.ning.com/
Basically, and island within Second Life (http://www.secondlife.com) has been created and is available for the use of schools in either classroom learning, professional development, meeting, or any other use. The maintainers have even created a building where educators can customize their own office space, I have placed my office in a corner spot on the sixth floor, would have preferred a lower floor but those were mostly filled already.
Second Life provides for a very powerful environment in which we can facilitate virtual learning, basically take distance learning to a whole new level. This is something that I had started looking into at work last fall, but no one seemed interested and I just kind of quit. It turns out that people were interested just did not know what I was doing and so a few days ago this information was dropped on my desk with a "let's discuss" which I though was just wonderful and really exciting. It is my understanding that the original goal was to roll out a class for this Spring semester but that just is not doable, however we are going to hit a leadership development thing going on during the spring (around February) as a proof of concept and then hopefully roll out a full course through the environment come next fall.
Anyway, been very busy with all of this Second Life stuff this week. So here is my office and if you happen to be a Second Lifer, look me up in-world: Jere Silverweb

Video Game Industry and Stuff

Well, my dad just pointed out that this has not been updated in almost a year. This means that someone is actually reading this, well not just someone but my dad so that means it is time for an update and this may be a better forum than Facebook notes anyhow.
So many things have happened in the year since I've been on here so lets just get started.

Job:
I am very happy at Wilkes Community College. We have moved from Boone to North Wilkesboro and we are all very happy with our current situation, at least for the most part. The school is a wonderful place to work and given the current economic climate teaching at the community college level is a very exciting place to be as so many displaced workers are returning for re-training. I teach in the Computer Information Technology curriculum and my classes cover the gamut from introduction to programming all the way to systems analysis and design. I now have 10 advisees of my own which is pretty nice but also pretty intimidating as I tend to worry about putting them in the wrong class or screwing up in some other way with their program of study. The school is going through a re-accreditation process in which we are implementing student learning outcomes and so all of the classes and curriculums are being rethought from the ground up. This means that while initially I took over someone else's courses and material, now I am redesigning all of my classes so that they mesh with the SLO and other guidelines that we are looking at.

Video Game Industry:
Have been making a bunch of very interesting discoveries over the past 6-8 months. Shortly after starting at WCC I began to ask about the possibility of offering some classes in video game design. These questions led to my being told that there is already a simulation and game design curriculum defined by the North Carolina Community College System, it even happens to be a part of Business and Public Service Technologies the division that I work in (you can read about it here and here). So, Late last spring I began looking at this and trying to talk to some people and just trying to find out what can and can not be done, etc. Essentially, nobody really cared. Don't get me wrong, nobody was trying to stop it, but it must be understood that the school had looked into implementing this program a few years ago however due to lack of local jobs and cost of the program it was not implemented (even though there was overwhelming student interest). I started by looking at the other schools that currently implement this program and noticed a definite trend (which had already been noticed) to get this up and running it is going to be several hundred thousand dollars for all of the software licenses (Unreal Engine, 3DS Max, Maya, etc).
Why, you may ask, is this so expensive? In order to properly train students to jump into entry level positions at game companies the student need to know the tools used and the tools used by the industry are very expensive. Well, that is fine enough, but why would schools in North Carolina be implementing such a program anyway? As it turns out, the RTP area is now considered to be the video game capital of the East coast, there are nearly 50 video game companies in that region (I am not going to go into why, although it is very interesting why it happened). So, the community colleges here are training people to be able to jump into those compaines. Ah, but wait.
The video game industry is currently undergoing a fascinating metamorphosis. The current trend is towards independent game development. What does this mean? This means that many of those Iphone apps, Facebook apps, Xbox Live Arcade games, online Flash games, Wizards 101, and the list can go on, are actually being created by one or two guys in their garage. You see, with modern digital delivery mechanisms, one of the biggest hurdles of game development is overcome and now average Joe can publish a game without having to bank roll publishing and marketing the way it was done in the past. But, how can average Joe afford all of the tools to make these games? Well, he can't. But he can afford the free tools that are available and are arguably as powerful as the expensive ones.
So, I have taken the curriculum and adjusted it towards the independent game developer or entreprenurial approach and have presented it. My boss was excited about it, her boss was excited about it, other people are getting excited about it so that we are now doing employment surveys, but we are not looking for jobs for game developers, but jobs for people with the skilles of a game developer (3D modeling for architecture or medical visualization, simulation development for business and economic models, virtual world creation for communication and training, and the list goes on).

Hmmmm, this got a lot longer than I thought it would guess that is why one should post more frequently. Well I have more to say, but will stop for now. Perhaps add a new post next weekend if not sooner.

Still here

Well, I actually forgot about this blog until noticing it linked on my facebook page. I suppose that as long as it is here I should write something from time to time. Anyway, I went with the community college and think that it was the best decision. This semester has been fun at the new school, started off pretty rough and spent a lot of time just barely being prepared for a class before walking into it, but I feel like I am starting to get a grip on things here. Got to advise a couple of students for the Spring semester which was nice.
The Be-anz thing is definitely on a perpetual hold. Raylene would like me to get back to wrok on it sometime, but I am also trying to get a game development club started here at the school and time is something of a previous comodity at the moment. I am fairly certain that if I do return to the project I am going to scrap the whole custom engine idea and return to the original concept of building from the Torque game engine framework. Not sure what kind of modifications I would need to make on the C++ side of the engine, but the primary point is that I would achieve the platform independence that I want without building the engine entirely from scratch. Building the engine would be nice, but others tend not to get so exiciting about succesfully having an agent walk across the screen.
Lets see other things...hmm there aren't any except for snowboarding. We have season passes at App this season and it has been very nice. I've been able to go 3 times so far and am hoping to be able to go again this weekend, the weather has not been very supportive lately.

Decisions Decisions

Well, it always is nice to have options available, but now I find myself in the position of being offered a full-time posting at a community college with the caveat that I withdraw from the part-time contract from ASU.  As a result of this juggling and uncertainty going into the new semester, the Be-anz project has been placed on hold indefinitely (again).  Hopefully I will be able to get back to work on it again sometime in the next couple of months.

We are all eagerly awaiting the start of the ski season here, well snowboard season specifically.

My sister-in-law got married the other week, it was a small family only affair and was pretty nice all in all.  The family spent the week out on the Outer Banks and doing the tourist thing which was fun for a few days, but it is so hot out there.  I guess the mountains have taken the surf out of me, I no longer miss the beach like I used to.  There are times that I still miss the open ocean, but without a boat you're not going out there anyway so, I am glad to be back home again.

Anyway, not much more to post at the moment, I do think that I need to try to develop a decent habit of posting something at least once a week, though I may just end up using notes on Facebook for that or something.

What to do

Now that my thesis is getting ready to come out of committee and go on to the graduate school, I am left with things to ponder and consider.  I have already accepted a part time position here at ASU for the next academic year.  I am currently teaching on online course at Wilkes Community College that may turn into a full time position, though I am waiting to hear back from them.  Other than that, I am now at the position where I can work on my projects because I want to more than because I have to.  This has led me to decide to revamp the simulator that was built for my thesis and turn it into a full-fledged 3D application with bells and whistles.  So, I am in the stages of decided if I want to host it here with Google code, would be nice since I have switched everything over to google in the last couple of weeks (gmail, igoogle, google docs, etc), or with the old standby of sourceforge.  I'm also trying to decide if I will use NetBeans or Eclipse as the IDE.  Although most of it is on hold at the moment anyway as I would like to use Java 6, but I am on Apple and do not have access to it, yet.  At any rate, I am considering using this blog to keep as a development journal of sorts for the Be-anz project, at least once I get it started.  

Videos and Such

Well, after playing around with the Blogger settings and the page elements that I can add I decided to add Google video to my Google account (video.google.com).  I figured this would let me post some videos and since I'm using Google blogger I could keep it all on the same system (well sort of).  Anyhow, I made the account and uploaded a video then added the video bar page element to my blog.  Problem is, that page element is really geared towards Youtube, which translates to I don't know how to get it to display only my videos (with my Youtube account, which I created for this, I just add my Youtube channel to the video bar element and it is good, except that Youtube has yet to update the video that I uploaded).   Well, not happy so continued playing around with things.  I added a ling bar to the side and I can cut and paste my Google video links into it, yeah kinda bland and boring.  I could also add and HTML/javascript bar over there and embed the code to play the video, well pretty neat but if I keep adding videos that will get pretty lousy.  Or.....

Once I saw the embed code element I remembered that I can click on the edit HTML link when I am typing my blog post and copy the code into there and:

Hey, hey that is pretty nifty (yeah my geek/dweeb level just skyrocketed but I am OK with that :) ) and that is what I really wanted to be able to do.  Now I think next time I will try holding the camera when I went down the hill, I ended up halfway across Rivers after jumping the curb and plowing through the slush on the road it was great :)  next project, making these blasted smilies display correctly.

New Semester

Well, it looks like we are getting ready to start a new semester and I am going to continue to try to modify the CS 1410 curriculum as I did during the fall as well. I have decided that modifications that I would like to make involve a lot more time than I had originally intended. At any rate, we will be making blogs this Spring and try using that as a delivery mechanism for labs, should be pretty interesting to see how it goes.

Not much more to add at the moment, so I guess that I won't.