Acknowledgements

Thanks to:

• Dale Duncan @ GippsTAFE for creating the "Dave" sequences and being the voice behind the avatar.
  
• GippsTAFE library team for LibGuide support.
  
• Roland Collaro at Symmetree for creating the "Where to from Here?" sequence we used as part of our conVerge10 presentation.
  
• The people at conVerge10 who attended our presentation; especially those who approached us later with comments and questions.
  
• The Australian Flexible Learning Framework for funding support

Combining Technologies

One of the challenges of this project has been to combine two different technologies.

Initially we hoped to have our avatar fully integrated into the LibGuide. This has proved to be more difficult than originally planned so we had to develop an alternative plan. CodeBaby creates the avatar as flash files which require Java script to run. The problem we have is how to upload and reference these correctly when the LibGuide is hosted by a third party server.

At this stage we have located the avatar flashfiles and the Java script on the GippsTAFE server and we link to them from rich text boxes in the LibGuide. This means the avatar pops up in a new window separate to the LibGuide. It works but is not ideal.

We are still exploring options to overcome this problem.

CodeBaby examples

Now that the Project is completed, I just came across some information sent to me in the early days when we were first looking at CodeBaby and thought it worth sharing. It shows some examples of various ways CodeBaby (and avatars generally) can be used.

These links show a number of scenarios and interesting uses of avatar software. I was impressed with the range of possibilities and versatility it offers. With imagination and know-how, there's no end to the ideas you could explore, it seems to me!

Using character to explain the benefits of interactive characters

Delivering feedback

CodeBaby advertisement

It's also worth taking a look at Symmetree and CodeBaby e-learning showcase.

Where to from here?

This project has taught us a lot about using LibGuides, using CodeBaby and combining the two. So where to from here?

The APA Referencing guide

There are a number of things we need to do with regard to the APA Referencing Guide. We need to:

• ensure information and links remain current
• incorporate new LibGuide features as they become available
• investigate the remote script box, this may allow us to integrate the avatar into the guide in a better way
• promote the guide to teachers and students
• collect feedback from users and make changes as required

CodeBaby

We want to explore the use of combining a CodeBaby avatar with artificial intelligence. This will allow us to develop some interesting and engaging resources to use with our students.

Embedding the Technology at GippsTAFE

So far the use of avatars in online education atGippsTAFE is still in the pilot phase. Our final challenge is to extend the use of this technology to a range of online programs.

Presenting at conVerge10

We recently presented this project at conVerge10. The presentation went well and received some good feed back from the audience.

However we had so much to talk about that we ran out of time. One section we missed was some tips about using the program CodeBaby so take a look at the image to the left to see what our brains trust has to say. I realise I have included some of this information in an earlier post but I really liked this image which is based on a file from Microsoft Office clip art.

New APA referencing guide now published.

Referencing - APA Style LibGuide
Please have a look at our new guide and leave us some feedback.

Thanks to all involved involved in the development of the guide.
Project team
GippsTAFE Library staff
GippsTAFE Nursing students and staff

More on collaboration

Our team met recently via Elluminate to discuss the Project presentation for Converge 10.
Our content for this had come together seriously quickly due in no small part to use of a web based collaborative word processing tool (in our case Google Docs).

Looking back on what we had written, we agreed there was a need to shift the focus of the presentation to some extent, away from emphasis on the platform for our resource Libguides, to look more closely at the avatar element of our guide as well as the software used to make it, CodeBaby. This meant considerable reorganisation of times and people's roles in the presentation itself, a re-write of our original plan.

At GippsTAFE, the library team uses Google Docs regularly for collaboratively developing reports, research, meeting agendas and (soon) policy. So I am pretty familiar with seeing how a document builds and changes.
But this is the first time I have collaborated on a document during a meeting. In one intense 45 minutes, changes flitted all over the document, sentences gone and new ones unfolding, times and names changing and then changing again. I could see who was entering what data, so knew who to direct questions to.
By meeting end, the rewrite was done and agreed on. Fantastic!

We liked this so much we are going to try developing slides for the presentation in the same way.

CodeBaby

CodeBaby is a program that allows you to create an animated online character that can be combined with a recorded message. The program automatically synchronises the character's lips with the audio and adds hand and body movements to create an engaging, life like presentation. Check out the CodeBaby web site for more details.

CodeBaby is the tool that we are using to create the avatar for this project. Yesterday I spent some time with Dale, our multimedia creator, to talk about his experiences with this program. Here are some of his comments:

• Ensure you do your initial recording in a quiet place, If there is any background noise in your recording the avatar's lips will be synchronised to that as well as your voice.
• The automatically synchronised gestures are a good start but you may need to tinker with these especially in longer sequences as sometimes the gestures that are used may not be appropriate to what is being said. For example in one gesture the avatar points emphatically which looks silly at an inappropriate place.
• You may need to add more head movements to give the avatar a more natural look.
• The gestures the avatar makes are limited, for instance it cannot point upwards.
• The resulting file can be exported from CodeBaby as a flash movie file which allows it to be incorporated into another flash object or as a stand alone .swf file.
• If you are incorporating it into another flash animation take care not to make the project run for too long or the various parts may get out of time. 60 seconds is considered to be a long animation so consider breaking your project up into smaller parts.

There are various options to choose from when you create an avatar in CodeBaby. You can choose male or female, there are several faces to choose for each gender and different clothes to provide options for a range of situations.

On collaborative blogging

At a recent gathering of the project team there was a recognition that our project blog had not “taken off” quite as well as we had expected.

Why hadn’t it become a steady stream of chatter and reflection about our progress? Certainly there has been lots of activity and plenty to talk about.

Perhaps we assumed that once a blog was created and we had our accounts that the rest would just follow, especially since we are all active in online forums in one way or another, including other blogs and Twitter.

We agreed that early on we probably should have set some guidelines for blogging to help create a habit and get contributors comfortable in this particular space. At least initially, we might have been wise to have structured in:
• a minimum of when we would post, and how often
• a regular, agreed topic and a rough outline of the content
• allocated the task to a specific team member and then rotated the role
• one person as blog “driver”, reminding us to post, suggesting ideas for content and generally encouraging. I know that our library work team blog, in its early stages needed a driving blogger (even now it wanes and needs a return to that strategy)
• commenting on each others posts

These strategies might help overcome any personal apprehension that your post is not striking the right kind of “voice” for the group. How do I know that is a problem? Well even know I am considering checking with the team that this post is OK.

I won’t. But I will ask them to comment :)

Rollover Buttons

I have been experimenting with adding rollover buttons to our APA guide as a way of highlighting the icons we are using to start up the avatar. We wanted a second image with a message added to appear when the user pointed to the icon.

After setting this up in DreamWeaver I cut and pasted the HTML code which used some Java script into the libguide. Initially this worked well and looked great. However as soon as I started adding more rollovers there were problems. It was not until Jo put two rollovers in boxes side by side she discovered that they seemed to be connected in someway. When she put her mouse over the second icon the rollover image appeared only on the first icon. Crazy but true!!!

My understanding of HTML code and Java script is limited so we are getting around this by only using one rollover image per page at this stage. This highlights the difficulty of using the libguides where we do not have so much control as in a regular webpage.