More progress from the thesis mines

I'm making progress on the technical side of my research. Getting some information out, at least - I've figured out how to write a plugin module for OpenSim that'll tell me where any user avatars are within a region, along with where the camera's looking. Ideally I'd like to be able to visualise/replay these recordings once they're done so I can see where people have gone and what they've looked at in the virtual environment. I've got screen capture going (with either FRAPS or Camtasia), and I'm hoping to have a Second Life/OpenSim client built shortly that I can then attempt to extract data from on the fly. I think I have promising sources for data mining and visualisation.

Learning how C# works appears to be going better than expected. Visual Studio Express 2008 seems to suck less than I remember Visual Studio sucking, and while there's still a few key bindings that annoy me from time to time it's a lot more pleasant than it used to be. Of course, it also helps that I've got a relatively sane code base to start writing against, and a lot of the things I find myself wanting to be able to do are more or less where I'd naturally expect them to be - or at least easy enough to find.

On the non-technical side, I'm missing the postgrad research conference while I'm away so they've kindly offered to arrange a seminar for me to present my research when I get back. An academic paper I'm writing is coming together well; I've written more volume than I need, but that can edit down and the rest can go into thesis chapters once I've rounded everything out. There's a journal's Call For Papers coming up that I'm thinking I might put in an abstract for, too. I've also got my PhD research proposal due on August 30th, the day before I leave for the U.S. - which effectively means a two week deadline, since I'm not going to be waiting until the last moment to hand important paperwork in then jump on a plane and hope.

The tricky part is in refining my proposal into a solid scientific research question. At the moment I know what I want to do and why it's important, but I'd like to be able to bring it into a concise research question, and set out a pathway for resolving that question. My first step's getting the data, and that's progressing well - but where to from there?

And in case anyone's wondering what I want to do and why it's important: rather than just running on impressions from things like interviews and pre-/post-tests to assess someone's learning, I'd like to be able to gain more of a fine-grained idea of what they're actually experiencing when they use a virtual learning environment. Unlike the real world where sensors are often bulky and observers visible, we have opportunities to understand people's interactions in a minimally-intrusive fashion. Some approaches could be quite general, but others may be strongly coupled with the interactive objects and environments that learners are using, allowing more task-specific conditions to be modelled and understood. There's potential to assess what parts of an interface or interaction are causing difficulty for learners too, and look for ways to address those problems.

Given that we're looking at education and thus research involving live people, there are likely Human Ethics Committee considerations as well. I've already done HEC stuff for my Masters thesis so I know the drill to at least some extent, but I'll need a solid roadmap of what I'm going to do for that paperwork, too.

(Oh, and if you didn't understand the explanation above? Let me know what wasn't clear. If I can't explain what I'm doing clearly to someone who isn't an expert, then I likely don't know it well enough.)

Hmm. Somehow it's past 3a.m. again. I must be sleeping.
*pulls up a cute photo of wolfwitch and one of her furkids to leave on the monitor as he goes to sleep*