Sony PSP with my digitized fiction and its links staring back at him, and said, "You have GOT to do this with textbooks." In the spring of 2007, two sweeping changes arrived. First, I converted all of the software code for building the book into a single program using the Python language. My friend’s comment inspired a more-advanced version intended for production of e-textbooks. I named it the Knowledge Transfer Tool, or KTT. The KTT uses many of the ELM’s components and its own enhancements and improvements to produce an ELM output that is targeted for textbook learning. The patent filings continued. Then came my introduction to virtual worlds.
Second Stage: Second Life
My avatar in Second Life, Jeddin Laval, had his digital birth on April 15, 2007, fumbling, stumbling, and goofing his way through the learning process of walking, talking, and dressing himself in a virtual world using only a keyboard and a mouse. Jeddin learned how to build objects and how to write programming scripts to animate and activate the things he built. That’s when the fiction I’d been writing and programming started to leak across into Jeddin’s world. Jeddin rented a little shop on Book Island where he could advertise, display, and link to my fiction on my Website. He got himself some virtual land. He began to build a little piece of my fiction’s Underground City. Linden Scripting Language (LSL) enabled me to help visiting avatars interact with the objects in the City model. The avatar could touch a display, and the display would react by presenting chat text or performing some other function. A year after Jeddin’s birth, the ELM and Second Life were connected. During the first year in Second Life with Jeddin, the work on the ELM software raced ahead. I tried to find potential interested supporters for what I was doing, and that’s when my naiveté about promotion became all too clear. Over the course of the year, I wrote, tested, and selected more components for the product, throwing out or deferring many in the process. Working alone has its upside, but task-switching and hat-swapping get old after a while. A year passed, Jeddin grew wiser and more able, and the next stage began.
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