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Dan Holt’s Advice for First-Time SL Teachers

Saturday, February 6th, 2010

Location: My SL Office

I recently sat down with Dan Holt (Sl: Profdan Netizen) of Lansing Community College to discuss his first term of teaching writing with SL (Fall 2009).

Dan’s an experience teacher for both creative writing & composition (academic writing–a better name–for my U.K. readers).

We had a wide-ranging discussion and I learned a great deal; Dan avoided some of the errors I made my first term, in 2007, in a similar course! Notably, he spent time in-world before bringing in a class of students.

Here are some notable points from the transcript of the interview:

Work with students throughout the orientation and first hours
Educate yourself and administrators before going in-world with students
Anticipate resistance from administrators who think online courses should be primarily asynchronous
Find a key ally (as I did at Richmond)
Exploit SL’s low overhead costs. These make it attractive for hybrid and online courses at community colleges
Address concerns about SL’s content and “addiction.” First to Dan (and me), fears bout SL are no different from concerns about the Web in the 90s. Second, showing off good educational uses and content of the world can convince some doubters
Find colleagues. Dan has had a little more success than I have recruiting other faculty. I attribute this to the different environments: Richmond’s publish-or-perish pressure can be a disincentive for tenure-stream faculty to experiment with technologies
Measure your class against others not using SL. Dan’s students did a little better in a comparative assessment.

I look forward to talking to other teachers about their first semesters in SL. The complete transcript of Dan’s and my chat can be found here .

Tags: education, pedagogy
Posted in education, how 2, pedagogy, students | No Comments »

Bot Technology In Second Life For Medical Training

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

Location: Waiting Room

I’m impressed with this YouTube video, done my my SL Roundtable colleague Kali Pizzaro. “Colin,” the bot shown, can reply to simple text-chat questions, and as this technology develops, it could provide a good training simulation for medical professionals.

Kali’s original post on this notes how the test demonstrates “our work on connecting “Second Life” avatar-patient-bots with specially written AIML [artificial intelligence markup language] and speech synthesis software. Hopefully we’ll add speech recognition too.”

Tags: bots, education, medicine
Posted in education, medicine, news | No Comments »

News from Rezzable: Steamfish, Stonehenge, and Beyond

Saturday, October 10th, 2009

Location: Second Life® Education Roundtable (picture by Ponderosafish at Olivia Hotshot’s Flickr site for the group)

During our last Roundtable meeting, Jon Himoff of Rezzable covered a lot of ground. I’ve pulled out some call-out points from his talk:

Call-out Points:

Next Steps: Following the work pioneered in King Tut Virtual Experience , Rezzable has developed Stonehenge Virtual and a Victorian-themed game, Steamfish, a race against time for players as a population contracts a new disease.
Second Life: Rezzable ended most of its work in SL because of the expense and lack of responsiveness from Linden Lab to their needs. At one time they ran 40 sims in SL; Himoff noted that 20 of them, however, were “abandoned” projects.
Greenies remains a playground, pure and simple, but the new ventures for Rezzable seek to something different, a educational experience that museums seem unwilling to try.
Reception by Museums: Major museums, in fact, appear to have an institutional culture at odds with projects like Heritage Key. Himoff did praise the British Museum for allowing Rezzable access to their collection. Smaller museums have shown more interest in the project. (update Oct. 12: Himoff added in an e-mail that he’s “not sure we are that much against the Museums, [but we are instead] trying to add value to them by providing context and engagement outside their walls.”)
Rezzable’s Mission: The company does not see itself as a service provider per se, but “as a content creator for virtual experience” in a variety of media online: 2D Web and Open Sim builds, these days.
Why Antiquity? The historical emphasis comes from Himoff’s passion for Antiquity as well as his belief that real sites and guidebooks don’t provide much guidance. As he notes, “you don’t understand what you’re looking at; you can get a tour from a guide or read a book but not a sense of the original creation of it.”
Why Antiquity Online? A Heritage Key site, like the King Tut Virtual Experience and Stonehenge Virtual, will allow visitors to do things to enhance a real-life visit, such as reconstruct what might have been at the site in Antiquity or interact with artifacts in ways not possible at the actual site.
Builderbot: The controversial Builderbot tool now exists as a resource for builders to port their content from one world to another. Its future is uncertain, “since we’re focused on Heritage Key it’s hard to allocate resources to maintain the tool.”
Investors are backing the Heritage Key and other Rezzable projects. Himoff seeks new ways to monetize the experience through premium-level resources.
Content at Rezzable: Professional journalists write the Heritage Key copy, and the projects are assisted by professional archeologists such as Zahi Hawass http://www.drhawass.com/
Copyright: Educators may use HK materials in their projects, since “everything is Creative Commons, [but] we ask people to provide attribution but can pull stuff off our site.”

The complete transcript of our meeting is now online. Happy reading!

Tags: education, kingtut, Rezzable, Tut
Posted in education, news | No Comments »

Thinking About UT and Second Life

Saturday, September 26th, 2009

Location: In the Throes of Campus-Envy

When Pathfinder Linden announced that the University of Texas system would, in a year-long project, be bringing all 16 of its campuses into Second Life, a turning point occurred in the history of virtual worlds. Pathfinder and Dr. Leslie Jarmon (SL: Bluewave Ogee) are shown above (image cribbed from the Linden Lab blog).

Pathfinder’s interview with Jarmon has a few points of real import for educators using virtual worlds. Jarmon notes what SL provides:

[I]t’s what I’ve called an embodied rapid collaboration platform, providing researchers, instructors, students, staff, and administrators access to one another in very new ways across geo-spatial and brick and mortar boundaries. Second Life itself is an open-ended complex learning system, with massive user created content, continuously moving the horizon of what known or understood. Finally, and powerfully, Second Life gives educators and students the developers tools, thereby making Second Life a tool-making tool itself. It has inherent robustness.

Perhaps my recent post about increased stability in SL is not merely personal perspective. I will be watching the UT experiment to see how students with laptops fare in SL, as well as how admins react. Many of them have only heard two-year-old press about lack of scalability and rampant adult content.

Yet Jarmon must have anticipated just such pushback. He salutes the ” foresight and boldness on the part of the Chancellors,” and that may carry the day during this experiment. I’m also encouraged by the systematic approach at the UT system. With IRB involvement, as well as campus leads meeting to plan for the development of their archipelago in SL, it’s a good guess that faculty development will be happening for classes, activities, and student-orientation.

If those pieces are in place, the outlook is strong for UT’s experiment. It’s a far cry for the gold-rush days of 2006 and early 2007.

Tags: administration, education
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Case Study from Loyalist College

Saturday, July 18th, 2009

Location: Linden Lab Blog

At our most recent SLER discussion, participants noted how many colleagues and senior administrators ask for case studies when wondering how effective virtual worlds are for education.

Linden Lab trotted out this post July 10, and since I don’t keep up with their blog on a regular basis, I missed it. Have a look at “Virtual World Simulation Training Prepares Real Guards on the US-Canadian Border: Loyalist College in Second Life.”

Dealing with Skeptics on Campus

Friday, July 17th, 2009

Location: SLER weekly Roundtable

Poor AJ Brooks! Our intrepid moderator had a raucous crowd on hand for the discussion of “Non-VW issues” last night. These should have included staff management, budgeting, project-planning, and so forth.

The moon was not full, but it might as well have been. AJ had a chatty and chaotic group of around 40 of us, and we resolutely stayed off-topic until near the end. Some excellent discussion did emerge (I’m combing through our transcript now). A major bone of contention (a fine metaphor, that) was how to convince campus skeptics about SL’s value. These ideas emerged from the swamp of discourse:

Objections to SL are not limited to “SL means sex.” See an old post here for more on that! Faculty may see it as merely a “game,” as too complex to invest their time, as only for distance education
My Scottish bud Kali, who works heavily with Blackboard, noted that the popular course-management system went through the same process of gaining credibility. Other participants noted how the Web itself, even e-mail, had a bumpy start with faculty and admins
The “SL is dying” meme hurts adoption. I suggested that the skeptics look at Tateru Nino’s figures at Massively, where she runs regular updates about usage of SL. I also pointed folks to this site by Virtual World Watch. Kali recommends a study (PDF format) done in the UK about investing in virtual worlds for higher ed
The urge to evangelize when we enjoy a technology hurts. As Kimbeau Surveryor put it, “I learned that VW evangelism is worse than being a door-to-door Christian.” Instead, several participants wanted to have case studies in hand to show how SL has helped with learning outcomes. I think I’d point skeptics to the project that Profesora Farigoule’s students completed, combining architecture and social change or other work that could not be done as cheaply (or at all) on the other side of the screen. By the way, I’d show colleagues the work on the flat Web first, before taking them in-world, even “over my shoulder.” That way, they see the potential in a format they respect, and not in something game-like.

Comment of the week goes to CathyWyo1 Haystack:

those who have the most success with using sl are enthusiastic with their students and encourage fun at the same time as learning.

Update for July 17: The entire transcript can be found here.

Thanks to everyone who participated.

Tags: administration, education, SLER
Posted in education, how 2 | No Comments »

Students Online: Their Engaged is Not Our Engaged

Monday, June 15th, 2009

Location: Montclair State University Virtual Campus

Photo Courtesy of Olivia Hotshot

We faculty who teach with technology claim we can multitask. Yet there is a bigger question: can anyone really do that? And what does “engaged in learning” mean to the Millennials we now teach?

I went to the June 2 Second Life Education Roundtable with those questions in my head, after hearing our topic from organizer AJ Brooks. AJ pulled off a coup by bringing Harry Pence, (SL: John2 Kepler) to a voice-chat meeting where Harry discussed his ideas and took questions from the audience.

Points worth noting:

Harry defines engagement as involving “being focused on the matter at hand”
We tended, as a group, to dismiss the idea that our minds can really multitask. Harry noted reading in Howard Rheingold’s blog about two types of attention, “multitasking” and “continuous partial attention” (Visit Rheingold’s entry on attention, as well as higher-level links to his Video Blog and his Web site).
Harry has never had a college student say “that’s too much” when he presents using voice and screen, but older audiences often get lost.
His college students agree with him when he says that their younger siblings are truly fluent with networked technologies and will replace them in the workforce.
AJ Brooks made a salient point I have often found true with my students: they are adept at using but not understanding the technologies. Iggy’s examples from his students: how few reallly can solve problems that require alpahnumeric fixes (such as tweaking source-code) or making proper back-ups or hardware hacks that come naturally to old geezers like me who can work on their own cars and build stuff with tools.
KZero’s diagram of Virtual Worlds by age of users, Q4 2008: http://www.kzero.co.uk/blog/?page_id=2563 shows SL with a smaller, and older, demographic than many of the virtual worlds younger Millennials are using now. The open question remains whether or not they’ll take to SL or something like it, with user-generated content, when they get older.
We noted how many of the worlds younger users encounter do not permit creation of new content. CathyWyo1 Haystack then asked, “do we want a generation of kids who are passively engaged or actively involved in the creation of their space?”
We all grew concerned about a generation “taught to the tests” and not encouraged to do as much collaborative learning. Harry noted a class in high school he encountered, where “Principal put them at the end of the hall b/c they were making too much noise and having fun” and making noise.

I’m fond of Rheingold’s maxim that “Mindfulness and norms, my students helped me see, are essential tools for those who would master the arts of attention.”

Can one be mindful of two things at once? Yes. Do them equally well? That I don’t know, but that too is where the norms for my class come in. In fall, if a student is online during class and it’s not course related, the norms are this: first time = warning, second time = “skipped class” in gradebook.

You can read the entire transcript of Harry’s talk here.

Tags: education, Millennials
Posted in Millennials, education, pedagogy, students | No Comments »

King Tut in Second Life: A Teaser

Friday, June 12th, 2009

Location: Kings Rezzable Region

I began my educational review of Rezzable’s Tut creations with Second Life, if only because it does give a preview to the much larger features to be found on the Heritage Key OpenSim grid. Teleport over to the starting point at Kings Rezzable and have a look. What I’ve seen so far is very impressive work.

Some initial observations:

The Starting Point: nicely arranged. It was an excellent idea to have the survey in several places for visitors who do not return to this point. My students will, of course, hop into the balloon. Then they will stand and fall out and try to walk back to the starting point’s platform, which means they’ll fall again, through the desert floor, and plummet thousands of meters, to my great amusement. The balloon should do something if it can be sat in.

Howard Carter’s Camp: Here is an area where my students could have a lot of fun fleshing out the material culture of the world when Tut was discovered. I’d like to know more about the motivations of the archeologists of Carter’s era, as well as those of a wilder earlier period briefly mentioned. Students know these larger-than-life figures through Indiana Jones, so why not give them a diary and some materials about the questionable legal arrangements made to secure some digs? Why not have a hunt for clues to discover Carter’s motivations? What about an assignment over the provenance of many antiquities?
The Mummy’s Curse: Since Carter knew about the legendary “curse,” and Rezzable notes it briefly in the audio here, why not play that up as a way to get students to think and write about the ethics of what the archaeologists were doing?

The Tomb: The artifacts are drop-dead gorgeous, the best primwork I’ve seen in SL. I’d like to know more, however, about their use in ancient times. Could we have notecards that would appear when an object is touched? Again, some beta-testing students might really enjoy developing these for Rezzable. Finally, the step back into the first room will be difficult for a noob.
Room with Wall Paintings: I can see my students playing here, in a writing exercise that asks them to study the images and guess at the meanings before they hear the audio. I like to have students do close image analysis anyhow, so this room would play along nicely with several earlier assignments. The North wall never rezzed for me and the doorway beyond was so short I could not get through it. Should the wall be a phantom texture? Given that the room beyond is empty, that may not be an issue.

My next dispatch will take me to the other parts of the Rezzable build, before I teleport off to OpenSim as “IggyO Heritage” and continue my dispatches. Speaking of…

Coda: Shades of Ozimandius. As I looked over Tut’s tomb, I wondered about the hubris of the Egyptian monarchs–and the occasionally pharaonic ways of Second Life’s makers. Huge costs would be incurred to host half a dozen regions in SL, which Rezzable can easily do on their own grid. My one peek so far into OpenSim confirms that the content there equals what I saw inside SL, and it certainly exceeds it in scope.

Tags: education, Rezzable, Teamtut, Tut
Posted in Teamtut, education | No Comments »

Introducing Team Tut: Rezzable’s Pedagogy in OpenSim and Second Life

Monday, June 8th, 2009

Location: Valley of the Kings

I was honored to get a ping from Hamlet Au at New World Notes, asking if I might meet Rezzable’s CEO, RightAsRain Rimbaud, as he gathers a team of higher-ed faculty and technologists to look at the pedagogical opportunities of the company’s Heritage Key site. The star of this project, as he has been on the other side of the screen, is the boy-king Tutankhamun.

Heritage Key, a Web portal for wonders of the ancient world, includes a virtual experience using OpenSim technology. The Second Life region serves as an showcase of one region, while a much larger virtual OpenSim world is hosted on Rezzable’s servers..

After briefly sending Iggy to SL to meet Rimbaud, we moved to OpenSim, where my avatar, “IggyO Heritage,” looked a lot like Ron Glass from the old Barney Miller sitcom.

IggyO did his best noob duckwalk following Rimbaud’s tour of the regions housing the treasures of Tut’s tomb. We began our tour at a facsimile of Howard Carter’s camp in the Valley of the Kings. Some goals for Team Tut emerged:

Provide feedback from a variety of academic fields.
Note areas where lesson-plans and other materials might work with the Tut exhibits.
Suggest interactive parts such as quests and games for students.

That’s only the beginning. I’ll be sharing my impressions of Rezzable’s efforts here soon. For now, I’ll just say that my first impression was awe. I took in the Tut show two years back, and even that scattering of artifacts opened a window into a world as unlike our own as anything I’ve seen in SL. Now the trick, for Rezzable and Team Tut, will be to find ways to engage easily bored Millennial students with the content.

Rezzable has made some incredible content in Second Life, such as the madly creative Greenies regions. I look forward to taking my class to that, and of course the Tut builds, this fall.