Moderated success

No. of sessions agreed to moderate: 4 (good); No. of sessions actually moderated: 3 (bad)

Wrote this post a week ago and then forgot to post. Is about Virtual Worlds conference which is History now, but am loathe to waste some writing. Also reading through realise it sounds as though conference was bit disasterous whereas (will hasten to add) was mostly fine and even good. Really it was.
Anyway.

Somewhat belatedly, am continuing tale of moderating at the Virtual Worlds conference. Was, as they say, one of Pride Before Fall. Had felt rather pleased with moderation at Friday's events, and rashly agreed to do 4 more sessions next day. However, failed on 3 counts, namely:
1) Did not manage to find out SL name of first speaker on day before;
2) Did not check that knew how to get to first venue;
3) Did not allow enough time on day to establish 1) and 2).
Thus found self at point when was supposed to be starting session lacking both speaker and venue. Did have tiny bit of excuse in that would have been v. helpful to have been given SL name of speaker rather than first life one (since various googlings turned up a blank), and also would have helped if landmark for venue had actually landed one IN said venue rather than considerable distance away.

However, was generally mortifying. Encountered one equally baffled punter at the teleport point, and said would contact him if found speaker/venue. Then TPed to anywhere in area that had green dots (since dots mean People). When eventually found my session, was already 10 past the hour (and person had offered to help was already in audience, so doubly embarrassing).

Apologised profusely to speaker afterwards (1st pic) and did manage to help 2 people in audience with sound and general info. Anyway, after this things could only look up, and connected with other 3 speakers in good time. Last of my sessions, on Open Wonderland, really moderated itself, since was team of people who were fielding questions in text chat.

In between had attended keynote of colleague Jackie, which thought was v. good. Afterwards went to last few sessions, including Zana talking about Conne River project (2nd pic) and Graham talking about Opensim (3rd pic). Also v. good. Pleased to see Kattan in audience. After that she visited cat and took picture 2 posts ago.

Had look round exhibition, well in fact was mostly amusing excursion round exhibition since discovered flying thing on Virtual Pioneers stand, and spent most of my time zooming round it in this, rather than contemplating pedagogic virtues of exhibits. Here is a celebratory animoto about VWBPE that I did.

Sort of ready .. but is SL?

No of slides uploaded into SL: 44 (bad, probably); No. of notecards created: 1 (good); No. of hours in advance that set up ppt etc inworld: 3 (v. good); amount of access to island where am supposed to be giving talk: zero (v.v. bad)
Have spent long time putting together ppt, putting text into notecard, adding links etc, loading notecard into poster, uploading ppt to Slideshare and setting whole thing up in SL conference room on ISTE.
Started to try trick recommended by Sirexkat, namely creating a little object for each ppt texture, so that by the time you came to that slide people's computers would have already picked up teh texture. Neat, but it was taking *** ages to produce them and afraid gave up after the first 8.

Anyway was feeling moderately hopeful despite earlier pear-shapedness of some technical things, namely that streaming inworld didn't seem to work properly, one key speaker couldn't get inworld and had to postpone and I couldn't get into one of the venues. Hey, that's SL. Also felt it was pity that was manifesting only as cloud of vapour (so presumably people with earlier viewers were seeing hideous Ruth avatar), considering amount of time planning wardrobe. All that cute pinkness and purple, and all one can see is mist.

However became not inconsiderably concerned when realised that all efforts to get onto ISTE islands, any of them, were failing. ISTE as in, where am supposed to present. Decided to do something constructive, so set up ppt etc. on Infolit as could get there no trouble and presumably so could others. IMed one of organisers who confirmed that ISTE 1 had gone missing. Not something that happens in RL unless is some sudden natural disaster or you find self in middle of Dr Who episode.

Anyway am now out of world in sanguine mood. Organiser seemed to have preference for me moving to another set up venue elsewhere, but frankly would prefer to be on home ground. Hey Ho.

Before got into WTF mode I did manage to drop in on Baldric Commons talking about some quests. Interesting. Attention was caught by one about the Giant's Causeway in N. Ireland (I've been there! one might appropriately say that it rocks) where people have to find the salmon of knowledge. I can think of a few people who could do with finding that. Students have to take their pic with the salmon when they find it, to put in teh Hall of Heroes, and the overall goal is to increase interest in the English texts (Baldric is with the British Counil in Barcelona). There was also a time travel quest, in which scenes are set up which have anachronistic objects and people have to identify which ones they are.

In fact this session is only one have actually managed to follow so far apart from hearing some of the Lindens opening speech via the web. What will the next few hours bring? Who knows. By that time there probably won't be an audience left.

Virtual Worlds: Libraries, Education, Museums : Part 3

This is the third report from the Virtual Worlds: Libraries, Education, Museums conference that took place in Second Life on 8 March 2008. I will summarise the remaining sessions I attended (I am pictured, right). For the 3rd parallel session I dipped briefly into Applying Distance Educational Theory to Virtual Worlds presented by Rebecca Hedreen (Library Coordinator for Distance Learning, Southern Connecticut University; Spiral Mandelbrot in SL). I realised after a little while that, although useful, it was not really new stuff to me. However, you may be interested in her website at http://delibrarian.googlepages.com/presentations

I was a little delayed finding an alternative session, since my 2nd choice had been cancelled, as the presenter hadn’t managed to get online: one of the hazards of a SL conference. My final choice was a session on options for young people, Virtual Worlds for Children presented by Fleet Goldenberg. He was giving the pros and cons of various virtual world s such as There, Whyville and Furcadia. The advantage that the SL teen grid has over most of these is the opportunity for original content creation, but each has their advantages.
One of the trends that Fleet saw was "Cross-compatibility of avatars between different platforms, enabling the creation of a true '3D Internet' of interlinked worlds that are linked seamlessly with the traditional 2D World Wide Web.” He also mentioned the use of virtual worlds in home schooling: not something you get much in the UK, but I think it is more common in the USA. Fleet finished by saying "In the meantime, LEM [Librarian, Educator and Museum] professionals ask only this: “Give us the tools and we will give you the world”. Some of those professionals are unwilling to passively wait for the tools they need right now to bring their ideas to life and are leading the way in designing them themselves or campaigning for their production."

Discussion afterwards focused on issues such as monitoring of access by adults and the impact of commercial interests (using virtual worlds to influence children’s “pester power” – trying to get them to want to buy things). Fleet gave out a link to his website with material, including videos, on virtual worlds: http://www.squirrelverse.com/links.html#demonstration

After this session there was a three hour break: rather irritating for me since it meant that the next session started at midnight! The first event was a “buzz” session with discussion around the kind of support that librarians wanted to give to learners and educators, and what they would like to see themselves in SL. Different perspectives emerged: with some interested in bringing in external resources, some in “standards”, some in more exploration of the affordances of SL. Personally I think it is valuable to exploit the skills of the library and information professional, focusing more on these rather than on “the library” and its RL resources. The chat transcript of this session is at http://sleeds.org/chatlog/?c=238

After this there were shorter presentations from Christi Confetti Higgins (Sun Microsystems: Violet Portola in SL; it says in her profile "I am a librarian at Sun Microsystems managing the digital library program."), Doug McDavid (Doug Mandelbrot in SL, who works in IBM), and Tom Peters (Maxito Ricardo in SL). It

I think Violet was one of the people who talked about 2008 as the year of virtual worlds. She felt that in SL relationships (with customers/ potential customers) developed more quickly. There are regular meetings within SL for Sun employees - instead of using conference calls, for example. They apparently have replicas of products in their buildings and librarians are included in staffing the Sun island, to greet and answer questions. There are going to be Digital libraries and research events in SL for employees. She said a little bit about Sun's own virtual world, Wonderland. It has a Java 3D based graphics engine an is open source, so can be downloaded from the Sun website. Relevant web addresses are: http://blogs.sun.com/vw/, https://lg3d-wonderland.dev.java.net/ and http://research.sun.com/projects/mpk20/

The final session before I left with my eyes drooping (at 3am) was a discussion about self-directed learning in Second Life, facilitated by Corwin Carillon. Apart from being interested in the topic, I was also attracted by the format: any more powerpoint and I would not have remained conscious. The chat transcript of this is at http://sleeds.org/chatlog/?c=239, though as some of this was in Voice (I was using Voice a lot of the time in this part) the transcript is rather enigmatic. One of the things that it made me reflect on were the varying terms that are used – particularly when talking to educators outside the UK – to mean similar sorts of things. Interesting to thinking about what “self-directed” really means. Issues to do with planning, supporting and student reaction were discussed. After this, I flew homewards and logged off, reluctantly missing some interesting sessions later on.

Libraries, Education, Museums conference: 1

This is the first post on the Virtual Worlds: Libraries, Education, Museums conference that took place in Second Life on 8 March 2008, mostly in the NMC conference Centre. In this post I cover the introductory session, and one on a SL class with Chinese and US students.
This event was attended by about 80 avatars. It consisted for the most part of PowerPoint presentations, although there were a couple of interesting exceptions. The opening session was Virtual Worlds: Libraries, Education, Museums, and More from Barbara Galik (Puglet Dancer in SL) and Kitty Pope (Kitty Phillip in SL).
Kitty celebrated it as the first library conference in SL. I will comment here that the conference was more focused on librarians than educators though some educators (like me) were attending or presented. Kitty highlighted library developments in SL: starting with the huge growth of librarians and info islands since the start. She gave some stats (e.g. the thousands of queries answered last year).

One of her messages was that "Collaboration is not just key but king" and she talked about collaborations with organisations and individual librarians. She mentioned the courses in virtual librarianship which are run, and felt we should be aiming to have classes on virtual librarianship as core in information and library school curricula. My comment here would have been that perhaps virtual librarianship should, in the end, permeate the whole curriculum, coming into various classes. However, as with other innovations, it may need a class of its own to start with. Of course, in the UK we only have one year for our Masters programmes, so getting something into the core curriculum is trickier than in those countries (the majority) where Masters programmes last 2 years. We are making a start with introducing SL at Sheffield this year, although more as a learning environment than a site for virtual librarianship at the moment.

Puglet Dancer when on to talk about the practical issues to do with ongoing funding of the Info islands, in particular the recurrent tier (rental) charges. They wanted to create an endowment for sustainability. Secondly they would like to be able to pay some of the volunteers. Thirdly they want to develop networking more widely - reaching out to (I think) more types of library.

Other challenges or necessary developments for SL itself included the need for a simplified introduction or interface to SL, plus the need to support larger groups. I think the latter point is an interesting one: on the one hand it is certainly necessary to make it possible to have more gathered together in one spot. On the other hand it would be a pity if this meant a move towards the ineffective large-group training sessions that you sometimes have in Real Life (400 students penned in for induction etc).

It was nice that the affective reasons for being in SL were mentioned too: "Avatars are inquisitive and they like to have fun!"
This opening session took place in the Babbage Auditorium in the New Media Consortium conference centre. One interesting thing was that the speakers were using voice, but someone was summarising in chat as they went along. I was thinking that this is something that would normally be seen as "special" for the hearing impaired, but here was being done more generally (also) to help those who weren't voice enabled.
There were then parallel sessions. I firstly went to "Preparing U.S. and Chinese Students for Collaborative Activities in Second Life" Presented by Leaunda Hemphill and Hoyet Hemphill, who are faculty in the Instructional Design and Technology Department at Western Illinois University, USA. I went along as we have a good number of Chinese students on our courses (Sheffield University, Department of Information Studies), especially in our Masters programmes. As a Department we are concerned generally about improving the experience of our international students, and also I have had some international students in my SL sessions.

The two presenters explained how they have been teaching a class of mixed Chinese and US students for the past two years. The focus of studuy is "technology integration issues and professional development of (school) teachers". Thus there were professional development aspects for the students and also the objective was that they could use these skills in helping their own students (schoolchildren) to collaborate using technology. The students were in the US (4 students, working full time whilst they studies) and in Northern China (12 students). They met with the Chinese students twice for 2 hour sessions in SL. The local (US or Chinese) faculty provide support in terms of providing extra materials, advice etc and Chinese students had some additional material in Chinese.
Part of the class this year is an activity where students investigate professional development opportunities and have to share their observations via a wiki, and Second Life is one of the professional development opportunities for study. They had used Moodle and Elluminate (conferencing) software previously – they decided this year to concentrate on the wiki and SL.
There were two two-hour sessions in SL. The 12 Chinese students had them together in a lab (which is what I have done in induction for my students), whereas the US students had inductions one-to-one. The SL sessions covered "1) introducing Second Life; 2) traveling in Second Life as a tourist and then as a student; 3) building in Second Life, and 4) teaching and researching in Second Life."
The speakers gave more information on exactly what activities they did - including orientations in basics such as notecards and movement. They seemed to have a lot of visits and tours including encouraging students to invite each other to locations
Some observations concerning Chinese students:
- They noted the need to be careful with terminology & language.
- They noted how social interactions were important to Chinese students in addition to the educational ones. The Chinese students were more interested in the personal aspects - including in interactions with lecturers - than were the US students. This fits in with things that our own international office (at Sheffield University) tell us, as well as observation of our own students. Speakers thought it also might be because the US students were working as well as studying, whereas the Chinese were just studying.

In terms of the sites the students visited "at the end of their introductory activities, they reflected together on what they had learned. What was the purpose of the site? What was its educational value? How could a teacher use these sites in her/his classroom?"

They had discussions about what the interaction was between SL and RL skills e.g. using SL for developing interviewing skills. The feeling was that there were a number of applications for teaching.

One interesting issue that came up was that when they were using Moodle the previous year the 2 groups (US/Chinese) exchanged 500 (!) messages on discussion boards in about one week - talking about various issues. This is (my observation here) in contrast to a tendency in RL to gravitate into national groups.

Bluewave Ogee raised the issue of using SL as a preparation for study abroad, and the speakers said they are going to use it to prep students who are going to Denmark. Also one can see its use in introducing students who are from another country, giving them an introduction in SL before they travel to you to study.