Collaboration

Another serious sort of posting. "This was presented at the European Business School Librarians Group conference, Ashridge Management College, May 2009 by Sheila Webber (my RL alt), Department of Information Studies, University of Sheffield, UK, s.webber@sheffield.ac.uk In the presentation she illustrates ways in which Second Life is being used for collaboration and networking, particularly by librarians and by business schools."

Collaborating in Second Life

View more presentations from sheilawebber.

And yet more

Discussion session held in SL: 1 (good); Student events attended in SL: 2 (good); UK academics' fashion show missed: 1 (bad)

Today's discussion on Infolit iSchool featured Testy Outlander talking about her research, which was investigating the info habits of 5 SL residents. Quite a good no. of people again, in fact I even had to augment the seating with some further Nice Brown Chairs. Testy's research blog is at http://librariandreamer.wordpress.com/. The transcript or chatlog of the session is online at http://sleeds.org/chatlog/?c=286

Am wondering about having a shopping event (i.e. lets go do free shopping together) after next session - see what response is). Should actually be finishing up notecard on a future conference track that need to consult with various avatars about - but now that am officially a blue-haired babe (see previous post) feel should be jutified in haunting boutiques of SL.
After discussion session, oozed over to the Emerge sim where had been Avatar Identity event involving catwalk display of volunteers. Only discovered this was on today, or would have tried to avoid clash. Could not actually try out catwalk as 2 creators were still there enjoying the disco beat. So looked round sim (some nice features - and great view from the bar).

Had had limited access to SL (and will do again for next few days) so trying to pack a lot in. Yesterday evening went to Ulster University to presentation by student Kerri about her work in virtual classrooms (there were 2, one is pictured) and to Texas Women's University to look at students work. Bumped into North Lamar so could exchange trenchant comments in IM.

Conference, Dancing

Workshops completed: 1 (good); Librarians carried on virtual bus tour: 16 (good); conference discos attended in RL: 1 (tiring)

Have completed 2nd workshop at LILAC conference. Seemed to go fairly well, and had extra time so was able to fit in tour of island. This was using Mystihud device where you can create chairs which follow you around (in fact can specify that they follow around anyone in vicinity so envisage some merriment in attaching sets of follow-chairs to unsuspecting friends).

Tour guide effect was heightened by fact that Pam, Ishbel and I were carrying lilac umbrellas so that could be readily identified by delegates. Anyway did indeed feel like guided tour as zoomed along towing rows of seats, and only had one real glitch when initially pressed PAGE UP when meant to press PAGE DOWN so almost got lost in stratosphere right at the start. Much jocular talk from passengers of feeling sick, can imagine might feel a bit odd. Though of course when new to SL this is probably just one more piece of oddness.

Was helped by PG student Alane inworld and was only after session was over that realised that hadn’t actually communicated to him fact that had ended. Hopefully disappearance of avatars signalled end but still was rather rude and hope has not soured good staff-student relationships etc. etc.
In session itself had usual issues of box opening, wearing carpets etc. and because of proliferation of conference boxes on ground at one point wasted some time trying to get delegate to copy someone else’s box, felt v. stupid.
At end of day lots more people signed up to Information Literacy Group, hurrah, and have promised to organise more events.

RL conference dinner on previous evening held in Liverpool City Halls, v. grand. As usual included disco after dinner and enjoyed disporting in party frock. Various pros and cons to RL vs. SL dancing.
Pros of RL dancing:
- exercising, therefore healthy;
- general enjoyment of bopping around to beat;
- can make whatever movements you want, within physical limitations, thus expressing individual creativity.
Cons of RL dancing;
- get tired when have been dancing for – well, for not very long, really;
- feet start hurting unless wearing v. sensible shoes;
- cannot adjust volume;
- no dancing and drinking at same time;
- spontaneous synchronised group dancing impossibility unless happen to REALLY be in film version of your own life.

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.

Virtual Worlds: Libraries, Education, Museums : 2

This is the second 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.
The next parallel session I chose was Whatcha Gonna Do?: An Academic Health Sciences Library in Second Life Embraces New Roles Presented by PF Anderson (Perplexity Peccable in SL); the paper was coauthored with Gillian Mayman (Gillian Oh in SL); Anne Perorazio (Kaiya Qunha in SL); and Jane Blumenthal (Wrenaissance Jewell in SL)
The whole presentation is up online at http://wwww.slideshare.net/umhealthscienceslibraries/ It has loads of slides and I think you can follow some of the main points, so I won't go over all the presentation. I did find it very interesting to see this example of how the services have developed in response to the nature of Second Life and users' interests - and to the opportunities offered.

The island (Wolverine Island) was bought by University of Michigan Medical School in Spring 2007 and students were introduced from September 2007. The island is closed to outsiders. In Summer 2007 the librarians were gaining basic skills and exploring science, health, library and education locations. However, there were a lot of technical problems, and some gave up in frustration. In addition one person had problems with a griefer and never returned to SL.

At one point before launch the team had to put together a video very quickly to help persuade senior officers, and the speakers found this ultimately a positive experience. Perplexity said "What this told me was how EMPOWERING Second Life is. That a real batch of noobs could do this just blew my mind." This video is at http://youtube.com/watch?v=EfsSGBraUhc

From September 2007 they helped out with an optional module and then had weekly brown bag sessions: SLUM - Second Life at the University of Michigan. These sounded very interesting – speakers, discussions, tours, freebie swaps and so forth. They had RL meetings when the brown bags started and email and blog were important as part of communications strategy.

They also mentioned that they have a larger proportion of distance learners participating in SL compared with the RL proportion of the population. This makes it sound useful for this purpose: keeping in touch with remote learners. They have a (private) wiki, which people asked for. Acadamics are the biggest group of users of the library in SL, however.

They went on to talk specifically about the library: the original very traditional plan had been replaced by aan open building without a roof. There were some RL activities that were unfeasible or didn't make sense in SL. However, instruction; liaison; resouce guides and troubleshooting seemed useful things in SL as well as RL.

They said how they used "vendors" (used by shops) for exhibits in the library; namely the Eatavend system. They "sell" freebies of various kinds, like shirts, food, gestures, and features of the library include game days, patient supprt group, parties, a "spirit" shop and Perplexity noted that "the LIBRARY is the current designated designer of offical UM sports wear for Second Life"! Altogether they were using new skills and going into new and unexpected areas (scripting, world tours, teaching in your (SL) underwear!). They were reaching new people as well, by the sound of it. Perplexity said "Getting a presence with the community was what has paid off the most Just BEING THERE". I have noted how useful collaboration and partinership are, and perplexity said that "No man is an island - especially in SL".

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.

Fat, creepy

Talks given about Second Life: 1 (good); Number of expensive multicoloured shawls bought in RL because of all this talk in SL about "cosy woollens" and "fall colours": 1 (bad); Pounds added to weight when viewed on wide screen: 20 (v.v. bad).

Last week travelled in RL to Germany to give talk at info literacy conference. V. nice conference in Konstanz, lake views, fine chocolate, twisty old-fashioned streets, hearty stews etc. also could show off German language skills (though conf actually in English). Was mainly talking about activity in postgrad class but also spent 10 mins on SL with demo. ppt is here

In fact had not thought would have access so got v.v. excited when saw could go inworld. However excitement turned to horror as saw how enormous bum and all other portions of anatomy look on wide screen computer. Even stick-thin avatars must look plump. Not sure what is to be done except to start campaign against wide screens on grounds that will cause emotional stress to avatars.

Discussion after talk took emotional turn. Someone said that she found SL creepy and she did not seem to be only one. Not sure whether she realised that implied that *I* was creepy but at any event was somewhat unsettling. One question was how students could tell was my avatar and not some raging pervert out to lure innocents into debauched activities (I paraphrase). This has simple answer since had stood in class with students and said "Look, that's my avatar".


Sure that can't be creepy since:


1) Do healthy things like landscape gardening and shopping;
2) Do not wear skimpy clothing;
3) Am not creepy person.

Hmmmmmmm not sure that would convince jury.

Have included pics showing avatar looking slim and, I hope, not creepy, at the Baden-Baden-Wuerttemberg sim which includes a Universitity of Konstanz buidling and the appealing Literatur Cafe.