Wonderland 0.4 – Demo video

What to notice
It’s helpful to understand that Wonderland has been envisioned as a platform for working/collaboration across distance. It provides a more immersive experience than you could achieve with current available technologies such as video and phone conferencing, web-conferencing and chats.

Two things to consider in a virtual environment are its capacity to facilitate users achieving specific tasks alone and together and its effectiveness at compensating for the missing sensory and contextual information we take for granted when we’re face to face.

The first point is not difficult to address. We call it task analysis, which means you break down a task into small components (sub-tasks) in order to understand how to design learning it. It gets tricky when you must also consider sensory and contextual information needed. We easily recognize the barriers to learning created by a classroom with fixed seating, inadequate lighting or instructional equipment, the same holds true in a virtual environment. Most of use use classrooms, we don’t build them. And we may walk into a technologically sophisticated room like our Learning Research Studio and have to learn how to use it technically and pedagogically.

So lots of things to think about.

Watch this video and you’ll see how Wonderland developers are designing for accomplishing specific tasks as well as compensating for missing sensory and contextual information. For example, when an avatar is speaking his body gestures and his name title (above his head) pulsates. This facilitates verbal communication and compensates for some of the visual information we have when we talk to people face to face. What else?

Suzanne

It’s Wonderland & the pICTsl Farm for Faculty Development

When one thing leads to another, you have to go with it. Human resource challenges and our general consensus that AW is rather last year’s VW model, and Wonderland is potentially tomorrow’s model, we’ve made some decisions.

I’ll continue participating in the Wonderland/Immersive Education development community as a user and potential content builder. Cathy (Mari) will likely start snooping around there too.

Jon Rizzo (ITS), who’s becoming conversant with SL building and likes to play, has got a parcel on the Farm to play on in his free time (if the surf isn’t up :) ).

We’re brainstorming on the design and content of a faculty development “outpost” at the pICTsl Farm. (We may call it something else).

In keeping with the initiatives goals, on top of the trends, and aware of our institutional readiness to accommodate vw technologies, we’re going to continue to provide faculty development in this domain and wait and see otherwise.

The faculty development outpost, or (maybe we’ll call it a barn) will be the only one of its kind in SL. Our emphasis is on using SL to introduce faculty to being and working in an avatar-based, 3D environment.

This parallels other work we’re doing with the Library, ITS and CTL, introducing faculty to social software. The main difference is that while web 2.0 seems to have reached its tipping point, web 3.0 is still “out there” for most folks.

I don’t see an avatarized version of psych 101 in the near future.

~~Suzanne