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

Activeworlds here we come

Expanding our exploration of the Metaverse, we’ve got a few green lights and need a few more, before we’re developing a presence in Activeworlds. There are over 110 institutions from around the world in their education  universe. The Educational Universe is an entire Active Worlds Universe dedicated to exploring the educational applications of the Active Worlds Technology.

River City, an NSF funded project with Harvard and Arizona State, uses AW, so I’m very excited to get in there and see what’s cooking. Stay tuned.

Google’s Lively

I downloaded Lively, Google’s avatar-based virtual on my pc last night and poked around a bit. I’ve been reading early reviews in the blogosphere too. Digado said this about his second dip into Lively. One tone is that it’s nothing special, and indeed compared to Second Life, it does lack the creative functionality, technical and aesthetic capacity that make SL so compelling. As it’s been pointed out, it’s a virtual experience not a virtual world, an avatar driven chat room similar to IMVU which has about 2o million users. Not comparing it to SL seems a smart way to go. It has low overhead and low investment. It might actually be a better introduction to avatar-based learning than SL for this reason.

Learning in Virtuality Archived Session

Access the archived Horizon Wimba session go to Blackboard>Course Design Institute>Communications>Live Classrooms>Learning in Virtuality Archive.

[slideshare id=485368&doc=virtua2-1214409150287338-9&w=425]

Learning in Virtualities on June 24

SDSU-DistanceEd-SL

Yesterday’s LAT published a piece about corporate America’s embrace of Second Life. New World Notes’ Wagner James Au, shared some of the back story. Great journalism, it was and what I love about the blogosphere.I added my 2 cents to his post, as I have been here and there, in the Metaverse- YouTube, Twitter,etc. I’m still refining it.

The LAT article is another tidbit to add to my box-o-examples of using SL in courses at SDSU. For now. Change is always afoot.

We’re just starting to go distance-ed at SDSU. Let’s get our footing in the 2D virtual realm first. Let’s get some experience under our belts with the tools we got already. And more importantly let’s start thinking anew about teaching and learning at a distance. It’s a different paradigm, model and set of theories.

It seems that the corporate world has allowed SL to become “official” meeting places for their globally distributed workforces. And why not. It’s outrageously cheap. It’s a new approach. What it offers (small and large scale social events at cool places with cool activities) are simulations of events. I could be mistaken, but I can’t imagine that IBM hosts Aspen ski weekends for it’s middle management in RL (real life). I could be wrong.

In any event, without making this more important than it is, three conditions come to mind and make this relevant to SDSU, 1) People cannot get together face to face, 2) People value (enjoyment, connection, etc) entering SL to meet with others.  3) It’s an alternative, not the only way of adding social connection to a distance learning endeavor.

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