pICTsl Farm Update
I haven’t been posting here, not because I haven’t been doing pICTsl Farm related work, but because it’s been more about my dissertation than not and as a result I’ve been posting about that here.
What’s new around the Farm? Well Amy Schmitz Weiss in Journalism and Media Studies, has moved in as a neighbor at Meadowbrook, taking over the space were Camp Comet was. Amy’s interested in exploring SL to bridge the distance gap with a partner school in Mexico and look at ways it can be used for role-play simulations in journalism education.
Sabine Reljic’s Center for Social Presence is also next door where Willow Shenlin SL, leads regular discussions on social presence in virtual worlds.
We redesigned a part of the Farm into a beach club, yes a beach club 
, and had a grand opening party on January 8. There was a great turnout. The focus on fun with the beach club is an attempt to get faculty into SL and experience it in a low stress/low stakes way.
I attended a web presentation of Project Wonderland: Toolkit for Building 3D Virtual Worlds, 0.5. and was impressed with the developments since last year. Wonderland is experimental technology, a community and not a product, which puts it in another league than SL. We’ll continue watching the developments in Wonderland and the Opensim, and maintain a presense in SL too. As with most universities, things around here move incredibly slow, there’s time.
Wisdom from the past – fast forward to the Beach Club
I ran into one of our IT Security Officers the other day in the ladies room. She overheard me talking about the the pICTsl Farm’s and the new Beach Club and we got to talking about Second Life and technology in general.
Unlike me, she’s been working in IT and with computers for 30 years. She told me that way back when it was hard getting folks to use computers. They weren’t sure why they should, what the benefit would be, since as far as they were concerned everything was just fine the way it was.
She said it was games and fun things to do with computers that got people into using them. Even in the workplace, people were encouraged to play and play around with computers.
That was a great story, I thought. It confirmed my intuition. Beach Club here we come! Hoo!
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 or Wonderland? Hmmm?
As we’re wading in the Activeworlds waters, deciding how we’re going to get in, I’m kind of wondering whether we should also (or instead) get into Wonderland a bit more. I’m connected to their and the Media Grid’s conversations, but we’re also looking at this with new eyes, with building some capacity to support a world in the future.
It’s really and apples and oranges thing, once I actually think it through. But the decision to allocate resources to one or the other is based (obviously) on its ROI. There’s no obvious choice, as there was last year with SL.
Decisions, decisions
Where has all the knowledge gone? Activeworlds circa 1999
I began getting a sense of the bigger picture, let’s say the beyond Second Life view, of virtual worlds doing my dissertation lit review. Now that we’re actively looking into AW, I’ve come across a mountain of information. Projects, research, people, consortiums, conferences, all involved in this stuff in the late 90s, early 2000s.
I started on this page of educational resources for AW. Drilling through to this Vlearn 3D, and transcripts from roundtables at AWEDU, to a paper entitled, “3D Virtual Worlds and Learning: An Analysis of the Impact of Design Affordances and Limitations in Active Worlds, blaxxun interactive, and OnLive! Traveler; and A Study of the Implementation of Active Worlds for Formal and Informal Education.
Moral of the Post: Where has all the knowledge gone?
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.
What Exactly Is A Virtual World?
Pop quiz: What is a Virtual World?
a) A shared space
b) Avatar-based chat room
c) 3D collaborative experience
d) All of the above
e) Or something else?
With new Virtual Worlds being announced almost weekly, the question bears asking.
The Virtual Worlds Review, for example, a pioneering effort in describing the development of Virtual Worlds, suggests six features common to all Virtual Worlds:
- Shared Space: the world allows many users to participate at once.
- Graphical User Interface: the world depicts space visually, ranging in style from 2D “cartoon” imagery to more immersive 3D environments.
- Immediacy: interaction takes place in real time.
- Interactivity: the world allows users to alter, develop, build, or submit customized content.
- Persistence: the world’s existence continues regardless of whether individual users are logged in.
- Socialization/Community: the world allows and encourages the formation of in-world social groups like teams, guilds, clubs, cliques, housemates, neighborhoods, etc.
However, with more companies and institutions jumping on the VW bandwagon, I begin to wonder if the term is becoming more broadly defined.
Case in point: Weblin.
The Weblin website describes their virtual world as follows:
Weblin “turns the web into a virtual world. Your personalized weblin avatar surfs the web with you, enabling you to see friends and meet new ones on the same site as you. Weblins can chat, move, show emotion, visit lounges, and trade stuff with other weblins.”
Wow! The whole web! Sounds interesting, yes? I thought so and quickly created a weblin for myself. I chose my avatar and decided to surf the web right away.
So.. IS Weblin a Virtual World? Or maybe Virtual World lite? Yes, it allows a shared social space, communication, immediacy. However, is it persistent? Does it allow any level of meaningful user customized content? Not really.
Why is this important? For a couple of years now, educators have been using Second LIfe as the standard by which to evaluate instruction and learning in a virtual world. But not all Virtual Worlds ARE Second Life. They each have unique capabilities and characteristics that must be carefully evaluated.
Does this make Weblin and other platforms “bad”? No. But it does make them different. And a wise educator will take the time to evaluate those differences in light of what s/he is attempting to accomplish with his/her students – and then make the most appropriate choice.
