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
One after the other - Wonderland and Active Worlds
I spent a couple of hours poking around a few nodes in Wonderland , Immersive Education Initiative on the Media Grid, and then in Activeworlds and Activeworlds educational universe.
Wonderland is self-described as primitive in terms of development, but given that it was only launched in June it’s quite impressive and full of potential. What’s most compelling about the grid is that it’s technological infrastructure is distributed, a computational grid. The idea that each entity or organization has a node on an open grid if fundamentally different than the computing framework of SL or AW, both of which are proprietary. It would seem that the media grid has more Metaverse potential than either SL or AW for this reason.
AW’s browser based interface is really quite impressive. I didn’t do much in there otherwise except fiddle with my avatar, which was also incredibly simple in their new 4.2 release. The user interface is designed quite differently than in SL and thus more useful for learning. For example it’s brower-based so that you get web pages and the AW in interface. AW has been around for since 1996 when it was called AlphaWorld, so they’ve been working on their product for a while and it shows.
I heard again at another conference that the the developments in technology, software and hardware (graphic cards) make it difficult to predict what’s a good investment. It seems that any investment is best made for the short term, at least to start.
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 Virtualities on June 24
If It Qwaqs Like a Duck…
… It must be another virtual world!
Thanks to a SLED announcement by Lori Bell of Alliance Library System, I had the opportunity to attend a Qwaq demo yesterday hosted by John at Learning Times. Very interesting, despite some unforeseen technical issues (gotta love technology!)
Built on the Croquet platform, the Qwaq environment offers some interesting collaborative features not currently supported in Second Life. For example, users can simultaneously collaborate on Word or other applications, view multiple live web pages (no dividing land into multiple parcels to support multiple media streams), and even stream a live video camera from their little Qwaq lego-like head. Yep - a talking head!
Due to the tech issues du jour, I wasn’t able to fully experience all the nifty Qwaq features. It plays nicely with Google SketchUp and seems to support multiple avatars quite well.
I’m excited! Does Qwaq replace Second Life? Of course not. But opportunities to experience and compare the differing strengths and capabilities of different platforms helps me think more carefully about instructional design decisions - including on which platform to develop specific projects. A good thing. I’ll be looking for more opportunities to experiment in Qwaq.
Here’s a YouTube featuring a Qwaq demo.
100 virtual worlds for children under 18
There being called youth worlds and there’s lots of them either in existence or being developed. The current ones are not 3D is the same way Second Life, but they have that sense of being in…well…a world. For example, there are avatars, and maps and buildings, things to do and people to meet.
