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.
Coming Soon – Faculty/Staff Beach Club
Situated behind the SDSU campus and next to the Library, the new Faculty/Staff Beach Club will be a one of a kind in Second Life. A Beach Club, you’re thinking?? What about learning how to teach in SL?
During the Gustav crisis, we received a request to use our SL facilities in case New Orleans’ schools might need emergency locations to conduct classes. I thought, “now that’s a resourceful idea.” I mention it because it reminds me that people create their own uses for technologies and that’s what we’re continuing to do.
We’re going to elevate the entertainment and social value of Second Life and push aside for near future the fact that Second Life is an educational technology. (Read this post and this post for more on SL as an educational technology.)
The Beach Club is about hanging out in SL in our casual San Diego kind of way. It’s about having a fun place to meet, chat and do Second Life kinds of things. It will have the usual SL and real life amenities such as indoor & outdoor lounging areas, a campfire, swings. Swimming, diving, water sports (e.g. jet-skiing, sailing, canoing), music, dancing and cocktails, a gift shop and informational counter.
It’ll be open and available 7/24 to all SDSU faculty and staff. Students are welcome too. If it sounds like play, that’s what we’re inviting you to do. But don’t be mislead into thinking that’s all it’s about. Are you working on an international project? With a team of folks spread across the country? Second Life & 3D environments are used more and more as places to meet, when distance and time is a concern.
Suzanne
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?
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.
What’s a virtual world & how should we pay attention to them?
Thanks Cathy! Great summary. I was going to comment, but since I can post, I thought I’d do that and extend the discussion.
I think we need to refine the term “virtual world” for our audience and context and extend the conversation to include cultural, organizational and pedagogical perspectives.
Improving student learning is our main goal and it’s easy as technologists, to take a somewhat instrumentalist approach to achieving that.
Here are my In-a-nutshell attempts at refining the notion of virtual worlds for our audience and context.
Cultural: Children are growing up playing in virtual playgrounds like Habbo, Neopets, Club Penguin,etc. Read more from BBC Tens of millions of adults spend an estimated 10-20 (See footnotes) average hours per week in MMOGs and commercially available virtual worlds. The majority are white and middle class. These are not neither culturally nor socially neutral locations of play. They have emerging cultures of their own. In adult environments, there are legacy cultural mores and practices from MUDs, chatrooms, instant messaging and online communities.
Organizational: At the organizational level, these should be considered first as educational technologies. As a public institution we have students, faculty and staff from diverse cultural, SESs and technological backgrounds. We make decisions about human and technological resources to support learning.
Pedagogical: Tools are pedagogical means not ends. At the same time, there is currently more evidence of learning through play, than there is of learning through pedagogy in these environments. I DO believe people learn in them. The first questions are what, how and why. The second are: are faculty ready to change what they do, how and why.
1 Ortiz dxe Gortari, A. (2007, September). Second life survey: User profile for psychological engagement & gambling. Paper presented at The Virtual 2007 Conference: Interaction, Stockholm, Sweden.
2 Yee, N. (2006b, June). The demographics, motivations, and derived experiences of users of massively multi-user online graphical environments.
Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments, 15(3) 309-329.
Learning in Virtualities on June 24
