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
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.
Cultures of Virtual Worlds Conference
I was only able to stay for one day of the conference, held at UC Irvine. It was similar to the MetaverseU conference in that some extraordinary thinkers and doers were there. Maria Bezaitis and I chatted a bit about how important metaphors are as bridges to understanding. Melissa Cefkin is doing some great thinking on interactional space. Jasmin Kafai and Deborah Fields are doing cutting edge research in education and virtual spaces with kids; and Tom Boellstorf ethnography on Second Life is due out soon. I’m also going to check out Paul Dourish’s book Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction and was glad to hear from Mimi Ito, who’s work on digital youth culture is fantastic.
The audience was primarily academic but the conversations were anything but. Students and experienced researchers presented their work, with the conference being all about emerging questions that crisscross business, education, research, schooling and entertainment.
Browser-based access to SL, open source & gender
A young British woman (yeh!) is developing AjaxLife, a web-based application for connecting to Second Life from within your web browser. She’s surveying us on what we’d like to see. Do the survey here. Great idea (the survey and the project). I’m cheering women on is this domain because it is overwhelmingly male in culture and practice. Read these gender reports from the EU and FLOSS (Free/libre open source software).
“Women are actively (if unconsciously) excluded rather than passively disinterested. The effect lies within F/LOSS cultural and social arrangements. The exclusion happens among people who often do not mean to appear, and who do not interpret their own actions, as hostile to women. The effect is an outcome of the importance given to the individual as the sole carrier of agency. ”
Democracy?
John Bransford on SL for learning
Bransford is coauthor of How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School. In late 2006 he hosted a discussion on learning in SL.
“People have asked if multi user virtual environments (MUVES) like Second Life (SL) can support ‘rigorous learning’. Given the right kinds of designs, the answer is ‘yes’ But the yes answer requires ‘effective designs’ Read the transcript from the discussion held in SL.
Preparing for ELI 2008
Educause’s Learning Initiative Annual Meeting is just around the corner and I’m preparing the data I’ve collected over the last 5 months to present.
Aurilio, S. (2008, January). Introducing university faculty and instructional staff to second life: A pilot initiative. EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative Annual Meeting. San Antonio, Texas.
This years theme is Preparing Students for Life 2.0 and quite a few of the presentations are about Second Life. I’ll be making as many of them as I can. I’m also looking forward to hearing Henry Jenkins, whose paper on participatory culture and new media helped me reframe the idea of a digital divide. How are we going to prepare students for life 2.0 with unprepared instructors, facilitators and guides?
Some empirical data and thoughts:
- The average visit time on this website has been less than 3 minutes
- The workshops were very well attended and rated by the majority as effective.
On the one hand it’s great the workshop was seen as effective; on the other, the reason for that extends beyond the topic, expertise of the instructor (Cathy is superb) and timing (Winter break). I marketed it well. I mention this often overlooked piece of the puzzle because it is directly related to sustainability. Another important piece is whether anyone really learned anything and whether there are better, more cost effective ways to learn those skills and knowledge.
If I sound like I’m critiquing the workshop modality, I’m critiquing it in the context of participatory culture and serious resource constraints. These workshop smile-sheet results together with the data for the website and actual consults suggest that a costly solution to what may not even be solely a training problem “is what people want.”
Some of the many, many unknowns I wonder about:
- How many faculty and instructional staff subscribe to the website?
- To what degree do they participate in the flat and 3D web for professional connections and learning?
- How many workshop attendees have continued to participate in SL since the workshop?
- How much did it actually cost to provide the workshops?
