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.

MetaverseU reflections

MetaverseU
Some quick reflections on the conference before leaving Palo Alto. Themes and comments that resonated for me.

It was great, intellectually stimulating event, and a fun, interactive crowd.  I was though disappointed at the lack of opportunities to have conversations.  Lot’s of folks attended via SL, and to facilitate a more democratic discussion, those of us live were asked to fill out cards with our questions that would be given to the presenters. It didn’t work really.

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:

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:

The educational uses of SL

This Wiki is an expanding collection of what’s going on and what could go in SL educationally. Worth bookmarking and keeping up on.

This History of Earth and Life on Earth Exhibit

“Cosmo Priestman, Ourania Fizgig and ScubaChris Wollongong take us through The History of Earth & Life on Earth Exhibit, created as part of a non-major undergraduate intro-astrobiology course, Exploring Life in the Universe. Students in the ASTR202 (spring 2007) class helped to design and build a scale model installation work on the timeline of Earth, 4.6 billion years ago to the present. Embedded in this timeline are important landmark events in planet formation, geology, biology, and anthropology.”

This was a great installation, with some great simulations. The walk through the spiral, the distance between each exhibit, simulated the time between each development. There were plenty of sims and 3D models within the installation, such as meteors, rain and organisms. A great example of what students can do in SL. Building simulations is one way students learn about the phenomena the sim models. Search this region in the Search LivingintheUniverse (30, 190, 251).