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.
Virtual Halloween Party: Learning can’t get much more fun!
When: Friday, October 24, 2008
Time: 8:00 – Midnight (PDT)
Where: SJSU SLIS Second Life Campus
This is a great opportunity to have FUN learning about Second Life. If you’ve heard about Second Life, spent time there or not, have an avatar or not, this is a low stakes opportunity to get a sense of the virtual world imagined and created by it’s users.
The host, San Jose State’s Jeremy Kemp, is a very active and enthusiastic Second Life educator. I’m sure he’s designed a great event.
For more info, head on over to the SDSU CDI blog, where I’ve posted too!
Hope you can make it!
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.
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.
