NMC VIrtual Worlds

NMC Virtual Worlds

"NMC Virtual Worlds is a program of the New Media Consortium, an international 501(c3) not-for-profit consortium of more than 225 world-class colleges, universities, and research centers. The mission of NMC Virtual Worlds is to help learning-focused organizations to explore the potential of virtual spaces in a manner that builds on community knowledge, is cost-effective, and ensures high quality. NMC Virtual Worlds provides a palette of premium custom services for education and training, and conducts an ongoing series of events, conferences, and programs. A suite of pro bono services and fellowships are a central aspect of the organization, and reflect our deep commitment to learning and access."

The NMC is offering parcels of land in SL as part of their NMC campus there. Each of these is a community with educational goals that have lots available to lease for faculty, academic departments and any institution that is "learning-focused." The community/sharing aspect of this is a big plus as collaboration really is a key word in the SL educational community and as I have learned myself - a lot more fun! Available service listings can be found by clicking here.

Final Class

Students previewed their final projects today. There were some amazing uses like a middle school math project involving prof development for teachers. One day I was on the MCGC site and they were meeting on a Sunday!

We ended our time together with a Dance party that included fancy clothes, a disco ball and GREAT music. While you view these images imagine "Jumping Jack Flash!" Virtual beer by the way is exceptionally harmless, and dancing in SL is a trip!

SLoodle

Our next to the last class we were taken to meet Giannina Rossini who guided us through the Second Life Sloodle site. This project is an open-source mash-up between Second Life and the CMS Moodle!

"Sloodle is an Open Source GNU-GPL project which integrates multi-user virtual environments such as Second Life® with learning-management systems (VLEs) such as Moodle® and helps the community of educators in virtual worlds test curriculum innovations and advocate those proven successful. Sloodle provides a range of tools for supporting learning and teaching to the immersive virtual world; tools which are fully integrated with a tried and tested web-based learning management system used by thousands."

A visit to their website http://www.sloodle.org/moodle/ is where you can find downloads, tutorials and a wonderful case study of a cultural exchange between Korea and Dubai that happened in this platform! Also here is a link to Huntington Junior College's announcement of its foray into Sloodle where according to MarketWatch:

"By creating a “social presence” using a mash-up of Second Life
and Moodle, called Sloodle, in coordination with Campus Management’s student information system, HJC has created a full-service virtual campus that enhances faculty-student interaction while automating management of rosters, grades, drop/adds, and other administrative chores. Students log in once to the college’s portal, and can leap into their Second Life campus, attend class, and participate in online cafe conversations."

Road Trip!

This week we took another "road trip" in SL to various sims. Esme had us all board these "chairs" that she had the power to bring us all along on like an amusement park ride. It was very fascinating. And I have to comment on the fact that even in virtual reality when I am living vicariously through an avatar, when I am dangling in "space" without terra firma below I feel a bit queasy. Interesting.

Our first stop on this trip was to Imagination Island where the way to travel around is via the Magic Bubble Teleporter. This sim contains some awesome projects which include: the Mythiea Library full of digital books on mythology and fairy tales, the Castle of Dreams where you can find recommended children's books with summaries, Rachelville an imagination area created from the mind of a seven-year-old who was undergoing treatment for Leukemia. I visited several areas: a merry-go-round, the Grief center, and I went underwater!

Our next stop was Ohio State University Medical School's Testis sim. This amazing sim brought me through a 3-dimensional model of a testis! Once I got to see up close and personal a seminfeous tubule for sperm production I thought that this platform had some seriously amazing education value!

Then we went to the Pothealer's Adventure on Numbukulla Island. This is an adventure/role play sim where the user finds clues and hidden stuff in order to solve a mystery. This sim takes some time to get all the way through.

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Our last stop was the Louvre...which in fact did not contain art from the Paris museum's collection, but was an interesting mix of art of various mediums.

FireSabre Consulting

http://firesabre.com/

One week we had a visitor to our SL class named Gus Plisskin. He is the founder of FireSabre Consulting a company that will help your organization develop presence in SL. His firm has worked on many 3D collaborative projects. The economic statistics that he gave us were astounding in terms of how much money exchanged hands in-world for buying designer clothing (40%), land trade, photo-realistic avatar skins, prim hair and avatar makeovers. (Reminds me of paperdolls when I was a kid - but these are very expensive dolls, yes?) In fact in the last 24 hours in Second Life $1.8 million US dollars exchanged hands.

Gus answered questions for the class about land aquitision and projects that Firesabre had worked on. He said renting land on an existing project was cheaper than buying land or one could start from scratch. It takes a couple of months for them to develop a project and for $250-400 one could start up and then it would be $50-100 monthly for upkeep. In other words for about $2000 a year a school could run a project in SL.

Welcome to FireSabre Consulting!

"We are a full-service building and consulting company for Second Life (SL). We can help you design, set up, and deploy your SL presence, and provide ongoing support after delivery. We are experienced with educational and non-profit projects, on both the Main Grid and Teen Grid. We can arrange land purchase, provide terraforming, building, scripting, texturing and clothing, account creation, and other administrative services."

What are some of the things they have done in SL?

• First public school build in Teen Second Life
• First middle school build in Second Life
• Ongoing support for the Ramapo-Suffern public school project for over a year (and counting)
  
• Participated in Global Kids project, first Teen Grid educational project; built in the Main SL grid and moved to Teen SL
• Advice and support to Schome Teen SL transition project
• TRUTHS satellite project proposal and exhibit for National Physical Labs, UK

NECC National Educational Computing Conference Summer 2008

I attended the NECC ISTE Conference on Second Life IN Second Life. It was pretty overwhelming. Some folks used voice, some chat....but look at the numbers of us attending!

Making prims

We learned to make objects during the June 13th class.

You can see that I made a cube and inserted a photograph of a class we had on the sides. It was easy to do right from within the second life interface. Then came:

Most of my classmates seemed to get how to make a gift box, but I was lost.

Second Life video tutorials

I was not going to let the gift box get me down so I spent several hours in Second Life looking for a house and furniture. I found the house and had a grand time getting it in place. I could not figure out how to make the door slide in....aaargh. What is Esme my teacher doing in Second Life at 11 pm at night? Oh this is addicting...

Finally it is done as the sun sets. And I go in and relax...

I wanted to learn to make clothes so I used creating your world to help me design a CCV shirt and load it to Second Life. It was harder than I thought and actually has no shading...It was made with Photoshop. I got the template and instructions here.

Prims comes from the word primitive which are the building block shapes that all second life objects are made from.

INTERSECTION: science fiction & reality

The idea of virtual reality first appeared in a science fiction novel called Simulacron-3 published by Daniel Galouye, in 1964. It is the story of a virtual world complete with simulacrum that eventually began to experience consciousness.

In 1984 William Gibson coined the word cyberspace in his novel Neuromancer, a story about a down and out computer hacker hired by a unexplained boss. He defined cyberspace as "a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions." This was considered an early cyber punk book.

One of the later cyber punk books, Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson (1992), is where we first hear the word avatar used to describe a person’s representation in virtual reality. "..when the computer crashed and wrote gibberish into the bitmap, the result was something that looked vaguely like static on a broken television set — a 'snow crash.'"

The science fiction series Otherland (Williams, 1996), speaks of a future where Internet accessibility to virtual worlds is common place and its publication coincided with the public release of Activeworlds on the actual Internet.

Now fiction and reality were one! Activeworlds is system where the user enters a 3-dimensional space via their computer browser and interacts with it using an avatar. What one’s avatar encounters in Activeworlds are surroundings and objects that have been created by other avatars as well as themselves. This environment differs from gaming because you are not locked in a scenario built into a video or role-playing game. You are actually in a multi-user visual environment (MUVE) collaborating with other users, sometimes observing, sometimes interacting, and sometimes creating.

Linden Lab’s virtual world called Second Life just celebrated its fifth birthday on June 23, 2008.

OPEN SOURCE code for MUVEs

"Croquet is a powerful open source software technology that, in the form of the Croquet Software Developer's Kit (Croquet SDK), can be used by experienced software developers to create and deploy deeply collaborative multi-user online vitual world applications on and across multiple operating systems and devices."

The Croquet Consortium

Croquet screen shots and video

Exploring other Virtual Worlds

CLUB PENGUIN ("waddle around and meet new friends")

I went to the link Esme gave us from Virtual Worlds Review and decided to look into worlds.com. Unfortunately my middle-aged eyes did not see the age of the news about this site and I believe this is a relic from the early days of virtual reality. I was excited because I read that this company received a patent (the first) for a scalable 3D server technology. But that was WAY back in 2001.

So I downloaded the client and moved around a bit in it last night. This morning I got in bright and early, but had trouble signing in (it didn't like VISTA) and then my poor avatar wasn't actually moving, but sort of floating like South Park cartoon characters do. I thought I had VIP access for a week, but I can't seem to really go anyplace but Ground Zero and an Auditorium. I saw one or two people there in my probably 4 hours of trying to fool around with it. I was only able to choose from characters they provided in the Avatar Gallery...what I really wanted to do was go to the Animal House...but at this point who knows what that it...probably not a Toga Party like I thought ;o).

From the VRW site comes this quote: The Worlds.com heyday may be over now, but it's worth a visit for those interested in the history of virtual worlds. In many ways, this entertainment-related collection of worlds perfectly encapsulates focus of the first wave of virtual worlds in the mid-1990's, with its merging of dotcom boom hype and giddy utopianism. Moving through these worlds now is like visiting a museum. A very weird museum at times (the "Sadness" and "Glee" worlds are particularly trippy!), but an interesting peek back in time. Being the historian that I am I may have to come back and see if I can find any of these old places. I feel though that this place with its small window or big window/poor resolution just make me pine away for Second Life with its high resolution and creative power.

I read and loved Dickey's article on virtual worlds and distance learning and especially how brilliantly she ties constructivist learning theories and scaffolding into her conversation of online ed. MOOs provide an environment that supports constructivist learning by allowing for the emergence of knowledge-building communities. That alone helped me to better understand the value of Club Penguin. In my mind I was "stuck" on the "lookism" aspect and was negating the making of meaning together. Then upon reading further I was better able to understand situational learning, which Emily sort of eluded to earlier in her post on the movie 1776. Situated learning include[s] authentic context and activity, access to expert modelling, multiple roles and perspectives, and scaffolding and mentoring.

As I proceeded to research academic articles relating to virtual worlds and construtivism I came across an article from the International Journal of Social Sciences called Utilizing Virtual Worlds in education: the implications for practice. The authors have a succinct description that helped me: In constructivism the learner is believed to construct their own understanding of content. Through this construction of knowledge the learner creates direct connections and meaning. In order for learning experiences to be beneficial to the learner within a constructivist methodology, the instructional experience must be authentic and intentional. Simply put, the instructor must provide learners with compelling problems that engage students not only in the adventure of the virtual world itself but additionally into a deep inquiry and analysis of a meaningful and authentic problem that students can relate to and that meets the lesson objectives.

An art jaunt in Second Life

Kaleidescope Walk

Galleries in Second Life

Relay for Life (Cancer Research fundraising)

Fractals

Molas Exhibit

Planetarium

Tattoo Museum

Photobooth

Week Three - Collaborative Learning

This was by far my favorite class meeting in the course as we were split into groups and moved throughout the Second Life grid as teams. The assignment was given to us in the form of a notecard:

The Task

You are journalists on assignment. Your editor (me) was to have a brief - containing the goals of your assignment and some background info - waiting for you at the airport. It did not arrive. Your team is made up of a project manager, a communicator/fact finder, a photographer and a writer. There is a story to write, but you don't know what it is. As a group you must determine how to divvy up responsibilities. You only have 10 minutes in each location...

Project Manager - Keep track of your team, the assignment and the time. Your job is to make sure the work gets done.

Communicator/fact finder - find people and ask questions. If no one is around or info is unreliable see if you can find out anything by searching google (name of island and "second life" as keywords)

Writer - create a notecard and record what the team learns about each sim. It doesn't need to be good writing, just clear enough for others and me to make sense of. The note card should contain the first name of each member of your team.

Photographer - take photos of the environs, something special about the place, something to show others about this sim, your colleagues in action...

Try to find out what is unique about the place, does it have any educational potential, why do you think I sent you here?

We were group 2 and assigned 5 locations - only 3 of which we had time to explore:

NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association)
Virtual Starry Night
Sistine Chapel
Svarga
College of Scripting Music

NOAA:

At the NOAA location we visited the island of Meteora (http://slurl.com/secondlife/Meteora/177/161/27/) where we saw 3d real-time weather reporting and could take a hurricane tour! They also have the island of Okeanos available for learning about the Ocean (http://slurl.com/secondlife/Okeanos/64/217/30/)

SISTINE CHAPEL:

A reproduction of the Sistine Chapel has been created an lives on Vassar's SL island. It was created by a professsor using public domain photographs and is to scale and simply stunning.

Welcome to the Vassar College Re-Creation of the Sistine Chapel.

We have re-created the Sistine Chapel as a proof-of-concept for how the technology of virtual worlds can augment or enhance a traditional liberal arts education.

TO VISIT THE SISTINE CHAPEL ON VASSAR ISLAND, YOU MUST AGREE TO THE FOLLOWING "CODE OF CONDUCT." You will only be asked to do this once.

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CODE OF CONDUCT

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Visiting the Sistine Chapel creates a deeply moving experience for many people for a variety of reasons, including religious, artistic and educational.

To preserve this same experience for those visiting the Sistine Chapel in Second Life, we expect all visitors to conduct themselves here as they would in real life: with respect for the environment as well as for those visiting the environment. Further, the Sistine Chapel was created for non-profit, educational use. You may not use it, or images of it, for any commercial purpose.

Any misconduct will result in banishment from Vassar Island as well as in a report to Linden Labs. Please contact Bret Rydell or Stan Frangible to report any such misconduct.

YOU MUST AGREE TO CONDUCT YOURSELF BY THIS CODE OF CONDUCT IN ORDER TO CONTINUE.

If you elect to disagree, you will be removed from the Sistine Chapel area of our island. However, you will still be free to visit other parts of our island. Note: the system that is used to remove you from the Sistine Chapel is one built-in to Second Life ("eject from parcel"). It is not the most graceful system, and we apologize in advance for the way that it may "drop" you on another part of the island.

Please use the blue menu on the upper right side of the screen to indicate your agreement with our Code of Conduct.

Virtual Starry Night:

Our last stop was the Vincent Van Gogh tribute in SL which you can get a taste of in this YouTube video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfruH02RD9M

Images are used with permission.

The "Code of Conduct" agreement system was developed by Kenn Nilsson of NDE Enterprises.

Hi,

Welcome to Virtual Starry Night, the Second Life Van Gogh exhibit. Here's some info to help you find your way:

> Cross the bridge to enter the museum with 70 Van Gogh masterpieces from all around the world. Along the routes you will find several 3D rendered paintings; you can use the '3D route' as a shortcut, just click on the paintings near the 3D objects

> At the central square you see the Yellow House with a mini-expo on Gaugain, who lived for while with Van Gogh in Arles (France).

> The mini-expo 'Vincent's Flowers' at the back of the square shows a selection of Van Gogh's flower paintings as well as some 3D'ed ones. Right next to it is the entrance of the 3D version of The Courtyard of the Hospital in Arles.

> A small shop is located on the first floor of the Yellow Cafe.

Keeping the area's default Night View on is highly recommended for the best viewing experience

Hope you'll enjoy your stay here!

BIOME - class two continues

We visited the BIOME (141, 171, 34) to meet Clowey Greenwood, a science educator from Northern Michigan University who has been enriching his face to face classes in Second Life since fall 2007. They received funding to make this sim and it is currently still under construction. The CONFERENCE ROOM, BIOME (43, 55, 69) we were in was round with a presentation screen at the front.

Clowey teaches elementary school teachers, and at the time was teaching a graduate course called “Current Issues in Science Education.” He says he gets great student evaluations of the course and teaches with text only – no voice. His rules include a 30-second wait before replying which he feels gives slower students time to respond, deeper or slower thinkers extra time, and leads to greater participation overall. From his experience students can come to a class in SL if they can walk to their chair and use their camera. What he has learned is that students needs clear directions, and splitting the class into smaller groups is effective.

[11:59] Clowey Greenwood: I was going to tell you about the undergrad's favorite activity

[11:59] Esme Qunhua: please

[11:59] Clowey Greenwood: They toured the cell on the neighboring island of Genome in pairs or 3

[11:59] Clowey Greenwood: and took snapshots of themselves next to parts of the cell.

[12:00] Clowey Greenwood: Then they used those snapshots to make powerpoint presentations of their "tour of the cell"

[12:00] Clowey Greenwood: the instructions were to pretend they were tour guides and, besides making it scientifically correct, make it fun and creative

[12:00] Clowey Greenwood: everyone loved that activity

[12:01] Clowey Greenwood: And they got a much better idea of what a 3D cell is like than you can get from even a (supposedly) 3D model in the classroom

[12:01] Esme Qunhua: Clowey can you tell us about the butterfly event and then we will get out of your way.

[12:02] Clowey Greenwood: Ode Butterfly collectors and Science Friday (the US National Public radio weekly show) are sponsoring a butterfly hunt across several sims

[12:02] Clowey Greenwood: This is starting right now. Below you will find a lot of posters with electron micrographs of butterflies and scientific information

[12:03] Clowey Greenwood: If you find a butterfly and click on it with your mouse, you might win a piece of jewelry

After the interview we took a break and many of us went looking for butterflies in the hunt taking place that day. It’s hard to catch a butterfly in virtual reality. After I managed to finally get one I “won” a bracelet made by an SL artist. It sparkled and I learned that this was a particle sim. The Particle Lab is a space in SL where you can learn how to do particle animation which is used to create things such as smoke, fairy dust and sea spray. Particle is a two-dimensional image which is always seen straight-on by any given avatar.

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Teal/180/74/22

Class ended with a three-dimensional Likert scale. This is a method of using closed-ended assessment questions meant to gauge feelings or attitudes on a rated scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree. This method is used for collecting rank-ordered data (all possible responses are given to respondents). I felt this was a very successful and fun way to gather this information.