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Herding cats

I was recently challenged with running a series of events inside Second Life for the JISC Innovating eLearning Conference. These were carefully paced to include a couple of orientation sessions for new avatars, a tour and an evening social event (a ‘fashion show’ as it turned out). For me, I was surprised to find that the biggest challenge of all these three happenings was the SL tour. The one that I had initially felt the most relaxed about. On the surface, a simple case of gathering a collection of meaningful locations and guiding the participants around each venue. But as with all things in Second Life nothing is ever quite as simple as one imagines. Having visited each location, built the notecards, the notecard giver, the automated group joining tool and picked a suitable start location on Emerge Island I over confidently assumed nothing could go wrong. Whoops. By 2pm, the scheduled start time, I was already trying to deal with 30 plus avatars in what I can only describe as complete mayhem. I have never experienced anything like it in Second Life before, and maybe never will again. As the sim started to lag with so many arrivals and so much activity the phrase ‘like trying to herd cats’ did not even come close. Through a mixture of shouting coaxing, pushing and patience I finally, with the help of the tours guides, managed to get small groups to teleport out to the first locations in what was some sort of ordered fashion. Phew. It was an impressive moment - exciting, panicky and intense. Perhaps all the things that make SL such a compelling place to be.

The tour was a learning experience for everyone and I have gathered together the threads from the post-tour discussion so anyone else who wants to create a tour in SL can take away the good practices that we all discovered:

1. Make sure you have a group set up in advance (for us this was the "JISC SL sessions" group) and use an automated group joining tool in-world to make it easy for everyone to sign up;
2. Prepare the tour locations and save on a notecard. Use a separate notecard with instructions for setting up the client to provide a good experience at each spot,  such as the graphics and media settings. Ten locations in two hours is plenty, with a few extra added and marked as "related" for people to come back and explore at leisure;
3. If you have tour guides then brief them in advance.
   1. On the notecard (thanks to Michael Vallance for this suggestion) you can add some pertinent questions about each location and aim for a more quest like experience;
4. Get everyone to arrive in an area with seating and get everyone to sit down, so that you can see numbers and minimise distractions;
5. In front of the seats have a media screen where you can place the instructions - texture with an image or stream in a webpage. Put a script inside the screen so that when it is touched it hands out the pre-prepared tour notecards. The instructions on the screen should give basic orientation instructions such as:
   1. How to join the group and activate the tag;
   2. The structure of the tour (see below);
   3. Get the tour guides to help those who are struggling;
6. Then, and this depends on numbers:
   1. Organise into small groups of not more than 4 (any more is just too tough to keep together) and send off in staggered departures;
   2. Or for larger numbers simply send off the participants in pairs. Each pair "friends" each other so they can communicate via IM and then support each other. The pairs head off on their own and make their way around;
   3. Tour guides can be located at the arrival points at each destination and keep everyone moving around the circuit;
   4. Use the group channel to check where everyone is and keep the tour as a whole in motion;
   5. Gather everyone back to the starting location at the end for a debrief and for gathering impressions;
7. A small tour circuit works far better than a large one. With a limited number of locations it means that groups (or pairs) will bump into other as they wander around - recognisable by their group tag - so lots of serendipity and always a friendly face somewhere at each location.

Creating a tour is an excellent activity and this is something that I would like our participants on the MUVEnation programme to also have a go at doing. Choosing spaces inside SL to visit is a reflective exercise and requires some thought into why you have chosen a location – its value and its purpose.

Who am i? ... mashed-up, disaggregated and distributed

One plus one equals three: the seventh barrier to innovation in MUVEs

'In design, one plus one equals three or sometimes more.'
Josef Albers (1969)

'Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.'
Herbert Simon (1969)

We make design decisions all of the time and Second Life offers particular design challenges that demand us to address not only our teaching approaches but also space, architecture and aesthetics. The art of design is not a natural skill but one that is learned and developed – Simon called for a science of design. Albers captures the complexity of design in the quote above, one that acknowledges the multi-layered nature of design and the multiple interactions that occur between these design layers when they come together.

'When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.'
Richard Buckminster Fuller

My question is - are we as educators in virtual worlds equal to this challenge?

Rhizome Project: exploring digital identities

from: stevenw 3 days ago

Eduserv funded Rhizome project on digital identities: an overview - the project launch slideshow.

Tags: online launch digitalidentity rhiz08 rhizome

Rhizome Project: exploring digital identities

from: stevenw 4 days ago

Eduserv funded Rhizome project on digital identities: an overview - the project launch slideshow.

Tags: online launch digitalidentity rhiz08 rhizome

Rhizome Project: exploring digital identities

from: stevenw 1 month ago

Eduserv funded Rhizome project on digital identities: an overview - the project launch slideshow.

Tags: online launch digitalidentity rhiz08 rhizome

MUVEnation programme opens for participants

MUVEnation - the course,
originally uploaded by StevenW Bohm.

After several months of hard work the EU funded MUVEnation programme opens its doors to participants.

The course - ‘Teaching and learning with MUVEs’ - is a free one year postgraduate programme, delivered online, for future and in-service teachers who want to use innovative methods and tools to address learners motivation and participation issues in compulsory education. MUVEnation is aimed at helping teachers acquire the necessary competencies to integrate massively multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs) into their teaching practice.

Registrations are now open for the programme which kicks off in November 2008. Full details are avaiable form the MUVEnation site here - http://muvenation.org/press-releases/ - and by downloading the pdf course brochure.

Download Brochure_MUVEnation.pdf

Please feel free to distribute this information anyone who may be interested in joining us.

Virtual spaces, Second lives: what are the potential educational benefits of MUVEs

from: stevenw 2 weeks ago

For the JISC Innovating e-learning conference November 2008 - http://www.jisc.ac.uk/elpconference08

Tags: jisc muve secondlife education jiscel08

Virtual spaces, Second lives: what are the potential educational benefits of MUVEs

from: stevenw 2 weeks ago

For the JISC Innovating e-learning conference November 2008 - http://www.jisc.ac.uk/elpconference08

Tags: jisc muve secondlife education jiscel08

Virtual spaces, Second lives: what are the potential educational benefits of MUVEs

from: stevenw 1 month ago

For the JISC Innovating e-learning conference November 2008 - http://www.jisc.ac.uk/elpconference08

Tags: jisc muve secondlife education jiscel08

Six barriers to innovation in learning and teaching in MUVEs

Preparing to give a conference talk at 6am on a Monday morning is possibly not the most appetizing of thoughts. But when you are speaking to an audience in Kuala Lumpur and you are still in London then the delivery times become somewhat constrained.  The symposium on Second Life was a session scheduled as part of the LYICT conference held a couple of weeks ago and I admit if it hadn't been for the Elluminate video feed and my fashion reputation I would have been tempted to to remain in my dressing gown for the whole thing. There were four of us on the UK end of the panel (Helen Keegan, Graham Attwell and David White) with a jet lagged Steve Wheeler fronting the show in  Malaysia. Technically a risky venture but it worked, just.

With only had 10 minutes to fill I wanted to keep the presentation short and simple. After some last minute dithering I decided to tackle one of the recurring criticisms of Second Life - the perceived lack of innovation in many  in-world learning and teaching activities. The result was an identification of six barriers:

1. Technical - machine and human related [and standards related]
2. Identity - the tension between playfulness and professionalism
3. Culture - reading the codes and etiquette of SL
4. Collaboration - building trust
5. Time - even simple things take time
6. Economic - nothing is for free

These are expanded in the slideshare presentation (which has been updated since the original talk) and feel comprehensive - there are probably more I agree but that depends on the level of granularity one wants to go into:

Update (28/10/08): There is also I feel a seventh barrier and that is "Design" - perhaps this is a meta-barrier but SL does offer up very particular design challenges.

One of the interesting points that came out of this whole exercise was choice of technology. Originally we had planned to deliver the session from Second Life but the advance testing revealed what a challenge it would be. Not only were we going to have to trust the technical robustness of the platform (gulp) but we were also forced to assess the question of added value from using Second Life? Fighting server lag, low bandwidth problems, variable audio quality and the sheer awkwardness of manipulating an in-world slide viewer were just too much to contemplate so we shifted to the Elluminate - an audiographic video conferencing tool. But what really tipped it for me was the lack of tools in SL for getting feedback from the audience. How do I know I am being heard - do I need to adjust volume, where is the back channel for people to participate, ask questions  ... and so on? Status indicators are key. I think using SL for conferencing requires caution ... think about the value-added, why make life difficult when it is not necessary? As a final thought, translated into pictures, here is a vision for SL that would help make it more usable - a whiteboard, an integrated IRC type chat client and a status indicator panel - perfect:

Six Barriers to Innovation in MUVE-based teaching

from: stevenw 1 month ago

Presentation at LYICT conference in Malaysia. 7th July 2008, last updated on 27th July 2008.

Tags: teaching muve malaysia lyict innovation

Six Barriers to Innovation in MUVE-based teaching

from: stevenw 3 months ago

Presentation at LYICT conference in Malaysia. 7th July 2008, last updated on 27th July 2008.

Tags: teaching muve malaysia lyict innovation

Six Barriers to Innovation in MUVE-based teaching

from: stevenw 3 months ago

Presentation at LYICT conference in Malaysia. 7th July 2008, last updated on 27th July 2008.

Tags: teaching muve malaysia lyict innovation

Six Barriers to Innovation in MUVE-based teaching

from: stevenw 4 months ago

Presentation at LYICT conference in Malaysia. 7th July 2008, last updated on 27th July 2008.

Tags: teaching muve malaysia lyict innovation

Waiting for myself

An interesting moment in transgressing my own boundaries between self and avatar. Rarely have we appeared together and here only in the name of science.

This video came about from a little research that was carried out in advance of an upcoming, 7th July, symposium that we will be presenting to a remote audience in Kuala Lumpar. We cannot be there physically so my question was, if we decide to use Second Life in what ways can we create maximum social presence?

I am an immersionist, that is I let StevenW build his own space inside SL, yet I am interested in ways to move information in and out of Second Life, punching holes through the membrane and linking in-world and out-of-world experiences. The porosity of SL has changed over time with channels opening for blogging; twitter, web-browsing, SL to Flickr, audio, facebook links, and streaming video. Taking the scenario of a face-2-face conference blended with SL participants I took a peek at the different ways to stream live video into SL. Inspired by posts from both AndyPowell and Rob Smart's blogs I set up a quick trial with Veodia, knowing their live video webstreaming service is now available for free and is offered in a format compatible with Second Life.

So how was it? Well simple, so simple I was left wondering what the catch was, bandwidth issues aside. Here is a quick run through of the steps I followed:

• Opened an account with Veodia, a straightforward exercise;
• Clicked through the screens to start my first broadcast;
• Pressed the appropriate button and let my Apple MacPro do the audio-video and capture;
• Previewed the stream to check I was on air and then copied the rtsp URL provided by Veodia from the live broadcast page;
• Launched Second Life;
• Made a coffee while I waited to get in-world ;)
• Knocked up a quick media screen, set the textures and then pasted the rtsp stream URL into the land parcel settings;
• Pressed the media player button in SL;
• Bingo, there I was alive and kicking in the virtual universe.

Whether we will use this for the symposium I am still unsure, my preference I think would be to have the audience streamed into SL so that we have some sense of those who are watching and listening in the conference room. Testing the set-up with fellow panelists uncovered three issues that are driving me away from using SL as a conferencing tool:

• First and most obvious is the heavy bandwidth requirements for this configuration and the related issue of delay, around 3-5 seconds, between the capture and delivery of the video stream;
• Second is the lack of status or feedback indicators, the kind of thing you find when using a tool like Elluminate where you can ask the audience questions and get feedback through a series of emoticons that includes useful items like the 'hands-up' attention grabber;
• Third follows a similar line and concerns the difficulty in providing a mechanism for live audience participation. Setting up a back channel would be an ideal solution and making use of the main SL chat window would be the natural place for this. Yet to my knowledge it is still impossible to remotely work with SL chat so delegates would need to log into SL if they wanted to use the chat window. The option of using a lightweight client such as AjaxLife might be a solution, if the audience all have SL accounts or deploying a non-integrated chat client bought in through the in-world media browser. Both options are still not ideal.

There is perhaps a fourth reason, intimated at the start of this post, the separation of avatar and typist. My avatar and me do not appear in public together, or least not very often and somehow that feels right. The quandry of where to post snapshots of us both together, Flickr seemed at first the obvious place, confirmed to me that despite the fuzzy boundary between real and virtual identities they remain in many aspects decoupled. SL is a different space and there exists a differentiated person which goes someway to explain my discomfort in completely collapsing our two identities.

How tall is tall in Second Life?

Well about 202m if you are given 15 minutes to build a tower and you have the physics switched on. That was the challenge I presented to all the avatars who came along to the SL social event organized during the Emerge online conference (23rd to 25th June). On paper (or notecard) a simple task and one that was reused from a teaching activity designed for the OpenHabitat project by Cubist Scarborough. In virtuality it was a more challenging competition than I envisaged.

Building in SL requires a number of skills: knowledge of the client interface, the ability to interpret the ‘build’ dialog boxes, good camera controls and a design based visual grammar that can adjust to a 3D working space. Complicate this mix by making it a cooperative task and the constraints of SL as a tool for collaboration start to become uncovered. The permissions structure in SL means that object sharing is problematic and needs to be solved if team building is going to be effective. To progress, clear communication channels between avatars needs to be established, not a straightforward matter when the main chat window is clogged with the noise from competing parties busy issuing each other instructions and encouragement.

From my perspective as judge and referee it felt like 15 minutes of mayhem. Thankfully, towers did appear out of the chaos and the most productive builders were those who in the end chose to go it alone. It was also a great insight into how to design a creative activity for a virtual environment such as SL. The issues that needed to be addressed (and were forgotten by me) were around scaffolding the activity – ensuring there were a set of baseline competencies in place from which creativity could emerge. Next time I will make sure:

•    the instructions (and supporting resources) are given well in advance to allow the less experienced participants time to brush up on the skills that will be needed. A few Torley Linden tutorials would have been handy here;
•    time is allowed for thinking and communicating strategy and possible approaches to the problem;
•    that I do not shift everyone from one venue to another and breakup the natural conversational flows that are developing, in this case moving people from the social area to the building area;
•    that if possible everyone is assigned to groups in advance and are not distracted by what can be a tortuous process of forming teams.

Second Life can be deceptive. On the surface it presents itself as an environment that can be interpreted by understandings from the real world. It can seduce one into believing that ‘teaching’ practices that work on the outside can be readily transposed inside. It is a sobering experience when the particular constraints of SL kick back and even the best-laid plans begin to unravel.

Thankfully here the entire session did not go completely awry and towers were wrought from SL’s basic prim set.  Congratulations to Art Fossett who was awarded the winners prize – a ‘Ruth’. Of course we will be expecting him back next year, or perhaps at the next social, to defend his title.

See the full photostream here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevenwbohm/tags/towers/

and other snaps here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cubistscarborough/tags/em0608/

Planet: Muvenation Case Study

from: stevenw 4 months ago

A case study for the Planet project from the MUVEnation project.

Tags: language pattern muvenation planetcasestudy language

Planet: Muvenation Case Study

from: stevenw 6 months ago

A case study for the Planet project from the MUVEnation project.

Tags: language pattern muvenation planetcasestudy language

Planet: Muvenation Case Study

from: stevenw 6 months ago

A case study for the Planet project from the MUVEnation project.

Tags: language pattern muvenation planetcasestudy language

Planet: Muvenation Case Study

from: stevenw 7 months ago

A case study for the Planet project from the MUVEnation project.

Tags: language pattern muvenation planetcasestudy language

Virtuals worlds and radical pedagogy

from: stevenw 5 months ago

Presentation that was given at the ESRC: Social learning in Virtual worlds seminar at City University, London on 14th March 2008.

Tags: virtualworlds pedadgogy radical secondlife immersion

Virtuals worlds and radical pedagogy

from: stevenw 7 months ago

Presentation that was given at the ESRC: Social learning in Virtual worlds seminar at City University, London on 14th March 2008.

Tags: virtualworlds pedadgogy radical secondlife immersion

Virtuals worlds and radical pedagogy

from: stevenw 7 months ago

Presentation that was given at the ESRC: Social learning in Virtual worlds seminar at City University, London on 14th March 2008.

Tags: virtualworlds pedadgogy radical secondlife immersion

Virtuals worlds and radical pedagogy

from: stevenw 8 months ago

Presentation that was given at the ESRC: Social learning in Virtual worlds seminar at City University, London on 14th March 2008.

Tags: virtualworlds pedadgogy radical secondlife immersion