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Just go here...it's amazing. Alas, Franklin Street not available...

Second Life Best Practices in Education - Link Dump

Here's a nice link dump to catch up on the SLBP confo last week...

WUNC today, the rise and fall of Friendster

On 'the Story' today..Jonathan Abrams from Friendster.

quote:

Dick talks with Jonathan about what he learned from the success and later failure of Friendster, and how he plans to compete with a new social networking project in what has become a very crowded field.

More of SL Best Practices in Education confo

A few keynotes this afternoon worth catching...catching the end of the IBM keynote. Place is SRO.

Search IBM and Secondlife in YouTube (do that later) to see some examples of their use of virtual worlds. ? on when virtual worlds truly become mainstream? Mainstream is difficult to argue..what is mainstream? Talk in terms of internet 1 (democratization of access), lots of people connected now took about 10 years. Web2.0 (democratization of participation), took about half the time. 3D internet is about people coming back. People are going to be involved in every aspect of environment, and it will happen fast.

Pirate Shipman, adjunct faculty at Pepperdine, is next keynote. Right brain attitudes important in today's world:

• Design
• Story
• Sympathy
• Empathy
  
• Play
• Meaning

Basic premise is that we need to focus on these areas, versus left brain logic. Pirate did a class project do develop virtual content reflecting these 6 aptitudes. This comes from the book "The Whole New Mind". Students given a small area and a 150 prim limit for their projects. We watch slides of the building progress on the class island. Students experimenting...Conclusion was that it was a powerful learning experience for all involved.




That's the keynote in progress..

Question...how do we teach in a virtual world? We need to discuss strenths and weakneses.

Strengths:

• SL is a spatial experience. Virtual world has physicality. Shapes, sizes, movement, spatial relationships take on deep meaning.
• SL is an immersive experience. We can respond as if we are really there...effects emotion and mood to be in a virtual situation.
• SL is a social platform. We can craft and present an identity to others. "This makes the us that engages with others easier to become". (Interesting).
• SL has tools to connect to and communicate with others. LSL allows us to develop socially aware objects.
• SL democratizes the ability to create content and learning artifacts, it's a participatory medium. (This is what I think is the key point, which SL captures well).
• SL enables collaborative development of objects. (I think building things with others, and having the tools in-world, is the key...this is why SL works, and why importing from blender, etc is not important, and rather not the point, but that's just me!).

Some talk about the playful spirit that is the game part of the environent...the keynote speaker is wearing a pirate eyepatch.

Weaknesses:

• Effective communication of large amounts of data is difficult.
• Technological overhead high.
• Combo of 2d with SL lacks synergy most of the time. Showing 'flat' images, for example, still easier in a browser interface..
• Activities outside of the scope of what second life does can usually be done better outside of SL. "Sometimes, though, the novelty may be enough".

OK...gonna hit some posters, then I gotta go....

Here's a parting shot of one of the posters, this one for the SL Genetics Center. All in all a remarkable day, and an effective use of SL. I've even got an inventory full of junk now I have to sift thru!.

Second Life Best Practices in Education

Popped into the SL Best practices conference. Hit the registration tables, got my gift bag, off to a discussion about DRM and contracts in virtual space.


Here's the scene at the presentation space...Parallels right now to Viacom v YouTube, discussion of safe harbor provisions as they will apply to Second Life. Real life money is involved in Second Life, real life legal action will follow.




What happens if someone misappropriates my content in virtual space outside of virtual space (outside of the 'rules' in Second Life)? There are layers of rights (game code, copyright) but do they give a practical answer?

Interesting angle...What happens when the players don't like what the game desigeners/owners are doing. Interesting because this could be seen as a game, but significant investments could be made in virtual space. How does freedom of speech, etc play in?

Second Life may be more open source. How about Creative Commons licenses? There are some mappings between the SL object permissions and CC permissions. What does CC give us in SL that copyright does not give us in SL? We need to be careful here about coding or contracting away rights that may be in copyright. Note this is from an Australian perspective.

Next pres, Profiling e-world customers...This is an e-marketing presentation.

• personalization of products and services (CRM)
• online profiling of customers (what's that)?
• all e-world transactions leave traces of data
• issues involving trust, accuracty, privacy

Online profiling is practice of aggregating info about consumers lifestyle, product preferences, purchase history. Adds up to info on customer's buying behavior. Now talk about SL specific approaches..

Brands and self image apply in virtual space. Research discussed addressing the issue of online profiling by introducing self-profiling. Capture online ideal self-image via brand personality. What evolving brands traits could be highlighted online? SL objects must be designed in a way to construct an ad-hoc shopt display for each customer, sensing their profile, brand identity, self profile.

Between presentations. It's interesting to watch typical real life confo behaviors play out in virtual space. Small groups congregating, people walking in to check the scene, and deciding to attend the other talk after looking at the boards. Presenters trying to figure out how to get their slides to show, etc. IOW oddly familiar. Also cool is how people linger to associate, and look around to check who else is in the room. Lots of networking going on, and informal off-line talk.

Into a panel discussion now... gonna sneak to the Grind for coffee. Just like a real confo!

OK..came back at the end of the panel..darn..took too long. Off to the vendor area, outreach, etc.


Popped in to a bit of discussion, SL Education is about collaboration and partnerships. Example, various teachers can swap sections to teach content that they are best at, and enjoy teaching the most. The content is the focus.




That's a shot from the discussion area. I'll wander over to the exhibits now. Saw the Moodle Booth, vendors who build sims, libraries. Here's an interesting thing, a booth for the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, who will be coming to Second Life...




More wandering..

Digital Campfires Foundation, looking at creating thinklets within second life. UTD has an impressive booth, going to have to visit their campus. Some discussion ensued about an open source model within SL. SLForge was one attempt to start this. Perfect for higher ed!

Schome looks like an interesting pilot project. "Schome park was the site of a pilot project during which over 100 memebers of NAGTY (National Assoc of Gifted and Talented Youth) collaborated with staff in Second Life to seek ways to transform educational spaces and practices"

Map of forces shaping future of education, from the Knowledge Foundation...Feed of current projects from My SL Project. Here's their academia edition. Saw Columbia College Chicago has a cool sim, I AM Columbia. I'm going to do a quick tele to their sim.




Checking out the galleries at Columbia College.

Back to the presentation hall. Instead of turning of our cell phones, we are reminded to kill all particles and animations. No SL bling for lag's sake.

Suzi Mazzenga (Xirconnia Morphett-SL) Drawing on Second Life Experiences to Enrich the First Life.


This presentation is being simulcast over the plain old web via SLCN (Second Life Cable Network) now.

Living outside of the circuit box...applying learning about self in Second Life to First Life...Compare your avatar in SL to real life. Mine is a virtual doppleganger. Or is your avatar a subconscious blueprint for making a better 1st life you?

What does your SL interaction say about you? Is your avatar a virtual extension of your personality? What does your SL home say about you? Did you put up a virtual wall to block your neighbor's view? Would you do the same things you do in SL in real life? Is there morality in SL? Various giggles and grins in audience.



Here's a shot of the talk, note the video screen showing the live simulcast.

How many have group meetings in SL? Do you have a traditional board room for meetings? Look at other non-traditional settings. Coffee shops, koi ponds...no walls, no chairs. Restrictions and expectations can be changed by working within SL as groups.

There is no 'back of the room' in SL collaborations. Gonna break out, do some RL work, and hit the IBM keynote...

IBM Promo Video on their new Virtual Biz Center

The simple thing that stuck with me, back when I heard Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger talk at as part of the RENCI Distinguished Lecture series was the observation that the '2D' web was about taking the catalog and putting it into the browser, while the 3D web was about taking the whole store, sales staff included, and putting it in a virtual space. The purely commercial side of the web is not the whole story by any means, but I suspect that the next Amazon or Ebay will rise from the 3D web, and that makes this stuff exciting to watch.

So dig this little YouTube video about the new IBM Virtual Biz center. I took five and logged in, and happened upon the real virtual site, and saw this thing on the Eightbar blog. IBM's Second Life presence is impressive, and I often point people there when they let me know that the virtual web is just a game....

Approx 31 Blogging about moble + SL, Croquet

Willi's got a bit in his blog about some prototypes we're working on. This one is meant to show on-scene disaster workers walking around assessing damage with gps and camera equipped mobile devices.

I messed with Croquet a bit yesterday. just out of interest, and also a bit because I was miffed at Second Life for deciding to bring the grid down yesterday. Such is life on the front end of the hype curve!

Initial impressions...

Second Life is more like the web, it has the chaotic, random feel that comes from random exploration, searching, and inputs from your social/professional network. Croquet has more of a self-contained, peer-to-peer feel. Right now I see Croquet as a targeted application development platform. I also see Croquet as lending itself to more abstract presentation. I really love the metaphor in Croquet of jumping through portals to navigate to new worlds! I'm quite sure I've only scratched the surface on Croquet, but it seems less collaborative, and more about cool new metaphors for information. In other words, I don't feel as much immersion, or presence of myself or others in the Croquet demos, but I do see more of a free-flowing, abstract experience.

That's not a knock, I see different horses for different courses. I'm even more of a Croquet noob than a Second Life noob, so take everything with a grain of salt. I've got to dive into Blender and Squeak, I think, before I really have a good grounding on the potential of Croquet.