Another response about KZ

Good day;

I received a link to Christine Crawford’s “An SL Orientation for your review” post on Nabble 2 from a friend. I visited the orientation an respectfully submit the following findings for your review.

Landing Zone

Observation: I landed directly in front of the first station, which was good.

Suggestion: I would always encourage you to put the instructions for any action, to the left of the view, not the right. Most visitors will be used to reading from left to right and the instructions should be the first thing they see.

Observation: I immediately noticed that the walkway leading to the next station was surounded by water. When I was a “Newb” walking was sometimes “problematic.” I intentionally simulated a laggy session and poor navigation skills and this is where I wound up! Many “Newbs” who don’t yet understand flying, would “drown” at this point…

􀀁

Suggestion: Guard Rails!

Observation: The “Welcome to Kuttara Zen” sign includes information seemingly designed for those who want to dance and those who want to “learn skills often used in SL.”

Question: Which of these activities (dance vs obstacle course) is the primary focus?

Comments: If learning is the primary focus, the invitation to learn should be on the left (see above). The text phrase “Right click and Touch this sign…” is also a little confusing.

Suggestion: Switch the learning and dancing invite text. Rewrite the obstacle course text to read: “To receive a NoteCard with instructions for the Obstacle Course, do the following: “Right-click on this sign, then left-click on the “Touch” menu item. Left-click on the “Keep” button on the pop-down menu.”

Note: You actually employ this type of instructional phrasing in the NoteCard provided by the sign!􀀂

Lantern / Notecard #1

Observation: The welcome message calls this place the “Chinsen Shuyo Teinen New Users Obstacle Course” I was introduced to this location by Christine Crawford as the “Kuttara Zen Avatar Training Trail”

Suggetion: Stick with a consistant, easy to say, remember and BRAND name!

Observation: Presumably “Task 1″ has already been accomplished.

Lantern / Notecard #2

Suggestion: Put the lantern “deeper” into the “zone,” so the visitor is better positioned to “Look around this stone platform” when they approach the lantern.

Lantern / Notecard #3

Observation: The “Lantern 3 Instruction Card” tells the reader that the “big pink tree… it (SP) due west.”

Question: Until the avatar reaches the sea bed and the embedded directional reference, how does the participant discern “West?”

Suggestion: Correct spelling and capitalization errors in this and other notecards and eliminate any references to compass directions, where directions are not clearly visible at the point where the instruction is being given.

Lantern / Notecard #4

Comment: When I first learned how to fly, I found it was easier for me to start by pressing the key and then using the Pg-up / Pg-dn keys for altitude control.

Lantern / Notecard #5

Suggestion: You may want to put an actual number (5, etc.) on the lanterns, to help with orientation. You may also want to warn people from holding down their directional arrows and flying to far. Because an exercise like this has the potential to send someone far from their intended location, you might want to include a Landmark and instructions to click on it if they get “lost.” 􀀀

Lantern / Notecard #6

Comment: The feather is a nice gift!

Question: What are these survey questions trying to evaluate?

Lantern / Notecard #7

Comment: Nice that you give people some instruction in “dancing.” It really is “one of the most important social skills of Second Life.”

Closing:

Congratulations on your orientation project. With a few tweaks, and some spelling and grammar corections, you will have a great tool to help “Newbs” learn about SL. I hope my feedback is helpful in reaching that goal.

ps. Nice quote from Winston Churchill Christine!
“However beautiful the strategy, we should occasionally look at the results.”

Respectfully,

Valiant Westland

 

Response to KZ SLED post

Dear Christine,

I saw your SLED post, and was interested to go through your orientation experience.  The orientation experience has been a very hot topiv on the mentor’s SLVOL (SL Volunteers List)

It is a very nice piece of work.   The instructions are clear, and the design flows well.

I’m assuming your 7 stations are not intended to be a total course introducing SL.  As a SL mentor, I spend most of my mentor time on the  Orientation Islands where new persons first land.  For the vast majority, getting their avatar to look the way they want it is the immediate and burning concern.  But tackling that would take another 7 stations by itself.

The next is to answer the question “What can I do in SL?”  They consider learning to move, communicate, use their inventory and search all just things to be done to get to that burning question. Naturally, many are quite impatient to get the tutorials out of the  way.  Your design is an improvement over the current hub and spoke  orientation of Linden Labs.  IBy indirectly answering pieces of the  “What can I do?” question, you provide a motivation to move on in a  clear and directed way.

Station 7 (dance) might be a little less clear for a new person. A little quibble on the overall design of this - you ask a new person to look up and click on the dance ball.  That assumes they know how to move their camera properly.   After your very careful tutorial on movement - that leap is a big one.

Specific terminology that might give a new person pause is “The instructions on the opposite side of the pavilion show how to use the  pink and blue dance balls (left click on one and choose “Dance” or “Sit” whichever is displayed. Your avatar will be held in a dance- ready position until a partner clicks the adjacent dance ball”    For  a new person - “Why pink and blue - and which should I take?”   and  “What does “held in a dance-ready position” mean?”

Also - I believe the note card is in error here:  “TTPS: When using the pink and blue dance balls, make sure you click the StandUp button on the bottom of the screen before you click on the dance ball. If you accidentally do this, you will need to close SL (File >Quit) and sign back on again to get rid of the problem.”    It IS possible to stop  animations on yourself without a relog, contrary to the note card’s
instructions.  “WORLD/ Stop All Animations” does the trick.

Hope this helps

Edward Griffith (SL)
Ian Graham

Silly me - forgot to mention one other thing . . .

I also peeked at the slide show . . .
The layout and design on your slides is fine - no quibbles.  SL gives you one big handicap though.  Textures take forever to rez.  That’s  not your doing, but you might want to design for that can cut the  information on each slide - and go with a 256 x 256 texture  - and  break things into more slides.  In my subjective experience - cutting  textures from 512 to 256 cuts loading time by a little less that  2/3.

Of course - Your mileage may vary.

My response to Ian:

Ian,

Thank you VERY much for your detailed review of KZ. I agree that avatar customization is a vital and immediate interest of most incoming residents. We felt that the scope of such an endeavor was too much for the assignment that we had in the BSU T&L course. However, I am currently designing a customization module for my final master’s project which I will post here when it is complete. In addition, we hope to develop a camera control module in the future which will be added to the beginning of the course since it is obviously one of the more important skills. I’m glad to see your review supports our own.

Your other suggestions are very astute as well. I am also concerned about rez time for the job aids (slideshow) and I will try to fix that using your suggestions. I was hoping to use a pre-rezzing slide show viewer but have been unable to locate one.

Thanks again!

Chris
(Silver Tomorrow)

 

Collaboration on SL Orientation

I posted this to the SLED list - looking forward to their responses:

Dear SLEDers,

With all the buzz around lately about SL orientations, I thought I’d take a moment to share with all of you an orientation experience I co-designed with Len Thurman (Daxx Aeon).

A little about me: I am an instructional design master’s student at the University of North Dakota. In addition to my usual coursework at UND, in the Spring of 08, I took a graduate course from the EdTech department at Boise State University entitled, “Teaching and Learning in Second Life.” The course was co-taught by Ann Jeffery from Southampton University in the UK and Dr. Mauri Collins from UNLV. They did a wonderful job co-teaching and I learned a tremendous amount from them and the other students enrolled.

During our course we were given a group teaching assignment which required us to work with another student. I chose to do “Inducting Noobs” because of some of my previous work in SL included creating instructional visual display boards (job aids) – I wanted a chance to use them in-world.

My partner was another instructional designer, Len Thurman (Daxx Aeon) from a community college in Arizona. He and two of his co-workers, Susannah Reiser (Fiona Wobbit) and  Laurie-Ann Schultz ( Laluz Graves) designed and built a “Zen Garden” on their parcel in a region called Kuttara. They designed it as a retreat for themselves and a showcase of SL for their administrators. When I told Len my ideas for the job aids, Len brought me to Kuttara and asked I’d like to use the space for our assignment. I studied the area and told him I thought we could design the instruction in modules which would be sequenced by “station.”

We designated 7 stations and decided which SL skills we would focus on for each station. I was very excited to use some of what I had learned in my Games and Simulations class at UND by incorporating motivational and flow theories - we gave out rewards at different stations when a task was accomplished (such as a flight feather for the flying activity and a t-shirt for another).

We designed the instruction using the ADDIE process and the Collins model (by Dr. Collins our instructor), including the iterative process of testing and revision. Len came up with the idea of notecards to teach mini lessons and give directions for the activities – he did a nice job writing them and we worked hard to keep them short and entertaining. We used a few job aids to give visual support in-world as well. The original flight activity was difficult to navigate for newbs so Len redesigned it, with input from Ann Jeffery and myself, to better scaffold the activity. We found that the dance activity also needed revision and so we made a few changes to that. We presented the process that we went through to design the trail, the feedback we got and changes we made to our peers for the final class assignment.

It was a lot of fun to bring our friends to our new build and ask for their feedback. Everyone gave a lot of fantastic feedback, and our instructor, Ann Jeffery was particularly helpful in correcting some of the design flaws. By the time we were done, Len had named the place, Kuttara Zen Avatar Training Trail, and henceforth dubbed “KZ” for short.

I am very grateful to Lisa Dawley for offering the course, Ann Jeffery and Mauri Collins for the arduous task of teaching it, Susanna and Laurie-Ann for allowing Len and I to use their retreat for our training, and to Len for putting in many hours and much creativity with me to design our beautiful little slice of SL.

Please feel welcome to take a few moments to go thru KZ and give us your feedback either on or off list. I will publicize the feedback on my blog (silvertomorrow.wordpress.com) when it is finished to help inform us all in the process of creating orientations.

Kuttara Zen: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Kuttara/119/61/21

 

Across the Metaverse, by Torley Linden

How exciting!

 

Wonderland

I had the opportunity to join other SL educators in the first introduction of Wonderland. Sun had an introduction in world and then guided participants to download the Wonderland client. They are allowing registered educators in their new virtual world. A Sun employee gave me a one on one tour. The graphics were primitive but the interface with applications was very nice. With one click of the mouse I had control of the white board and other applications.

I tweeted the introduction in that occurred in SL:

The Wonderland servers could be mirrored or backed up at any number of places. Each node is hosted by anacademically oriented institution. Wonderland was done by educators for educators to get this technology in their hands can be bounced around and hosted on any number of servers. Sun isencouraging universities to become a “node” on the grid - let us know if you want your center to be involved and host your own.

It was a new experience tweeting (taking dictation essentially) while someone else was speaking. Keeping it to 140 characters and remembering what was being said while keeping up with the in-world and MSN chat was a real challenge. It was an impromptu thought to begin with and I didn’t do such a great job, but it  was fun experiment.

When I finally finished downloading Wonderland, and logged in, I found that my friends on Macs were having trouble. I asked Nigel from Wonderland to help them, and he immediately logged into gchat and tried to talk them through it. Most of the developers are using Macs and know how to get past the Java issues. It took him and Annie a couple of days to work through the problems but he persisted and I was impressed. Especially when I found out he helped Terran too! Way to go Nigel - thanks!

Like I said, the graphics were very primitive, once they’re upgraded (significantly) I can see that it might be a better alternative to SL for some things, especially for corporations that want to hold collaborative distance meetings. However, I think it will be a long time before Wonderland offers significant competition for SL.

Photos to follow

 

InSLed Week 2

This week started out with Annie having technical problems because Annie couldn’t get online and then had to spend her time working with her students. I ended up taking her script and posting it to chat. It was really great that we had everything scripted out.

Suzie decided to move into groups before starting the quest, and we have organizational problems with it becuase it wasn’t planned ahead - lesson for the week - don’t change organizational things on the fly!

 

cyber celibacy vs education

In Meaningful Learning and The Participatory Web, a web book by Grabe and Grabe, they ask:

“How do the risks match up with the educational potential of applications that may involve a certain element of danger?”:

A couple of data points from this study (The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children):

• Four percent of those surveyed indicated experiencing an “aggressive sexual solicitation” (perpetrator made an effort to take the “experience” offline through phone contact, mail, or face to face meeting).
• Location of computer when experiencing an aggressive sexual solicitation - 79% home, 12% friend home, 9% school, library, or other.
• Age of solicitor associated with “aggressive solicitation - 44% <18, 34% 18-25, 15% >25, 7% - no clue
• Means of access - chat 32%, IM 54%, other 13%
• Reaction - 44% removed self from situation, 23% warned solictor, 7% changed online name, 15% ignored, 2% reported to parent or authorities, 7% met person

It is the combination of these percentages we have to process. Is there a risk to adolescents? Obviously! Are school uses of communication technology involved? Rarely! Do adolescents act responsibly? Mostly!

I’m sorry but I can’t help but liken this unto the politically and religiously hot question of educating children about safe sex or promoting celibacy. Personally I take a middle-of-the-road stance because I believe in promoting celibacy but recognize that not all kids are going to hold out. So why ignore the problem - arm them with the tools they need to be safe no matter what their choice is.

The same idea applies to Internet use and education; according to the studies referred to above, the potential risks to teenagers and younger kids is low and the potential benefits of use of social media is high. To combat the risk, educate them. Why is this so hard?

Work cited:

Grabe, M. and Grabe C. (2008). Meaningful Learning and the Participatory Web (registration required). Retrieved on June 17, 2008 from http://learningaloud.com/participatoryweb/

 

Checkin out Flock

Interesting approach to social media. giving it a try.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

 

Virtual Worlds and the New Frontiers of Learning vid

Thanks Terran Timeless (Michael Galvin)

Collaborative Technology and Engaging the Campus 2008
Track 1: Community Engagement: From local impact to global influence

Conversations about assessment, transfer of learning using virtual worlds by Lev Gonick, Stacy Williams and Mark Turner from Case Western Reserve University, Ed Lamoureux from Bradley University, Cory Ondrejka from co-founder of Second Life and now at University of Southern California.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-nq1q3FeKk&feature=PlayList&p=A878DF07BE7B51A3&index=78

Cory
15% of people in SL script

 

alignment and national standards

Never having taught in a school, I have not had much of a reason to really study national standards. In the Digital Media course I’m taking with Dr. Grabe, we focused on national standards and discussed how they are translated into classroom activities. It was a fascinating discussion for me, in part because I was recently invited to review this website www.advanc-ed.org. As I was reading about standards, benchmarks and frameworks in the book, Integrating Technology for Meaningful Learning by Grabe and Grabe, I was able to see how alignment in all of these areas would be beneficial.

Here’s something I wrote for class that I wanted to share (and is something that I applied the internalization process to before addressing - see “The Who” post):

Standards are written by national organizations such as ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) and NCATE (National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education). The standards written at this level are very broad, like the one in the example, Students understand human, cultural, and societal issues related to technology and practice legal and ethical behavior. (Standard 5), intended to outline the “general concepts and skills student should acquire” (Grabe and Grabe, p. 23). National standards are then broken down into granular levels called benchmarks and frameworks. Benchmarks which are still quite broad, but more specifically outline what will be required by grade level. A curriculum framework, usually at a state or district level, is even more definitive and organizes the objectives for skills and knowledge to be gained. It is up to the classroom teacher to study the spirit and letter of the standard from the national level to the framework level, and construct activities, learning experiences and assessment for the students which will meet the goals originally intended when written.

Alignment is a term often used in instructional design to describe a tie between the objectives, the content and the assessment in a course; ideally these would be in sync covering the same topics. When thinking about how this ties in with national standards; I see standards as objectives that must be analyzed using a top-down approach. During the process of granulating national standards into benchmarks, frameworks and then into individual lesson plans, educators, textbook manufacturers, and administrators, etc., at each level must align their thinking and their goals to one another using the standards as tools to do so. With regard to the standard in this example, reasonable alignment would mean that a benchmark for this standard would be included for each grade level, such as “students should understand copyright issues with internet publications.” At the framework level, school districts would be more specific in saying “students must understand copyright law with regard to blogs” and a lesson plan might include, “students will be able to generate an essay that outlines three legal and ethical issues related to copyrights and blogs.” In this way objectives, content and assessment are aligned from national to individual classroom levels.