Silvertomorrow’s Weblog

I asked Padl about land and lo and behold she knew someone selling! Wow, beautiful, quiet, right on the water. Two parcels. A moon too. The sale went smoothly and I’m very excited we have our own virtual land. Seems silly in some ways, but also feels about time. I have all kinds of ideas on what to do with it, but i think i will let things take their own shape in their own time. Now is time to concentrate on encyclopedia. There is one more parcel for sale next door, i wonder if we should buy that too….

Met with Lynn, the UND CIO, and Lori this morning at 8:00 am (No, I can’t believe I got up in time for that either – amazing). I spent days preparing for the meeting, talking with Mike (my husband) about how to zoom out on the problem and think about how to create a system that could withstand time and trial. I came up with a diagram I called the “Second Life Initiative” which I later renamed to Virtual World Initiative.

<will insert image of diagram soon>

The ideas were well-received, but neither knew of someone who could fund my BSU graduate course. I am considering who else I might ask. Lori is going to take the course with me (yay!!) and we will see about teaching it for T&L next semester as a Special Topics course. Maybe I should talk to Dan….(Dean of EHS).

 Anyway, there’s a lot of work here for someone who is not getting paid or getting credit, so I need to be careful. There are many other projects for me to work on, especially my Scholarly Project. It may be time to buy land soon….

Now that the Internship is finally done, what will my next step be? I have so many ideas they are running around in my head confusing me. I know my scholarly project will be about SL skills and best practices for newbie faculty. Right now I have to do an “exhaustive literature review” for the book chapter…goody. Perhaps that should be what the chapter is on – best practices. Yep. That’ll work, so I’m killing two birds with one stone and becoming an expert in this area as I go. One deicsion made…next…..

March 24, 2008

So funny how I think I make a decision and – nope! My Scholarly Project is NOT what I said here (but I can’t talk about it yet). AND I hear from Joe Sanchez (North Lamar in-world) that the ‘best practices of SL is BS.’ I’m not quite sure why he thinks that but I’m hoping to have another lively conversation with him soon!

Conclusions

On the one hand I am sad that we were unable to create a prototype for UND in-world. But on the other hand, I am glad that we did not go in that direction yet. After looking around at all the different sims that universities build, I would like UND’s sim to be different. Yes, there should be a few buildings that are replicated for the sake of marketing the University. But I think the idea of a Center of Excellence is a perfect blend of interdisciplinary work which can be funded by special monies and which can be designed in innovate and interactive ways for SL.

I believe my first experience in SL with the workshop on immersion was an important foundation for my perspective on education in SL. As a result of this internship, I have achieved many of my own personal goals. I have grown long, beautiful silver hair, I wear gorgeous fashionable clothing and even a belly ring when the mood strikes. Even more than that, I have met many wonderful people and made professional contacts I never would have made in any other way. I have had my first publication accepted (on SL of course) and have settled on an exciting topic for my scholarly project. If the goal of any internship is to help the student find his or her career path, I would say that this has been a highly successful experience!

Thanksgiving break week – I didn’t think I was going to do much toward my internship this week, but it ended up being very busy and successful. Monday night I met with Lori and her class online. I rezzed the platform and I raised into the sky about 50 meters. Everyone joined me and then I created UND seats for them all and we talked a bit about SL using voice chat. One of the members of the class had their mic on overdrive and was overpowering the other people in the sandbox. They decided to force us out with annoying noises, so we TP’d to another, quieter sandbox and sat on the sand and chatted. The students were very engaged in the conversation about how to use SL in education and some of them stayed later after the class to see some sites. I took them to Glidden and showed them the art café and told them about meeting the builder. They loved the art on display and I took the picture below to demonstrate the irony of having RL photography displayed in SL.

Also this week, I met padlurowncanoe (padl). I IM’d her as the contact for an ISTE event about 30 minutes before the event was to occur and we immediately started talking. We talked all week about instructional uses of SL and about the Virtual Education Simulation (VESIM) which she and three others had created and trademarked. After all this discussion, Padl agreed to allow me to use her land to present for the Tech Trends (TT), and she and her partner JS Vavoom (John) agreed to demonstrate the Nursing Education Simulation (NESim). Since we had so many people coming from the Nursing program, I thought that we should close with the demo on how to use SL for Nursing Education.

Lori and I agreed that we wanted to have Larry Johnson, the CEO of NMC speak at the TT about what he’s seen other universities do in SL. Larry agreed and so we had a line up: me, Larry, John. Again, I knew I wanted this to be a different approach than a bunch of slides, but I was concerned about teleporting to different places in-world. I decided to demonstrate how to use some of the “visual” tools in-world by putting a few of my slides up on a viewer and then explore a sim or two if there was time.

I spent many hours preparing for this session, discussing different approaches with Padl and Mike (my husband) and working out which slides to show and creating them. I made sure everything worked and asked in-world friends to attend to give us an in-world audience. I was concerned also about the audio because there were several factors to work out. We had to use a private channel according to Padl to deal with attenuation issues. We had to make sure everyone in the sim was included in that call. We had to make sure that my laptop was hooked up to the sound system in the room as well as my microphone. The mic I was using was different than the one I normally use with the laptop. In other words, there were many audio issues to work out and I felt a strong desire to get them worked out ahead of time. As we did not do that, there was a delay in getting started and difficulty transitioning between speakers. I felt that the slides were still a poor choice. I tried to bring in personal experiences, humor and important information, like the Gartner report, but I still felt awkward between slides. Upon reflection I think I would rather risk the pauses during teleportation than between slides. Lesson learned. Overall, I think the TT went well.

As I prepared for this workshop I became a bit more nervous than last time, I think because the Dean of Nursing and another Nursing faculty member who had SL experience was going to be in attendance. I was hoping to “wow” them with my knowledge of SL. There was only one problem – someone fell asleep. As I stood there laughing to myself I realized that she was right! The presentation WAS boring. Why was I teaching SL using PowerPoint of all things?!! I was suddenly rather disappointed with myself. I should have known better. We went on to the in-world portion of the training and had the same problem as last time. People were too busy experimenting with their new avatars to pay me much attention. Again I had to laugh because as a group of three presenters we were still going off our agreed track. It was fine though and people got their questions answered. I walked away knowing I was going to have to revamp the entire session for the Tech Trends.

This week in-world I met a couple of interesting people, one of whom agreed to give Mike and I building lessons for the cost of his textures. I spent a few hours with them learning that I am really really BAD at thinking in 3D. This does not bode well for building a prototype. I am confident I can learn this, but it will take me some time dedicated to just this.

Also this week I spent a little time preparing for Lori’s class coming up on Monday. She asked me to help her decide what to do and so I created and distributed more Landmark boxes and created little UND seats for people to sit on using my new skills and knowledge of textures and prims. We decided to try using a platform above the sandbox where we could still rez objects but would be away from prying eyes. I am looking forward to the class.

While I was preparing with Lori, my professor friend, Joey, asked me to review his lesson plan for his SL class. I took about an hour and really analyzed the contents. I thought the timeframe was too short and that the students needed more SL skill building, especially with the highly conceptual tasks he was asking them to perform (analyze, compare and contrast). He told me later that he had worked on some skill building with them which had not outlined in the lesson plan, which was good. I hope it works out well for him and his class..it was great to use my instructional design skills to analyze a real lesson plan for SL!! Thanks Joey!

Update on November 28
I received a panicked IM from Joey today asking me to help with motivating his students. It turns his students were having trouble accomplishing the goals that had been laid out for them. Most of them had not met with their groups and were reporting in with “ I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.” I wasn’t really able to help Joey much other than to offer moral support. He had changed the group assignment to a reflective presentation on their experiences in Second Life and was offering as much support as he could to his poor students. I haven’t heard back yet how the presentations went. I’ve added this experience to my reflective journal because it reinforces my belief that students and faculty are on a level playing field when they walk into SL and all need strong support in building basic skills. After these skills are built, the experiences can become rich and deep. I also felt very grateful that I had taken the time to learn my way around SL and get a feel for the true potential for engaging learners rather than simply raising a structure to sit empty and cold.

On Wednesday and Thursday of this week I attended Wimba training in Fargo with the rest of the CILT department. It was great fun to travel with them and spend some relaxing time. It was funny to be in the audience as an instructional designer since that is what the instructor was as well – a graduate student in IDT and employee of Wimba. It was also strange to have people come up to me and say hi! I went to your presentation at Beyond Boundaries! Yikes. I didn’t remember them and got shy (please!!). During lunch on Thursday I met several people who are interested in Second Life and got their business cards. We talked about Facebook and exchanged ideas on how to use it in the classroom. Then, I heard about an IDT NDUS listserv that someone in the room was moderating – someone named Sam – so I told Lori about it and she and I went up to him and asked him about it. We got to talking about Second Life as an instructional tool and Lori suggested an NDUS SL group. I was excited by the prospect that my idea could be implemented, so I immediately went in-world and created the group. Perhaps this can be the beginning of collaboration, even in some small degree.

Next week is the second Intro course and some of the nursing faculty will be there. I want to make this experience more directed so that people are not lost. Lori agreed that we will spend a few minutes letting them explore and then pull them back together as a group. I updated some of the slides to include a mock trial of Socrates that I heard about on the listserv and attended. The experience brought to mind the question of attention. One of the students who was a major participant in the trial IM’d me after she was done and told me she liked my shoes (they were sparkling). We spent a good portion of the time in this class chatting about clothes, shoes and hair. On the one hand, I can see where this is inappropriate. On the other hand, the audio portion of this trial didn’t work so there was a lot of time spent waiting for people to type into chat with their predetermined responses. The idea was good, but delivery was mediocre.

I read in the “Professor Avatar” article from the Chronicle that despite the creator’s hard work on this replication, art history profs at his own university decried it’s use as a teaching tool because of it’s variants from the real colors. Should I include that little nugget when I use this to demonstrate the value of this replication as a teaching tool??? Hmmm…

This week was the myspace/facebook Tech Trends Forum and it was a great learning experience for me. I was so surprised that I was not a bit nervous to speak to a room full of about 15 people. However, there was also a meeting with the faculty mentoring people who were being given a tour of campus. On Monday Lori told us they were coming to CILT and told us to be in our offices ready to talk about what we do. Fortunately, I decided to dress up, and much to my surprise Lori asked me to speak to the group as a whole in front of a PowerPoint presentation she had prepared! Chad had to come looking for me because I was downstairs preparing myself to show them a bit in SL and didn’t know she wanted me. I ran up the stairs (oh God) and made a fool of myself trying to say something intelligible while huffing and puffing. That really shook my confidence because one of my program faculty was there and I wanted to do a good job to represent my department. I redeemed myself though, because of the three groups that visited me in my office to see SL, two did not want to leave. I’m sure it was me and all the fascinating things I was saying they were interested in and not the MUVE (sarcasm). Seriously though, it was another great learning experience because it taught me that I need to be ready on the spot to talk about SL (out of breath or not) and I was able to show some more people that Second Life can be a real instructional tool. One person even recognized a building on the Berkman campus as one that he had been in on the RL Harvard campus. He was excited to see something familiar and this reinforced my belief that some RL replication does have a place in SL.

I’m beginning to think my title should be “SL Evangelist” rather than “Intern”

This week I was invited to the CILT meeting to plan the workshops for the rest of the semester. We’re doing one more Intro workshop and a “personalizing your avatar” workshop which Elizabeth is going to use to teach what she learned at her Adobe conference on how to make your avie look like you. We’re also doing a Tech Trends Forum which is geared for the whole campus. The first Tech Trends will be on myspace and facebook and Lori wants me to do a 5 minute promotional blurb on the SL Tech Trends the following month.

With all of these workshops and presentations, I’m beginning to wonder about my internship goals. How will I meet the “building a prototype” goal? I’ve been so busy learning about education in SL and fixing up my avatar to look like I know what I’m doing that I haven’t had time to learn to build. I have tried a few times, but I feel really intimidated and afraid of messing up in front of others. I decided to head over to the Ivory Tower and try the self-paced building tutorial there. I learned a little bit about linking and unlinking objects, but I’m finding it extremely difficult to think in three dimensions. I think I need a tutor.

I was hanging at the sandbox this week and a “guy” named Joey* with the label “SL researcher” walked up to us and started talking. Someone asked him if he was paying people to take surveys and he said no. I IM’d him on the side and we had a very interesting conversation about avatar identity. I was surprised at how open he was, as he told us all that he was a professor from the East Coast (I forget which school) and was conducting part of his class in SL. We became “friends” so it should be interesting to see if our common interests lead us to further discussion.

Note: I had many discussions with Joey over the course of my internship, but only those that are relevant are recorded here.

Ok, I am officially sick of Second Life right now. I crammed all week trying to get myself and Silver ready for our first workshop. Silver received a new shape, a new skin and new eyes. She looks great and very professional! Her looks combined with her new walk, she is acting less and less like a newbie. I want to get her an up-do for formal occasions but alas, that will have to wait.

We planned the workshop and conducted it on Wednesday. An hour or so beforehand, Lori, Elizabeth and I reviewed what I was planning to say. It was helpful to rehearse, and Lori’s input was extremely valuable – she told me to add my stories to make it more personable. I had some compunction about using PowerPoint slides to teach about a virtual world, but Lori had suggested it and approved them, so I decided that instructionally, it was sound. We would go over the concepts and show them in screen shots what the SL client software looked like, how to use the basics and pieces of what the actual environment looked like. Then we would move them into Second Life using dummy avatars I had created.( Earlier in the week we decided to create eight dummy avatars whose first names were North Dakota cities.) There were some technical issues with it, but I figured it out and we disturbed them in the workshop for people to choose from. I had also created a Landmark box which I distributed to each avatar (beforehand) and opened to each inventory so that they could learn to teleport themselves to the various locations I was planning to show them.

This workshop seemed to be very well received. I felt confident and only a little nervous. Lori jumped in to fill in some of the stuff I didn’t know and tell one or two of her own stories. But when we entered Second Life, people did not pay attention to the billboards in the NMC Orientation. I tried to facilitate, but the three of us (Lori, Elizabeth and I) were going off in different directions with different people, so I let it go and answered whatever questions came up. We didn’t get to the exploration portion because people were too focused on learning to move, communicate and customize their avatars. I need to think more about how to manage the in-world portion of the workshop.