[Reminder/Update] The Future of Virtual Worlds in Education - EDUCAUSE Virtual Worlds Constituent Group Annual Meeting
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Sorry.AFK
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This is a reminder that this year's EDUCAUSE Virtual Worlds Constituent Group meeting at the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference is taking place tomorrow (Wed), November 4th. Details below. Hope you can join us.
The theme, and topic of discussion, will be "The Future of Virtual Worlds in Education". The hastag for the conference (for Twitter, blogs, etc...) is #educause09 so we are asking attendees of this meeting (on-site and virtual attendees) to use #educause09vwcg I know its a lot of characters but we want to keep in sync with the conference tag.
This year, our meeting will be taking place simultaneously in three (3) different places - on-site in Denver, in SL, and on Heritage Key. (is this the first time an on-site conference meeting is taking place simultaneously in two different virtual worlds?)
If you will be attending the Annual Conference, please join us on Wednesday, November 4th from 12:40pm to 2:10pm Denver time in Meeting Room 604.
If you'd like to attend in Second Life, the meeting will be taking place in the Montclair State CHSSSouth Amphitheater, at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Montclair%20State%20CHSSSouth/129/158/22 from 11:40am to 1:10pm SLT. If you are attending in Second Life, we still need a couple more volunteers - please email me off list.
This meeting will also be taking place in the King Tut Cosmic Gallery on the Heritage Key grid (which is an OpenSim grid). For how to attend this meeting, please visit http://heritage-key.com/educause-future-virtual-worlds-vx-login-links If you already have an account, this will provide you information on attending. If you don't have an account but would like to try it out, there are also instructions there.
For more details on this specific meeting, please see this page:
For more details on the EDUCAUSE Virtual Worlds Constituent Group, or to sign up for the listserve, please see this page:
Hope to see you in one of our meetings.
best, aj -- AJ Kelton Director of Emerging Instructional Technology College of Humanities and Social Sciences Montclair State University 1 Normal Ave, Montclair, NJ 07043 ---------- http://www.sorry-afk.com http://sorryafk.wordpress.com/ Second Life: AJ Brooks Twitter: sorry_afk Plurk: sorry_afk Skype: sorry.afk AIM: sorryafk Facebook: AJ Kelton Myspace: sorry_afk Are you LinkedIn? http://www.linkedin.com/ _______________________________________________ Educators mailing list To unsubscribe https://lists.secondlife.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/educators |
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Villano, Paul Mr CIV USA TRADOC
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Folks I hope you will read this note as a plea on behalf of the hard work and passion that each of you puts into Second Life and not snarky as I'm sure I will be accused of it being.
I attended Educause yesterday and one of the questions that came up was whether educators are building in Second Life more for themselves than for students. After my experiences of the past two years in SL I must answer that question as yes. Yet again today I tried to attend an event in a lovely virtual world. Down to twittering (not tweeting, grin) birds and all kinds of lovely, textured trees. The problem was it was useless because of the number of people there eating up tremendous bandwidth on top of the heavy build. We must stop this. As I understand it virtual worlds are on the cusp of either being accepted or dismissed as useless and they have much too much potential to allow that to happen because we are getting so involved in the cute little running mice and flowering trees that we are forgetting students on older laptops with limited bandwidth will not be able to access these sites in any numbers that matter or for any useful purpose for synchronous training/meetings. These sites are great when you're alone but they are much too detailed for use with groups. So please, if you're building, consider the student. It might literally be a matter of whether some students without access to classes because of geography or illness get some classes soon. Cut down on the cutesy stuff so students can meet, voice will work, video will work, and we can do what we are all so empassioned to do. _______________________________________________ Educators mailing list To unsubscribe https://lists.secondlife.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/educators |
Cathy Anderson-2
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Wow Paul, Great Point! Even after being in Second Life for over a year I get so frustrated with moving around and down spiral staircases, small rooms, narrow hall ways, and yes Lag! Think not only of your students but what it is like to be new and moving around the environment ..as so many of our students are when the first come into second life. We have erroneously dubbed this generation the "digital native" and assume they all have the skills to be successful in Second Life or other virtual worlds, but they don't necessarily meet that definition. Try to remove as many barriers as possible between the student and the learning opportunity you have created for them...so they can be successful and feel that the experience of learning in Second Life was a positive one!
On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 3:26 PM, Villano, Paul Mr CIV USA TRADOC <[hidden email]> wrote: Folks I hope you will read this note as a plea on behalf of the hard work and passion that each of you puts into Second Life and not snarky as I'm sure I will be accused of it being. -- Cathy Anderson SKYPE: cathylanderson Twitter: twitter.com/cathylanderson cathyandersonblog.com cathyanderson.com Facebook: Virtual Worlds Assessment Group _______________________________________________ Educators mailing list To unsubscribe https://lists.secondlife.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/educators |
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Cathy Arreguin
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In reply to this post
by Villano, Paul Mr CIV USA TRADOC
Some javascript/style in this post has been disabled (why?)
Thanks for the reminder, Paul. Well said.You described what I call the "builder syndrome" ... The tendency for instructor/facilitator/builders to focus too much on their own content creation process, rather than on the needs of the learner and what exactly IS trying to be accomplished by bringing them into this fabulously rich experience. In essence, I believe when we, as learning facilitators, are creating a learning environment, it's very helpful to keep in mind, not only the probable user/learner experience (based on computer hardware, graphics card, connection speed, previous experience, etc.) but also why we are asking them to go in-world. Because it's fun for us? .. Or because we are providing immersive, engaging, helpful learning activities and experiences they cannot find elsewhere? Or? I was working with a colleague recently, who purposefully revisited her learning environment using a much less powerful computer. She was rather surprised to notice what she, as a learner, now missed (and mis-experienced) as a result. I know of others who ask new users to "think aloud" as they visit a site for the first time. You also brought up a great point regarding asynchronous vs. synchronous learning environments. I learned the hard way that designing a space for group use is NOT the same as designing for solo learning. (In my case, I had a scenario with chat bots that worked perfectly 1:1. When mobbed by groups of students, it became just ridiculous. Ah, live and learn.) Thanks again for your comments. Cathy ~~~~~~~ Cathy Arreguin MA, Educational Technology Instructional Technology * Educational Media * Virtual Instruction Instructor: San Diego State University, EDTEC700: 3D MultiUser Learning Environments Instructional Muse Virtual Solutions for Real People Second Life: Mari Asturias Teen SL: Cathy Gkid Reaction Grid: Mari Asturias Twitter: cathyarreguin On Nov 5, 2009, at 1:26 PM, Villano, Paul Mr CIV USA TRADOC wrote:
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Eloise Pasteur
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In reply to this post
by Villano, Paul Mr CIV USA TRADOC
I, for one, object to this.
There are certainly cases where people go overboard with building poorly out structures. There are, and have been for a long, long time, equally minimalist builds for meetings. Way, way back (2004/5) in days when there were no options to exceed 40 avatars in a sim, Thinkers meetings used to fill sims and work quite smoothly: a flying amphitheatre, yes we had skyboxes back then; discussion with the neighbours to apologise for taking over the sim and away we went. Declaiming that "Place X was terrible for a large meeting and so terrible for education" implicitly assumes that the only use for a location is teaching large groups. Whilst that may be the case for some users of Second Life, there are a lot of people using Second Life for small group teaching. Suggesting that the next time they plan to have a large meeting they might want to make a flying amphitheatre to avoid some of the worst of the lag from their sim is always an option. Talking to your students, on their elderly laptops and limited bandwidth, and discussing ways they can improve performance for those occasions when they are overwhelmed, and getting the information right, is well worth it too. Setting draw distance way down, all the twiddles turned off can make a big difference. If it is a meeting you can choose from the advanced menu to turn off rendering all kinds of things: character, simple, alpha, particles and clouds can make a huge difference and stop you seeing all those trees and avatars that your set-up can't cope with. I rarely toggle all of those, but just clouds and particles can make a noticeable difference. So can setting your camera position. Zoom right in on the speaker's slides if that is the relevant thing and stop your machine trying to render all those extraneous pixels. That's not to say that the people responsible for the build shouldn't consider the use to which the site is going to be put. People probably need to consider it more consciously than they currently do when thinking about events in Second Life. If you lecture groups of about 60 you would comfortably expect a small lecture theatre and try to book one. You wouldn't consider holding that lecture in your office. You would try to avoid a lecture theatre that seats 500, or a sport stadium that seats 50,000 because your 60 students would rattle around and get lost. Equally, if you were running a scheduled tutorial for one or two students you would probably use your office unless your institution is blessed with an excess of small meeting rooms. When talking about RL it's seemingly instantly obvious: we've had those years of experience to get used to it. Part of the problem is that you "know" your sim can take 40-100 avatars in a way that your office can't. But if you've designed your sim for 5 avatars at a time because that is your normal group size, it will almost certainly struggle with 40, but it will cope with them far better than cramming 40 people into your office. If we're honest, even a sim that is completely flat with a single terrain texture and no prims doesn't perform very nicely with 100 Ruth avatars on it - and Ruth is the least impact your avatar can have on the sim, at least that you can choose: you also need to remember that simply adding more avatars chews sim time and bandwidth. It's not a solely a function of the build, it's a function of the technology too. Your typical avatar, wearing clothes on non-prim shoes, socks, pants, shirt and jacket layer, but bald - a sub-standard "working avatar" streams 3 live- composited 512 X 512 textures plus a 64X64, all with alphas. That's quite likely more than 12 different species of tree. As soon as you add prim hair and shoes (almost de rigeur for everyone these days), well who knows how much extra you are adding? And if you're planning a big event, it can be done. Back in 2007 we managed 1300 unique avatars during the day, in a 24 hour long conference (http://www.secondlifeinsider.com/2007/06/02/slpbe-conference-round-up/ ) across 8 sites. A number of the sites suffered lag that you may or may not consider excessive, but with planning and care it worked really quite well. Back then, total residents was under 7 million (http://www.secondlifeinsider.com/2007/06/03/today-in-second-life-saturday-2-june-2007/ ) so what that would scale up to now if the same proportion attended I'm not sure (can't seem to find the total resident number any more) but I'm pretty sure that to cope with it we'd have to upscale the number of sites by basically the same proportion as the increase in numbers. El. On 5 Nov 2009, at 21:26, Villano, Paul Mr CIV USA TRADOC wrote: > Folks I hope you will read this note as a plea on behalf of the hard > work and passion that each of you puts into Second Life and not > snarky as I'm sure I will be accused of it being. > > I attended Educause yesterday and one of the questions that came up > was whether educators are building in Second Life more for > themselves than for students. After my experiences of the past two > years in SL I must answer that question as yes. Yet again today I > tried to attend an event in a lovely virtual world. Down to > twittering (not tweeting, grin) birds and all kinds of lovely, > textured trees. The problem was it was useless because of the > number of people there eating up tremendous bandwidth on top of the > heavy build. > > We must stop this. As I understand it virtual worlds are on the > cusp of either being accepted or dismissed as useless and they have > much too much potential to allow that to happen because we are > getting so involved in the cute little running mice and flowering > trees that we are forgetting students on older laptops with limited > bandwidth will not be able to access these sites in any numbers that > matter or for any useful purpose for synchronous training/meetings. > > These sites are great when you're alone but they are much too > detailed for use with groups. > > So please, if you're building, consider the student. It might > literally be a matter of whether some students without access to > classes because of geography or illness get some classes soon. Cut > down on the cutesy stuff so students can meet, voice will work, > video will work, and we can do what we are all so empassioned to do. > _______________________________________________ > Educators mailing list > To unsubscribe > https://lists.secondlife.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/educators http://educationaldesigns.eloisepasteur.net/ http://eloisepasteur.net/blog/ SL Education collaboration forum: http://forum.eloisepasteur.net/ _______________________________________________ Educators mailing list To unsubscribe https://lists.secondlife.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/educators |
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Linda Rogers
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I was first working with musicians in assisting with classical concerts across Second Life in 2006 and observed the same problem as Paul points to with concert venue owners. They went overboard with high resolution graphics and cutesy details but the simulation would begin to fail with more than 10 avatars in the place. The focus was entirely on the looks rather than the function of the place.
After a number of bad experiences due to bad builds (and careless event coordination by some owners), I asked the Cedar Island community to consider hosting a music venue. I planned and held a half day consultation session in 2007, inviting some skilled builders, SL sound experts, successful event planners, and veteran SL musicians. Out of that small productive gathering came some excellent advice and a building plan that was acted upon by Jon Seattle, Cedar's owner and founder. The result was an elegant simple space reminiscient of a summer music festival using only a very few low resolution textures. Shortly after the launch of the simple amphitheatre and my own music series there we hosted a concert by Sinfonia Leeds, a community orchestra from the UK. We had 25 avatars on stage and numbers settled at 83 in the audience and while some experienced lag, the sim remained stable and sound was strong and uninterupted. Personally I think that it is all about reasoned choices. There is a solid educational/functional use for some very detailed, visually rich sims: museums, art galleries, historical reproductions of cities and buildings of interest. These simulations serve the needs of a few visitors at a time to wander through, look at things and learn, independently or in small groups. At the other extreme you have locations for a lot of people to meet and listen to lecturers, panels, or observe demonstrations. In the middle, you have mixed use simulations. The difficulty I have seen again and again is that people want it both ways. They plan a very visually rich environment, stuff it full of things to look at and interact with... which is great...but then others expect to have an event in the same sim with 80 visitors. I'm not sure who is to blame in these situations, the builders, those who create displays & content or the people who plan big events in spaces that weren't designed for them. When people cite a sim crashing as a marker of a successful event I am so frustrated I want to knock heads together. Only those of us that plan the logistics of event presentations know how difficult it is to schedule speakers, professional musicians, etc. and to maintain their trust that their event will be well-managed. Our time and their time shouldn't be wasted because someone put the capacity of the simulation too high and/or was not monitoring the sims performance statistics. While some audience members might go away giggling, "Oh we crashed the sim! Woot!" (God I hate the word "woot") the experienced presenters or performers tend to merely register that this is a poorly managed site and not one to return to. _______________________________________________ Educators mailing list To unsubscribe https://lists.secondlife.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/educators |
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