NMC Campus Observer

Presenting in RL/SL

CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) : Jan 22, 2007 10:10pm

We had a great audience, both in Atlanta and NMC Campus in Second Life for today’s presentation on The Next Generation of Digital Learning Spaces: Exploring the frontier of Virtual Worlds at the EDUCAUSE ELI Conference. Thanks to all who showed up in real world, and kept a good back channel flowing. We kept the Second Life client on the projection screen the whole time- there was zero powerpointing.

It was a bit of sensory overload! But we managed to again bridge RL and SL (we took a photo from the session and posted it in world as well):

To begin, what we did was to use my the input microphone of me MacBookPro, NiceCast software, and our streaming audio server to send audio from Atlanta into SL (see more details on our audio casting set up). A piece of the overload is that there is a 12-18 second lag between what’s said here and what is heard in world. Fortunately, my colleague Ninmah Ash was monitoring the chat. Sorry for anyone that had audio troubles. Attached to this post is our audio recording, and soon we will post a chat log transcript.

It looked like at least 20-30 avs were in world, and we had about 40-50 in our conference session. What we did was to explain a bit what people were seeing (for those at the conference who have yet to experience their Second Life). We asked people in Second Life to say hello, and share where they were from, and we saw responses from, across the USA, Germany, the U.K., etc.

So our plan was that myself and Heidi Teecee performed a small role play, illustrating the Kinds of questions Heidi gets IN Rl as an instructional designer supporting faculty interested in Second Life. I played the part of a faculty member, a huge stretch for my limited acting skills. We had a set of planned Q&A, and then we opened it up to the audience in both places to share their experiences in supporting faculty using Second Life, or just questions.

We also had NMC Campus CEO Larry Pixel on hand to talk about the NMC Campus expansion plans (now includes 30 sims!) as well as the opportunities available via our new NMC Virtual Worlds program.

Our apologies to those in world who either did not find the location, could not hear the audio, or we did not get to your questions. It seemed like we connected with both audiences, and there was a huge amount of tangible interest and energy in our RL audience.

Presentation Podcast

Chat transcripts:

• Chat transcript of Second Life audience participants
• Transcript of role play provided for participant without audio

Blog mentions:

• The Clutter Museum

Story filed under: Audio / Video, Campus Headlines, Teaching and Learning

See all stories by CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine)