The Next Generation of Digital Learning Spaces: Exploring the frontier of Virtual Worlds presentation at EDUCAUSE ELI 2007 Annual Conference January 22, 2007 Transcript relay of presentation provided by Ninmah Ash NMC Campus Observer blog coverage at http://www.nmc.org/sl/2007/01/22/educause-2/ [12:09] Ninmah Ash: Alan is playing a faculty member, and Heidi will be an instructional designer [12:09] Ninmah Ash: Alan: Hey, I just heard about SL and I'd like to know how I could use it in my magazine writing course. [12:09] Ninmah Ash: Heidi: Based on your goals, I can think of a few options. [12:09] Ninmah Ash: Heidi: one, you can have your class meet in SL [12:10] Ninmah Ash: Heidi: we can send out your students' pieces all around the world for commentary from others [12:10] Ninmah Ash: Alan: how would my students meet in SL? [12:10] Ninmah Ash: Heidi: there are some suitable areas on NMC Campus that I can show you [12:10] Ninmah Ash: Alan: But isn't SL open? Won't people come disrupt my classes? [12:11] Ninmah Ash: Heidi: Well, we have had several classes there and we haven't found that to be the case. Students can wander off, of course, just like the real web, but during class time you can keep them in the class area. [12:11] Ninmah Ash: Alan: what about all my powerpoint slides? [12:11] Guest: LOL [12:11] Ninmah Ash: Heidi: we can make slideshows, or we can put them into a book that students can keep. [12:11] Ninmah Ash: ;-) [12:12] Ninmah Ash: Heidi: Don't your students produce a paper now? [12:12] Ninmah Ash: Alan: yes [12:12] Ninmah Ash: Heidi: I can think of a lot of ideas you can use to extend that to SL. [12:12] Ninmah Ash: Alan: what are some ways to connect SL and RL? [12:12] Ninmah Ash: Heidi lists several websites, newsletters, etc. [12:12] Ninmah Ash: Alan: I like to use video clips... can I do that? [12:13] Ninmah Ash: Heidi: You can! That would be a great anchoring activity to start off their journey in SL. [12:13] Ninmah Ash: ALan: it looks so complicated! I can barely walk and my clothes look awful [12:13] Ninmah Ash: Heidi: Yeah, we have to work on that. [12:13] Ninmah Ash: Heidi: But as it happens, we have a faculty orientation planned, so you're just in time.[12:13] Ninmah Ash: Heidi: We'll be giving out a gift box with clothes in it, too. [12:14] Ninmah Ash: (audience laughs) [12:14] Ninmah Ash: Alan: I have an account, but I keep running into green people with wings and werewolves. [12:14] Ninmah Ash: Heidi: well, the werewolf is actually a very interesting person, and he's connected to Educause [12:14] Ninmah Ash: Alan: And they let him dress like a werewolf? [12:14] Ninmah Ash: Heidi: Well, some people use SL to explore different aspects of their personality. [12:15] Ninmah Ash: (few more comments about clothing and personalities) [12:15] Ninmah Ash: Alan: How do I keep my students from getting distracted? [12:15] Ninmah Ash: Heidi: Just like in RL, we set some boundaries and set expectations beforehand. [12:15] Ninmah Ash: Alan: how can students communicate in SL? [12:15] Ninmah Ash: Heidi: there is a group chat, and newsletters, and emails you can use. [12:16] Ninmah Ash: Alan: I heard you need a really good computer and that SL crashes a lot. Is it reliable for classroom use? [12:16] Ninmah Ash: Heidi: it'll run on the university-issue laptops, but it's best without other programs running. I suggest we do the orientation in the campus lab so that we are all together. [12:16] Ninmah Ash: Alan: Great. Hey, does it work with Blackboard? [12:17] Ninmah Ash: Heidi: uh, no. But there are resources you can tie in to web-based tools like Blackboard. [12:17] Ninmah Ash: Alan: Is the tenure committee going to take me seriously? [12:17] Ninmah Ash: Heidi: well, there are things we can do. You could present at a conference on your experiences, and write for a juried journal. [12:17] Ninmah Ash: (end of roleplay) [12:18] Ninmah Ash: they are asking if anyone has war stories they want to share, or questions. [12:18] Guest: ah, thanks. [12:19] Ninmah Ash: Alan is explaining to the RL audience how we got a photo of us into SL just like that. [12:19] Guest: ah [12:19] Ninmah Ash: Q: How did NMC get into SL? [12:19] Ninmah Ash: Alan explains (see http://www.nmc.org/sl for details) [12:23] Ninmah Ash: Alan is talking about the blog now [12:23] Guest: yea, I have linked to it [12:23] Ninmah Ash: the question was, how do we advertise what we are doing [12:23] Ninmah Ash: mostly via the blog [12:23] Ninmah Ash: and the mailing list [12:24] Ninmah Ash: Heidi is talking about the NMC educators group, and how she uses it to introduce her faculty to SL and get ideas for things to do [12:25] Ninmah Ash: and she connects with other Instructional Designers who are giving presentations about things they have done [12:25] Guest: ah, very good [12:25] Ninmah Ash: she says, you don't have to have your own island, you can meet in areas like NMC campus or similar locations... some are classrooms, some are more informal settings like campfires [12:26] Ninmah Ash: Q: Are there guidelines for organizing classes and managing things like chat, which can get chaotic? [12:26] Ninmah Ash: Heidi: It depends. You have to look at your goals when you set up the activity; it could be very different depending on what you teach. But I'll tell you what we did. [12:27] Ninmah Ash: Heidi: In a journalism class, where you are sending them out into the community, they are very likely to get distracted. That's typical of that kind of experience. But you can control it by keeping it to a short time, maybe in a lab, where everyone is together. [12:27] Ninmah Ash: Heidi: we found that students wanted scaffolding. We thought they would wander off and be independent, but they were more needy than we expected. [12:28] Ninmah Ash: Heidi: So we took time with the introduction, and gave them a short period of time and guidelines for a task, and they barely got it done... it took longer for them to get comfortable than we thought it would. [12:28] Ninmah Ash: Alan: There are gadgets you can use too, like the hand-raise chair, where students can raise a hand to speak, or the talking sticks. [12:29] Ninmah Ash: Q: Talk about technical requirements and support. [12:29] Ninmah Ash: Alan: You need a good video card, it's very CPU intensive. [12:29] Ninmah Ash: Heidi: Honestly, it is a difficult hurdle. We use univeristy-issue laptops, and we did have some problems. [12:30] Ninmah Ash: Heidi: If you're not with the student, it's hard to tell what's going on, so we kept them with us after the first time when they were all over the place. [12:30] Ninmah Ash: Heidi: We found that helped since we were available to assist them. [12:32] Ninmah Ash: Larry is addressing the SLOODLE question that came up in chat. [12:32] Guest: ah [12:32] Ninmah Ash: Larry: we don't have a research agenda for SL; our aim is to create a space for others to use [12:32] Ninmah Ash: Larry: so if others are experimenting in that area, we'd love to hear about it. [12:32] Guest: great [12:33] Ninmah Ash: Q: how are faculty orientations constructed? [12:33] Ninmah Ash: Heidi: The best advice I can give is not to do it alone. You need 1 or 2 helpers. [12:34] Ninmah Ash: Heidi:We have an agenda; we get them to create an account. Then we learned from experience that it takes them a long time to do some things you'd never expect. [12:34] Ninmah Ash: Heidi: For instance, students take about 10 minutes to pick a name. Faculty take extra time with their appearance. [12:34] Ninmah Ash: Heidi: We have a little script of what we want to cover, and we allow an hour or 90 minutes. Plus we know everyone is always 15 minutes late, and we allow for that. [12:35] Ninmah Ash: Heidi: I'll have two people circulating around the room as I'm going over things. [12:35] Ninmah Ash: Heidi: It takes a while for faculty to get their feet wet, and we actually reach out to them and ask if they are interested. [12:36] Ninmah Ash: Alan: The whole thing about your avatar and look sounds silly from outside, but tehre is something really important about that in terms of your identity. I echo Heidi's point about making time for that. [12:36] Ninmah Ash: Alan: When you first go into SL, they send you to Orientation Island where you learn the basics; you have to get off of orientation island, and then you land in this really strange carnival space and no one is sure what to do there at first. [12:37] Ninmah Ash: Alan: We are working with LL to create our own Orientation Island so that if you create an account with NMC/SL, it will send you to Faculty Orientation instead of the main Orientation Island. [12:37] Ninmah Ash: Alan: We are working on setting up mentors, so that there can be a more friendly orientation for faculty. [12:38] Ninmah Ash: Larry: We started with a very very small group of about 20 people; membership in NMC Campus now is over 2000. It does take time to get used to SL, but we don't train faculty ourselves. We provide a written guide and let them take the time to get used to it. [12:38] Ninmah Ash: Larry: When we have an event, we advise people to go in by themselves a few days before the event to get used to moving, go shopping, etc. so that they are ready when the event arrives. [12:39] Ninmah Ash: Larry: our focus is more on providing information in the wiki and PDFs and things, and letting people orient themselves. [12:40] Ninmah Ash: okay, they are taking more questions... [12:41] Ninmah Ash: Q: the pedagogy about using SL; where would it be most beneficial to use SL in my class? [12:41] Ninmah Ash: Heidi: I think that one of the strengths is that it offers a bridge between an internship and the campus [12:41] Ninmah Ash: Heidi: for instance, students can practice being a photographer without leaving the classroom. [12:42] Ninmah Ash: Alan: SL is chaotic and uncontrollable, but you can take your students from more structured environments to ones where they are more responsible for their interactions [12:43] Ninmah Ash: Alan: a lot of people use SL as a virtual meeting place. We've done a lot of our meetings for NMC in SL [12:44] Ninmah Ash: Heidi is describing opportunities for training in SL that are not available in RL, such as toxic cleanups, etc [12:44] Ninmah Ash: and the value of connecting with other students in other parts of the country [12:44] Ninmah Ash: and how creative the atmosphere is. [12:44] Ninmah Ash: Alan is describing the virtual theatre project [12:45] Guest: yes, and the world [12:45] Ninmah Ash: quite so [12:46] Ninmah Ash: a very long question is being asked [12:46] Ninmah Ash: I'll type it when they sum it up [12:46] Guest: okay [12:47] Ninmah Ash: It seems to be about intellectual property concerns regarding objects created by students in classes [12:47] Guest: ah, I see [12:47] Ninmah Ash: UT Austin held a freshman English class. Some students were under 18 [12:48] Ninmah Ash: you have to be 18 to come to the regular grid (?) and for a college level audience you are straddling that age barrier [12:48] Ninmah Ash: they had to set up their own island. [12:48] Ninmah Ash: The students got so involved in the form of what they were creating, they lost sight of the fuction (ie the assignment) [12:48] Ninmah Ash: and they apparently signed a form saying UT would own whatever the stduents created [12:49] Ninmah Ash: Larry: There are some erroneous assumptions in the policy that led to asking the students to sign that. [12:49] Ninmah Ash: Larry: You can't take things out of SL, so what happens to the IP if SL goes away? [12:49] Ninmah Ash: Larry: LL is a for-profit company, and their policies reflect that. [12:51] Ninmah Ash: Larry: We are also interested in other platforms (besides SL). The thing we want to know is not how to use SL, but how to build interactivity in virtual worlds. [12:52] Ninmah Ash: Larry: When we started in SL, we found that our advisory board really needed us to build a classroom in order to think of it as an educational space. [12:52] Ninmah Ash: Larry: but that's not the potential that virtual worlds offer [12:53] Ninmah Ash: Alan: We have a few minutes left, and Larry is going to talk about the expansions that NMC is planning [12:53] Guest: okay [12:54] Ninmah Ash: Larry is getting set up, Heidi is describing things they are intersted in at Seton Hall, to use SL for exploratory learning [12:54] Ninmah Ash: Heidi: For biology students, since a flatworm doesn't excite them very much, they are interested in buildling a biology simulation where students can do virtual fieldwork and take notes. [12:55] Ninmah Ash: Larry's on now... [12:55] Ninmah Ash: Larry: Lots of people come use NMC campus, which is great, and there's lots and lots of room on the campus [12:55] Ninmah Ash: Larry: The map on the stage shows it [12:56] Ninmah Ash: Larry: In just the center square we have a museum, a library, an amphitheatre, ... other spaces... 36 meeting places on just that one sim, and there are 29 other sims in NMC campus now. [12:56] Ninmah Ash: Larry: We are building a performing arts hall, a music center, a life sciences center [12:56] Ninmah Ash: Larry: We have a script that will rez any molecule in the protein database [12:57] Ninmah Ash: Larry: We are developing other sims for other purposes. One of them will be available for rentals [12:57] Ninmah Ash: Larry: and there are larger spaces too [12:58] Ninmah Ash: Larry: We announced NMC virtual worlds last week -- this is the service arm that will support the islands with the rentals and build out custom spaces [12:58] Ninmah Ash: Larry: There are details at virtualworlds.nmc.org [12:58] Ninmah Ash: Larry is showing the NMC Campus Observer and talking about what it is [12:58] Ninmah Ash: which I know you have seen :-) [12:58] Guest: thank you :) [12:58] Ninmah Ash: sure thing [12:59] Ninmah Ash: the session is just about over [12:59] Ninmah Ash: did you want to ask any questions? I'm so sorry the audio didn't work for you [12:59] Guest: Thanks for the transcript, Ninmah. [12:59] Ninmah Ash: sure thing [12:59] Guest: No, I'm okay. I get what's going on [12:59] Guest: :) [12:59] Ninmah Ash: :-)