What Educators Want in a Virtual World: All

Location: VWER meeting, Aug. 2


Late in July, I published my lists of wants for in-world features and technical features for a educational virtual world that I would build, had I time and money enough. Then I put the issue before 23 members of the Roundtable. Here is their list of wants:

• Cross-platform & mobile friendly
• Non-mesh build options
• Cross-world travel and inventory control
• Accessibility for users with visual and hearing impairments, such as easily visible icons, as well as text-to-speech and speech-to-text support
• Media on a Prim (MOAP), including Flash support
• Integration with Kinect & similar interfaces
• Ability for students under 18 to access content (with my caveat of "freedom of, and from, adult content)
• Better system for notecards
• Working economy where content creators can be paid for their work but as JeanClaude Volmar warned us, "Just don’t make the economy so tightly coupled to the creator to render objects useless like it is in SL."
• Avatar puppeteering and webcam support
• Better permissions systems to allow more flexibility with collaborative builds

It seems we do "want it all," and many VWER members want a virtual world as a primary tool for teaching.

As readers know, I tend to agree with VWER participant Alan Sandalwood, who noted "I worry that we would try to do everything in VW; It’s a tool to be used judiciously."

My own students say a version of this: "what's the point? Our parents pay high tuition to be taught by a PhD in a classroom." For them, VWs are worthwhile for limited simulations or a field trip to see content otherwise unavailable. Other educators will use the technology differently and, in many cases, in transformative ways.

To read the Aug. 2 transcript, click here.

From Scratch, Key Elements for an Educational Virtual World, II

Location: VWER meeting

In my last post, I focused on the in-world features of an educator-built virtual world. Next week we'll debate that as well as this second big aspect of design: technical requirements. My suggestions for a virtual world that would please students and not hurt faculty evaluations:

• Laptop + Wireless: Desktops are as dead in dorms here as are land-line phones. If an application cannot at least run on a laptop untethered from any cables (power cables too: students travel light) the application may as well not exist.  Students will seek out a desktop work station for projects requiring high-end apps, but the don't and won't own such. Try requiring students to visit a lab a few hours weekly, outside of class, to log into a virtual world many would find "creepy" anyhow. I'm glad I'm not you when evaluations are given.
• Fast, Easy Start: the world must be drop-dead easy to install. No tweaking the viewer, no need to upgrade video cards. It must work right away to retain the attention of students and protect the course evaluations of their faculty.
• Cross Platform: The Mac OS has jumped on my campus from 5% in the mid 90s to at least 40% two years ago. I now hear, but don't quite believe, it's at 70%. Clearly, any virtual world for students in higher education must work on a variety of operating systems and types of hardware, thus:
• Browser Based: Cloud Party's use of WebGL as its basis trumps Second Life, which in its current form is nigh impossible to run in a browser. Making the world browser-friendly eases the leap to tablet computing, if this part of the market does replace the laptop for many users.

What have I forgotten?

From Scratch, Key Elements For an Educational Virtual World

Location: Thinking Cap in Place

After my few posts about Cloud Party and Glitch, I began pulling together a list of features that I'd want in a virtual world if I had unlimited funds and time to build one myself.

I plan to put this list of features to the vote with colleagues in VWER, before we hold a meeting about "What I learned from a silly game called Glitch" early in August.

• User-Generated Content: The killer feature for virtual worlds used by educators. We can make and share our creations in a world that is, essentially, a big sandbox
• Collaborative Permissions: Creators can transfer full ownership for shared builds so backups and exports are possible. Mixed-permissions builds in Second Life are a nightmare
• In-World Building with Simple Tools: Again, for collaboration this seems very popular with educators
• Offline Building with Professional 3D Tools: For advanced builders with 3D modeling skills
• Local Hosting Options: Educational Institutions like to own their hardware and make backups frequently
• The Illusion of a Contiguous World: World maps are available for Glitch, most OpenSim grids, and Second Life. In Cloud Party, to my knowledge no map is available
• Several Means of Travel: All virtual worlds include point-to-point movement such as teleportation.  Those making simulations in a world, however, should be able to turn that feature off, so participants are forced to walk or ride to a destination. Second Life manages this well with settings for parcels and regions
• Freedom of, and From, Adult Content: This will be contentious even among educators. I'd suggest that pornography is not needed in an educational world, but adult content, such as art-museum nudity or discussions of sexuality, is necessary for many educational purposes
• Simulations Tools, Including a Physics Engine a Combat System: My students asked for this again and again in reviews of my House of Usher simulation. In realistic simulations, bad decisions have consequences.  Avatars in these settings should get tired, hungry, injured when appropriate. They might be able to "level up" for accomplishing goals in a course or assignment. This idea got suggested in Edward Castronova's Exodus to the Virtual World and I like it a lot
• Simple Help Tools: Glitch wins on this. The designers' humorous approach to FAQs and the Pet Rock charm me every time I log on.

What did I forget? Sound off!

Jumping into Jibe

Location: Pathfinder Lester's Home, Jibe

In class on Monday, I plan to discuss why I don't think Second Life or OpenSim are good venues for Writing Center work.

I've blogged about my reasons here and then, later, after reading an article about a centers' use of Second Life, I reconsidered. A virtual world might be JUST the venue for a gathering of writing tutors between schools.  They would not be there to look glamorous or roleplay as elves. They'd be there to chat about ideas, as they would in a face-to-face conference.

A conference of this sort does not require a world and a persistent set of avatars.  A one-off event in something like Reaction Grid's Jibe might be perfect, and with a team of developers I could see setting up a conference venue that small or large groups could use year after year.

So in class Monday, my students won't see a hard-to-master user interface best suited for collaborative teams building in a virtual world.  They'll see something that can work with a Web browser and a plug-in.

I remain skeptical about Jibe and Unity 3D when mainstream-techie faculty like me wish to do building, especially in collaboration and in real time. As I've often stated, I am not evaluated on my 3D modeling skills. Thus, I don't plan to master the complex tools to make these models, no more than I plan to master LSL scripting. Unlike Photoshop or Dreamweaver (and hand-turned HTML code) these 3D applications do not yet figure into my daily work and annual evaluation.

But for such a conference venue, where pedagogical decisions are not vital, I'd be happy to hire out the work and focus on the content we'd share from the other side of the screen.

Update 4/17/12: Jibe was very jumpy indeed on a wired connection and a decent Windows 7 desktop. While downloading the Unity plug-in was a snap, the rest of the experience was very subpar. My avatar could not walk, lag was enormous, and after lots of fumbling I managed...to sit in a chair.

My students were not impressed. Sounds a lot like Second Life under bad conditions.

Me and My Shadows

Location: Second Life, Side of Road

Not much to report here except that the latest version of the 2.x client, on a newish MacBook Pro, produces dynamic shadows. The effect is laggy and worked only under "high" or "ultra" graphics settings.

I had to dial the graphics back right away before attending the VWER meeting last Thursday.

Still, for all of the grief I have given Linden Lab since the end of education and non-profit discounts (and before, over other matters) I like seeing them keep promises about features of their virtual world.

Cloudy Day, Fixed

Location: Hiding in My Fake Office

I was ready to wear Miso Susanowa's head as my avatar, I became so frustrated at being stuck as a cloud.

With both the 1.23 and 2.6 viewers, as well as Imprudence, the forecast remained "mostly cloudy."

My colleague from VWER and moderator-in-training, Grizzla Pixelmaid, gave me a surfer-dude starter avatar. Putting on "Craig" saved me for a moment, even if his smiley gesture messed with my "no perky people" rule.

Soon all was right again with the fake world and I reassembled my usual persona.

Many thanks, Grizzla!

This is NOT the Future

Location: Holding Sides, Laughing

Hamlet Au ran a reference to a New York Times piece about virtual meetings.  We've been talking a little about the concept in my current class, as we read Exodus to the Virtual World, by Edward Castronova.

Other than making me sing "The Time Warp" from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, I saw little use in the graphic that accompanied a story about a groundbreaking (to the Times staff, anyhow) development.  We are a long way from selling that particular technology to any serious business.

There's also a drop-dead hilarious video of a "business meeting" with this clumsy technology.  I'm no graphics maven but I could not get through the demo without breaking down in gales of laughter. The avatars make Second Life's look wonderful.

Granted, as I noted over at New World Notes, using an avatar seems to spur more participation in a meeting than I have seen in teleconferences or Elluminate meetings. This merits formal study by academic psychologists: I have no idea why the avatar is more empowering than a teleconferencing window.

That said, I do prefer those technologies or Skype for small-group conferences, but they fail to enable really good work for large groups. In some cases, one may as well watch a television seminar with one or two active participants.

Second Life does pretty well for large-group meetings, but it suffers in professional circles from its rep for cybersex and nonhuman avatars. My colleagues not in virtual worlds, like many business folks and even many of my Millennial students, are wary--very wary--of identity shifting online.

For that crowd--and it's one I suspect to be the majority of potential conference users--to make the Castronova "exodus" they'll need something like the virtual meetings shown in the Times story.

But with necks.

Second Life Browser 2.6 & Other Viewers

Location: Two Grids at Once!

Today, I tested both the SL viewer 1.23 and the latest version of Imprudence Viewer on the machine where I installed the new SL 2.6 viewer. Both worked.

There was a moment of concern on the SLED list that the new viewer might disable access to other viewers on one's computer. Clearly that has not been the case for me.

I logged on again, with SL 2.6 and Imprudence simultaneously. This was the acid test, shown: at right, Imprudence running for Jokaydia Grid; at left, SL 2.6 for SL's grid. I did have to wait for the viewer to auto-download an update.  I also noticed that point-and-click movement has stopped working after the update--or is it just me?

So far, I've really enjoyed the SL viewer and think Linden Lab addressed issues that bothered me about earlier versions of Viewer 2, namely, that I could not build as easily using the new viewer.

Over the summer, time will tell as I use the new Viewer on my primary machine and with my primary avatar.

Second Life's Beta Viewer: Advanced Mode

Location: On My Way to Svarga

As my time permits, I'll be doing multiple posts about my impression of the Beta viewer. I'm liking what I see so far.

In this installment of "Adventures With a New Viewer," Roderick Reanimator had to find his inventory, met a pretty woman riding her horse, teleported to Svarga, and conducted a few experiments without making too much of a fool of himself.

Roderick rezzed, on the same machine that I'd used for testing the basic version of the Beta, but he appeared as the premade avatar he'd switched using Basic Mode's pick-a-look options. I had, after that, put him back into his usual outfit from another computer, but those changes did not "take" when I logged on today.

I'm happy to say that nothing in his inventory has vanished, but then I'm still using the Beta Viewer on a different machine from my usual SL rig.

The Client AS a Web Browser

I can see myself liking this client a lot. Linden Lab turned the call for a browser-based client into a client that looks a lot like a browser, back buttons and all.

The interface is as clean, in advanced mode, as the lean, mean Firefox 4 broswer. The annoying sidebar from Viewer 2 can be clicked closed or open, so that would enable a builder to have enough real-estate on the screen for useful work. My objections to it vanished when I saw that. I have since come to understand that Viewer 2 has the same open/close feature.

A right-click on the ground evokes a "build" option. There's also a "build" menu on the top of the screen.

On my Mac, Cntrl + ALT + D brought up the familiar advanced menu. I selected quiet snapshots and elected not to play the typing anim (I leave it on only in big meetings, where it helps identify a "speaker").

I also found the environment editor with its advanced settings quickly, under the "world" menu's sun option. That was very helpful for taking snapshots.

A Beta for Immersion? Augmentation?

The integration of real-life and virtual identities does not go as far as Facebook proponents might wish, but immersionists may not like how quickly the Beta client pushes you to use voice. It is enabled by default (though easily turned off). The "me" menu has a "my voice" option that includes--if one subscribes--a morphing option for roleplay and gender-switching.

Web profiles opened very slowly for me. I've not used them, so at this point I cannot comment beyond "that was slow."

Features I Use a Lot: Pretty Good So Far

I take many snapshots, so I find one aspect of the Beta a bit annoying. When one clicks the "view" button, a very nice camera control appears. It's intuitive until you click off, then it vanishes.  This means more clicks every time a photographer changes the angle for a shot.

I do like the ability to toggle between presets for the camera--front, side, or rear. These make moving a bit odd, but they add a function that I've never used in another viewer, though perhaps I was not aware of it.

Snapshots are easily done, from a camera icon at the bottom of the screen. Just as I was fiddling with the settings, Alecto Vella showed up on horseback. She notes that like Iggy, she goes out on the roads of SL exploring. I guess the horse does not cause the sim-crossing lag that my cars do, because she looked realistic trotting along the Linden highways. She agreed to pose for some snaps as Roderick learned the controls--pretty quickly in fact.

Given Iggy's work to transcribe all of the VWER meetings and publish the chat as a public record, I needed to find if logging worked. It does, from a "privacy" tab under the preferences. That is the first option of the "me" menu.

Perhaps using the word "privacy" is not only more intuitive but also a nod to those who seek to avoid giving too much first-life data away. We'll see how Linden Lab strikes that balance, but for me, it's soon back to Svarga to explore while using the new viewer.

A Look Ahead: Virtual Worlds in Aerospace & Defense

 
Location: VWER Meeting

image courtesy of Sheila Webber's flickr photostream

Back on Feb. 3, were pleased to host two Greg Moxness & Charles O’Connell, technologists from a major US defense contractor, who spoke at some length about their predictions for virtual worlds entering the mainstream. They were not speaking in their role of company employees, but they spoke knowledgeably about how technological advances might reshape 3D immersive environments.

I'll summarize some of their points below. You can read the entire transcript here.

• Charles, on convincing coworkers of the value of virtual worlds, “Seed the young with ideas, soon become the decision makers or at least influencers–took about 4 years.”
• Charles on developments to come “not sure military or defense is leading in this case. [Advances] more from commercial spaces, gaming and entertainment.”
• Greg, on near-term advances: “the whole idea of gesture recognition and 3d worlds this could be this year or next”
• Greg suspects we’ll see “full body haptics,” and Charles notes “Haptics–likely to be involved because it has such high value. [It's] never all or nothing. 2D and 3D will exist together….documents and spreadsheets along with 3D objects”
• Greg on neural interfaces like those in Gibson’s Neuromancer: “[M]aybe a step too far. . .maybe 20-30 years but will the human become less and will the machines evolve?” Charles: “a key thing that might happen, if it can be done noninvasively, something outside the body that can monitor brain waves, nerve impulses.” (Iggy’s note to any student readers: from Anderson’s novel Feed, that is the early version of the Feed interface).
• Greg agreed with the following remark by Charles, about the relative merits of 2D and 3D environments for training: “3D has immense possibilities, not an either/or question. Use 2D when better suited, or good enough. 3D [is for] experimentation or experiencing things not possible for some reason in RL.”
• Greg on an advantage of virtual worlds, the need online for something approximating face-to-face contact. Charles notes his belief that “relationships are much stronger in VW.”
• Charles also came out in favor of transparency in avatar identities (if not appearance) noting, “Treat people with respect, it’s a real place. One life, not two. It’s probably best to be yourself when dealing with others in VW.”

I look forward to their returning to the Roundtable in 2012.

Texter or Gamer: Which Are You?

Location: Solitary Pursuit Called Writing

I'm a hermit by inclination. Whether it's real life or the shimmering and consensual hallucination called a virtual world, I like my quiet. I don't appreciate the random IM, the unsolicited chat-request when I'm replying to my electronic mail. Lots of folks who fancy themselves writers seem to be that way.

This reaction is a long-term one that built over many years, but until I read "Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction" in the New York Times, I did not fully understand why. Writer Matt Richtel notes that what Sherry Turkle has called "always on, always on you" technology has created new social types on campus, "not the thespian and the jock but the texter and gamer, Facebook addict and YouTube potato."

My colleagues who gather to discuss education in Second Life, and who post to blogs about it, often confuse these types. There's a conflation of ideas that runs like this: our students live virtual lives already and virtual worlds are an inevitability for them.

This is a mistake. Mediation and virtuality are separable to them, if not to us. There's a huge difference between the augmentationist who is always on Facebook or texting people known already and the loner who chooses to get immersed as a alter-ego, then connect a guild or a few distant gamer-pals through an MMORPG. Most Richmond students, who tend to be socially adept and careerist, are not loners by inclination and they've been scared by stories of gamers who end up where they began: mom and dad's basement.

Ironically, they hurt their grades either way, as the NYT story shows.

In my case, I escaped the basement, though I never had my bedroom down there. We had a nice dry cellar with 1970s wood paneling, and, yes, the D&D group met there in the 70s and 80s. I even escaped the lure of online gaming because of the massive amounts of time needed to be good at a game and the inability to make one's own game; I've long been the game-master type rather than the player. Academics and folks who write a lot tend to tilt that way, too.

But I'm neither traditional texter nor gamer. So are many of those who made SL what it is today.

It's possible that Linden Lab's recent move to stress the social aspects of Second Life over its creative aspects is a wise move: there are more texters than gamers out there. This leads me to think about which social networkers they want. If my students are any indication, they already have all of the social network they need; it consumes enough of their time to hurt their intellectual work. They have no patience for a non-intuitive interface such as SL's.

Will my colleagues who buy into triumphalist narratives about the course of networked technology "get this"? Not until they come to understand the shaping power of various technologies and the habits of use of various generations. There will be exceptions; one colleague is just as wrong in claiming that the Linden-Lab ideal customer is a bored housewife.

Finding a sweet-spot demographic is Linden Lab's problem to solve. Since I'll likely not be teaching in SL again, but only in focused-and-directed simulations in OpenSim, I have time for other worries. I ask a neo-luddite's questions about our networked lives and worry more about the next generation of young people. They are even more addicted to portable devices and easy connectivity than the ones I now teach.

How on earth can they be taught to listen to what silence can say?

Shared Media Presentation by Peter Miller

Location: TidalBlog

In a slide show with audio, Peter Miller gives a good overview of how shared media work with Second Life's Viewer 2.

For those who have not tried shared media, Peter provides an excellent primer.

Have a look. It's worth reconsidering whether or not to use the unpopular viewer, now, or at least wait until other developers make better viewers that permit this feature.

Second Life and Writing Centers...WHY?

Location: Reading The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors

There's a humorous illustration in Ryan and Zimmerelli's otherwise excellent (and free from the publisher!) guidebook. In the Fifth Edition, an image shows a bone-stock male avatar, circa 2006, sitting in a virtual writing center being tutored.

Let's ignore the avatar's tragic lack of fashion sense and bad hair for a second. The real issue to me comes from the overkill of using a hard-to-master interface in an immersive environment when lower, or at least parallel, forms of technology can suffice.

I've long claimed here and in my academic writing that virtual worlds provide two advantages for education: immersive learning and simulations. "Immersion," for those not familiar with how we eggheads use the term, means the "lost in the moment" experience that happens to gamers, writers, and athletes "in the zone" and enjoying the experience.

Students seeking writing help may indeed enjoy the experience and learn a great deal, and they may be in distance-learning programs where face-to-face consultations with a tutor prove impossible. Do they, however, need an avatar?

Second Life and similar virtual worlds provide great opportunities to live a work of literature and even change its ending, as a group did last week in our university's House of Usher. Virtual Worlds let students create 3D content, use voice or text to chat with others globally in other languages, to tour simulations of famous historical sites or art installations that can be walked or flown through. As User Interfaces (UIs) improve, as some worlds become "cloud based" so they'll run on lower-end hardware, and as more students come to us with experiences honed in Club Penguin, virtual worlds may well have a place.

That time has not come, yet, for the tutoring of writing.

In other venues virtual worlds offer more utility than a teleconference or group call on Skype. We can tour each other's creations and we tend to have more equal conversations than a teleconference, which seems to devolve, in my experience, into a moderator presenting to a mostly silent audience. In SL, however, I've attended roundtable chats with 80 or more people, at least half of whom contribute to the conversation.

Smaller teleconferences or Skype chats do work extremely well as egalitarian platforms for conducting meetings. Skype provides the ability to use text or voice, and one can paste in URLs. Google has a range of strong applications, too. It's more likely to me that a future writing center, even on a residential campus, might employ Google Docs + some form of voice chat or IM to give writers an alternative to a face-to-face meeting. Our library's IM line has saved my butt a few times when doing research from office or home. I've even had a question answered, with a URL provided, during class time when a student asked a question I could not answer.

Technology should not drive pedagogy, and that seems to be the case when a center opens the doors to SL; the time invested in training tutors could be better invested elsewhere. At the presently clunky level of the SL UI, the high-end graphics requirements, the long orientation experience, as well as the need to download a special viewer, I just do not see too many writing centers employing avatar-tutors.

Unsolicited Advice: Social Media in Virtual Worlds

Location: Talkin' to The Man

There's been a good discussion of integrating social media richly into Second Life, as Linden Lab uses Avatars United, recently acquired from Enemy Unknown AB (read Tateru Nino's account of this purchase).

Many SLers have been saying "meh" about integrating social networking and Second Life. It took me a while to see a reason for it, but I came up with one: the 25-group limit.

I understand the role that groups play--a key one--in enabling access to items and land in-world. As (I believe) Pathfinder Linden explained to us at a Roundtable meeting, every time an avatar crosses into a new parcel the server checks access rights and more. Having, say, 100 groups would create terrible lag. But a social network outside the Lindens' asset server would not induce any lag at all.

Imagine checking group notices, updates, and more on a prim-based terminal inside SL. What if I could log in with my avatar's virtual laptop to get landmarks and other information handed out not from an in-world group, but posted to Avatars United? Any Hippo Technologies Vendor can do this already.

What if..if..the assets handed out by the social network site could be used in any compatible virtual world?

Whoever figures out how to do this will deserve a great deal of credit, and will have a lot of money in the real-life bank.