This was our last week in ETEC 648D and final projects came to a dramatic conclusion. Class met one final time in SL to present our final projects (instructional design module in SL). I must say I was very impressed with the projects the other three teams came up with.
My personal favorite of the bunch? Tuy, Lisa and Nadine's Spanish language fashion showcase project! One of MY personal things I love about SL is the fact that it is worldwide and you get to see, meet and see things from all over the world. During my time in SL I was just fascinated all how world-spanning it is as I met and befriended folks from as far away as Bulgaria, the Netherlands and Germany in Europe, Peru and Brazil in South America and Australia. The potential of the tool to connect and learn more about others different from us is something so key to our ever evolving global economy.
As an educator the implications of this for usage in teaching of foreign languages become very apparent. I was just blown away at how the girls set-up their SIM. It was such a cool experience to be able to walk through the fashion gallery they made, click on a piece of clothing and hear the Spanish word for it said out loud. It was VERY impressive, or as we say en Espanol, "muy bien!"
And that basically sums up my time here in ETEC 648D revisiting the fascinating world of Second Life, "es muy bien!"
Fin
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Second Life FAIL?
Probably the biggest observation to come out of this week's adventures in ETEC 648D was the big audio problem we had in SL during Wednesday night's class.
I will always tout SL's power and potential in education for use in simulations, experiential learning and as a potential DE platform, but Wednesday's episode highlights one of the major problems with SL at this point in time: as an "outsourced" solution you are at the mercy of Linden Labs network problems.
Unlike an in-house hosted system for delivering content such as a Sakai, Moodle or self-hosted instance of a tool like Elluminate or a Wimba, Linden Labs is hosted and run purely by Linden Labs so if Linden has a network problem or schedule maintenance on your parcel during your class time you are completely at their mercy and have no control whatsoever. This is in contrast to hosting your own services on your own servers in which case you still retain some control over things.
Fortunately for us, Peter is a very tech savvy individual (as you'd expect from a guy with a PhD in CIS) so we had a back-up contingency lined up and implemented very quickly. For instructors who are less tech savvy and had nothing else to fall back on I shudder to think of what a waste and frustration a night like Wednesday would have been.
I suppose Wednesday can best be summed up by the old adage of technology, "Technology makes our lives easier -- when it works."
Final post next week :)
I will always tout SL's power and potential in education for use in simulations, experiential learning and as a potential DE platform, but Wednesday's episode highlights one of the major problems with SL at this point in time: as an "outsourced" solution you are at the mercy of Linden Labs network problems.
Unlike an in-house hosted system for delivering content such as a Sakai, Moodle or self-hosted instance of a tool like Elluminate or a Wimba, Linden Labs is hosted and run purely by Linden Labs so if Linden has a network problem or schedule maintenance on your parcel during your class time you are completely at their mercy and have no control whatsoever. This is in contrast to hosting your own services on your own servers in which case you still retain some control over things.
Fortunately for us, Peter is a very tech savvy individual (as you'd expect from a guy with a PhD in CIS) so we had a back-up contingency lined up and implemented very quickly. For instructors who are less tech savvy and had nothing else to fall back on I shudder to think of what a waste and frustration a night like Wednesday would have been.
I suppose Wednesday can best be summed up by the old adage of technology, "Technology makes our lives easier -- when it works."
Final post next week :)
Friday, July 31, 2009
From Virtual to Mixed Reality
This was quite the week for me in terms of learning more about virtual worlds and education. In addition to my studies in ETEC 648D, I also had the fortunate opportunity to attend the Campus Technology 2009 conference where virtual worlds/immersive education was one of the hot topics.
In this week's course we continued to develop our building and script manipulation skills. While I've dabbled in SL for a few years now, I have never spent so much time building objects. Of course, it helps that we have full directions in this on how to build objects as it's a major pain to have to play with object settings to get the object to look like what you want it to. This week's focus was on animations and sounds and doing sound design in the virtual world environment. Manipulating ambient sound in SL is actually a new skill for me as it is something I never did previously so to see that it merely involves dropping a sound file in an objects content tab is kinda like one of those Hollywood, "Ah, that's how they did that!" moments for me.
In terms of my conference experience, I had the opportunity to see what a lot of the leading researchers in educational technology are doing. While Second Life did come up, two of the keynote speakers (when from Harvard, the other from somewhere in Australia) actually have gone ahead and developed their own virtual world platforms on various projects. A lot of the literature we've gone through about student engagement and increase in learning through "immersing" oneself in content was reaffirmed in both speakers experiences which was awesome. One thing I particular found interesting was the concept of "mixed reality" which our Wednesday keynote speaker discussed. Mixed Reality is basically the next evolutionary step from a virtual world. Instead of us interacting in a program via an Avatar, it involves our physical bodies interacting/manipulating objects in a virtual environment. Below is a sample video of "mixed reality" I found off of YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8yx5VpbQpA
Exciting stuff!
Till next week
In this week's course we continued to develop our building and script manipulation skills. While I've dabbled in SL for a few years now, I have never spent so much time building objects. Of course, it helps that we have full directions in this on how to build objects as it's a major pain to have to play with object settings to get the object to look like what you want it to. This week's focus was on animations and sounds and doing sound design in the virtual world environment. Manipulating ambient sound in SL is actually a new skill for me as it is something I never did previously so to see that it merely involves dropping a sound file in an objects content tab is kinda like one of those Hollywood, "Ah, that's how they did that!" moments for me.
In terms of my conference experience, I had the opportunity to see what a lot of the leading researchers in educational technology are doing. While Second Life did come up, two of the keynote speakers (when from Harvard, the other from somewhere in Australia) actually have gone ahead and developed their own virtual world platforms on various projects. A lot of the literature we've gone through about student engagement and increase in learning through "immersing" oneself in content was reaffirmed in both speakers experiences which was awesome. One thing I particular found interesting was the concept of "mixed reality" which our Wednesday keynote speaker discussed. Mixed Reality is basically the next evolutionary step from a virtual world. Instead of us interacting in a program via an Avatar, it involves our physical bodies interacting/manipulating objects in a virtual environment. Below is a sample video of "mixed reality" I found off of YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8yx5VpbQpA
Exciting stuff!
Till next week
Friday, July 24, 2009
Ain't No Party Like an SL Party!
So this week's big news out of MY Second Life is the big grand opening of UH Second Life Island. For those of us who've been blazing down the SL trail over the past few years the opening of UH SL is quite an achievement!
I had a chance to meet many others who've been looking into SL aside from those of us in the ETEC community. I met quite a few folks from the MLIS program (who I am aware were also using SL) as well as folks from various marketing departments throughout the UH system who are looking at SL to further expand the UH brand.
DJ Becca Imako (my SL-partner in crime) spinned the tunes at our SL party and treated a lot of the newly initiated UH SL Residents to the way Residents like to get down with their Avatar selves!!! It was "good times" as we say :)
This week in class we had a chance to create the standard educators SL toolkit, a PowerPoint display, a URL display, a Media Player and a book. I've come across all of these (except for the book) throughout my time in SL through my networking in the SL ed groups. When I first got into SL a few years back I was truly amazed at its power to deliver traditional classroom content which piqued my interest in exploring SL as a possible DE platform. SL is waaaaaaay cheaper than the Elluminate and Wimba solutions we've looked at but it's main issue is platform stability which we have no real control over.
I've used SL media players, PowerPoint viewers and URL displays before and find them really easy to manipulate but this was my first crack at making them from scratch so it was a fun week in class.
Till next time...
I had a chance to meet many others who've been looking into SL aside from those of us in the ETEC community. I met quite a few folks from the MLIS program (who I am aware were also using SL) as well as folks from various marketing departments throughout the UH system who are looking at SL to further expand the UH brand.
DJ Becca Imako (my SL-partner in crime) spinned the tunes at our SL party and treated a lot of the newly initiated UH SL Residents to the way Residents like to get down with their Avatar selves!!! It was "good times" as we say :)
This week in class we had a chance to create the standard educators SL toolkit, a PowerPoint display, a URL display, a Media Player and a book. I've come across all of these (except for the book) throughout my time in SL through my networking in the SL ed groups. When I first got into SL a few years back I was truly amazed at its power to deliver traditional classroom content which piqued my interest in exploring SL as a possible DE platform. SL is waaaaaaay cheaper than the Elluminate and Wimba solutions we've looked at but it's main issue is platform stability which we have no real control over.
I've used SL media players, PowerPoint viewers and URL displays before and find them really easy to manipulate but this was my first crack at making them from scratch so it was a fun week in class.
Till next time...
Friday, July 17, 2009
Second Life: My Way of Life
Second Life has become a way of life for me over the past week as my enrolling in the ETEC 648D course has collided with full speed with a current work project so Second Life has consumed a good portion of my waking hours for the past week.
Over the past several months we've been engaged in the formative stages of writing a formal grant proposal to acquire space and personnel to develop a Second Life presence in-world for our campus. This week culminated a milestone in our endeavors as we did a formal demonstration and presentation of Second Life to a select group of faculty and students in our AutoCAD program for their feedback on the viability of using Second Life to teach some AutoCAD curriculum.
A good portion of my week was actually spent in-world preparing for this presentation with some co-workers developing resources and a walking tour. This actually coincided well with the projects we did for ETEC 648D as many of the resources and studies I have found for the SL Resources and SL Research project will be/were used for both our demonstration and as part of our literature review which will go into the grant proposal.
For myself, it's been over a year and a half since I've been fully immersed in SL culture and I'm very glad to being back to being a regular Resident here in SL.
As for our demo...it went very well! The students seemed genuinely fascinated and the faculty curious (as opposed to rolling their eyes and dismissing it). We did do a brief survey past demo and most students shared they'd be comfortable in learning in a virtual environment. When questioned of whether they'd "prefer" learning in a virtual environment versus a traditional environment the results were split down the middle: 48% stated a preference for a traditional environment, half were indifferent and 2% preferred a virtual environment.
Till next week...
Over the past several months we've been engaged in the formative stages of writing a formal grant proposal to acquire space and personnel to develop a Second Life presence in-world for our campus. This week culminated a milestone in our endeavors as we did a formal demonstration and presentation of Second Life to a select group of faculty and students in our AutoCAD program for their feedback on the viability of using Second Life to teach some AutoCAD curriculum.
A good portion of my week was actually spent in-world preparing for this presentation with some co-workers developing resources and a walking tour. This actually coincided well with the projects we did for ETEC 648D as many of the resources and studies I have found for the SL Resources and SL Research project will be/were used for both our demonstration and as part of our literature review which will go into the grant proposal.
For myself, it's been over a year and a half since I've been fully immersed in SL culture and I'm very glad to being back to being a regular Resident here in SL.
As for our demo...it went very well! The students seemed genuinely fascinated and the faculty curious (as opposed to rolling their eyes and dismissing it). We did do a brief survey past demo and most students shared they'd be comfortable in learning in a virtual environment. When questioned of whether they'd "prefer" learning in a virtual environment versus a traditional environment the results were split down the middle: 48% stated a preference for a traditional environment, half were indifferent and 2% preferred a virtual environment.
Till next week...
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Everything's A Gift
I've been studying Second Life for about 2 years now as part of my work duties investigating emerging instructional technologies. About two years ago I worked and lived in-world for about 3 months meeting all kinds of interesting folks and experiencing all kinds of cool things...
Flash Forward two years later and here I am taking a course about Second Life in Second Life as a graduate student. Learning within Second Life in the context of an academic course is very fascinating. I've "learned" in Second Life before in context of taking building courses, attending conferences and other educational "walking tours" within world, but a class for academic credit is something else! In terms of the adoption curve of teaching credit courses in-world I know we're at the "early adopter" portion of the curve as many Universities have taught in-world for a few years now, but taking a credit course in-world is still quite a trip!
This week we had the chance to learn the basics of building in-world. I've taken building courses in the past during my foray in SL a few years back and I have the basics of manipulating Prims down but it still amazes me how you can construct some nifty things with some very basic shapes. I for one will probably never become an expert at building (don't really need to as I can just hire whoever I need) but I have a fine appreciation for the power of geometry :)
More next week.
Flash Forward two years later and here I am taking a course about Second Life in Second Life as a graduate student. Learning within Second Life in the context of an academic course is very fascinating. I've "learned" in Second Life before in context of taking building courses, attending conferences and other educational "walking tours" within world, but a class for academic credit is something else! In terms of the adoption curve of teaching credit courses in-world I know we're at the "early adopter" portion of the curve as many Universities have taught in-world for a few years now, but taking a credit course in-world is still quite a trip!
This week we had the chance to learn the basics of building in-world. I've taken building courses in the past during my foray in SL a few years back and I have the basics of manipulating Prims down but it still amazes me how you can construct some nifty things with some very basic shapes. I for one will probably never become an expert at building (don't really need to as I can just hire whoever I need) but I have a fine appreciation for the power of geometry :)
More next week.
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Welcome!
Welcome "Avatar Chronicles." Over the course of the next few weeks I'll be blogging my experiences on the use of Virtual Worlds in Higher Education with a focus on Second Life. Enjoy :)
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