eFest08

Members of the extended SLENZ team at eFest08

I have just returned from the 2008 eFest conference at SkyCity in Auckland. This conference brings together educators, instructional designers and many others interested in all forms of e-learning and blended learning in New Zealand.

As it was just over a year since Isa Goodman and I presented our thoughts on Second Life for education to eFest07, we spent a little while discussing how far the thinking around education in virtual worlds had come since then.  Delivery of the NMIT island Koru was being eagerly anticipated at the last eFest and there were attendees who were highly sceptical of the value that this might bring to our students.  A year later, our second island has arrived and for the first time we were able to present some real experiences of teaching real students in a real course using a blended approach which combines real and Second Life delivery.  Toddles Lightworker, otherwise known in real life at Todd Cochrane has been demonstrating how this can be done effectively in a first year degree course, and he was able to join us in providing some personal observations on its effectiveness (Thank you Todd!).

While there are still doubters and sceptics within the community, Dr Scott Deiner inspired many with his from the University of Auckland inspired many with his presentation of the build which he has created for the delivery of course material to medical students, both with a simulated Intensive care unit and a sohpisticated HUD driven system to simulate in real time the pressures of an emergency unit.  All members of the SLENZ team, and many in the audience, were inspired by the approach that Scott (otherwise known as Professor Noarlunga or just ‘the Prof’) is taking and the opportunities it creates for possible collaboration not only between medical students but also perhaps between nursing students as well.

Part of the purpose of the presentation was to highlight to interested educators the areas in which our literature review is suggesting that Second Life may add value to student learning and to encourage all to think of ways in which they might be able to contribute to the development of the SLENZ project.  This will be the subject of a separate post over the next few days as the SLENZ team are just about to issue the request for proposals to work with us to develop learning activities to trial in Second Life.

One other bonus of eFest was meeting up with Dr Melanie Middlemiss, who is managing the ONGENS project.  This project is a collaboration between the University of Otago and the the University of Canterbury and is looking to investigate the creation of a virtual grid for New Zealand to support the use of OpenSim.  I have been investigating OpenSim over the last month and will post some of my intitial thoughts later.

So a final thanks to all who contributed to eFest, especially those who took the time to come to our presentations and to talk with us further about the project and Second Life in general.  Great to meet up with some old SL friends (Iphi and DebZee) and also some new ones (Lianna) and some who I am sure will become friends over the next few months!  And thanks to ITPNZ and all other sponsors of eFest and particularly to Amy for making it all happen! You did a grand job!

Wellington Railway Station

Thanks to some exciting and innovative work by my colleague Rollo Kohime (aka as Mike Baker of NMIT’s Visual Arts team), Koru has sprouted a new and rather interesting build over the last few months.

Wellington Railway Station on Koru

Mike is currently studying for his Masters in Art and Design, majoring in Dance and Video through the Auckland University of Technology. His project, “In the Company of Strangers” comments on how strangers negotiate the parameters of meetings, exchanges and conversations in urban spaces. The build, which utilises Mike’s own photographs, blog entries, comments, soundscapes and which will include his video, explores this in one urban space, Wellington Railway Station. The effect is mesmerising and highly immersive. Take a trip to Koru to contemplate the existence or not of some of the boundaries between the virtual and the real, and those between strangers. If Rollo is there, he will happily chat to you about his work in progress and he plans to have a more public display of himself working in Second Life during the Nelson Arts Festival.

Wellington raliway Station - Interior

Watch this space for more details on this!

or you can visit Mike’s blog for more information or to leave your comments. Below is a SLURL to Mike’s build on Koru: And if you come visiting feel free to look around the rest of the island too, listen to the tuis or the morepork and if you are really lucky you may catch the whale song in the bay. http://slurl.com/secondlife/Koru/86/77/22

The SLENZ Project

Well the SLENZ project is finally up and running and is really the main reason why this blog hasn’t been updated for way too long!

The core development team met a few weeks ago to set out the arrangements, understandings, roles and general pattern of the project. It was an inspiring meeting in which we all met for the first time in real life, although we had all met in SL. One major outcome of the meeting was the agreement that we needed an official, impartial communicator – particularly blogger – for the project. Johnnie Wendt’s (aka John Waugh) name came immediately to mind as Isa Goodman and I had known him for a long time in SL and I had had the pleasure of meeting him once for a wonderful coffee in downtown Nelson as he was passing through! John took little persuading to join the team and the SLENZ blog was born, with its first entry on Aug 1st to coincide with the real start of the project.

Work was already underway on gathering and absorbing resources for a major literature review focusing on the pedagogy of virtual worlds as well as on other’s experiences of teaching and studying in that environment. That work is continuing and is proving to be an exciting challenge. As yet there is still little peer reviewed literature on Second Life or virtual worlds and of course what there is, is often very out of date by the time it is published. We have to be careful not to place too much weight on such studies, despite their provenance, just as we have to carefully assess informal literature. At the TELSIG conference, there were some interesting comments from Mark Brown on the rise of the ‘amateur’, particularly through the ease of online publishing, and how dangerous relying on such anecdotal information could be. I am constantly reminded of that admonishment when trawling through the amount of online information about education in Second Life. However, I cannot ignore the fact that a huge number of valuable insights and a large amount of incredibly useful information based on practitioner’s experiences and reflections are contained in these informal publications. While such literature may not be rigorous in the usually accepted sense, we cannot afford to ignore it!

Last week saw the first of the project steering group meetings. It was so encouraging to know that we had such a supportive and friendly governance group. Drawing together senior managers from 4 ITPs (Institutes of Technology and Polytechnics), the TEC (Tertiary Education Commission) and 2 of NZ’s biggest corporate presences (IBM and Telecom) and with a link to the University of Canterbury – this is a group of people who know what they are talking about! It is going to be fun working with them!

TELSIG – 2008

I am currently attending the Tertiary Education Libraries Special Interest Group’s (TELSIG) biennial meeting In Palmerston North – once again, a friendly interesting conference with some very interesting speakers, particularly Ass Prof Mark Brown of Massey University views on emerging trends in eLearning and some useful information on such things as recent developments in NZ copyright law and institutional repositories.

Not a conference that I would usually have attended but one where I had been invited to coordinate to session on Second Life in education and its potential for libraries in particular. Having been given a 2 hour session, we managed (with valuable assistance from Tim Darlington and Rob Mooar – thanks guys!) to create a truly inter-world presentation!

I provided a short overview of Second Life using in a standard form (i.e. powerpoints and speaking to the RL audience) but then it got interesting! Having mentioned the value of real time interaction, we were able to move almost seamlessly to Jo Kay in Sydney or rather to Jokay Wollongong on Jokaydia in Second Life. With the assistance of Timothy Greig’s avatar Aramis Maginot, we were able to project Jokay on to the screen while she showed us around the Jokaydia islands, talked to the audience about what we were seeing, and answer questions put directly to her. Impressive technology indeed!

We then moved to Emerald Gerant (in real life Kathryn Greenhill of Murdoch University in Australia) for an insight into libraries in Second Life and for a quick view of what Murdoch are doing. The audience was also treated to a little view of themselves as Timothy had taken a photo of the conference which he then uploaded to SL and which Kathryn then used to decorate a cube which revolved beside her as she was speaking! She had also arranged for her webcam view to be projected into Second Life – cool!

At the end of her talk, Emerald then teleported to Koru where Aramis Maginot was waiting to present his slides both to an inworld and a real world audience while Timothy provide the voice over in the conference room transmitted back into Second Life. His talk based on the work from his Master’s thesis was very interesting and hopefully he will find time to give us some help with the SLENZ project.

I finished up with a very short conclusion on the future and our SLENZ project plans. By far and away the most complex technical presentation that I have been involved with, and I am still a little in awe that it worked with so few glitches!

Everyone seemed to have found the presentations interesting and thought provoking and much of the rest of the day and evening was spent answering sl questions! Exactly what I had hoped for!! Sure hope some of you will find your way into SL!!

ICCMSN2008

Conference season has arrived for those of us in New Zealand and it has been my pleasure to be involved with two so far with one more coming up next week.

The first conference on my list was ICCMSN2008 (International Conference on Computer Mediated Social Networking) held at the University of Otago, in Dunedin – a friendly stimulating conference and even the weather behaved!.  Others have blogged in more detail about the conference itself and a number of resources from the conference are available, including the slides of my presentation and thoughts for the panel on Online Identity. The conference organisers are intending to bring everything together from the conference website soon.

For me it was a very stimulating conference and a very useful networking opportunity.  I wasn’t able to attend all the sessions as I often found myself involved in long conversations with people instead.  It was such a pleasure to hear the opening address by Martin Purvis and to re-make contact with him.  I am certainly hoping that we will be able to provide support to each other in our investigations of virtual world environments.

It was also a highlight to meet Malcolm Shore of Telecom NZ and University of Canterbury.  One very  productive conversation lasted two hours and we are now SL friends! Once again we are both hoping for opportunities to work together in the future in helping to create a NZ virtual community.

It was fascinating to hear about the strengths and weaknesses of LSL (Linden Scripting Language) from Robert Cox and Patricia Crowther of the University of Canberra.  There are too few LSL experts down-under! Wonderful to meet them in real life and to have acquired two more interesting, stimulating and helpful SL friends!

I came back buzzing with ideas and am currently still frustrated by not having had the time to really get going with some of them.  Never mind!! Not long now.

Multiple Intelligences: Zotarah Shepherd

Koru has been the busiest yet as the venue for Zotarah Shepherd’s fascinating build on Multiple Intelligences. Zotarah has been an active and long standing member of the Kiwi Educators group and although not a New Zealander has always been keen to help out. In return, we were happy to make some land available for her to place her ‘build’ so that it could be seen and graded by her Professor (she is in the final stages of her master’s degree). A big thank you to Isa Goodman who arranged for her to use some of his land (and prims!).

Beth Ritter-Guth was an early visitor and encouraged the members of the SL Education list-serve to visit and little did we appreciate the interest and traffic that Zotarah’s build would bring to the island (145 in just a few days, many staying half an hour or longer) and it has been wonderful to meet some of those visitors and to know that they are also enjoying the ambience of Koru – one visitor said to me ” if NZ is really like this I better put it on my holiday list!” Perhaps we should be asking for support from the NZ Tourist Board too!

I won’t try to tell you too much about the work underlying Zotarah’s build as Zotarah does that herself very well in the notecards that you receive when you visit and also through the interactivity of the exhibits. Let me just say that her work is an interactive explanation of Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences. She has build a number of ’stations’ to represent the different ‘intelligences’ and then provided relevant activities to illustrate them. The stations are :

The red circle represents Kinesthetic intelligence.
The orange circle represents Interpersonal/Social Intelligence
The yellow circle represents the Literary/Linguistic Intelligence.
The green circle represents the Naturalistic Intelligence.
The teal circle represents the Spatial/Artistic Intelligence.
The blue circle represents the Mathematical Logical Intelligence.
The purple circle represents the Musical Intelligence.
The white circle represents the Intrapersonal Intelligence.

Can I encourage you all to come and see Zotarah’s build – as I think it is going to be known!

Digital Storytelling

The Second Life demons were playing with us on Friday evening but still an eclectic group met around a campfire on Koru and told some of our Second Life life stories. Unable to successfully record the audio stream, the event was largely ephemeral but those of us who were there had a wonderful time. Iphigenia illustrated hers with photos while I was able to pass around Arwenna’s story on a notecard while other, friends both old and new, delighted us with their thoughts. For many it was the first time we had shared stories in this kind of forum, in either life, and the sense of connection and community was strong. Even better was to discover later the truly global nature of the experience that we had helped to create.

It may have been a small beginning but roll on next year! And in the meantime keep the stories flowing.

Reminder – Sharing Second Life stories

May 16th seems to have come round VERY quickly!

The Kiwi Educators group invites everyone to come and share their Second Life lifestories on Friday May 16th 8pm (NZ time)  (thats May 16th 1.00am PDT) at the Kauri grove on Koru in celebration of the  International
Day for Sharing Life Stories.

We’ll be using Voice chat to share our stories in a storycircle.  Be prepared to speak for no longer than 5 minutes and IM Arwenna Stardust inworld to arrange for the display of any images you would like use to illustrate your story.  With your permission, we’ll record your stories and have them ready to share later.

Even if you prefer just to listen (we’d love an audience!) come and join us!

Live NZ music in SL – NZ Music month begins

What a party! It may not have lasted that long but it was a huge buzz. The first time we managed to stream our own live music from Nelson, New Zealand into the Kauri grove on Koru. (OK nothing new for SL but new for us!).  The occasion was a surprise Kiwi Educators party for Isa Goodman’s 2nd rezday (He’s now one of the terrible twos!) and we used it as a reason to finally make the music happen! What a great start to NZ Music month.

Toddles Lightworker kindly lent us the use of his streaming account, Thelonius Ra was the engineer and Mandosam Carter played guitar, mandolin and sang and oh we all danced! A very big thank you to everyone.

So will we be doing it again? Oh yes! We have PLANS. We hope to have Mandosam again, other musicians too, and eventually we hope to offer SL as a live performance venue for students on the RL Diploma of Contemporary Music Perfomance here at NMIT. And wouldn’t it be great to be able to offer the winners of the Smokefree RockQuest a gig in SL as one of their prizes? How about it Pete?!

So once again a special thanks to all those who put up with my nagging and made it all happen – it is very much appreciated – and tired though he was I hope Isa liked his little surprise. We wouldn’t be here today without you Isa – so a very BIG thank you to you too!

Second Life Stories Storytelling Day

Just had a very productive meeting about the International Storytelling Day. It’s on Friday May 16th and we will be having a storytelling circle at the Kiwi Educators meeting place on Koru. It will be at 8pm NZ time (thats May 16th 1am SLT/PDT) and we invite anyone to come along and tell part of their SL Life story. We will be using voice and we hope to record the stories, with your permission of course, and have them archived on Koru for other to hear at a later date.

We thought we would ask everyone to limit themselves to around 5 mins but if you know that you need longer then please let us know in good time. It would be very helpful if you would let us know if you would like to tell your story – then we can plan a programme – but we will keep it as informal as possible and you can just turn up on the evening if you prefer.

And don’t forget you are more than welcome to just come along and listen and enjoy the telling! Watch this blog for further details and feel free to comment here or to email or IM me (or Iphigenia Flores) to let us know if you are interested.