NMC Campus Observer

SLCC - We Can Do Better?

CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) : Aug 27, 2007 03:42pm

I’m here in Chicago,after SLCC 2007 ended, waiting at O’Hare to get home…. and struggling to find the correct balance of words to try and describe the experience here. To be blunt, the highlight of SLCC was the opportunity to have that magical meeting in RL of people you have gotten to know in SL- it happened so many times I lost count. But… going from our “normal” SL experiences of being able to go anywhere, to fly, to instantly communicate with anyone to a place where we where sat quietly in rows inside fixed rooms and watch Powerpoints — that left me wanting.

We can do better.

It can be way too easy to slip into a critical mode when so many people, volunteers, gave a lot of themselves to pull together an experience for the 1000+ attendees. This is in no way to sleight this monumental effort, nor could I proclaim I could really pull off a better show.

So here it is– the “community” aspect of the acronym happened- we brought together a lot of folks with this shared passion for being in Second Life, and nothing, nothing, can match the excitement of meeting F2F people you know only as SL avatars. There was this interesting phenomena when you met someone, as you introduced yourselves with 2 names (real name first? SL name first?). That was good.

No, that is an understatement- I lost count of how many people I got to meet and greet that I have crossed paths with in SL. If our time there was really just a “game” or “for losers” there would be little value or incentive to meet in real life. We were there to expand even farther the connectivity we feel in world.

But the irony I came away with I can only try and say in photos:

The first is typical of the sessions at our Symposium on Creativity in SL while the second is typical of this weekend in Chicago.

We can do alot better.

We devote huge amounts of time, energy, passion, into creating and interacting in a visual stimulating 3D world– and when we come together to share this passion, we sit in rows of chairs and watch bullet point slide shows– I have come to expect this in the typical education technology conferences I have seen for 15 years; for some reason, I thought a conference about Second Life would… perhaps use Second Life??

We can do better.

Yes, there were significant issues with internet access here. Large hotels generally put big financial screws on conferences for internet access, but I was shocked that for an audience who is likely tethered to a net connection 16 hours a day that absolutely none was available in the conference halls. Zip. It was like taking away my oxygen. I could not breathe.

But that would not have strictly changed things, but woah, was I hungering for a back channel. Very hungry. Or heck, just a simple teleport to a beach.

The other irony is that this conference is again named around the “Community” word, yet is organized to what ended up rather tall silos of Education, Business, Machinima, and Social. I really did not make a huge effort myself to cross over, but it feels somewhat counter to the experiences we have in SL– beyond a session or two, I pretty much stuck inside the education silo. And there is a whole other substrate of the “in crowd” the secret meetings, etc, that have some ring of exclusivity.

We can do better.

A most significant gap was that although, when the network worked, audio was streamed into Second Life, with the audience’s lack of network connectivity, we had zero connection with out virtual audiences. We could not see them, and the only contact back to us was via one rep with a wire, or sometimes, via cell phone. We have all the knowledge ant tools to create a much richer connection between real and virtual audiences, but we really need to fold that mindset into our planning, or just forget about even trying such a thing.

With that said, our sincere gratitude goes to the persevering people who showed up in world, and the ingenious on the spot thinking by people there (thanks Desideria Stockton, Eloise Pasteur, and others I may be forgetting) for keeping things interactive when the audio from here was not working. They have shared a bunch of the chat logs and other resources:

Saturday Sessions:

http://sleeds.org/chatlog/?c=75
http://sleeds.org/chatlog/?c=74

Nino created two “on the fly machinima” projects:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwND3YzJ8sw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZQr6UiTNHQ

Sunday Sessions

Morning Sessions with Hilary Mason and the Games Panel:
http://sleeds.org/chatlog/?c=79
http://sleeds.org/chatlog/?c=80

Jonathan Richter/SaLamandar:
http://sleeds.org/chatlog/?c=81

Info Islands Panel:
http://sleeds.org/chatlog/?c=82

Larry Johnson’s Keynote:
http://sleeds.org/chatlog/?c=83

Wrap up:
http://sleeds.org/chatlog/?c=84

And look at the great documentation done by Global Kids. Those sessions were the exceptions, as the GK folks always get us up out of the chairs, moving around, doing activities. We need more of that!

Let me say again that the effort Jeremy Kemp and Daniel Livingstone did to organize the education track was stellar, to say the least. Their job was not easy by any stretch, and they were hampered as much by the site limitations as we were.

But I say, one more time… we can do better. Let’s go beyond the typical conference mode. Let’s leave the bullet points at home. Let’s do an SL Camp, an un conference. Leave the ballroom hotels behind. Let’s fly out of this old mode.

I’m not really quite this grumpy, and the connections I did make are truly valuable, but is SLCC 08 stays to the traditional conference approach, I’d rather be home in my PJs singing in world with Desi and friends.

Story filed under: Campus Headlines

See all stories by CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine)

12 Comments Add your own

1. barry joseph | August 27th, 2007 at 9:47 pm

Thanks Alan! I can’t believe we never got to meet in person!!!
2. Creative Conferencing - T&hellip | August 29th, 2007 at 7:11 am

[...] wanted to share, particularly in light of some of the critique of the traditional conference scene (poor Alan!). Here are the instructions: This will be an unusual conference. We generally won’t have [...]
3. Daniel Livingstone | August 29th, 2007 at 8:31 am

Hi Alan,

Thanks for the feedback, even if it smarts a little

From where I was, the breakout session on the Saturday seemed to go really well and did give people a good chance to chat - but you are right that there was not enough activity like that - and the feedback session made it clear that people wanted more.

More tracks, more chance to interact, more stuff for new folks, more hands on stuff, more coffee, more more, more opportunities to interact with people in world.

The last one at least had been intended - all along our plan was to have one projector showing action in world. Our *secret* plan was to sneak people in-world onto the odd panel whenever we could. The network borked that
We kept that part secret because we were unsure about the network quality - not ever suspecting things would be as bad as they were.

But lots of feedback and ideas for next years event - however it works its going to be a hard balancing act.
4. SLCC postmortem I «&hellip | August 29th, 2007 at 9:40 am

[...] and panels were all great, though we over-packed the event with panels and presentations (see Alan Levine’s comments, for example). There are a number of reasons for this ending up the way it [...]
5. CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) | August 29th, 2007 at 9:53 am

Daniel- I anguished over trying to write this in away that would not “smart”, but its inevitable. It’s easy to be a jeering critic on the sidelines rather than a player.

And judging from the feedback on SLED- the format fit for a lot of folks.

That said, this is part of my own long term pondering about how we do professional gatherings and hoping, hoping we start to see some more changes on the format- unconferences, virtual (SL) meetings are nibbling at the edges.

But if I go to the trouble of taking time away from work and family, fly to a distant land, live in a hotel surroundings– I am hungry for maximal experience for the exchanges, and thirsty for getting content I cannot acquire from home on my web browser. How do we construct those experiences? (I have not the answers….)
6. Jeremy Kemp | August 29th, 2007 at 4:49 pm

Thanks for this analysis! I’m 100% positive that NMC could put on a better show - as you have many times in the past.

I think the proceedings are a crucial added benefit here for the community. That cannot be overlooked.

We very nearly did not have ANY projectors to work with at all. The conference planners didn’t think to order any. I brought three of my own because I wanted to do a more immersive presentation style with SL feeds on the walls. I got a call to my room early Saturday morning and donated two immediately.

We can do worse.

We accepted a VERY high percentage of submitted pieces. The intention was to give junior academics the fuel they needed to be contributors in the field. Bosses paid for travel, hotels, etc. I heard personally of at least two people who would not have been there without this liberal philosophy.

We can do worse.

Another barrier for some came in the form of pre-conference salacious advertising. The Ball. I made a personal invitation to one of the lead presidential candidates to do a call in. (One of the library associations has a president with connections.) I got a positive result up front and then nothing once staffers saw the ball schedule. The Deep Dish Trolley Tour was arranged to give an alternative. It was pretty well attended.

We can do worse.

The cliquey aspect was most unfortunate. I shouldn’t have done the joke awards and Dan warned me against it. That said, we are an emerging community of practice with quickly growing bonds.

My ideal conference would be completely hands-on. Each attendee would have a wireless broadband connection. Avatars and bodies would navigate the conference with equal ease.

Thanks for the comments here!

–jeremy
7. anon | August 29th, 2007 at 9:45 pm

Maybe you put your money where your mouth is, instead of being a sideline quarterback?
8. CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) | August 29th, 2007 at 10:07 pm

Mmpshgs, mphshs fffmpps.

Oh excuse me, Mr/Ms Anon, I had money in my mouth. I took your advice but it did not really do much ;-). Can I have a third cliche, please?

So I assume your intent is, “Okay Mr Criticism, if you don’t like SLCC, then why don’t you do something better?”

Well heck, I thought I had been doing that since March of 2006. I have been part of organizing ongoing events, facilitating the bi-weekly Teachers Buzz sessions, doing F2F conferences, coordinating live audio streams between the EDUCAUSE Focus session last March, we just finished out an 8 day full online conference in SL… Do I have to trot out my resume in response?

Or am I just supposed to stifle my observations and rah rah along with rest of the in crowd singing Kum Ba Yah? Can you teach me how?

Thanks, Anon for the illumination.
9. Jeremy Kemp | August 29th, 2007 at 10:31 pm

“Put your money where your mouth is”
As the lead sponsor of the SLCC Education Track, NMC has very definitively done so!
10. Jeremy Kemp | August 29th, 2007 at 11:23 pm

Designing Powerpoints to describe SL is a little bit like throwing pottery to describe the ocean. IMHO, you have to use Machinima to make a point properly.

But I want to reframe your argument a little.

SLCCEdu07 was not a workshop on new media, like blogging, podcasting, etc. but rather a snapshot of an entirely new field. If we were covering some aspect of a YouTube, then in-depth sessions with hands-on covering 90 minutes for one speaker would make sense.

By offering a grab-bag assortment of MANY speakers, we went broad rather than deep. This seems appropriate for an extremely early overview of the discipline. We could, for instance, fill two days on “serious games” using various MMO platforms. We could likewise cover faculty development, identity and culture, tools and procedures in longer periods.

This was a snapshot and not a seminar. Next year there should be multi-tracks and a training lead-in day.

FYI: A pre-conference survey found that 50% of attendees had spoken about SL at an official event and 1/4 had published on the topic.
11. anon | August 30th, 2007 at 5:08 am

“As the lead sponsor of the SLCC Education Track, NMC has very definitively done so!”

Anyone can throw down a couple thousand bucks. The convention topped $150,000. NMC certain contributed a small fraction of that.

Try spending hundreds (thousands) of hours and plan your own convention. NMC can’t even seem to keep its own sims from being completely empty. I doubt they could keep a room filled with 900 people in person.
12. Daniel Livingstone | August 30th, 2007 at 7:21 am

Hmm like I said, it’ll be a balancing act.

Where we went most wrong (IMHO… Im still listening to what people are saying on the mailing lists and on other blogs) was not giving people space for discussion - but there were many presenters there that I really enjoyed and learned from. Presentations that I probably wouldn’t have bothered to watch if I’d at home because they weren’t clearly *my* field, or my area.

And as Jeremy notes, without a fairly traditional academic program at the core a lot of academics will have problems getting funding to allow them to come along. It’d be a shame to have convention packed full of great discussion if we knew there were people who were cut out of the discussion precisely because of that.

Perhaps an answer next year will be two have a lighter workshop program, accompanied by an un-workshop program…

But its great to have this discussion just now, because its important that next year’s event learns from and improves upon this years.

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