We spoke last week over at NMC Campus to learn more about the projects at the Towson Innovation Lab.

More recently, Jan has been effectively collaborating with fellow teachers at a few other US universities, as well as tapping into them as guests in her classes. She is now setting up a new project to take this collaboration to a global scale. She has lined up partners in teh Czech Republic, Scotland, Thailand, and else where in Asia for the Collaborative, Cross-Cultural/Global Art + Design Project using Second Life, described there as:

A specific project theme will be selected and structured in concert with participating institution, student, and faculty interest. Participants will explore one of several themes through design research and sketches and collaborate using Second Life as a virtual classroom for cross-institutional, cross-cultural, interdisciplinary dialogue in in-progress design reviews and final critique.

Studio One Interview with Ruby Snook / Jan Baum (13 Mb MP3 / 18:05)

More Information:

• Towson Innovation Lab
• Global Design Collaboration
• Project Object/Object Design

Interview with Aurili Oh [14 Mb MP3 19:22]

I’ve been more interested in talking to educators given several recent articles / blog posts suggesting “Second life is dead” (e.g. Whatever Happened to Second Life?, Second Life isn’t dead, but it’s a niche)…. to me its really in the “post-hype” stage.

Suzanne recently completed her doctorate in Education with a dissertation on Learning in the Wild of a Virtual World:

This study took place in the online 3D virtual world Second Life®, a recreational environment designed for world-building and socializing, and intended for individuals 18 years old and older. It described learning from the perspective of Second Life® Residents and focused on their world-building activities. As a virtual ethnographer, my avatar interacted with seven main participant-avatars in-world. Real life ages ranged from 33 years old to mid 50s; all but one were women. I collected data from 20 other Residents also. The study contributes to a nascent body of educational research exploring new forms of inquiry and practice conceived in virtual worlds, and breaks new ground by positioning itself in terms of a constructionist-learning context in which adults actively engage.

The findings reiterate previous research of learning in virtual worlds. It is situated, social, intrinsically engaging and requires a high degree of personal agency. Learning in Second Life®, however, typifies constructionist principles, and qualities of adult learning which, in practice, are relevant to children as learners too. The context-specific activities of world-building invoke in learners a capacity to be self-directed problem-solvers of concrete and personally meaningful tasks. These activities result in novel expressive forms, and performative expressions of self through one’s avatar. World-building engenders artists’ and artisans’ habits of mind in the forms of learning-by-doing and trial and error.

Compared with the larger population, Second Life® Residents are trailblazers. I therefore proposed cyborg learners/learning as a formulation for characterizing the expressive forms and ways of learning documented here.

* Learners embody avatars in a 3D graphical space.
* They are geographically dispersed.
* They occupy at least two or more social and technological locations simultaneously.
* Learning is technologically and socially platform-specific.
* It is socially interdependent.
* It depends on intrinsically motivating activities.
* It engenders forms of learning-by-doing.

These findings contribute to a broad research paradigm addressing games for learning, mobile learning, open learning, personal learning environments (PLEs) and multi-user learning environments (MUVEs).

In our interview, Suzanne shared how she did her research, which included in depth observations of how people learned skills in Second Life informally and some of the broader implications for this kind of learning.

She also talked some about the student focused projects she currently supports on San Diego State’s Aztlan Island.

You can find her dissertation online as a Google Doc along with references at http://tinyurl.com/yjojsu3

And w00t- if you look closely, you will identify a few scenes shot on NMC Campus! Kudos to the machinima skills of Pandora Kurrajong (aka KerryJ)

Listen to interview [14 Mb mp3 15:17]

If you have entered SL on NMC Orientation Island, attended an event in the NMC Conference Center, visited an exhibit at the Aho Museum or Ars Simulacra, picked up freebies on Learning, explored Virtual Macbeth, you’ve experienced what they create for us.

CJ, who works for us from his home in the U.K., is a real life architect, bringing some amazing skills to our builds and designs, such as his method of modular buildings. Stella, who was famous in Sl for her sculptures before joining NMC, crafts her designs from her home in Nebraska.

We met on the sim that was the original one sim home for us when NMC Campus launched in early 2006. As you may now, less then a year later, NMC Campus grew to 8 sims, and rapidly went above 90. Recently, we’ve been moving a few sims around to generate a more cohesive core, of what I am calling (not sure anyone else is or cares) NMC Campus 3.0. Until now, each of our sims really was island like, and the goal here os to create more cohesiveness in moving between sims, and bringing together ones that serve similar functions. For example, Research Park, with the lovely Red Rocks Amphitheater, is now adjacent to NMC Conference Center, convenient for our conferences when we use both venues.

For moving around, CJ has designed a new transport system, riffing a DR Who motif, of a TARDIS. These blue phone boots, that you will soon find on all our sims, offers a clickable map that allows you to teleport to other NMC Campus sims. We have new signboards up everywhere that broadcast via RSS the latest stories from the Campus Observer and the NMC Campus Community Events Calendar.

But the real work has been the core of the original NMC Campus to make it the focal point.

Our plan is to create a place people will visit, hang out informally. At the core is a public sandbox, what we are calling our “60 Minute Social Sandbox”

The 60 Minute part is the piece that auto-returns things to you (to keep it tidy). This is not really the place to work on projects (we have NMC Labs available for that, more space), but this more as a place where people can informally share, do impromptu demos, etc. Our plan includes a new program, lacking a formal title, but “Somewhere in the world is is Lunch” urging people around the world to park here during their lunch hour and interact with other people that show up.

And just before we recorded the interview today, we brainstormed a great enabling tool. We were talking about some new LSL scripting that allows access to an avatar’s profile pic. In about 75 seconds, CJ created a little prim demo, where as we took turns could click it, and it would assume a texture of our profile picture:

So our Social Sandbox will use similar code to locate the textures/pictures of anyone hanging around the sandbox, and then we can broadcast that to other sims on NMC Campus as a way of seeing “Who’s At NMC Campus Now”, with a click teleport to jump to the sandbox.

Look for more announcements soon as we ramp up activities at NMC Campus, coming up on our third anniversary this April.

Speaking of a while ago, many of you probably recall fondly the May 2007 Best Practices in Second Life Conference. Completely organized by volunteers, SLBPE was a 24 hour marathon of learning, and logged well over 1400 avatars participating.

Today we spoke to Phelan Corrimal (aka Kevin Feenan) of Rockcliffe University, who has taken on the fearless task of organizing the follow-up to that event- the Virtual Worlds – Best Practices in Education Conference, which will take place March 27-29. 2009.

Interview with Phelan Corrimal (14.9 Mb MP3, 16:16).

Pheland shared that plans are moving along nicely, with about 35 people from around the world already volunteering to help run the conference, and many SL organizations have stepped up to support the event. The Call for Proposals is open now through the end of February.

Like the previous conference, this will be a free event for attendees. Since the running of the 24 hour conference took a heavy toll on ther organizers (with pre-conference tasks and post-conference wrap up, many people went sleepless for 48+ hours), this conference will be spread over 3 days, but with hours that should be friendly to a round the world audience– According to Phelan, there is someone from Brazil organizing a Portuguese track

The conference plans to be spread across up to 16 sims, with audio/video streamed hopefully across the conference areas as well as outside Second Life.

If you are involved or interested in teaching and learning in Second Life, definitely make plans to attend this conference! It looks to be as big and exciting as the first one.

But wait, there’s more video to see! Gary Hazlitt has published his 44 minute video of the Wall V2 Performance:

Since the ribbons were cut May 7, 2008, faculty and staff at the University have been busy using the space and developing new applications for therr virtual learning space.

They are inviting you to learn more about their Second Life campus and how it has already been put to use in this new machinima video:

Some things of interest include their learning spaces high above Burns Tower, the “Sky Labs” where faculty and classes meet in flexible designed spaces, a space for sharing “freebies” a gallery of student created content, and a lab where faculty are developing custom learning applications.

In the video, we learn from Volleychick Boa about how Second Life is being used for Speech Critique where students stream their webcam into Second Life for review by their faculty, how the debate teams are conducting activities in world, a nifty survival experience (a crashed plane! snow!) for a management class, and the development of a student club area, just to name a few examples.

To visit this exemplary campus in Second Life, check out the University of the Pacific at http://slurl.com/secondlife/U%20Pacific/166/141/22

Originally published at NMC Virtual Worlds

As a sneak preview, Gary has published his own video interpretation of The Wall V-2, and ironically, has placed it to a soundtrack of a live Pink Floyd performance of Comfortable Numb, a song not used in the show!

Read more about Gary’s work on this and enjoy this sampler:

Look here soon for the release of the final video.

Robins RL avatar is Steve Hornik, an accounting professor in the College of Business Administration at University of Central Florida. Robins has been using Second Life actively for at least a year, and it was a few months ago when discussing NMC’s Second Life account creation and Orientation experience that he shared he had brought 200 students in through that service back in April 2008 (hmmm that is the cause of the nice spike in usage!).

He did laugh when I asked, “So what do accountants do in Second Life?” but quickly responded, “We count things!” Actually, as he shared, accountants are pretty active, with CPA Island and recent events like “XBRL and the International Future of Financial Reporting”. There is also an Second Life Association of CPAs and KAWG&F was the first accounting firm to open a working virtual business office in Second Life.

Check out his work on Really Engaging Accounting web site — and he did mention he is going to be sharing some results of his research into student engagement at the upcoming SLCC conference.

What caught our attentions was when he mentioned he was planning to bring more than 700 students through the registrations system for his upcoming fall semester accounting course — this is a basic required course in the UCF Business College.

In our recorded conversation (see below), Robins describes the ranges of ways he uses Second Life, with basic content like access to class content/recorded lectures and onto some custom interactive activities where students must manipulate a data modeler. He also shares some of his strategies for using Second Life with a large number of students (revolving around asynchronous design).

Studio One Interview with Robins Hermano (26:52 18.4 Mb MP3, apologies for poor audio quality in first half due to network flakiness)

We look forward to learning how the “big” class succeeds!

I spoke briefly to Chase Marellan, who in real life is Nicholas Chase, programmer and author, and a principal at InterSection Unlimited, makers of a very interesting Second Life application called ChatBridge.

This tool has been used since June for the weekly Metanomics show, which is video broadcast from one sim in Second Life to several others (include Outreach on NMC Campus) as overflow viewing places.

In Second Life, ChatBridge is a small mic device, and what it does is to broadcast any local chat in one sim to all of the other sims, so there is a common chat area across all sites. This is much more reliable than the group IM channel the Metanomics folks used earlier this year.

But there is another more interesting feature- the ChatBridge also allows people to participate in that same chat area via a web site, not even logged into Second Life. So interested viewers can create an account at Metanomics and go to the live show page. There they can see the streaming view embedded in the web, and read and add to the chat going on across the Metanomics sites in Second Life.

This got me very interested in this web/Second life integration, and given the NMC in world conferences were large enough to have multiple sims, I was interested in how this technology might work.

So in this interview, Chase describes how ChatBridge works, where it is being used, and some other aspects of connecting the virtual and web worlds.

As a note, Chase is co-authoring a book due out soon on Platform Second Life:

This book focuses on the skills needed to build applications that connect real life and Second Life. This includes:

* displaying RSS feeds in-world and creating 3D displays with external data
* controlling access to your virtual presence based on a real-world database
* updating external databases based on what happens in the virtual world

Platform Second Life is aimed at developers building Second Life applications, from casual scripters trying to build a cool tool to enterprise-level coders integrating with their company’s legacy systems.

The book is not yet published, but a f ew chapters are available for purchase via the Manning Early Access Program.

So we do have an audio file to share, but its hard to listen to. The story is I use WireTap Studio to capture my interviews. When I upgraded to my new MacBookPro, the serial number got disconnected, and I did not dig it up in time for the interview, so I ran it in trial mode– completely forgetting in trial mode, you can record, but about every 15 seconds there is an overlaid audio of a sultry woman saying, “This recording was made in a trial version of WireTap Studio Pro” — how embarrassing! I promise to do better next time!

Interview with Chase Marellan 5:55 4.1 Mb mp3