Joe Sanchez and Leslie Jarmon – The Educators Coop

Lorri Momiji came into Second Life in 2006 – the same year that the Alliance Virtual Library started practicing librarianship in grid.  Lorri is a library and information systems (LIS) educator and former librarian in RL, and so her initial interest in SL was both in terms of how she could use the environment to teach her LIS graduate students, and to understand what libraries and universities were doing in Second Life.

Since her introduction into Second Life, Lorri has brought three classes of LIS graduate students (in the 2007, 2008, and 2009 fall semesters) as part of a class called Virtual Reference Environments.  In her class, students work within Second Life learning to build, or attend lectures such as the one held by the head of reference at Second Life Libraries.  Another guest speaker the students had the pleasure of meeting manages Imagination Island, Rachelville, and the Kansas State Library in Second Life.

Some of the students created projects in Second Life, such as building collections or working in the reference service.  Others chose projects in different environments outside of SL, such as running social media sites, working in SMS texting services, or other types of reference services.

Lorri was one of the original members of the Educators Coop.  She saw a notice about the organization in Second Life, came to the open house, and there met North Lamar and Bluewave Ogee.  Lorri already had a cottage at Imagination Island/Mythica, but she wanted a place with more prims for her students, so she opted into renting parcels from the Educators Coop.

While not a self-proclaimed builder, Lorri does dabble and recognizes the importance of building skills in Second Life.  She learns enough to teach others the basics.  While on her four parcels at the Educators Coop, Lorri shared a gadget for creating sculpties that one of her student assistants is using.  The gadget can, for example, take a photo and create a sculpty based on it.

In addition to bringing college students into SL, Lorri also teaches fellow members of the Educators Coop on occasion through workshops.   In one such workshop, Lorri shared her research on librarians in Second Life.  In another session, she demonstrated the use of another gadget that makes shaped prims automatically.  With this device, instead of having to shape every prim by hand, you can instead just click a button to get the basic shape going.  The item not only saves time, but is useful for showing students how to build.

Making any point of the learning curve easier to traverse is crucial to succeeding as an educator in Second Life.  As other educators have mentioned, the learning curve to enter Second Life is fairly steep.  Lorri shared the same experience with her students and felt that the learning curve never really ends.  Every short-cut or trick-of-the-trade one can use can make the difference.  For example, she now presents all of her Second Life lectures in both text and audio.  She is also learning about incorporating gestures and animations into her lectures.  In addition, she makes the Second Life component of her classes optional, to ensure that the students involved really want to take part in the virtual world experience.

The experience the students have is broken into two live class sessions.  The first day is about learning the basics of Second Life, such as how to move the avatar around and how to navigate the grid.  The second day is about scripting, building, and more advanced skills.  When it comes time for presentations, Lorri encourages participation and assessment from all of the students.  This allows the students to share and reflect on what they have learned by reviewing each others work.

In addition to being an educator in and out of Second Life, Lorri sat on two panels at the ALA Virtual Libraries and Museums Conference:  Lis Educators and The Future of Libraries.  She’s also written two articles about Second Life, librarians, and teaching.  The first article, published by the Journal of Virtual World Research, is about how librarians answer questions in Second Life.  The second article is about teaching in Second Life and will soon be published by the International Journal of Virtual World Personal Learning Environments.  Lorri is currently writing a paper on the professional librarian identity in Second Life.

Lorri Momiji is involved in both the librarian and education SL community and was also part of the team that worked on her university’s Second Life island.  She works and teaches in these spaces.  As part of her research to build these spaces, she looked at fifty different libraries in Second Life, how they operate, and how they were built.  Some libraries are immersed or “embedded” libraries.  These facilities fit right into the roleplaying culture surrounding that particular community.  The librarians assume avatars that match the roles and appearance of the sim.  They serve their communities in a way that is most familiar to that community.  This goes a long way to improving the trust between the librarian and the patron.

In RL, people automatically trust other people that are similar to them in some way.  Children trust children, adults, prefer adults, and people of the same language will tend to go to each other for help and information.  It is no different in Second Life.  Information providers that Lorri interviewed talked about trust and how they realized their appearance could impact trust.  How they looked or how they dressed increased or decreased their approachability to the patrons in their particular community.  For example, an avatar that wears glasses is assumed to be intelligent, even though no avatar ever has any need to wear them.  The librarians make sure they look approachable yet professional to ensure they are taken seriously.

The world of reference in Second Life is certainly different than in the RL.  Primarily because most reference questions in SL are about Second Life.  Even the most practiced librarian can find themselves struggling to answer reference questions because they are suddenly faced with an entire new field of information.  Unlike the real world however, universal translators have completely removed the language barrier from the field of librarianship in Second Life.  And a librarian can get help from another librarian instantaneously by just sending an instant message (IM) or TPing (teleporting) that librarian in.

In her Research, Lorri also stumbled across the natural tendency in Second Life for the creation of circles.  in the RL, a perfect circle isn’t easy to make.  We tend to build our structures in squares and rectangles, especially since we have to abide by the rules of gravity.  In a world where gravity is adjustable, and the creation of a perfect circle is simple, so much of Second Life creation revolves around circles.  Even our speech in Second Life is circular.  In RL, the laws of physics teach that sound is emitted conically from the source, losing projection depending on a variety of factors.  In Second Life, sounds emits in a perfect circle from the speaker, lending perfectly to the circular coliseum-like seating we so often see in Second Life presentations.  The librarians in Second Life have taken the laws of SL physics into account, making their reference desks and areas circular as a better fit for their virtual world.

In “real life,” Lorri Momiji is Dr. Lorri Mon,  an Assistant Professor teaching librarians at Florida State University’s College of Communication and Information.  She holds a PhD and a Masters in Library Information Science.

Sheila Yoshikawa came to Second Life in May of 2007.  She attended one of the many events hosted by the Educators Coop where she met North Lamar and discussed their mutual affiliation with information schools.  Already an experienced land owner by then, Sheila had no need to rent Educators Coop land, but she still joined the group and invited North Lamar to lead a discussion on her sim instead.

Sheila Yoshikawa is a UK educator at the University of Sheffield in their Department of Information Studies where she teaches students pursuing their Bachelors of Science in Information Management.  Last semester she successfully brought in 34 freshman students in her Information Literacy class into Second Life on a rotating schedule.

Getting her students into Second Life was no small task, as SL was not “really” accepted by her administration and is not on their “managed desktop.”  Therefore, SL was only accessible to the students via their department computer lab, which is closed on evenings and weekends.  However, both Sheila and her students persevered and together accomplished some innovative learning experiences.  Even if that meant Sheila had to unlock the computer lab for the students late at night.

Providing sufficient access to the computer lab was only one obstacle Sheila Yoshikawa and her students had to overcome in order to commence learning in Second Life.  Many of her students were new to SL and virtual worlds in general, so the basics of navigating Second Life had to be addressed first.  Those that were used to virtual worlds found the graphics wanting, compared to the latest games on the market today.  The computers available to the students were also sub-optimal to the performance requirements for Second Life, decreasing graphic presentation, and increasing lag.  This led to obvious frustration for a generation used to immediacy.

When speculating how Sheila would circumnavigate these issues the next time she brought students into SL, she thought it would be helpful to build relationships for the students with others in Second Life ahead of time.  This would make the students more comfortable.  Without a guide, SL can be overwhelming and quiet if you don’t know where to go. A guide might shorten the learning curve and increase enjoyment and learning.  It is quite difficult for one teacher to do this with 34 students alone.

In the students’ study of information literacy in Second Life, the students focused on two key elements.  First they exhibited Power Point slides on models of the “7 Pillars of Information Literacy,” effectively giving lessons to the public on information literacy.  The Seven Pillars of Information Literacy was the  initial task of the Advisory Committee on Information Literacy (then the Task Force on Information Skills) of the Society of College, National, and University Libraries or SCONUL.  As a result of the committee’s work, the “Information skills in higher education: a SCONUL position paper” briefing paper was produced in 1999. An important part of the paper dealt with the Seven Pillars model of Information Literacy, which has since been drawn upon in a number of curriculum developments.  In real life, the students had learned about the 7 pillars as a 2D pantheon of information literacy, but in Second Life, Sheila was able to present it to them as a navigable 3D structure.

In addition, each student performed a “critical incident” interview with a patron.  A critical incident, or CI, is a time when that person needed information in Second Life for one reason or another.  It is the beginning of the information search process.  Following an inquiry-based approach, the students took the information from their interviews and proceeded with original research and data gathering.  The research was then analyzed as part of an assignment on information behavior theory and they were assessed on their performance as interviewers.

In other words, the students had the opportunity to study human information behavior immersively and experientially with people from around the world.

Overall, the student’s reaction to the experience was positive.  Most found it “quite cool,” but for many it was unfortunately just another assignment competing for their time.  Sheila noted that, as college freshmen, many were overwhelmed by the college experience in general, especially living away from home.  This preoccupation, coupled with the workload from other classes, did not provide a relaxed and exploration-encouraging atmosphere engaging the students in a way that was meaningful to them.

What the students did find the most engaging, however, were the critical incident interviews.  They considered the real life interaction with patrons from around the world refreshing compared to the transmissive “pretend research” they felt they had always done in school to that point.  Here in Second Life they were seeing theory in practice, candidly, and in real time.

Assessment, for the educator, was more successful in Second Life as well.  Previously, the students were given an essay to write on information behavior, which of course takes hours to grade, is more difficult for students for whom writing is not a strong suit, and are easy to plagiarize.  However, the assignments in Second Life were easier to grade as it was visually apparent whether or not the students grasped the theoretical models by looking at their displays.  In order to “succeed” in the assignments, the students had to apply the theories they learned, allowing them to do what they had been reading about.

Another interesting assignment partaken by Sheila’s students was to fill an information void regarding the swine flu epidemic.  The students were to address the problem of how to “get the word out” and then orally present their findings back in the RL traditional classroom.  In addition, they posted slides of their findings in Second Life which were made available to the public.

Sheila also teaches a Masters level class in Second Life.  The class of 20 students is called Educational Informatics for students looking to achieve a Masters of Science in Information Management or a Masters of Science in Information Systems.  In Sheila’s master level classes, the application of Second Life is more obvious, but the students actually spend less time in grid.  In addition to attending the recently completed Third Annual Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education Conference, the students are living immersively in a village that Sheila created for them.  Each student gets their own home, which they themselves claim.  The scripting of the village was designed by Black Kelley while Sheila contributed elements such as a nearby pool, and a beautiful pink glass dome.

These locations provide more than just aesthetic appeal.  The students can visit these locations and record chats and then publish them online.  It’s a space where they can record their thoughts as in a diary.  To visit the Educational Informatics Village 2010 at Infolit iSchool, visit http://slurl.com/secondlife/Educators%20Coop%202/195/198/251
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In the Educators Coop, Sheila Yoshikawa was instrumental in a project wherein different educational areas were created around the sim.  Joined with Lorri Momiji, Black Kelley, and Piratelionecu Humphreys, they created a fun fair area.  Sheila specifically contributed to the surrounding woodland of the area, a sky platform, and work on the ground level.  While riding on the ferris wheel, Sheila explained the purpose of the project.  The idea of the fun fair was learning to move and do things cooperatively.  For example, to use the ferris wheel, one person has to stop it so another person can get on it.  Not to mention the fact that people who are terrified of heights – as Sheila herself admitted – have the opportunity to experience the beauty and joy of a ferris wheel.

Sheila’s favorite part about Second Life are the colors and shapes of the world.  The landscaping, the clothing – everything – are manipulative tools for an educational environment.  A photographer in real life, Sheila  sells her photography in grid.  To see her photography visit, http://slurl.com/secondlife/Juicy/156/178/25.  Sheila also loves the diversity of the people in Second Life.  She claims to have had so many meaningful connections with the people she’s met here and has learned so much from those interactions.

In “real life,” Sheila Yoshikawa is Professor Sheila Webber of the University of Sheffield’s Department of Information Studies in the UK where she teaches undergraduate, graduate, and phd students.  To learn more about the adventures of Sheila Yoshikawa in Second Life, visit her blog at:  http://adventuresofyoshikawa.blogspot.com/

The final piece of my three part video series featuring student reflections about Learning in Second Life is now available.

DaiLaoShi joined Second Life in August of 2006 and wasted no time immersing herself in all SL has to offer.  She realized that in order to really understand Second Life, she would need to own land.  Her fearless entrepreneurial spirit led to the three sims she owns today, including a ranch in the Texas Hill Country, Cocoa Beach, and land in the Educators Coop.

She first heard of the Educators Coop in June of 2007 with an event they were holding at the time.  DaiLaoShi came to the mesa, met with the originators of the Educators Coop, and rented her first 512 x 512 parcel during the second round of land grab.  She chose one alongside the mesa and made it public to all, allowing her to meet many different kinds of people since her parcel was one of the few places that were set up to visit.  Owning land, she claims, completely changed her experience in Second Life.

Before she introduced me to her Educators Coop parcels, we first visited Cocoa Beach, her sim which boasts not only shops and a night club, but a castle, romantic hideaways, a shipwreck, little red school house, music mansion, amusement park rides, and so much more.  DaiLaoShi brought me to the marina, handed me a mermaid tail, and we swam beneath the sea to her underwater Greek-inspired mer-environment.  The environment, one of two she has for merfolk,  is overseen my Poseidon himself with statues of hippocampus, angler fish, and even a giant clam cradling a pearl.

After the tour of Cocoa Beach, DaiLaoShi showed me her Texas Hill Country Ranch where we went horseback riding.  In order to ride the horses, you need to be a member of the Cocoa Beach Music Group, but once that is taken care of, you can ride along all the trails of the sim.  If you need to fly to get to another part of the sim while riding, there’s no need to dismount.  When in flight, your horse will sprout wings and fly you to where you need to go and even gallop across the water.

While riding our horses, side by side, through the beautiful Texas Hill Country, DaiLaoShi shared her professional passions in Second Life and the focus of her doctoral dissertation: finding and categorizing instruction and instructional design in Second Life.  DaiLaoShi ultimately envisions a sim with 16 parcels, each representing a different form of instruction in Second Life.  At this location, a teacher that is new to SL can actively participate in the different forms of instructions, educating themselves on how best to use Second Life for their classes.  As DaiLaoShi enthusiastically pointed out, there are many different ways to use SL to teach.  Many first think of a transmissive approach with auditorium-style seating.  But Second Life can also be used for conversations in the round or immersive experiences like learning in a 1920′s Harlem Brownstone.  Another example DaiLaoShi gave was teaching and learning in a sandbox, providing a fully team constructivist learning experience, which also allows synchronous and asynchronous teaching opportunities.  DaiLaoShi also touted the ingenuity of the College of Scripting, Music, and Science which is an 8-story tower that walks even the most basic beginner all the way to becoming a master scripter.

Many have explained how difficult it can be to surpass the SL learning curve sufficiently so that it does not interfere with student lessons.  According to DaiLaoShi, it depends on who you are teaching though.  She noted that younger students – those used to navigating video games and online environments – pick the material up quickly and are then bored since Second Life does not provide entertainment directly the way a game does.  On the other extreme are her students who have had no video game or online experience, making the simplest functions, like walking, flying, or chatting, monumental obstacles that take extra teaching TLC to navigate.

A self-proclaimed member of the “gaming newbies,” DaiLaoShi also got involved in Second Life to become a “doer” as opposed to a “watcher.”  She kept hearing about virtual worlds and video games and decided it was time to give it a try herself.  When she began the journey towards her Phd, she initially wanted to create an MMORPG for U.S. History.  However, once she became involved with Second Life, she realized it would be a better platform for her dissertation.  Once again, DaiLaoShi became passionate about the education opportunities in Second Life and provided more examples.  She asked me to imagine what The Magic School Bus could do, if it were in Second Life.  In Second Life you can go back in time, visit other planets, hold atoms in your hand and build molecules.  DaiLaoShi even mentioned a video game remake that a friend had created in Second Life of Asteroids wherein the player is actually standing on the surface shooting the asteroids as they fall from the sky, as opposed to the old 2-D version.

DaiLaoShi has also noticed an influx of the 50+ crowd into Second Life and she’s excited about exploring potential ways to pass knowledge from the “greying crowd” to the “gaming crowd”.  Many corporations are losing their older experienced employees to retirement and budget cuts; opting instead to hire fresh graduates with seemingly more education, but less experience and lower salary requirements.  While these decisions seem sound in theory, in practice the experienced employees leave with vast amounts of institutional knowledge leaving corporations informationally bereft.  An Instructional Designer by trade, DaiLaoShi was once contracted by a large oil company to research this very phenomenon.  Under the guise of having someone be able to do the job as a temp, she was asked to suggest solutions.  She provided solutions, but the contracting company did not implement them.  She suggested an interactive map that would bring up the forms and regulations needed to do each individual job, as a means of controlling the quantity of institutional knowledge loss whenever restructuring occurred.  Instead, the corporation opted for training, and 2 years later they are still struggling to regain what they have lost.    Administrators make the incorrect assumption that knowledge is in some repository or artifact, when it is actually in the people.

Instruction design happened upon DaiLaoShi by accident through personal need.  She chose to homeschool their five children, but was unhappy with the instructional materials available to homeschoolers in 1987 when she began.  After twenty years of homeschooling, she implemented many curricular changes.  After the last of her children were in highschool, she went on to get her Masters of Education in Instructional Design and Technology from American Intercontinental University and then went straight into the phd program of Education in Instructional Design for Online Learning at Capella University where she is currently working on her dissertation.  She is slated to graduate this year.

DaiLaoShi has and continues to bring her expertise of instructional design into the classroom, in and out of Second Life.  She designs how to make use of technology and education and she plans to continue teaching instructional design for both higher education and corporations.  She currently teaches in the IT department at the School of Undergraduate Studies at Capella University, a fully online institution.

At its core, instructional design is the intentional matching of learning theory and instructional theory to the instructional problem at hand.  With roots in the World War II era, instructional design takes into account the learners and the location of the learning.

DaiLaoShi doesn’t just design instruction in Second Life.  She is also quite the experienced builder.  She gave me a tour of her 6 parcels on Educators Coop 4, most of which she uses as an experimental sandbox for her latest ideas.  She even graciously gave me a beginner’s building lesson.  She is currently trying to make a teddy bear that will flop back into a sitting position when placed back on the floor.  You can see the progress of her teddy bear by visiting her sim.

DaiLaoShi has also offered to help with the upcoming First Annual Bluewave Virtual Conference in anyway that she can.  She has extensive experience event planning in SL, including participating in Second Life’s 5th Birthday and organizing the largest Second Life event to date – a fundraiser encompassing multiple sims and seventeen hours of non-stop music and entertainment.  DaiLaoShi proclaimed that Bluewave’s life, approach, and her part in the creation of the Educators Coop really made a difference in her life, and she would like to give back by contributing to this conference in her memory.

When asked how she came about choosing her name, DaiLaoShi explained that it is a phonetic pronunciation of a phrase in Chinese.  DaiLaoShi had the wonderful opportunity to teach a workshop in China one year, and the students there referred to her as DaiLaoShi which means “teacher professor.”  She loved the nickname and so kept it when she created her Second Life avatar, but it does admittedly cause problems.  Many assume that she is a fluent Chinese speaker (which she is not) and some won’t speak to her at all assuming she doesn’t speak English.  To rectify this situation, she created DawnRyder Wycliffe, which is the avatar she uses most of the time.  You can find DawnRyder Wycliffe at Cocoa Beach most evenings, as Cocoa Beach has music events seven days a week.

In “real life” DaiLaoShi is Diana Odegard Brauhn.  She holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science, a Masters of Education in Instructional Design and Technology, and is completing her doctoral dissertation.  She currently teaches at Capella University.  Professor Brauhn lives on a ranch with her kids’ cats and dogs, 3 horses, and about 20 cows and calf longhorns in the Texas Hill Country west of Austin.   For more information on Professor Brauhn, and to view some of the papers written for her phd courses, visit www.dianabrauhn.com.

RxTopGun Clip has been in Second Life since late 2007.  He became involved because he wanted to do research with Dr. Alan Combs (SL: PunGently Writer) and Dr. Combs mentioned SL and how it had a great 3D atmosphere.  RxTopGun attended a talk about Second Life by another professor around the time he signed up.  He was quite impressed with the ability SL lends to create from the ground up and the options SL offered to create ideas and projects.  Dr. Combs encouraged RxTopGun to “login and go” and he most certainly did.  Shortly after entering Second Life he joined the Educators Coop and has been actively involved ever since.

In Second Life, RxTopGun was hoping to learn about how SL could be applied to the Pharmacy School curriculum.  He knew there had to be a way to provide pharmacy students with options to learn material besides the normal powerpoint and as PunGently put it, “a talking head.”  RxTopGun wanted to embrace and experiment with the experiential learning that SL could provide.

RxTopGun devoted lots of time and effort learning all the technology that takes place in SL and the environment thoroughly.  He wanted to ensure he would be able to produce the multitude of ideas floating around in his head.  Now a doctor of pharmacy (Pharm.D.) student, RxTopGun designs and builds the scenes for PunGently’s classes and a project called CSI: Austin.  CSI stands for Clinical Scene Investigation.  The project is not only a build, but it is a model, and a hidden connection.  As a team, PunGently directs the students and provides an opportunity for RxTopGun to be creative.  RxTopGun devotes his time and energy to coming up with new levels of interactivity within their college, although RxTopGun does admit it is hard to get others involved with SL’s steep learning curve.

CSI: Austin is designed to give pharmacy students an experiential CSI experience, though it can be applied to all areas of education through adaptation.  Ideally, when educating in SL, you want to use both the resources that SL provides and those found online.  When you get “the best of both worlds,” it is referred to as the  Immersive, Interactive, Second Life & Web, Environment, Training Model or IISWET model (pronounced Too Sweet).  By utilizing the amazing resources that both have to offer, you can far exceed notecards and blue boxes and save some money while still being able to teach.  It does not hinder the educator by having to learn how to code in SL to get critical information and it tracks the usage of the “off the grid” website to help facilitate learning.

One technology does not replace the other they are both symbiotic at this juncture.  The web is unable to mainstream an interface like SL with the widespread ability that SL offers.  In addition, SL is not conducive for using the web due to parcel media restrictions and other constraints of the software which is in the process of being developed to provide these features.  Why though do students have to wait on either medium to come out with a single best solution when it has been there the entire time?

By using the IISWET  model you can create effective and interactive environments that truly are informative and can be quickly implemented.  With this method, you would never need to use a notecard every time you want to “give” a student another part of the case or another interview that was made.

Users can incorporate java(TM), ajax, Google(TM) documents, collaboration, and most importantly using both the web and SL to your advantage.  After all, isn’t the whole point for the student to learn what you are teaching?  IISWET  provides a great and familiar bridge for new users who use the web as they can pickup and adapt SL to their class much faster.  When the day comes that SL does enable all web features seamlessly and you can do everything in world there will be no need to redo all of your material…because it has been there the entire time.

Until then, RxTopGun continues to get creative and push the boundaries of both technologies, giving students what they crave in a creative and interactive form.

Here is an example of RxTopGun and CSI: Austin implementing the IISWET model.  In a CSI: Austin experience, a student gets presented with a clinical case – such as toxicology.  The student will “get the facts” as if they had arrived on scene.  The students then viewed a short “setup” movie to set the scene.  They then literally fell into the scene and had to use their knowledge of toxicology, SL, critical thinking, and resource utilization to come to help the patient out.  This “saves” the patient from the toxin they came in contact with thus allowing the student to react real-time to a situation without any concern of a real individual actually getting hurt.

In addition, RxTopGun also worked with North Lamar and Quercas Minotaur to design the previously mentioned Nereus Project, sculpting the research vessel and many of the under water items.  RxTopGun is always ready and willing to lend a hand with 67,000 items as supplies or helping to build something from scratch.  He funds his generosity towards the Educators Coop via his shop, Rx Designs where he sells bridges and piers, with over 500 unique customers and over L$90,000 in sales.  Help support RxTopGun by visiting Rx Designs.

For those who are SL building challenged, RxTopGun advices to practice as much as possible – advice Chade Villota gave him when RxTopGun first came in world.  RxTopGun also advices to learn as much as you can and look online for how to break into building.  For those interested in sculpting prims, learn how they are made first.  If can understand the overarching concept, then everything else will be much easier.

RxTopGun fashioned his name as follows.  The Rx in dedication to his field of pharmacy, TopGun for flying into the danger zone of SL, and always doing his best.  If RxTopGun’s previous and current projects are any indication, he was most assuredly aptly named.

Currently, RxTopGun is restructuring an island for the upcoming First Annual Bluewave Virtual Conference in May.

In “real life” RxTopGun is 27 year old Jason Haislet, finishing up his Doctor of Pharmacy (Pharm.D.) degree.  He currently resides in Austin, Texas with his dalmation.