Joe Sanchez and Leslie Jarmon – The Educators Coop

Tonight in Second Life or perhaps this morning (2am Central time) my friend Sheila Yoshikawa/Sheila Webber from Sheffield University will be hosting a RL/SL conference,LTEA 2008: Inquiry in a Networked World. I will be assisting with the SL portion of the conference as a moderator just in case Sheila runs into technical problems during the Real Life conference.

Shelia has arranged for quite a bit of interaction between the RL and Sl attendees. Two examples are copy and pasted from her blog:

Programme
00.00 – 01.20 (i.e. starting 8am UK time; 5pm Sydney, Australia time) Inquiry into IBL
LTEA2800 in SL will start by mirroring the exercise that will have been carried out as the opening plenary in the RL conference: participants will share their ideas about IBL and identify questions or issues about IBL that they would like to explore. Photos and text from the RL conference will have been uploaded to the conference wiki (http://networked-inquiry.pbwiki.com/) and SL delegates will be able to respond to these ideas as well as producing their own ideas about IBL and (if they want) 3D representations. The outcomes from this SL session will also be uploaded to the wiki.

01.30-02.20 (i.e starting 9.30am UK time, 6.30pm Sydney time) IBL in SL
The session consists of an interaction between participants in the RL conference and participants in SL.
Delegates at the SL track of LTEA2008 will lead discussion aiming to illuminate the possibilities for Inquiry Based Learning (IBL) in SL. RL delegates will participate via their own avatars or via facilitators and observation of the data screen. Participants may also compare their views of IBL, and reflect on the affordances of the RL and SL conference in developing these views. Lyn Parker (Maggie Kohime in SL) will lead the RL participants.

I’m excited to be a part of the conference and to see how the participation between the real and virtual audiences occur. I have attend conferences in a face-to-face setting that streamed SL into the room and I have attended Second Life conferences where video streams of presenters were displayed to SL audiences. Sheila has put a lot of thought into creating interaction between the two audiences going beyond the typical virtual audience asking questions to the f2f. Here is a picture taken from the face-to-face conference of the participants drawing on the table cloths during lunch

It will be challenge to stay awake since the conference begins at 2am my local time. It doesn’t help that I will be heading to the airport to fly out to ALA Annual conference at 6am….its’ going to be a rough night : )

To register, email LTEA2008inSL@gmail.com with your RL and SL name. You will be invited to join a SL group (as access to Infolit iSchool will be restricted to conference delegates)

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Here is a picture of the Second Life session…I think this image of the SL users “visualizing” Inquiry based learning is fun to compare with the face-2-face table cloth drawings

Last week my 3Dconnexion space navigator mouse arrived in the mail and I finally had an opportunity to play with it today. After a simple software install the mouse connected to my Mac without a problem, I’m running 10.5.2.

I was pretty excited to try it out with Second Life so I logged in. Tried to fly…nothing happened. I tried to rez a box…nothing happened. I looked up the 3Dconnexion space navigator webpage and it said the software is only compliant with Second Life 1.20 (7). I needed to download the the release candidate, which I’m glad did (the release candidate works so much better on my machine than the current SL download).

The space mouse was hard to use at first. It really is a different way to navigate the world. To fly, you pull the mouse up and to land you push the mouse down. To pan you twist the mouse to the left or right . I found it easy to fly around a sim and to land but it was difficult to simply walk up to an avatar and have a conversation. I kept bumping into people….user error

Building wise the space navigator was a bit overwhelming at first. It was amazing to watch as I was effortlessly twirling prims around on their various axis. Be sure to lock all the surrounding objects including your attached items when you first use the space navigator. If you accidently select an object you are wearing and touch the space navigator your object will get tilted, twisted or flipped pretty quickly. See the picture below. I was wearing wings while I was rotating a box and at some point I clicked my wings which then got all twisted and out of line (this will make no sense to a non SL user). The 3Dconnexion space navigator worked very well with Google Sketchup, in fact it made the tool easier to use. I’m looking forward to learning how to work with the new tool.

Tuesday night from 6-8SLT a group of students in my class will be hosting thier final project; Second Life Idol at the Music Academy Online in SL.    They have 8 contestants, all Real Life singers who perform in Second Life lined up and ready to go. The event will be three rounds with audience voting to determine the winners. a 5000L prizer and an iTunes gift card will be given to the winner. During the event donations will be taken for the Relay for Life. Last Thursday the event was featured on the Music Academy Live weekly broadcast on SLCN.TV. A clip of the show is below.

 
Watch the video

Tonight April 27, 2008 the first group of my students will be hosting their final project in Second Life. The group is having a carnival complete with rides, games, clowns, and DJ to raise money for Wheelies (see the movie below) starting at 6SLT.

This is a picture of their rehearsal held on Thursday afternoon. Please join us tonight and help them raise money for a great cause and to see an example of what students can achieve in Sl

Some of the students in my Working in Virtual Worlds class recently submitted an extra credit assignment where they had to pick a virtual world and make a short video providing an introduction for a noob audience. These are the first few i have received.

Habbo Hotel

Furcadia

World of Warcraft

Club Penguin

This extra credit assignment turned out pretty well so i think next semester i will incorporate it into the regular content of the class. Each student will have to create a machinima about their final project so this exercise gave them a little practice before the major movie is due.

Tyra banks recently launched her own virtual world called Tyra’s Virtual Studio I saw a short commercial for it while i was flipping channels and my curiosity got the best of me so I had to check it out. Luckily they have an Alpha version for Mac OSX which worked fine on my laptop. Tyra’s world is very comic book like. The avatars look like flash renderings and the bodies are outlined with thick black lines. Once you get into the world it is very easy to navigate with an avatar but teleporting seemed to take a long time.

There is a lot of commercial media in Tyra’s Studio. The browser/client runs a media player while you explore the world and the player shows you the artist and album of any songs that play. Users can even rate songs as they play in the media player. I liked that feature a lot. There have been many times i have been in SL and i wanted to know the name of a song but there was no way of finding it. I was on at 3:30 am CST and their were many people hanging around chatting and dancing. I didn’t see any camping chairs : )

The world seems small and that is likely the reason the world seemed so heavily populated. I only spent about 30 minutes exploring so my observations are very limited in scope. The avatar gestures were easy to use and they had plenty of options for a noob. The dancing was much smoother than i have seen in Sl and the default dances, about 25 or so, were well made and actually looked like REAL dancing. I made a short video of my experience.

My students begin spring break today which is great for me because while they all head south to the beaches on South Padre Island I get to stay home in student-free Austin and attend SXSW. Since we have almost hit the midpoint in the semester i thought now is a good time to share some of the work they have been doing in my Working in Virtual Worlds Class.

Tasks completed so far in SL:

1. Get to the island

2. Claim a condo

3. Use their condo to tell a story

4. Give a tour of their condo to the class and tell their story

5. Build a flag that waves in the wind, a bench, and send a postcard and notecard

6. Create a group and take the class on a tour of an SL location

7. use a 4096m plot of land and create a scene with a group.

#7 was just completed on Tuesday, mind you, they have had weekly readings, weekly 350 word blog posts, and a test already this semester. Here are the instructions i gave for #7.

In your teams I want you to create something with your land. You will need a theme, an entry point, some type of navigation, and something interactive or a “feature”. Think back to the tours, Mercedes had a car to drive, Mexico had a pyramid etc.. what will be your group feature? We will spend 15 minutes in your space on Tuesday March 2 so have stuff for us to do.

I basically handed over 1/4 sim to four student groups. They have complete access to terraform, build, script anything they want. After a weeks worth of work they created a Winter Wonderland, A Wild West Town, A forest sanctuary, and a tropical beach. I made a quick and dirty 2 minute screen capture of the class on tuesday. Take a look and see what they did.

Metaverse U was a fantastic conference/workshop  that i attended last week at Stanford. I planned on adding my notes here but I don’t think can add anything that hasn’t already been said and aggregated at technorati + metaverse U 

My course syllabus was quoted in an article titled A Disruptive Technologyin University World News in January. I stumbled upon the link while looking for this article from Government Technology that features the work of Texas universities using Second Life and a few pictures from my flickr page. I figured now is a good time to make a blog post where i could keep all these links together. Maybe now i won’t have to search for these articles when I try to explain what I’ve been working on. 

Young Librarians Talk about The Future of Their Professions is a piece from the Chronicle of Higher Education that I really like because the article isn’t about virtual worlds. It is about 8 librarians that are changing the field, I’m honored to be included with the other librarians. 

Teachers, College Students Lead a Second Life is short article printed in USA Today that aslo features my Flickr page…It is a shame that the pictures show me leading one of my classes to the Virginia Tech Memorial in SL and that less than a year later we have had another fatal shooting spree at a university campus… 

Educators Explore Virtual Worlds   is a nice write up from the Office of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin featuring the Educators Coop. 

 Second Life Worth a Second Look   is an article promoting a talk i gave at the Texas Advanced Computer Center back in May. 

Professors in Pajamas is an article written by the Second Life News Network SLNN about the Grand Opening of the Educators Coop.

Join the members of the Educators Coop tonight in Second Life from 5-8SLT. DJ Bcreative Wild will be spinning holiday music and special request from 5-7. Join us if you can, we’d love to see you : )

CLick here for TP to Educators Coop

Overflow TeleportNorth Lamar and Bluewave OgeeJoe sanchez and Leslie Jarmon

This is the first of four student machinima projects I will be posting created by the students of Working in Virtual Worlds, a class I teach in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. Students were required to plan, coordinate, and host an event in Second Life as part of the class activities. Originally we had planned on having two tests in the semester but when the students asked to replaced the second test with a machinima project I agreed ; ).

The machinima project was an open assignment, i required the machinima be about the event they held and that every group member’s voice be heard. Other than that they had creative freedom. This is a video produced by the Drag Rats (4 students) who held a custom motorcycle show in Second Life. Many thanks to the Saints of Hell in Second Life for agreeing to partner and work with the students on their assignment. As you will see, the event was a huge success, at the highest point over 60 avatars were at the event. The video is five minutes and the students begin their narrative about 3 1/2 minutes into it.

Corin Lipinski led this team and produced most of the video. She graduated last week from UT Austin with a degree in Advertising and she is looking for an entry-level job in Austin. As you can see she is very fluent in everything Second Life and Web 2.0, if you have an opportunity available or have any leads for her please email me and I will put you in contact with her.

joe / North lamar