Student orientation to SL and University Life

We have almost completed an orientation for 400 freshman students joining our Department. Started 3 weeks before the new semester, with 16 SL workshops in our computer lab first, then the last 2 weeks fully in SL.

The program consisted of 7 individual learning activities: learning styles, multiple intelligences, active learning, academic honesty, classroom etiquette, citing references and room design. Plus 3 competitions - parachuting, through the hoops and fashion show, and 8 live sessions on learning challenges, plagiarism, library and open Q&A finishing with a dance night tomorrow after the fashion show.

For details of the program see: http://virtel.shtm.polyu.edu.hk/sotel/ and you are welcome to visit our campus island and have a go at some of the activities. We have been using a couple of chat bots to help with some of the activities and also employed some student helpers to assist and support students on a roster basis so someone was always around from 9am to 9pm every day. Our island is called HKPolyu campus at http://slurl.com/secondlife/HKPolyU%20Campus/123/153/26

China islab in second life

An interesting look at a Chinese Second Life virtual world

The Social Virtual World's a Stage

A Film by Gary Hayes © Personalizemedia 2008

Flying to the moon - Teleporting across virtual worlds

"Staff of Linden Labs, the creators of virtual world Second Life, and IBM announced last night that they have achieved the first recorded teleport of their avatars from one virtual world into another. Researchers from the two companies teleported avatars from the Second Life Preview Grid to an OpenSim virtual world." This could be the beginning of a real interaction between virtual worlds and make it possible for many of the millions of users/avatars to experience other virtual environments.

"While unaffiliated parties have created versions of this process before, Linden says theirs is the first effort to achieve trans-world teleportation without logging out of one world and logging in to the other. No virtual goods were transported across the barrier, a major concern for Second Lifers concerned with virtual property theft and rapid depreciation of their assets' value." (from Linden Labs reported in Read Write Web

Journal of Virtual worlds

Here is the link to the journal

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research

This looks to be a very useful source of research in VW:

The Journal of Virtual Worlds Research has just launched its first issue. "JVWR is an online, open access academic journal that adheres to the highest standards of peer review and engages established and emerging scholars from anywhere in the world. The Journal of Virtual Worlds Research is a transdisciplinary journal that engages a wide spectrum of scholarship and welcomes contributions from the many disciplines and approaches that intersect virtual worlds research."

Vol 1, No 1: Virtual Worlds Research: Past, Present and Future. This is the inaugural edition of the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research and is published by the Texas Digital Library with Jeremy Kemp editor.

Chapters that interest me include:

• Toward a definition of virtual worlds
• Avatars Are For Real: Virtual Communities and Public Spheres
• A Typology of Virtual Worlds: Historical Overview and Future Directions
• Virtual communities - exchanging ideas through computer bulletin boards
• 3D3C Real Virtual Worlds Defined: The Immense Potential of Merging 3D, Community, Creation, and Commerce
• How Open Source Software Will Affect Virtual Worlds

2nd Issue: Social Identity and Consumer Behavior in Virtual Worlds
3rd Issue: Culture of Virtual Worlds

Well done Jeremy for getting this going

Virtual Plants on Mobile Phones

This project is called the "green tamagotchi project". The idea is to take care of a plant on your mobile phone - change light, put water, some fertilizer, and see the growth of a virtual plant. After some days you'll get a beautiful plant with green leaves and flowers. You could then send it to your wife for her birthday...

See the story here: Virtual Worlds

Congress Holds First Hearing on Virtual Worlds; Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale Testifies | Virtually Blind | Virtual Law

Congress Holds First Hearing on Virtual Worlds; Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale Testifies | Virtually Blind | Virtual Law

Private, Secure Sims & Open Source

MUVE Forward by Topher Zwiers: A New Hype Curve for SL: Private, Secure Sims & Open Source

An interesting post by 'Topher Zwiers' on MUVE Forward blog. He discusses the opening up of SL to commercial enterprizes for collaborative work. He says "this move by Linden Lab and IBM focuses on the collaboration potential of Second Life for global organizations: reducing travel costs, increasing communication, establishing deeper relationships within an organization, etc."

Virtual World Gets Another Life - WSJ.com

Virtual World Gets Another Life - WSJ.com

Lectures in Second Life

Yesterday SHTM held its first virtual Professor-for-a-day in the PolyU virtual campus. Prof Patti Shock from Harrah Hotel College at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, gave a unique lecture from the USA to Hong Kong students in PolyU. At 9.30am Hong Kong time, Prof Shock joined us at 5.30pm in Las Vegas to make a presentation on Marketing & Promotion Strategy for Meetings.

Using the virtual world of Second Life Prof Shock was able to give a live talk with powerpoint presentation in the virtual campus. Students both in the lecture theatre in Hong Kong as well as virtually from their laptops elsewhere were able to join the session. After a 40 minute presentation, students asked questions about virtual meetings, marketing strategies and promotion, and feedback and further discussion took place.

Students were also asked to give their feedback to this virtual lecture, and 20 percent found it a 'very interesting experience' with the remainder saying it was 'interesting' and 61 percent said they enjoyed virtual learning. Comments on the experience included, "It eliminates the time and geographical barriers, especially useful for the meeting industry where time and cost is a major concern...once a semester is enough for a virtual lecture, it would be boring if we had a virtual lecture every week...human interaction cannot be replaced."

This was the first time SHTM has used Second Life for a lecture, which demonstrated the ability to bring together teachers and students from two continents in one classroom. On 15 April we will hold a virtual conference with an event planner from the USA giving a demonstration of how virtual meetings and conferences take place.

Second Life is a Multi User Virtual Environment (a virtual world) where the users or residents create the content and activities. It is currently being used or tested by over 400 universities around the world, and SHTM/PolyU is the first in Asia to develop a full campus and offer a number of courses in Second Life. We are also collaborating with other universities overseas and departments in PolyU to pilot new teaching ideas and develop best practices in teaching and learning in virtual worlds.

Virtual conferencing in Second Life

A commercial Second Life conferencing service, has some useful ideas about what and how to do it.

"Using the on-line virtual world Second Life, Conference Island provides a far more enjoyable meeting experience than video conferencing and is without doubt better value for money. And it out-performs telephone hook-ups because it is so visually stimulating.

It's about more enjoyable meetings. It's about putting people in the same room at the same time, even though they work in different parts of the world. Think about this: through Second Life you will give them a sense of shared space. Face to face across a table, dangling their feet in a swimming pool or flying on a magic carpet." Read more here.

Snapshot below of virtual meeting between PolyU students (HK) and staff from Rixos Hotel Group, Turkey

Proceedings from NMC Conference on SL & Virtual Worlds

The conference proceedings from the 2007 NMC Summer Conference in Indianapolis on Second Life and virtual worlds is available from NMC. The papers are available here as a free PDF download, full colour, hyperlinked, with embedded video - a useful read.

Table of contents:

• The Arts Metaverse in Open Croquet: Exploring an Open Source 3-D Online Digital World
• Beyond World of Warcraft: the Universe of MMOGs
• ClevelandPlus in Second Life
• Folksemantic: Web 2.0 Tools for Teaching and Learning
• I Taught It, Bought It at the Game Store: Repurposing Commercial Games for Education
• Multi-threaded Interactive Storytelling for Literary Journalism
• Out of the Cave or Further In? The Realities of Second Life
• Pleasure, Play, Participation and Promise: Socio-emotional Dimensions of Digital Culture Which Are Transforming the Shape of New Media Literacies
• Searching for an Ideal Live Video Streaming Technology
• Selling through Storytelling: The Tale of New Media Advertising in Consumer Culture
  
• Stereoscopic Visualization of Scientific and Medical Education
• Student Video Projects: Supporting the Beginning, the Middle, and the End
• Supporting Authors of Digital Case Stories to Engage Faculty with Innovative Teaching Practices
• Teaching Field Research in a Virtual World
• A View from Second Life’s Trenches: Are You a Pioneer or a Settler?
• The Yale Galapagos Project

The 3D Web and Virtual Worlds

Interesting post about the future of virtual worlds. There is a move to make the independent worlds able to interface with each other as part of a virtual 3D web. Thanks to Stephen Downes for the link to this paper from: "Today's virtual worlds represent the first phase of 3D Web. Dedicated servers running their own virtual worlds are to 3D Web what MySpace is to today's Web. In the future, 3D Web will be a network of virtual worlds that are owned by various entities. The success of virtual worlds will depend on factors such as openness, enterprise-strength platforms, vibrant communities, and a portfolio of services." Read the paper here.

Amazing artwork

I just had to feature this amazing artwork from Chris Jordan. Chris explains that his series looks at contemporary American culture through the lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on... Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 410,000 paper cups used every fifteen minutes. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. The underlying desire is to emphasize the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.

Picture depicts 106,000 aluminum cans, the number used in the US every thirty seconds.

Where does teaching stop and learning start in SL?

Some very useful discussion going on in SLED mailing list about the suitability or otherwise of Second Life for education. I will try and summarize some of the key ideas here to keep a note for future reference. This one from Paul of Language Lab:

"There isn’t one size fits all approach so to what extent this applies to your area is for you to judge. When we built Language lab we were unsure exactly what role the formal classroom would play. However we thought we should include a few and they formed the starting point for our systematic (learning about what is appropriate for our type of) teaching 8 months ago. Here is what happened…

Within about a month of classes meeting twice a week we had exhausted what the virtual classroom could offer:

• tutor led discussion? Tick
• pair and group work before reporting back to whole class? Tick
• presentations using whiteboards? Tick
• break out groups coming back to lead presentations? Tick
• reading, listening comprehension? Tick
• excursions and then back to the classroom? Tick
• video? Tick

Then we said – fine, we’ve done that but aren’t we restricting ourselves unnecessarily? Students said – this is great but why don’t we ‘get out’ more? Since then we have hardly had anyone in a formal classroom. Our classes which are either context specific speaking skills or functional / situational orientated have been in park, art gallery, museum, hotel, wine bar, cafe, nightclub etc etc etc. Usually a combination: start in the cafe (reflective / chat / introduce topic) and move to the clinic or the hotel depending on the class aim.

A classroom is only a convention for a RL gathering place. It can be deconstructed into a collection of functions and the teacher can carry around a projector (yes, they have their uses of course), chairs, board etc in their virtual pocket to take advantage of where they happen to be if that isn’t already allowed for. Not everyone has the luxury of being able to build whole neighbourhoods with specific functions so use holodecking. The same approach applies though…

For our purposes it has also been our experience that some places are clearly more functional / transactional , some are purely social and some work happily as both. Main thing for us is not to get hung up on absolutes. Rather see what works and doesn’t and take note."

Many thanks to Paul for this useful insight.

Real Hotel Activity Updates in SL

Hotel chains are stepping into the virtual world as a part of their development strategy. Is it for real? Neeti Mehra from Sunverse gives an update on two hotel groups using Second Life.

(caption: relaxing on the piano in the lobby of the PolyU Virtual Hotel)

Demographics of Virtual World users

Kzero Research has a useful blog post about the uniqueness of Second Life..." it’s not just the buildings and landscape. It’s the things that happen around them - commerce, education, meetings, groups, events and the depth of content creation. It’s a living, breathing environment." Read the full post here, and their graphic of the registered users of various virtual worlds users by age group.

Virtuality and reality 'to merge'

Speaking at the Games Development Conference in San Francisco, leading inventor Ray Kurzweil predicted that the virtual and real worlds will merge and that 'virtual' is a misnomer.

"In virtual worlds we do real romance, real learning, real business. Virtual reality is real reality." he said. "Games are the cutting edge of what is happening - we are going to spend more of our time in virtual reality environments."

"Fully emergent games is really where we want to go. We will do most of our learning through these massively parallel interactions. Play is how we principally learn and principally create."

Do you agree? Read the BBC's summary of his talk here.

UNLV and PolyU meet up in SL

Yesterday I met up with colleagues who teleported in from the US and Canada to exchange ideas on what we are all doing in the world of Second Life. It was great to have Patti Shock and Mauri Collins from University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), Dan Parks (creator of MeCo Mansion and Virtualis Convention Centre) from Vancouver and Gloria Nelson (Gloria Nelson Event Design) from Wisconsin, visit us in Hong Kong.

They arrived at our virtual PolyU campus at 8 am (HK time) and around 4 pm (US Pacific time) for a tour, and then flew to our new ‘resort hotels’ on the island next door.

We then flew over to tour Dan’s remarkable and beautifully designed MeCo Mansion. Dan has created both an innovative setting with a range of communication and technology tools to use in Second Life. Later he showed us around the Virtualis Convention and Learning Centre, the largest public convention center in Second Life with state-of-the art virtual facilities with educational breakout rooms, a grand ballroom, exhibition hall and the Eisenstodt Learning and Community Matters Center.

Dan has kindly offered to let educational institutions use the Centre for training and educating students in the meetings, events and hospitality fields at no charge. We finished our tour by swimming in the pool on Gloria's yacht Victoria and watching the pyrotechnics from the cockpit of the yacht.

During the visit some of my colleagues came into the office to see what was going on, and found they knew each other from previous real world meetings in the US and elsewhere. We were able to link up with Karin Weber and David Jones from Hong Kong PolyU, Dan Hawkins (Washington State Uni) and other PolyU colleagues who wandered in during the 3 hours of discussion, chat and exploration. All in all, a very interesting and informative time spend in the virtual world...and now back to work!

See snapshots of the tour and also Patti's blog posting on their visit