6 building mini-challenges for educators in Second Life

June 23rd, 2010 • MUVEs
Tags: MUVEnation, MUVEs, mvn08, Tutorials

During the MUVEnation programme, I often heard: ‘I’m an educator, I don’t need building skills! There are a lot of freebies out there!’ To this I always explained that even educators need to know how to interact with objects without frustration or fear to destroy everything. That when we use a classroom or display objects inworld, we need to be able to apply simple modifications, position and align comfortably objects in the space.

For this purpose, I have created, in April 2009, a series of mini-challenges aimed at developing basic skills, necessary for building (or better putting things together) in Second Life. I wanted to exploit the advantages of: a) micro-learning by creating activities that could be carried out in just a few minutes; b)    learning by doing and exploratory learning by designing activities that achieved through practice and which solutions had to be “found out” by the learners themselves; c) self-paced learning by giving total freedom to participants to carry out the activities in their preferred rhythm and order; and finally d) create a (sort of) playful learning experience.

The mini-challenges were structured as follows:

• One evocative and short title
• One image that shows what has to be achieved by the student: the image of the challenge.
• One simple instruction about a task to perform which evidence of performance can be shown by the students in a screenshot With eventually, a question.
• Finally, a set of resources that would help the student to solve the mini-challenge, if required

I published each mini-challenge in a dedicated forum, and asked the participants to reply with the visual evidence of their performance. I loved designing these mini-challenges and the participants enjoyed doing them. And I have received positive feedback about them:

• “Marga this is an excelent approach to get the teachers ready with the SL basis. I enjoyed it a lot! The exercises are easy and fun, the overhead comes when you have to take the picture, upload it to flicker, get the code for the medium size and create your record here! Nice idea!” Max Ugaz
• “Thak you very much for the opportunity Margarita. The tasks are very simple. At the beginning they look somehow challenging especially for a newbie like me. But I manage to master some skill by attending workshops given either by MUVEnation colleagues or other instructors in other regions inworld. I see these are the basics.” Hamid Mernaoui

I only wish I have realised how successful this approach was and have used it to design the activities of the introductory course!

Here my first 6 mini-challenges. I have been asked permission to re-use these mini-challenges in other teaching contextsAnd I have happily accepted. These challenges are released under Creative Commons, by attribution, non-commercial. If you build upon this work, remix or translate it or even build extra mini-challenges like these, please share! I am also happy to share the verctor files I used for the keyboard and mouse in the pictures.

01 – How to take snapshots of your interface?

Take two photos of your interface with your avatar facing the camera:

• the first with the snapshot button
• the second showing the snapshot window, by using the Screen print key of your keayboard

Put the photos on your Flickr account and post it here, in medium size, as a reply to this discussion.

02 – I go nuts when I see all these numbers

Create 4 boxes on the ground:

• The first will be a perfect cube with size at X:1.750, Y:1.750, Z:1.750
• The second will be a large prim X:3.250, Y:3.250, but with Z:0.750. Mind the dot!
• The third will be a tall and thin prim X:O.950, Y:0950, Z:4.500
• The Fourth will be a wall X:0.200, Y:3.000, Z:5.000

If your prims with the modification get half buried in the ground, then lift them up by pulling the blue arrow. Now guess! What are all these numbers for? Which coordinates X, Y, Z help you to make an object larger? Which help you to make an object taller?

Want more?

• Opening edit tools – Second Life Video TuTORial QUICKTIP
• Learn building at the Ivory Tower of Primitives
• Strongly advised: The 1-prim barstool trick – Second Life Video TuTORial (If you manage to make a barstool, sit on it and add it to the photo)
• For a quick overview on building: Building is Second LIfe

03 – One meter higher please!

Take a photo of the 4 prims created during challenge 02, but positioning them precisely on the space, in the MUVEnation sandbox

• First prim, the cube, at position X:135, Y:205, Z:25
• Second, the large prim, at position X:138, Y:205, Z:26
• Third, the thin and tall prim, at position X:141, Y:205, Z:28
• Fourth, the wall, at position X:143, Y:205, Z:32

Now guess! What does the black bar with numbers in the upper part of the screen indicate? If someone asks you to put a box a little bit higher, which position coordinate do you have to change: X, Y or Z?

04 – Remind me again: How do I duplicate an object?

Take a photo of 10 walls, their size is X:0.200, Y:3.000, Z:5.000. You will have to make the first wall and then reproduce the others 9 horizontally. To duplicate just SHIFT+click+drag on X. Once finished, make sure that all your walls are spaced horizontally, 0.500 between them! What? Aha! Work out how you do this by increasing your horizontal position!

Now guess! Which coordinate do you have to drag to duplicate a prim vertically? How do you make sure that your objects are positioned precisely at 0.500 from each other?

Want more?

• Go to the Duplicating prims station in the Ivory tower of primitives at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Natoma/176/196/26
• Shift-drag to copy objects – Second Life Video TuTORial
• Copy prim
• Building in second Life Basics 4: duplicating objetcs

05 – Rotate that prim and show me the East!

Take a photo of a wall with size X:0.200, Y:3.000, Z:5.000, with the initial rotation at 0, 0, 0, when you are rotating it to the East. Your photo must show the rotation circle on Y (green) around the object and the related grid with East and West positions. Final rotation should be 0, 90, 0.

Want more?

• Go to the Rotating prims station in the Ivory tower of primitives at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Natoma/161/171/26
• Rotating a prim: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHSSfCRPIZ0

06 – Under the grid

Rez two boxes, standard size in the sandbox. Sit on the first. And put the second one at Z:24.500, then rotate on X it at 225. Activate the local ruler mode and make it visible by touching the green/orange position ‘sliders’ (or tiny triangles or whatever you prefer to call them). Take a photo of yourself under the grid!

Now guess! What are the differences between world and local grid? Why the local grid is useful?

Want more?

• How to use the building grid – Second Life Video TuTORial
• Using the Grid in Second Life for Prim Placement
• Reference ruler & grid – Second Life Video TuTORial QUICKTIP

The Holodeck versus the Builder’s Buddy script: 3 teacher’s point of view

June 23rd, 2010 • 2 comments MUVEs
Tags: Builder's Buddy Script, Holodeck, MUVEnation, MUVEs, mvn08, Tutorials, Workshop

Last year, during the MUVEnation programme we explored different holodeck technologies for the design and deployment of flexible learning scenarios inworld. Amongst these, we focused in the 2in1 Production Holodeck by Inside This World and the Builder’s Buddy Script by Newfie Pendragon.

Professor Shirley Williams, from The University of Reading, led this process and developed herself the tutorials that we first used in the course:  Building with limited space, Workshop on using the Builder’s Buddy Script, Unpacking your Holodeck, and Putting content inside your Holodeck. She also blogged about it here: Holodeck: first steps at production and Builder’s Buddy First workshop

The participants found the process particularly challenging. We even had a collection of Holodeck horror tales in a dedicated forum! But despite the complexity, 50 participants effectively engaged in and completed the production of their learning scenario with either the holodeck or the Builder’s Buddy Script. To support this process, I have also developed a detailed visual tutorial of the 2in1 Production Holodeck that can be found here: Creating a simple scene with the Holodeck!

The release of these tutorials launched an interesting discussion about pro and cons of the 2in1 Production Holodeck for educators and its comparison with the Builder’s Buddy Script. You will find here 3 teacher’s point of view about their use, all based in personal experience of the tools: Jaime Álamo Serrano, professor of chemistry at the University of Valencia, Spain; Nergiz Kern, English language teacher in Turkey, presently completing a MA in Educational Technology and TESOL at the University of Manchester; and me!

For Jaime, the main criticism was related to the conceptual differences between exterior and interior scenes that are not so clear:

I would add that the difference between exterior and interior are not so clear. For instance, to say that a house is the exterior and the furniture is the interior is very restrictive idea, because you cannot ass more interior scenes as any new replaces the former. Instead think of ‘exterior’ as what will be permanent and not changed accordd different ‘changing’ (interior) scenes. Another example: think of your classroom. Some furniture will be always the same, but in each day or session you’ll use specific scenes for the topic of that class. You need different interior to practice different sets of vocabulary, botanical species, architectonic samples, and so on. So that part of the furniture, educational tools and other parts being always there should be ‘exterior’. A kitchen, another example, will have different foods each time you teach how to cook. These changing foods will be the interior.

In relation to using the Holodeck versus the BB script, Jaime’s opinion is that:

The Builder’s Buddy is much more customizable than the Holodeck. It’s open source and free.

Also the BB rezzes the components more precisely and much better than with the Holodeck

Also the BB has the possibilities to Reset and Record again  that the Holodecks lacks.

In addition when using the BB you can nest several levels of BB scripts. When using the Holodeck, only two (interior and exterior). Besides the BB provides a much nicer and intituitive menu system.

Finally, the only issue is that you have to learn to handle the channels.

My opinion is that:

• The process of using the BB script and the Holodeck are close: making scene, putting scripts, taking back, recording position… However using the holodeck is more complex. Once you learn one, the other won’t be very difficult to learn.
• On the other hand I find the holodeck, once you’ve learned how to use it, quite practical, in one single object you have all the scenes you need.
• I agree: “the Builder’s Buddy is much more customizable than the holodeck. It’s open source and free”.
• I agree: “Also the BB has the posibilities to Reset and Record again that the holodeck lacks”.
• I agree: “Using the BB you can nest several levels of BB’s. Using the holodeck, ony two (interior and exterior)”. But I still prefer the Holodeck menu, because it offers all in one.
• Finally what I really prefer in the Holodeck is the easy way to be used by visitors and owners with different set of rights , without touching the scripts.

One issue that came often during the MUVEnation programme was the complexity of using the Holodeck. I’ve received requests for help and even complaints about people who could not use the Holodeck because it was too difficult. At the time, some of these people were not yet able to position correctly a platform or a door, to modify alone a simple script, or even to retrieve the Holodeck object in their inventory or to send a landmark to another resident’s profile. Without any doubt using the Holodeck is much more difficult than using the BB script. And in the Holodeck’s user manual, it is clearly stated that the Holodeck is for people who have two months of building experience.

But what concretely is two months of building experience for an educator? In helping the students to understand and use the Holodeck I observed that those who succeeded were confident inworld and were capable of 1) managing their inventory and retrieve perfectly any element within; 2) positioning precisely objects in the grid; 3) editing the basic features of these objects using the camera independently of their avatar’s position.

At the time of this discussion, in April 2009, Nergiz Kern’s opinion was:

So, on one side we have the issue with building skills. You need to have some basic building skills as you mention. You don’t need to really now how to “build” from scratch, though. The scenes most of us built are made up of freebie objects like chairs, boards, tables, etc.. So, you only need to be able to move them and position them where you want. The only scripting skills you need for the BB script is to be able to open a script, modify and save it. For simple scenes (that are not nested), the only thing people will need to change in the script is the channel number. The version we are using, makes changing other settings easy, too. On the other side, we have the different tools, namely the holodeck(s) and the BB script. Which is easier, more intuitive and more practical? I think we can’t anwser the more practical question clearly because a lot will depend on your needs and the purpose of the scene. If you, for example, need a shell, a holodeck can be easier because it provides you with ready shells that you can, then, modify according to your needs. In order to build shells with the BB script, you need to have good building skills and it will take time. I agree with Marga, that the holodeck allows you to have everything in one place/prim with a nice menu to select the scenes you want. On the other hand, I can easily hand out the boxed scenes made with the BB script. Holodecks, because they are commercial products, have some important limitations regarding permissions. I am not quite sure yet how far these go but this makes them less useful for educational purposes, especially when you want students to work together or don’t have the money to buy everyone a holodeck. Regarding ease of use, there seem to be huge differences between different holodecks. I have unpacked, rezzed and browsed through the scenes in the Production holodeck, unpacked the scripts, etc. But reading the long instruction and reading all your “horror” stories, did not make me want to use it. Around the same time, I was provided with a Horizons holodeck. And I have to say, creating a scene was very easy, even easier than with the BB script. There is only one script and the moment you put it into an object, it’s position is recorded. It’s also much cheaper then the Production holodeck. Another advantage is that rezzing and clearing scenes is much easier, also changing permissions from private, to public or group. When rezzed, the holodeck looks like a disk which is easier to click on than a small wall pannel. It has a small wall pannel, too and even a HUD to control it, when this is want you want. There is only one problem that I have to find out about. Once you create a scene and save it, it becomes unmodifiable which is a complete nuisance if you want to change a scene or even only rename it. My conclusion is that the BB script

• is easy to use once you have used it a couple of times and practised by creating mini scenes,
• It doesn’t cost anything,
• you can easily share your creations
• you can be creative with the box. It can come in all kinds of shapes (Nick/Corwin showed me one that came in the shape of a rucksack which had a picnic scene in it).
• The nesting allows for complex structures. Again, it was Nick I thik who showed me a kind of pyramid. Each time you clicked one level the next appeared. Great for presenting something in a gradual way.

If you have a folder in your inventory with all the boxed scenes, it is not much more difficult or time consuming to drag out the scene you need than to rez your holodeck and select the scene from the menu. Also, sometimes, you might not want others to see all your scenes. You could have differen copies of your holodeck for this but then it gets complicated again. If you want all your BB scenes in one place, you can create a picture board like you did, Marga.

Nergiz has also extensively written about her experiences using the holodecks for education in:

• Building holodeck scenes in Second Life
• Holodecks and language learning
• Holodeck or Builder’s Buddy Challenge

And you, Holodecks or Builder’s Buddy Scripts, what do you think?

Creating a simple scene with the Holodeck!

June 23rd, 2010 • 1 comment MUVEs
Tags: Comic Life, Comics, Holodeck, MUVEnation, MUVEs, mvn08, Tutorials

Last year I created a 10 pages visual tutorial*, with Comic Life, about using the 2in1 production Holodeck from Inside this world. At the time, it was carefully reviewed by my colleague and friend Jaime Álamo (Professor at the University of Valencia), but I never had time to integrate his changes to the tutorial and release a new version. This has been done now. You can download the PDF file here. Enjoy!

*At the time of the production of this tutorial, many teachers asked me how was it done. Here some information about the process: the visual tutorial was made from the experience gained during the workshop to my own students. It took me 32 hours of work. This included in particular: the review of the complete documentation of the holodeck, writing the story board/scenario, testing the instructions, 50 snapshots taken inworld to illustrate each of the steps of the tutorial, preparing the layout and putting together the objects (photos and text) into Comic Life.

The collection of educational tools for Second Life

March 2nd, 2010 • 6 comments MUVEs
Tags: Book, MUVEnation, mvn08, OER, Second Life, Tools

I’ve been interested, for several years already, in creating a documented collection of educational tools for Second Life.  The effort however to produce a snapshot in time of the variety of tools available for educators required a dedication beyond individual commitment. If the purpose was to create a valuable contribution for the community of educators at large, it was clearly a work for many, many helping hands and contributors.

The MUVEnation open online programme gave me the opportunity to organise such a work. First, back in September 2008, I coordinated the efforts of 33 partcipants in the introductory course for the identification of more than 100 tools used for teaching and learning in Second Life. Later, in March 2009, 55 education professionals (lecturers, researchers, learning technologists and teachers) have collected, tested and fully described more than 150 tools for teaching and learning in Second Life. The result of this collective work has been transformed into a book, published as an Open Educational Resource under CC licence by attribution unported, so anyone is free to distribute without restrictions: adapt, translate, re-mix and improve it.

The book is presently under a last quality control review for public release and it should be available by the end of March 2010. The book was edited by me in collaboration with Jaime Alamo, professor at the University of Valencia. The list of authors who contributed to the collection is here:

Read more »

Selected participants in the MUVEnation programme

December 31st, 2008 • 3 comments MUVEs
Tags: MUVEnation, MUVEs, mvn08

Back in October 2008, we were overwhelmed by the number and quality of the applications to the MUVEnation peer to peer learning programme. Although our initial plan was to accept only 80 practitioners, we decided to admit +200 participants from around the world and carry out the selection process based on their participation activity during the introductory module of the programme.

We have now finished the selection process. The high rate of effective participation made us reconsider the numbers. And we have have admitted 107 active participants, from 26 different countries. 80 of the participants are based in Europe. 27 are across the world, from Argentina to Australia, from Jamaica to Israel, from Venezuela to Morocco. Leading countries with the higher number of participants are Spain, Italy and the United Kingdom.

We will be further exploring the use of virtual worlds for education from January to June 2009. And working together on the following areas: analysis of teachers needs, competency framework for the use of virtual worlds in education, commented collection of educational tools in Second Life, exploration of other virtual worlds, Sloodle, narrative analysis of teaching practices including the analysis of factors that impact their success, elaboration of learning patterns connecting RL educational challenges to virtual worlds scenarios, and the validation of these scenarios by concrete implementations inworld.

The story of my first Bot or ‘Voorst: a forest trapped in a crow!’

November 27th, 2008 • 4 comments MUVEs
Tags: Bots, MUVEnation, MUVEs, mvn08, Second Life

This is the story of Voorst Turbo and how he became a Second Life Bot. I created Voorst because I wanted an ALT to live again, with new eyes, the experience of my first steps in Second Life. I wanted to be a male avatar and for name I’ve taken Voorst, for my son Forest, and Turbo for the speed of my life.

My motivations come from the difficulties of setting up a group subscriber, for closed groups in SL, that sends automatic invites to people who ask for membership. Actually, what I wanted was a procedure to send out group invites to verified Moodle users, so as to recreate somehow Moodle groups inside Second Life groups. I contacted Daniel Livingstone who introduced me to Paul Preibish (Fire Centaur) who suggested me the use of a Bot:

‘I too use a Bot to accomplish automatic group inviting (You’ll find her on my Island English Village, her name is EnglishVillage Robonaught). I programmed her using the basic examples from libsecondlife.org. (using Mono), and she lives on my server (and in SL). When someone clicks on a “join group” button in SL, the prim sends a specially formatted message to my Bot, and my Bot (who is an officer in the in-world group) sends a group invite to that person automatically. In addition, I could theoretically program her to automatically insert the users name into the mysql db at the same time, so you could display the Inworld group membership on your website. There are several scripts on SLexchange that already offer this sort of service’

So a Bot? It looked quite challenging, but I decided to give it a try. Here is what I’ve learnt:

• What is a Bot? a Bot is a Second Life citizen that is used by his or her owner to perform machine tasks inworld. Or better: A Bot is a SL citizen who is driven by a machine and not by an human being. Some call them ‘non-human players’. A Bot is an avatar: looks like any other avatar inworld, has an avatar name, has an avatar profile, can participate in a conversations and perform several kind of tasks like sending IMs, TPs, inventory items, invitations for a group…

• What are they for? A Bot can be used for several things: for maintaining presence inworld, increasing traffic statistics, appealing audience (pole dancers)… But also to perform automatic tasks inworld, like, in our case, sending invites for closed groups after a membership request.

• How can we make a Bot? This is a two steps process. First you need to create an account for the Bot, then you need to buy the little piece of software that will control the Bot. In my case a bought The JVA multi-purpose Bot for sending group invites to MUVEnation participants for 7 groups at the same time. When I installed the Bot manager in my computer, Paz went inworld for rezzing the Bot base and its utilities like the group subscription and the mailing list. Paz made Voorst officer of all her MUVEnation groups and positioned the Bot base where she wanted. Once the initial set up finished, Voorst went inworld to decide about his appearance. And after all the coming in and going out necessary for final tweaks, I connected the Bot software and Voorst appeared at the same time that Paz, inworld. Magic!

Setting Voorst has been finally easy. I was prepared for a very complicated procedure, but no. The only tricky thing was the logs in and out between Paz and Voorst. For example, Paz had to log in for making him officer of the groups. Then he had to log in for accepting. Then Paz had to log in for giving him money to buy an avatar. Then Voorst logged in for trying out. Phew! I have never launched my viewer so many times during the same day! And forcing SL to close via the task manager. And restarting the computer as well!

On the anecdote side, I can tell that Voorst wanted to become a non-human avatar, a wolf for instance, and forced Paz to buy him a new brand skin for 4000l$, in Lost Ferals. After expending all the money, he wasn’t happy with his new skin and started to beg for money again: to StevenW, to Daffodil and also to Daf. StevenW gave him 20l$. But it wasn’t enough. So Paz had to return for another 1000l$. And again Voorst for trying out the new skin. And then Paz for setting the base. And then Both!

Some spare thoughts:

• Becoming a non-human avatar with a robot, machine or feral animal skin appears like an appropriate solution for Bots, so people get less disrupted and don’t start speaking with them as if they had an human player behind them.

• Now that I know that Voorst lives 24/7 inworld, because my computer is acting like a server, I feel the pressure and struggle when shutting down my computer.

Finally some useful links about Bots in education: [SLED] What kind of Bots do you want for education? initiated by Fire Centaur as well.

Last but not least a stolen story from the MUVEnation forum, written by Sus Nyrop about Voorst, Paz and me:

The raven Voorst is now helping Marga with certain registration tasks. I saw the two of them, Marga and Voorst late yesterday night, but apparently they were very busy and logged out before I could learn more about how this Bot was created and set up.

I looked up the name, Voorst, and the ethymology is Prince in Ducth (a village named Voorst, as well as a musician).

Perhaps Dutch princes have this power over their owner, but I was puzzled about Marga’s report from setting this up (see this in another thread written today), as she explains how the Bot was demanding a very costly skin - the creature was described in rather independent terms.

I did not get any closer to understand more in detail, about what it takes to set up súch automated systems. The Bot appears to be a real avatar, so naively I was offering my friendship, as a usual procedure whenever I bump into MUVEnation inhabitants.

Marga, Lawrence, I think ”setting up a Bot” would be an eye opening training session either as a witness to the process, or hands on doing it –  maybe as group work, and others have given sign of interest. Perhaps later in our course, if not soon?

I am looking forward Sus!

EF-ODL workshop? Err… Play again please?

October 8th, 2008 • 1 comment MUVEs
Tags: eLearning, MUVEs, Workshops

I’ve attended the EF-ODL Seminar last Thursday, in Charleroi and (tried to) animate a workshop on the use of MUVEs for teaching and learning. The experience made me reflect about forgetting public events for a while and to stay in my comfort zone, near to the school, where no babysitters and their last minute problems, can ruin my day: my 1st painting class, my tête-à-tête diner or my presentation in a conference. So I was absent the first day. But managed to be present the second day, and arrived just in time for a tweet and 3 glasses of wine with the friendly people of the Koning Willem I College.

Rush, sunny day in Brussels, train, cold, rainy day in Charleroi. On the up side of the seminar, we had open wifi everywhere and good wine. On the down side, a part from the very slow connection, I missed socialisation spaces with chairs and tables for people just to sit, tweet and exchange with peers. Also the diet buffet, up or down side? Up, as the few carrots on the table were a successful carrot for conversation around the table!

For this workshop, I haven’t prepared a plan B and just intended to run the first part of the session based in basic skills development through a cooperative game and then an open discussion about the MUVEs affordances for education. Without a decent Internet connection, I decided to drop the in-world session, opened my computer and started to pull some resources from my Flickr photos of educational spaces, tools I have developed for the macro and micro analysis of teaching within MUVEs and bit of research articles in preparation about good practices. I knew it wasn’t great and prepared at all. But that was my rabbit in the hat for that session with awful Internet connection. And some participants, like Faraday van der Linden, Wilfred Rubens and Ruben Bellens were generous enough to help me with questions, comments and engage with the discussion.

During the session, I promised to the participants, with two different skills level (newbies and more experienced), to run two distance workshops so they wouldn’t lose their time and I will not waist my efforts of preparation. Here we are then!

First, the tools that I presented in the workshop:

• Assessing factors towards the successful intregration of ICT . There is also a blog post from Steve on the subject, with insightful comments from Ray Tolley, Steven and myself: Assessing factors in the introduction of ICT in formal settings
• The list of affordances of teaching and learning in Second life. Please watch this presentation we prepared for the OCC 2007: Making the right MUVE (p.12):
  • Facilitating social interaction ( including the notion of the death of distance), social presence and cooperation;
  • Visualisation;
  • Contextualisation;
  • Exploring the relation with ‘doing’ in the physical world (e.g. designing, building and scripting);
  • Informal learning opportunities e.g. language based communities;
  • Affective nature of immersion, empathy and related motivational aspects;
  • Simulation and experiential learning;
  • Roleplay or taking on ‘new’ roles;
  • Strong virtual communities and identity formation (coherence around groups, sub-cultures and geography);
  • Identity play;
  • Ownership of learning – opportunities for content production that are both individual and owned.
• Teachers perceptions about good and bad practices in Second Life. Here I used fragments of a research paper that I’ll present in Online Educa this year. I’ll post about this soon. Promised!
• Analysis grid for hands-on workshops in SL (annexed here). I discovered how awful is to present this material to people. Although we have carried out an in-depth analysis of hands on workshops, each criterion of the grid needs to be illustrated with pictures, detailed explanations and examples. A series of posts to come?!
• Disaster stories about teaching and learning in Second Life. Again another piece of work in progress. I’ve started a process of collection of teaching stories in virtual worlds, is all about narrative research: my main centre of interest at the present. Here you can find one disaster story by me: A teaching nightmare and its comments: A comment to ‘When it all goes wrong!’ by Eloise Pasteur. Others will be published later. If you have your own disaster story to tell, please contact me directly. I also accept anonymous stories. I am working on a formal publication of this material.

“Discovering SL without pain”, a distance workshop for newbies!

• Sign up for the workshop in the public wiki.
• Give your availability in Doodle

“Educators can also have some fun”:

“Educators can also have some fun” is a distance workshop for more experienced users who want to discover via a cooperative game some teaching tools in SL.

• Sign up for the workshop in the public wiki
• Give your availability in Doodle

Interested by teaching and learning within MUVEs? Why don’t consider participating in the MUVEnation peer to peer learning programme? The programme is open to European teachers willing to explore the potentialities of virtual worlds for education. Here nobody is “The tutor”. This is an emerging field. And MUVEnation will offer a collective experience where we, practitioners and researchers, will think together about education, rethink the use of technology, share good practices, exchange expertise and build solutions (learning patterns) that address our own educational challenges.

‘My choice goes to simplicity !’ Is that possible Shirley?

September 15th, 2008 • 5 comments eLearning, MUVEs
Tags: Aggregation, Blogs, MUVEnation, MUVEs, Tags, Teacher training, Technology, VLEs, Wikis

We are about to launch the MUVEnation programme to help teachers to acquire the necessary competences to integrate MUVEs into their teaching practice. We have had, since the beginning, several discussions related to the platform(s) for delivering this programme. And we have been delaying the final decisions till the last minute. Our different backgrounds, uses and experiences of technology didn’t help. On the contrary, during our last meeting in Valencia, consensus building was a painful process.

So painful, that I reacted badly when the choice emerging was against my vision for the programme. Fast forwarding memories : I called for a vote. Things went completely out of my hands: a VLE !, a VLE ! a VLE ! Wrong, wrong, wrong ! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh ! In my despair, I insisted to record in the minutes that I, the coordinator, was against the choice of Moodle as the central technological environment for MUVEnation. Pitiful and useless ! Me, nor Moodle !

Afterwards, I asked for written explanation of partners ideas in our wiki. I wanted to understand (sort of revenge : ‘now explain yourself !’), and also analyse the reasons for their technological choice. To make something coherent from it, to make it work.

To my surprise, I was hit back by simplicity, coherence and harmony of visions. Here I deliver my conclusions and open the discussion about some pending issues.

I decided to make this document public, because I feel that it can help other people trying to find a way to teach “à la” Web2.0 and to negotiate the move from VLEs to social technologies in education. And also, because the recent launch of the MOOC about Connectivism and connective knowledge, and its technological deployment, made me realise, although obvious, that many of us struggle with issues about centralisation versus dispersion of information. And try to find original ways to make co-exist old and new tools : newsletters and mashups, centralised forums in Moodle and PLEs deployed in blogs, wikis, twitter feeds, Elluminate, all together ! For more about this see Matthias Melcher diagram in his First impressions about CCK08.

Thanks to Pier Giuseppe, Laura, Melanie, Nick, Louise, Erena, Shirley and Karsten for their valuable contribution to this piece of work !

For the MUVEnation programme, we envisage the use of four basic components, in purple in the map :

• Blog, our central hub for information. In our blog, we will post updates, news and any kind of information about the follow up and progress of the programme and also information about related areas of interest.
• Moodle, a central space for the community of participants to communicate and receive information about activities. In Moodle, participants will build their profile with photo and personal description, access to the forum for having centralised discussions with peers and tutors, access to the weekly activities, participate in synchronous informal discussions thanks to the status indicator and the IMS functionality.
• Wiki, our space for cooperation. This is our space to do things and will be used to develop cooperative activities in three stake areas : analysis needs of teachers teaching in MUVEs, collection of good practices, design of learning patterns.
• MUVEnation island in SL for virtual activities such as meetings, building of educational tools, harvesting good practices, etc.

All participants in the programme will use their own blog, tagging the pertinent content with the tag : MUVEnation. In their blog, used as a blogfolio, the participants will gather their evidence of performance and record weekly reflections on their progress and achievements.

Additionally,

• For those who are comfortable with aggregation, a MUVEnation PageFlakes.
• For those who are comfortable with social media, tagging with MUVEnation all related resources in Flickr, del.icio.us, youtube, and others.
• For those adepts of microbloging, a Twitter profile to follow. But also a Twitter feed for comments about the programme by all the participants, using MUVEnation preceded by a hash (#).
• Other tools may be introduced like VoIP via Skype and Elluminate.

Finally, some comments and replies to interesting issues raised by Pier Giuseppe, Laura, Melanie, Nick, Louise, Erena, Shirley and Karsten :

• One single loging ! Enable a single loging across all environments or limiting the number of loggins is an important issue. The team of the University of Reading, has enabled a kind of single loging feature across WP and Moodle. So once participants register into WP, they are also automatically registered into Moodle, sharing username and password in the two environments. However useful, this feature is not a SSO across all the environments used in the programme. See for example the extra loging required for Pbwiki, for personal blogs, for SL, for Twitter, for Flickr, for Del.icio.us, and so on. We are still technologically far from a SSO for all the electronic environments we use. And, as a personal note, when I use MyOpenID, although useful, it increases the number of clics to loging in the application.
• One place for everything ? Well, this would be the ideal and would resolve somehow the SSO issue. However this is not compatible with the use of the tools we have already deployed : Moodle, blog and wiki. A solution for this was to concentrate everything in Moodle or so set up a new environment where we concentrate all our tools, like Ning or Mixxt. I started to explore this last solution, but I was discouraged by the amount of work to be provided, reproducing somehow all what I have already done, mainly CSS and structure.
• Participants need to own and create their personal learning environment. At the beginning of the project, I thought the participants will have their blog under the MUVEnation WPmu. But, finally I think is better to encourage them to create or to develop a personal space they can use as a learning device and that will exist after the programme finishes.
• We don’t want the participants to get lost or dispersed. Indeed this is the n°1 concern. We are all afraid that teachers, who are not literate in the use of social media, don’t find their way among so many tools. That’s why I proposed, by the way copying CCK08, the use of a (daily) newsletter delivered to the participants’ email. Other tools are, for the most advanced users, the MUVEnation PageFlakes and the twitter feed.
• We need a one stop shop ! Yes, and this will be the MUVEnation website, with links to Moodle, Wiki, SL and Aggregation devices. Here, news will be sent with updates about the activities to carry out and advancement reports. There are, however, two questions here. The first is who post these updates, as we are 23 persons involved in the programme delivering. How not to overlap and repeat posts about the same subjects. Is the project coordinator the programme coordinator, and therefore main writer of news in the blog about the subject ? If not, who does ? We need to clarify our policy for writing here. The second is related to the blog itself. Are we mixing in the same feed our usual posts about MUVEs and education and the posts about the programme Do we need, another blog for this or to create a page where only the posts inside the ‘programme’ category are displayed ?
• Storage, storage ? Where to upload, share and retrieve common resources ? Good unsolved question. Moodle ? Is yes, will participants have the right to upload content to a central resources folder shared by all. Do we need another tool here ?
• Managing identities. The solution provided by the majority consists in using the profile functionality of Moodle and encourage participants to use it : filling with a short bio, putting a photo, and also links to personal resources like a blog. Also some information about the virtual self would be appreciated.
• National and European communities : How to ? There are two major visions about the implementation of the national communities. On one side, use our WPmu and create a blog for each national community. On the other side, create a thematic forum per community. For me these two are compatible and I would go for their integration.
• If we use a given tool (i.e. Moodle), do we have to use all its functionalities ? Some advocate for dropping all what we already have, for instance the wiki, and using only Moodle tools and functionalities, wiki included. Wikis in Moodle have proven to be unusable, they act as silos, information-tight between them. Let’s use the best of Moodle and drop what isn’t working as we need.
• Moodle is old-fashioned, yecch! Indeed, So we need a new skin, and it it is in the MUVEnation colour chart better. Please co to the Moodle themes database.
• Do we need to move to ELGG ? Help ! Nooooooooooooooo !
• MUVEnation, MLIN4 or MLIN408 ? Karsten, where are you ? OK, I thought that returning to the principles of our tagging handbook would be a good idea. But after I recalled that we are all using MUVEnation. Let’s keep it then, despite its 10 characters (which leaves only 130 for twittering). Personally, I don’t mind having 5 characters less in my tweets.

Shirley, my choice goes also for simplicity. Is that possible ?

‘You are getting too much into this’ or I only want to play with you!

July 3rd, 2008 • 7 comments MUVEs
Tags: MUVEnation, MUVEs, Second Life, Storytelling, Workshop

Difficult to tell a story when others already went through their duty: I too scavenged a hunt! and Scavenger Hunt in Second Life. I have also participated in the scavenger hunt organised by the team of the University of Reading (Karsten Lunqvist, Pat Parslow and Edwin Porter Daniels), and here is my story:

So we met in the MUVEnation island, StevenW, the usual old Futuras, a slightly changed Ere and for the very first time Nifara, MelAnn and others whose name I struggle to recall, nor that I have already met then IRL. Nifara Blackadder organised the SL Scavenger Hunt and gave us an amazing list of heteroclitic objects: from a girl called Linden to Buddha, Constantinople, tea cup, Tuesday and the seven dwarves! Our mission was to produce, in 45 minutes, through whatever methods we thought were the most efficient, the largest quantity of items of the list. And we were told that we could find these items as freebies, build them or even buy them.

Blue and red team: off you go the competition started! And with the competition, my fears. As I feared the process of creating teams. I wanted to participate in the activity as something social: to share and enjoy with people I know, with whom I spend time inworld. Not that I am closed to new encounters. But this wasn’t quite the activity to meet people, but to be effective carrying out a given task in a given time. Naturally I wanted to be in the same team as StevenW, but I would also have asked to be in the same team of Netty if she were there. Although I was glad to work with Ere. I was also curious of cooperating with Suzetta and MelAnn, but wondering what surprises their SL personas hold and feeling somehow that their RL presence (through their voice on the phone, an email or a blogpost) was blurring my perceptions of them inworld.

StevenW, blue. Me, red. Disappointment. What to do? Intense IMing on the backstage… Accept and play? Dull. I would have dropped. Too many things to do in the office. Stand for my choice? Annoying. I could not help feeling childish when asking to be in the same group as StevenW and all the fuzz that followed because we wanted to play together. But I wanted to play with him and could not see the point of joining a group of people I don’t even know. I wondered how others felt about this and I think that maybe some form of socialisation has to take part before creating teams. Now I recall other experiences of cooperation inworld and I have always felt this anguish of finding a partner and trying to escape to the anonymous cooperation, between strangers. Complicity, empathy: that is what I always look for! Finally after little discussion and thanks to Ere’s finesse and understanding the situation was solved. Phew!

Then serious things started. I created a group for organising cooperation, although we were forced to move between our back-channel to the main channel for listening to Nifara. Why I did not invited Nifara to the group? I would have been easier for him to follow the two group chats. But I felt this as an intrusion… Anyway, we discussed briefly the strategy: going first through our inventories, rezzing like mads, making little modification to existing objects and building quickly simple objects. Straightforward and committed to the task for StevenW. Suzetta, an incredible lateral thinking and creativity: duplicating mannequins for twins, duplicating the same mannequins for the seven dwarves, rezzing a dog called Tuesday, calling one mannequin Linden… God! And MelAnn a willingness to cooperate beyond limited skills, learning by doing and redoing, until the task was accomplished! What a team! I felt sorry for Suzetta’s problems with her laptop. And also wanted to help step by step MelAnn but I thought that another IM channel would have been too much. Then once my inventory finished, I went to Yadni’s Junkyard. I spent 3 minutes searching for the LM without success and then I recalled that maybe it was in my inventory and mentally thanked Torley for the ToW and Qtips for managing my inventory. I arrived to to Yadni’s place and (as always with freebies) was overwhelmed by tons of boxes, containing tons of objects that you have to guess under a generic title such “House furnitures”. I am looking for a bloody clown! TP back! TP back!, TP back!

Think Paz, think! “Whatever methods we think are the most efficient”… Time running, what I normally do when searching for an item in SL? Whoosh + dingding in my mind! Slexchange of course! But it was already too late to do what I use to: search for item on the web, locate the creator, search for the creator profile inworld, look at his/her pics, locate the boutique and search for the item, look, try and eventually buy. I don’t like buying directly from Slexchange as I cannot see the object nor try it in world first. So too late for this. Think… Well I can do the same but instead of searching the object physically I can represent it in a prim… Let’s go for it: clown, Batman, brain, tea cup and of course the leader of the blue group as well! Time over. We won.

3 snapshots of the victory:

• My first is laughing out loud at StevenW with a pair of wings pretending to be Batman.

• My second is incredulity listening to Nifara arguing that although we won, we won by a little margin as we have used too much jpgs. What Mr Nifara? Are you saying me that putting a jpeg in a prim has less value than other methods? And here, why on earth people like to change the rules, once the competition is over? “Whatever methods we think are the most efficient”. Nobody specified that in the list we had to find 3D objects and that representations of those objects did not count or did not have the same value… Why a representation of George Bush counted and not a representation of a tea cup? So why? And I think that from an external point of view a 3D object means much more work than its representation: ‘a simple photo’. But I would like to explain that there is also valuable work behind a texturised prim. In this case: searching for the item, screen printing, pasting in Photoshop, cropping a perfect square so as to have a good texture, upload the texture inworld, create a flat prim and texturise one of the faces… Is that less difficult than rezzing an object already present in the inventory? Why our clown had less value than our wig, mannequins, plane or whiteboard? So unfair.

• My third is discovering Suzetta and being disrupted by listening to her colleagues calling her by her real name: he, he, he. And also seeing the instructions with double RL/SL names, and seeing instead of Suzetta’s photo inworld a photo of her RL counterpart. ‘A problem, a problem!’ I shouted as I wanted to raise attention about the nature of immersion and our freedom to not to be ourselves inworld. Guys you are constantly going OC (Out of character)! And then someone said to Suzetta ‘Well, you are getting too much into this’. Today I reply ‘do not dare to call me by my RL name inworld, because I do not answer, I am not me’. (Thinking about this, I still wonder who has to sign this post: me or me?)

Paz Lorenz

A comment to ‘When it all goes wrong!’ by Eloise Pasteur

June 21st, 2008 • 3 comments MUVEs, Observer pour mieux agir
Tags: Éducation, English, MUVEnation, MUVEs, Pratiques

Je poste ce commentaire ici et non pas sur When it all goes wrong!, car il est rejeté par le filtre anti-spam du blog d’Eloise Pasteur. Un autre post en anglais: mais je ne fais pas exprès!

Eloise, I would like to give you some further insight towards understanding “A teaching nightmare!”. This post presents itself as a short narrative that was written as part of a wider research process using storytelling to describe experiences in the area of teaching and learning in Second Life. I have been studying ‘hand-on workshops’ for several months in the role of participatory observation. From the analysis and mapping of these workshops, we (Steven and I) elaborated a taxonomy that covers four main processes and 26 criteria.

• Taxonomy of Second Life practices in learning and teaching activities: Analysis grid for “hands-on workshops” – V.1 (1/2)
• Taxonomy of Second Life practices in learning and teaching activities: Analysis grid for “hands-on workshops” – V.1 (2/2)

Amongst the results of our research we found a tension between teacher’s IRL experience, pedagogical approach and the control of the virtual environment. Control (of the space, of conversational flow, of communication dynamics) appeared to be a factor that greatly influenced the outcomes of the workshop and the difficulty for experienced IRL teachers is that this belong to a specific set of knowledge and skills related to teaching in SL. Reflecting about this I wanted to test with myself, and evaluate if an experienced SL denizen in the grid since 2006, IRL teacher for more than 16 years, but without any specific knowledge of the ‘backstage of ·hands-on workshops’ (e.g. never used a script to give automatic instructions) was capable of presenting a practical workshop and evaluating its outcomes. I wanted to know what other criteria for success I would find … when this time being an insider! I agree, practice first is good advice. However in my opinion, this has a lower impact when plotted against other criteria such design/display of the learning environment. This experience allowed me to identify some missing criteria in the grid such as ‘interaction policies’ and ‘didactic strategies for individualisation of learning in a short synchronous session’. There is also one issue that interests me and this is about the time spent in the preparation of the activity. I would appreciate if you shared your experience about this. Finally, a word about telling unsuccessful stories. I am convinced that unsuccessful stories can uncover good practices and help us to identify better ways of using virtual environments for education. Sadly these stories disappear behind the culture of the successful-look-at-me-teacher or the too-shy-to-recognize-I-have-also-failed. I will kindly accept your offer to test the next workshop. So be prepared for an invitation! But I would also like to interview you as experienced teacher. Finally I was wondering if you would like to tell me a meaningful story about teaching and learning in Second Life: one that worth the effort to be passed on, that will smooth my path as a virtual teacher!