I’m afraid I rather fluffed my part, as I committed the cardinal sin of focusing on the question rather than my prepared answers. I failed to convey the excitement of teaching and learning in Second Life as well as what it felt like in a way that listeners would understand. For whatever reason, when Ms. Morris asked what the class was about, I talked about the course topic rather than on the idea of CyberOne reaching out to a much wider audience than was ever possible before, in a deeper and more engaging way. Shucks!

There was a very interesting feeling of presence in the BBC virtual studio that I hadn’t quite felt before — perhaps because I knew this was being broadcast live in another channel. It’s too bad I didn’t find a way to work that feeling into what I was saying in the interview yourself — being radio, all of this has to be described, not just assumed.

Patrick was a real sport to join us at 1:30am (he’s also EDT) on Labor Day weekend, and I think he represented the student perspective quite well. Thanks, Patrick!

Journalist Misa Kurasawa from the Weekly Toyo Keizai met with a number of us a few weeks ago for a cover article about Second Life. The issue is finally out, and I think it covers the CyberOne and Hub2 courses. I can’t know, because the Toyo Keizai doesn’t publish the full article online, but the Babelfish translation of the issue’s topic is Second life Temporarythoughtrevolution: The worldwide oven it is it got on the move!! Our section of the article has the heading, “Joint ownership” of place; Production efficiency improves with how new to work by it is. (I suppose automated translation still has a way to go).

It was a fun interview, and with a little bit of effort I hope to have a translation of the relevant part of the article soon.

Below are raw-text notes I took at the education session at State of Play. I’ll write something more coherent when I catch some time. At right you can see Becca and me participating in our own ad-hoc backchannel via Berkman Island.

Doug: transferability. Games as terrible environments, not for learning, but for teaching — because gamers are subversive. MMOs as spaces for both real AND the virtual without the two competing. Critical vs. productive disposition: interpretation vs. meeting others’ needs. WoW learning as fusing critical + productive: learning how to process information and build in relation to the specific, personal, and contingent. Where does learning happen: in world, boundaries between wrlds, boundary spaces: forums, guild sites, wikis…). Games are better at setting dispositions than content — consider games and learning, not games and teaching.

Lauren: State of Play Academy. How to take advantage of this space to teach law + tech more effectively. Use concept of place to change the kinds of teaching we do. “Distance ed on steroids.” Most of the class participants have never been in a virtual world before class — goal is to bring more people in, not just attract the natives. Add granularity to experiences that students can get — they don’t make commitment and can come to individual classes. Rethinking higher education — how do people learn. In relaunch, reconsidering classes as conversations — teacher has only a short moment to hit 5 bullet points before students start talking back. Greater opportunity for teaching: lots of people in the world with expertise, but not much chance for them to be involved in the educational process. How do we open up for students to learn from people other than professors? Like a next step from blogging — an open conversation opportunity.

Aaron: hype has been good for convincing administrators to run with an experiment. Topology of course locales: all-virtual, blended, dedicated sim modules (e.g. roleplay). Echoing Doug, need to give up control — can’t just do a powerpoint. But other extreme: go learn about new media, is too scary. Challenge is to create structure for students and let them go. Things will go wrong — you can invite students to help debug the course. Another challenge of computer literacy — there’s an assumption that younger students are cyborg tech jocks. Use the computer jocks as course assistants — pull aside early. Convince students that it’s OK to use VW as homework assignments. Check out NMC in Second Life + SLED. Also check out earlier work in text-based MUDDs.

First question: Games/VW as appropriate for teaching, how to adjust pedagogy? Doug: What can VW’s do uniquely? Those things move away from traditional transfer model. But let’s not celebrate that games can solve all of our problems. Math is a terrible forum for exploratory learning. Lauren: Wouldn’t just transfer regular Stanford class into VW but rather try a different approach.

Second question (Becca): When a University wants to start an Island, a problem with GC’s being willing to sign TOS.

Third question: Why all this focus on SL — is there something about a fantasy world that puts off teaching? Andy: Tools in SL for building. Why can’t we renegotiate the EULA — must it be institution-to-institution? Does university’s interest in $ get in the way.

Fourth question: “Crafting” (in rules) Creation : What is it that you want ppl to learn.

How to learn the new craft of teaching? Situated Learning, see Constance’s work @ Wisconsin, Gee @ Wisconsin.

Dispositions as being more along the lines of social organziation. By contrast, episodic and violence. Grief-playing as a disposition. (Killing as part of the game, vs. griefing as doing violence to the game?)

Simulation environments for business learning — role-playing power of virtual worlds + data-driven simulation. Lauren: example of flyover rights in There as a way to convey property rights (exploratio). vs. simulation where you can recreate case or facts. (Seems like this is a crucial identification of how virtual simulations take advantage of both role and processing power of computers).

Games as no different than other areas of education that aren’t straight knowledge transfer: same kind of resistance. Doug: idea of building stuff is itself a new pedagogy.

How do you “feel” about law? Using simulation of acting out scenario of implementing Nazi law on Guernsey Island. But frustrated with drawing the magic circle — is there a solution that VW provides?

How to evaluate the learning in that environment?

Last quip: Let’s rename “No child left behind” to “no child doesnt’ make Level 60

Aaron Delwiche (Trinity University); Lauren Gelman (Stanford University); Doug Thomas (University of Southern California)

Below is a link to a short excerpt of a class meeting in which we listened to and discussed one podcast. We used Second Life’s to stream the mp3s to students; however, because media playback is set per-user, not for all users simultaneously, I had to synchronize the listening by having everyone hit “play” simultaneously. (Ergo the &:1…2…3…play! chat text you see in the beginning of this recording.) This is a technique I’ve used in WebEx meetings at Legal Aid University as well, where low bandwidth in many of our offices obligates us to distribute video via CD-ROM and have students play them as simultaneously as possible in their respective offices around the country.

I asked all the participants to type words or phrases that jumped out at them. The point was to listen critically to each podcast for the elements of empathetic argument. Not everyone participated in this portion of the class, but we got a fairly good mix (and the usual spate of off-hand comments).

Click To Play

The night before I had attended a training by Milosun Czervik on behalf of the SL Library Group on presentation tools available in SL. Milosun had introduced the topic to the SLED listserv with a heavy dose of disclaimer yet still received admonitions from active-learning fundamentalists. I tend to anti-lecture bias myself, but teacher-centered presentations are crucial even to the most student-led educational experiences. After all, students still need to know how to conduct their activities.

I picked up some really useful tools at the Milosun’s presentation, most notably a chatfeeder (works like a teleprompter — you pre-write the talk and press a button to “speak” each line from the text) and AngryBeth’s whiteboard. These two tools allowed me to prepare my presentation in advance, crucial to ensuring that the discussion stay focused and on-schedule. What’s more, the chatfeeder helped me overcome what I find to be the biggest problem in text-based presentation: typing speed and the time gap between a speaker and a respondent. With a press of a button, I can issue a complex and thoughtful idea that would otherwise take as long as a minute to formulate and type. This ability gives the presenter an “edge” in pushing conversation forward in what can otherwise be a chaotic free-for-all. Partly this is because people can read faster than they can type, so audience members can easily take control of a discussion just by sheer weight of the amount of text 30 people can generate simultaneously. (As I’ll eventually get around to writing up, text-based chat is excellent for egalitarian, non-linear discussion, but by the same token difficult to anchor).

In preparing the presentation beforehand, I also made sure to incorporate audience interaction, which seems paradoxical, but was quite effective on Thursday. So, every third line or so I asked a question that usually succeeded in setting off audience discussion that seemed quite engaged. Probably more importantly, I used the prepared text as the backbone of the talk, but then interspersed them with live chat that responded directly to audiene input. Here is an example:

GeneKoo Li: question: How might new technologies or media change commercial exchanges into relationships?
USA Brody: more resources
GeneKoo Li: (I think we are already covering that, but any further thoughts?)
Cordelia Moy: cooperation?
Mith Feingold: Businesses use customer databases and preferences to shape their offerings and make targeted ads
Dancer Morris: new technologies allow more interaction between a business and a customer
GeneKoo Li: OK, is there a difference b/t what Mith and what Dancer describe?

In this segment of the talk, the first line I spoke was through the chatfeeder, and the other two were “live.” What then followed was several lines of animated discussion among the class which continued for a while even after I moved on to the next item in the prepared speech — which is fine pedagogically, since it’s important for the audience to “own” the learning even as the lecturer tries to maintain a strict agenda, but presented a technical challenge that I’ll turn to now.

Despite what I felt was a successful discussion, we also ran up against the boundaries of the chat discussion. As several students have now complained, SecondLife (and There.com) lack a threaded chat capacity. The result was a huge blob of undifferentiated text, and one student even requested that the instructors preface their lines with some kind of special character so our words could easily be segregated from the audience’s. (Not a bad idea, either, for indicating whether a line of text is live or canned). Hopefully I’ll take up the topic of chat’s architectural biases shortly.

What has impressed me most about this event how the students took ownership of it afterwards. One student took the trouble to create a color-coded transcript (PDF courtesy of another student), and another posted a video capture of the event. Ergo, my desire to overlay a conversation on top of the video in “director’s commentary” style afterwards, which I still hope to do at some point.

Finally, I am writing up some best practices for the State of Play Academy on how to deliver a lecture in a virtual world. Because There has speech capabilities, the chatfeeder is unnecessary, but the need to prepare is universal. Also, the likelihood — in fact, the desirability — of audience cross-chat is consistent across platforms. For presenters used to linear, one-way lectures or facilitator-controlled discussions, text-based chatting is probably the most alien experience as it demands a different way of thinking about audience engagement as well as the capacity to keep track of multiple discussion threads simultaneously while still driving the agenda forward.

Here’s Becca and me standing in front of the assembled xSchool students (we had 23 total, plus some lurkers apparently). Now that people have had some time to play around, some are starting to sport some pretty unique and outrageous outfits.

Creating groups part A

We decided that the most viable groups would be based on time availability rather than project ideas, both because for a distance course time often trumps everything else, and because it’s too early in the course for most people to have a clear idea of what projects they’d like to take on. To make this happen in-MUVE, Ansible created some tiles for people to group themselves on. Since it was hard to read them on the ground, she duplicated each one so that they stood upright…

Not all times worked for everyone, and of course the people who couldn’t make the meeting time (Thu, 9-10pm EDT) weren’t there to indicate their time availability. In the picture at left, a group decided to compromise between 8 and 9pm EDT and chose 8:30. Everyone who could make that time stepped off into the space between the tiles, leaving one person who then joined another group. What a way to compromise!

Here’s the Thursday, 10pm group chatting. I’m guessing they are West Coasters!

A pretty surreal picture of the group after they’d divvied up. You can see two participants chatting in mid-air. One of the students at the bottom of the picture is sporting a fabulous swan-like dress that garnered quite a few complements. She was our fashion maven for the evening, handing out free Harvard T-shirts. (Don’t tell Harvard’s IP attorneys!)

It was definitely a good way to divvy up the group in-MUVE; however, we’re now left with about 15 people who didn’t show up and we still have to assign. A fun activity and definitely good for building group spirit, but probably not the most efficient way to create groups. Something asynchronous and web-based is probably ideal, though there are precious few options out there for group scheduling. (Someone needs to build a module for Moodle!)

Creating groups part B

In addition to creating groups out of our Extension School students, the other activity for the evening was having the X-School participants show the law students around the island. Becca did a lot of grunt work up front assigning both sets of students to two time slots (8-9pm and 10-11pm). For the first group, we stuck with our original plan of creating groups of 2 xSchool and 2 HLS students. This turned out to be collosally difficult for a number of reasons:

• We didn’t know who was who — whether any individual was xSchool, HLS, or an interloper. See the next post. We never really resolved this problem; instead, we just kept asking everyone who showed up on the island, “Are you a law student?” Our visitors were probably quite amused (or insulted).
• The HLS students were plunged straight into a weird environment and didn’t necessarily know how to move around, talk, or listen. It was very hard to get the group separated out into HLS / xSchool. I tried creating a line to divide the two groups and different shapes for each side (it was too hard to get them to understand “Gene’s left”). We solved this later in the 10pm session by getting people to sit, right off the bat, on either side of our ampitheater, like in a wedding. Becca enforced this with an iron fist, which was highly necessary!
• Any group larger than two was just too hard to track. There was no place of permanence to annotate these groups — the chat was too cluttered to scroll through and find where I said “Mr. Duck, Mrs. Mouse, The Green Bat, and Chicken Little get together!” when Mrs. Mouse asks for her group again. We didn’t have physical spots the way we did for the project groups, and there was no way to forcibly move avatars into them anyway (or at least none handy last night). We partially resolved this at our 10pm session by reducing the group size to pairs — each person had only to remember one other name, though it was still difficult for some.

Overall it was an exciting experience. I’m still awaiting feedback from the law students, in particular, on it. Some of the xSchool students returned gushing that they learned quite a bit as well. I’m a bit more nervous about the ones who didn’t come back. And I feel bad for the ones who came and didn’t get assigned to a group at all because we ended up having an HLS student shortage at the end of the evening. Maybe we can match up the remainders with something like a dating service…?

[17:27] Rebecca Berkman: i am not sure we are arguing for replacing market-based activity, but possibly just for setting up norms and laws that encourage a balance between the two.
[17:27] GeoffMcG Xi: can you give us a for instiance rebecca?
[17:27] GeoffMcG Xi: i like the copyleft example from early lectures
[17:27] Rebecca Berkman: one thing i am very interested in is ways in which people can set up for-profit business enterprises that do not rely on proprietary ownership of information goods.
[17:28] Rebecca Berkman: well, for instance, i can spend my free time contributing to wikipedia, but it doesn’t pay me.
[17:28] Hart Zhao: like reputation?
[17:28] Aphilo Aarde: I think Benkler is even making the case for a signficant domain, that re-distributes information production wealth, even dramatically.
[17:28] Rebecca Berkman: if i didn’t have another job that paid me, i would be unlikely to have the free time to spend editing wikipedia.
[17:28] GeoffMcG Xi: i meant a legal arrangement
[17:28] Rebecca Berkman: so we need to have some way for our economy to produce the goods and services we need so that we can participate in things that are meaningful to us for non-market reasons.

In terms of participants, we had about 5 “at large” and 2 “official” participants. While the at-large participants were very engaged in the subject matter, it was unclear to me at the end of the session whether they were willing to commit to the class beyond watching the lectures / reading the materials. Granted, these are both significant activities, but I think the biggest value from the class for participants will be undertaking a term-long project. Of course, since we have no groups and projects set up yet, there’s nothing for anyone to commit to. We’ll find out what happens in a few weeks with our at-large group who are nothing if not enthusiastic at this point.

chatlog2006-09-25.txt

We held our first synchronous gathering last night on Second Life, 9-10 and 10-11pm Eastern. (Needless to say, it was a late night for us). Our plan was to get the groups comfortable with the space if they weren’t already (some in our class are “non-techies,” others are Second Life veterans), start to get to know each other, and send them off on their way with their second week’s assignment, the Scavenger Hunt (link is to a public version of the class). The agenda was basically:

1. 1-15 minutes Get groups organized. We decided to split the class in half: I would take the first ten students to show up; Becca would take the remainder. In theory there should have been 20 students in each time slot. During this time period Ansible doled out spending cash (woohoo!) and instructions for the scavenger hunt. She also added everyone to the official class roster in case we ever need to close Berkman Island to outsiders (which we will when we host the entire class).
2. 10 minutes Conduct the “Stand up if you…” activity. This is a common activity in face-to-face settings for a group to get relaxed and sometimes to help them address difficult issues. In the latter case, the facilitator escalates the “riskiness” of the questions. In our case, we didn’t really have a difficult issue to discuss, so we mainly did it for the “getting to know you” aspect of the game. (Another variation is to have N-1 seats for a group of size N, and the person standing names a characteristic, and everyone who fits that description has to change seats, like musical chairs but with the standing person being “it”).
3. 10 minutes Pair the group up and have each pair introduce him/herself to the other using IM.
4. 10 minutes Each person then introduces the partner to the group using public chat.

Overall, I think the meeting went reasonably well — the first group was definitely livelier than the second, perhaps because it was larger and earlier. (10pm is very late for East Coasters!). I had predicted huge technical problems, but for the most part there were few problems, at least among those who were able to log in. Several people had trouble figuring out the IM interface, which when you have several IM’s going can get difficult, especially because there is an island-wide non-private channel.

It was eerie standing in a room while people are IM’ing and seeing/hearing nothing going on. The overall silence of Second Life compared with There.com (because of There’s built-in voice capabilities) contriibutes to that feeling. It would be helpful if an avatar displayed its IM status — I thought that a headset would appear on their heads, but maybe I was too far away to see them?

Text chat isn’t necessarily the most natural of communication methods — I find it very helpful in There to use it as a “backchannel” when someone is giving a voice presentation, but when the presenter is also using text chat, I think the audience tends to hush up out of respect. Probably we just need to get to know each other a little more, and also show people how to use the IM channels more effectively, to get livelier meetings. Also, the process we imposed last night was definitely constraining — on purpose! Next week will be even more fun, when we bring the law students into the mix.