Nine residents of North Allston sat down with our staff, experienced the space virtually on both the big screen and their own laptops, and brainstormed how the park could play a role in community life. We asked the residents to pick a theme from among the several that emerged from the formal design process being led by Harvard and the ICON Group. Among these themes were “playful,” “educational,” and “contemplative.”

Because the park is still in the early design phases, we focused on broad strokes rather than specific design, and participants knew we were throwing out ideas, not specific recommendations. Nonetheless, the residents were actively engaged in thinking through how the space might weave into the fabric of the neighborhood, what can realistically fit in the relatively small, L-shaped parcel, and what the community really needs. Among the general ideas were a fitness circuit, ampitheatre-type group space, a covered seating area, and a naturalistic pond.

The outcome of last night’s process will be available to view in Second Life through tomorrow afternoon, when a new community group will come in and do it all again. We’ll be providing Copley-Wolff Design Group, the landscape architects for the park, with these ideas as well as more specific designs later in the summer. If you’re a local constituent of the park, please consider joining us at tomorrow’s brainstorming session:

Harvard Allston Education Portal
175 N. Harvard St
1:30-3:30pm

We’d especially like to thank, among the Hub2 staff, our interpreters — local Allston youth who have been learning more about both the virtual world of Second Life and the real world of park design — who helped residents manipulate their avatars through the virtual space. Our hosts, the Harvard Education Portal, also worked extra-hard to ensure that the computers and network stayed up and running.

[ EDIT: Link fixed. Sorry about that! ]

[ UPDATE: The Chronicle of Higher Education reported on this event, and I'm mentioned near the end. ]

Event Details

December 8, 2007 from 2-5pm EST
Askwith Lecture Hall in Longfellow Hall
13 Appian Way Cambridge, MA 02138
Directions

Speakers

• Enabling the Age of Immersive Education [2-2:30pm EST]
  Aaron E. Walsh, Director, Immersive Education Initiative | Faculty, Boston College
• Placeworlds: Fostering Civic Engagement through Immersive Education [2:30-3pm EST]
  Gene Koo
• School 2.0 and Immersive Education [3-3:30pm EST]
  Timothy J. Magner, Director, U.S. Department of Education | Advisor, Immersive Education Initiative
• The Restaurant Game: New forms of Artificial Intelligence for Immersive Education [3:30-4pm EST]
  Jeff Orkin, Research Assistant, MIT Media Lab | co-Chair, Immersive Education Initiative
• Pedagogy, Assessment, and Learning Outcomes for Immersive Education [4-4:30pm EST]
  John Carfora, Director of Sponsored Research, Amherst University | co-Chair, Immersive Education Initiative

1. Who has time for a second life?
2. Spatial imagination
3. Virtual imagination
4. Imagining new solutions
5. Net-locality
6. Building new solutions

In other news, we’ve been meeting with City of Boston and Boston Redevelopment folks over the last week, and in that time have come to sharpen our thoughts on how Second Life can foster more deliberative, community-led processes in urban design. While we are not Second Life boosters, at the moment no other tools combine the ability to collaboratively build and inhabit spaces the way SL does. We plan to describe these affordances in our forthcoming article, but one aspect I just started grasping today is the idea not just of net-locality (the extension of places into virtual networks, à la Red Sox Nation) but also of situated presence. That is to say, most design processes result in some kind of virtual fly-through, but “you” take the form of a disembodied camera (often not even under your own control).

By contrast, virtual worlds enable presence, which has implications beyond just, for example, seeing how easy or hard it would be to walk down the street given a particular arrangement of street furniture. It would also allow purpose — the possibility, for example, of situating community participants in particular roles — whether the child trying to get to school or the truck driver attempting to make deliveries. Indeed, in opening the possibility of robust, situated role-playing, such systems could even offer polarized community members to take other points of view — ultimately, a community would care quite a bit about whether trucks are able to make deliveries to their local shops even though they might also fear the noise or potential for accidents.

With any luck, our discussions with the city of Boston will give us a chance to test out these ideas.

Workshop panelist Grace Lim-Tan Keh Buoy has posted photos from our workshop at State of Play V in Singapore. Thanks Grace!

I’m still hoping to acquire some video from the event, which I’ll compress and post as soon as possible.

As described earlier, our method was (1) to deconstruct successful games, running on the assumption that good games provide strong learning opportunities; (2) develop a set of principles of successful learning environments; (3) apply that framework to real-life examples, including a proposed project. Our starting hypothesis is that for teachers who are good at creating teacher-centered educational experiences, developing learner-centered experiences might be quite challenging.

Some lessons learned that are applicable both to future conference workshops and, I hope, to learning experiences in general:

1. Exploit small-group dynamics, but model them first. We started by playing the classic sequencing game (get yourselves in order of…) which assisted us into breaking into mixed-experience groups. But we squandered this effort by following up with a large-group activity that dissipated some of the early energy. We asked the entire group to identify factors in a game that they were familiar with that made them compelling experiences. While these questions were good, participants hewed to highly theoretical, general answers — most refused to give specific examples. Perhaps we should have modeled some of the answers ourselves. Then we might have had the small groups, rather than the whole group, answer a set of the posed questions, with narrow parameters for acceptable answers.

2. Focus on practical, not theoretical, activities. We should have played more games as object lessons for the session. Scot started us out with tic-tac-toe, which he used as an illustration of how games get us into a different zone even when the game is so simplistic. We probably could have teased that out more, and perhaps pulled some activities out of Rules of Play, especially since we couldn’t require participants to read Jim Gee and Raph Koster in advance. In any event, it was unrealistic to expect that we could develop a framework from scratch in the span of 1 hour. Better to do 3 spot lessons and then move on to the next phase.

3. Problem-solving is fun: Any game designer can tell you that! I think our case study was really the best part of the morning — each group went at it with some level of seriousness, though maybe not as much gusto as I might have hoped (see next lesson). We ended up with some really good responses. I think it was also at this phase that the Second Life participants got really into it (see lesson 5).

4. Culture matters. I could detect some pretty serious variance in individual participation even at the small-group level, and I attribute it to a combination of language, culture, and knowledge differences. There’s not much we could have done about the knowledge differentials, but I suspect we could have done more to have eased the group dynamics around language and culture. I noticed that most of the groups — about 10 people each — had only about half actively participating.

5. Let virtual participants actually do something. I think this is where we fell down in the first half — a large-group discussion just didn’t lend itself to Second Life participation. It’s also where the workshop shone — giving the SL participants a task was a great way to get them involved, and so we should have done the same for group discussion.

I will try to post pictures and video of this event as they become available.

Some theorists argue that games are great environments for learning, but terrible tools for teaching. Is it true that we are still struggling to incorporate games and virtual worlds in the classroom in meaningful ways? Organized by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, this workshop convenes leading game designers and educators together to examine the ways that games and virtual worlds are already shaping the learning processes of children and adults. During the second half of the session, participants will apply these insights to real-world case studies, developing a concrete list of best practices that will be useful to designers and teachers alike. This Workshop will be led by Catherine Bracy and Gene Koo from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School and Aaron Delwiche from Trinity University.

My hope is that, as a workshop, this will prove to be a useful and action-oriented session. On a personal note, I’m excited to be going to Singapore (never been) and have the chance to swing by Taiwan afterwards to see my father’s family, whom I haven’t visited since 1987.

Last semester, Seattle U. Professor of Law Elizabeth Townsend-Gard taught a 1L property class that included a Second Life component, in which students explored virtual property as a way to gain insight into real property. I find this pedagogical tool of using virtual worlds as a cognitive foil for the real one a fascinating way to make use of virtual worlds, and hope to make use of that approach in my soon-to-be-announced class this fall.

Innovator Profile: Prof. Elizabeth Townsend-Gard and Rachel Goda (Law School Innovation blog).

CentsCity applies the engaging technology of online role-playing and social networking sites like the Sims and SecondLife to develop high school students’ financial and math skills. In a virtual city, colored by landmarks such as Penny Park and Six Cents Cafe, every user has a fictional persona with an occupation, investments, buddies to chat with, and quests that teach math and financial skills. This virtual experience makes learning more dynamic and breaks beyond classroom walls. The young people served by CentsCity will become adults with the financial savvy to build their own and others’ assets.

This reminds me of Wells Fargo’s various efforts at creating a financial literacy game, “Stagecoach Island,” in Second Life and ActiveWorlds. I admire Mr. Lloyd for what he’s pursuing and hope he’s got his head around how difficult it can be to create a game — or even harder in some ways, a virtual world — that is fun, compelling, and economically accurate. After all, one of the biggest problems in virtual worlds is rampant inflation and inability to control the economy (see the ActiveWorlds link for a description of how these problems plague Stagecoach Island). Then again, too much financial accuracy might just pull the rug out from under “fun.” Good luck to him and CentsCity!