VWBPE 2015 – Ciaran Laval

March 23, 2015

VWBPE 2015 Was An Important Event For Virtual Worlds

The importance of a conference such as Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education should not be underestimated when it comes to putting virtual worlds on the map. Most of the chatter I’ve seen has, unsurprisingly, been about Ebbe Altberg’s keynote speech. Nalates Urriah has taken a very interesting and in depth look at Linden Lab’s nextgen virtual world based on this speech.

Avataric looks at VWBPE from other perspectives, including how even in a virtual world being shy has its challenges as she braved being a host, as well as a participant, at the conference. There’s even an inworld/real world crossover with a husband hitting a wrong button. This wasn’t as painful as it may initially sound!

Beyond that the conference touches other parts of the virtual world sphere with links to OpenSim and Unity 3D demonstrating that education and virtual worlds are willing to tackle new technology when opportunity arises.

The conference also involved communities such as Chilbo and Seanchai making their mark in the education space. Interactive storytelling as a teaching tool is a development I’m eager to see progress, but Seanchai play an important role in bringing storytelling to new audiences full stop.

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March 20, 2015

Oz Linden Meets The Educators At VWBPE 2015

Unfortunately I did not get to see Oz Linden live at VWBPE 2015 this evening, which was disappointing because I wanted to see this discussion, alas I had to go shopping and then got into family matters, which changed all my plans.

However over at the VWBPE website there is a small part of Oz’s appearance where he answers questions. This video is not the full appearance of Oz the Great and Powerful, you’ll have to keep your eyes peeled for that. However it contains enough information for us to take a look at the sort of challenges educators using Second Life face compared to individuals. However don’t think that the information does not apply to people who aren’t educators, there’s interesting news of developments for all here.

One of the questions Oz got asked was whether or not screen sharing would ever be available in the Second Life viewer. Oz’s answer was a very sensible one. Oz pointed out that screen sharing is an area whereby other people have already developed solutions, and those solutions work well. Oz said that he himself will use applications such as Skype to share his screen with other people to look at bugs, new features etc.

That’s a very fair point and sometimes we overlook the fact that there are other applications dealing with matters very well that will work with Second Life.

However as an example of the fact that not all apps that do something well work with the Second Life viewer, a rather fascinating issue was raised. Someone pointed out that the Second Life viewer accepts typed Chinese characters, there’s a Google App (which wasn’t named) that allows people to speak Chinese and then that spoken word is entered into a document or a browser, so we’re probably talking about a speech to text app. However that app does not work with the Second Life viewer, if it did students would be able to interact with NPC’s in Chinese.

Oz was totally honest and admitted that he wasn’t familiar with the app, so therefore he didn’t know how it injected characters. However he says that he could not think of an architectural reason as to why it doesn’t work, but there is one extremely big problem in terms of Oz looking at this, he can’t speak Chinese.

However we then saw an example of how Linden Lab’s community can assist, Oz suggested that this may be something he could put on a list for Open Source developers to take a look at because there’s more likely to be an Open Source dev who can speak Chinese than there is a person at Linden Lab who can speak Chinese and work on the problem.

The question of education pricing was raised and Oz, honest again, replied that this really wasn’t an area he could discuss as it wasn’t within his remit. However he did point out that Ebbe Altberg had touched upon pricing in his keynote speech.

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March 18, 2015March 18, 2015

Ebbe Altberg Opens VWBPE 2015 With Keynote Speech

“I’m afraid you’re going to have to remove your weapon.” the woman told me.

“I’m a Dwarfin King, a King! Do you understand me?” I replied.

“Don’t take that tone with me or I’ll have to ask you to stand outside the room.” the woman sternly replied.

I bowed my head and removed my sceptre. Yes, the educators are in town and Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education 2015 has officially opened with a barnstorming speech from Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg.

Now if you’re looking for a transcript, I’m sorry but I’m not going to provide one. I’m not a big fan of transcripts, but more importantly, my notecard was eaten halfway through so I lost all my notes! However thanks to the power of my memory (this might not end well) and Daniel Voyager’s Twitter stream I may be able to provide some information. An important thing to note is that Ebbe Altberg’s speech may have been aimed at educators but it was extremely relevant to virtual world fans of all types as he delved into the future of Linden Lab’s top secret, but so far unnamed (other than being not Second Life 2.0) virtual world.

Ok so the bombshell news, the nextgen virtual world from Linden Lab will have an age rating of 13+. Now before we all panic too much, Ebbe pointed out that legally there’s really no difference between a 16+virtual world and a 13+ virtual world.

Another bombshell for those looking forward to getting an early look at Linden Lab’s nextgen virtual world is that initially Linden Lab will be hand picking participants and they will be looking for participants who know Autodesk Maya and can create experiences for Virtual Reality and a PC platform.

Concerns were raised as to why Linden Lab were looking for people with skills in what is a rather expensive piece of software, rather than an open source product such as Blender. Ebbe assured people that they will be looking for the nextgen virtual world to be open to many different creation products, but for the early testing, they want people with Maya skills.

In terms of costs, Ebbe is looking to lower land costs and increase sales taxes in the new platform. Linden Lab are spending a decent amount of time trying to find the ideal balance here, although it’s much harder to change the balance for Second Life than it is for the nextgen platform.

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March 16, 2015

Don’t Get Twitchy, Look Forward To Virtual Worlds Best Practices In Education Instead

Iris Ophelia has received a reply from Twitch regarding whether streaming of Second Life via their service is allowed : Update: Twitch Responds With Their Stance on Streaming Second Life. The long and short of it is, that Second Life streaming is indeed prohibited :

Second Life is not permitted for streaming and those accounts reported for doing so will be suspended. Content in this game is unrated and often sexually explicity, which is content we do not allow on our services. We also do not permit Adults-Only rated games and games where nudity is the core focus, feature, or goal.

Please read our Rules of Conduct regarding sexually explicit acts or content for more information:

http://www.twitch.tv/user/legal?page=rules-of-conduct

I could write a long rambling post about this, or point out that Grand Theft Auto, an 18 rated game, is happily streamed. However I’d rather just point people in the direction of The Drax Files : World Makers on YouTube, which is certainly not a series that exemplifies nudity being the core focus, feature or goal.

Another virtual world event that doesn’t have nudity as the core focus, feature or goal is Virtual Worlds Best Practices In Education, which starts on Wednesday of this week and it’s a far more important topic. This is the 8th annual event and here’s a brief explanation of what it’s all about :

Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education is a global grass-roots community event focusing on education in immersive virtual environments. This open conference is organized by educators, for educators, to provide an opportunity to showcase the learning that takes place in this community of practice. All educators are encouraged to present, attend and take part in this discussion of collaborative deeper learning and co-presence in virtual worlds and games.

The Opening Keynote speech will be from Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg in Second Life, however this conference does go beyond Second Life, other featured speakers include :

Pam Broviak – Manages the Public Works Group, an online resource offering information related to public works, government, and social media.

Gord Holden – Recipient of the Virtual Education Journal’s Reader’s Choice Award as the Edovator of 2014.

Jeroen Frans – One of the three Founders of the Vesuvius Group, LLC, and functions as Executive Director and Virtual World Technology Specialist.

Sensuous Maximus – Co-founder of the renowned Builders Brewery within Second Life.

Susan Toth-Cohen – Professor and director of the post-professional clinical doctorate in occupational therapy at Thomas Jefferson University.

John Fillwalk – Serves as the senior director of the Hybrid Design Technologies initiative [HDT] and as the director of the Institute for Digital Intermedia Arts [IDIA Lab} at Ball State University.

Jay Jay Jegathesan – Holds a Bachelor of Commerce (Hons) from the University of Western Australia (UWA), majoring in management and marketing.

For more detailed biographies about these speakers go here : http://vwbpe.org/conference/vwbpe-2015-keynotes-and-featured-speakers

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March 9, 2015

Stage Design, Business Studies, Graduations – Educators Share Their Second Life Stories

A couple of weeks ago Linden Lab blogged : Share Your Educational Success Stories. The idea was, as the blog post suggests, for educators to share their educational success stories. A forum thread was created for these stories to be shared and some educators have been happy to share their stories.

One thing that stands out straight away about these stories is the global appeal of Second Life, and therefore other virtual worlds. People have posted their stories from countries including : Austria, Germany, Japan, Turkey, Canada, Scotland and United States Of America.

There also appears to be a diverse list of reasons for using Second Life. Quite a few are for learning English, but there are also use cases cited for stage design, Business studies, machinima and even graduations.

Moni Duettmann who has been teaching at the University of Applied Sciences in Graz, Austria writes:

For starters I built a model of the actual hall, where the stage would be built in real life, a convention room of the university. Now everybody could get a realistic idea, where things would really happen, once they were developed in Second Life. The purpose of the stage was defined as a presentation for other works the students had made in that semester.

They developed a theme with a steampunkish design and started working on it online in Second Life. The big advantage of the method was, that not only everybody could practically work on the objects simultaneously and communicate about it, but it was visible how it would really look, before efforts to build it would be carried out. The result was a virtual model that looked exactly as the later built with cardboards and prints. Even some simple animations were included in the design, later translated into electrical fan action.

Whereas some educators use Second Life for distance learning, others use Second Life due to the nature of Second Life having a virtual world economy. These concepts are well emphasised by a post from Linda Sautereau of Indiana University’s Kelley School Of Business :

At Indiana University, I teach undergraduates and they have managed businesses as well as researched the differences between virtual and real businesses. They also present their findings in-world. I’ve made the exercises more “fun” for them in that I give them 10 sites to visit and report on. This assignment allows them to become familiar with the space prior to working on the main assignment. The feedback from students has been positive. One student told me that took my section because he had heard about the assignment.

SL has allowed me to assist a colleague at Tuskegee University to expose his e-commerce students to virtual worlds. Each year, his students and mine conduct a virtual negotiation. My purchasing students would normally have to be the sellers as well as the buyers. This way, my students can experience virtual negotiations as the purchasers, while my colleagues students role play the sellers. I’ve also done this with a professor who was teaching a sales management class at Indiana State University, which is 1.5 hours from our campus. It has helped all of our students to understand and experience that business can be transacted at a distance.

What we also see in the thread is the power of collaboration whereby different educational institutions can work together within a virtual world environment such as Second Life.

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