Virtual Learning Worlds

I had a great time yesterday speaking at Drexel’s LeBow College of Business and the Villanova Center for Instructional Technologies to a wide variety of audiences. We had instructional technologists, assistant Deans, faculty members, other administrators, IT specialists, grad students, undergrads…a great sampling of the entire educational community. I hope everyone that attended a session found some portions of the talk useful and informative.

A few notes from the discussion portion of the talks:

• The possibility of using student presentations to assess assignments in Second Life. For example, we have an assignment where students create a poster. Several technical requirements need to be met in Second Life as part of the rubric. Instead of the instructor logging in and examining every student project to make sure the requirements are met, have the students present their poster, and illustrate to the professor that yes, the team did meet all the technical requirements.
• Drexel already has a presence in Second Life that involves folks from the Library. The library has a great program up and running where faculty can ‘rent’ or ‘borrow’ an avatar using a library computer running SL. This is a fantastic idea which could help ease people into the SL environment in a very quick fashion (no orientation island, no registration, just jump right in with someone present to help).
• The idea of intellectual property rights as it pertains to technology commercialization raises a lot of issues. Especially when you have students doing a lot of your SL development, some voluntarily, who go on to develop some sort of technology that could be commercialized. How do you handle this?

Slides from Wednesday

Special thanks to Cathy, Erik, and Jen for organizing the presentations.

This post isn’t very content heavy, more a support post for a virtual worlds talk I’ll be giving at Drexel’s LeBow College of Business and Villanova later today. I’ll post a summary sometime later in the week.

IST’s Second Life Portal
Be sure to check the “SL Resources” section for educational and development resources.

A few virtual worlds…
World of Warcraft
ToonTown
Club Penguin
There
ProtoSphere

A few tools to build virtual worlds…
Active Worlds
Multiverse
Croquet Consortium
SmartFox Server

Sloodle

Second Life Currency Exchange

This is by no means scientific, just a few hand-raising polls I conducted in my class a few weeks ago. My class is ~45 students, mostly freshman majoring in IST.

- 85%+ have Google Accounts. It seems that most of the accounts are used for Gmail. A handful of students are using Google Docs, and after a couple presentaitons on the Google toolset, I think a few more students will begin using Google Docs for team assignments.

- 80%+ have some sort of MP3 player. Seemed like just under 1/2 the class have iPods.

- 60% consider themselves gamers.

- Almost an even split among IE users and Firefox users. A pleasant surprise.

- 5-8% Mac users. That’s about standard.

- Laptops. It seems that most students DO have their own laptops based on the presentations we do. But if they don’t need to present, they don’t bring the laptops to class.

So what does all this mean for me as the instructor?
1. Since most students have Google accounts, the first barrier to entry is already overcome (authentication). One student suggested putting the assignments for the course in a Google Calendar that the rest of the class could subscribe too. Interesting idea, but now I’d be managing the assignments in two different places (syllabus + Google Calendar). Not sure if I’ll change it this semester, but an interesting idea.

2. I’m toying around with Podcasts quite a bit. I try and publish one at least once a week that supports the course, and each student is uploading a podcast assignment to our iTunesU space. We’re having a couple minor problems with iTunesU, but for the most part this is working rather well.

3. Laptops. I don’t know why, but this little piece of information (students have laptops but don’t bring them to class) is what interests me the most. I’ve gone ‘paperless’ for about 2 years now, taking my laptop to every meeting, class, event, or engagement related to work, and use it to take notes and do research on the fly when a question comes up. Personally I think it’s made me more efficient and better organized. Are students using the lab computers to take notes in some networked fashion (Googld Docs? ANGEL? something else?)? Are students taking notes with the ol pen and paper? Do students take notes anymore?

There seems to be a massive disconnect in the way we (educators, corporate folks, the ‘older’ crowd) utilize laptops versus our students and the younger generation. Mabye it’s just the nature of college vs. work life. I’ll need to go find some of our recent grads to find out if they have a laptop tethered to their shoulder now.

A colleague recently sent a blog post my way about the future of Second Life. Nothing major here, I’ve blogged before about Second Life going open source. I’m just curious how this is going to play out, and figured I’d post some personal thoughts on the matter.

Our college is involved with numerous open source projects that involve using things like Plone and Drupal. So I get a glimpse into these communities and know a little bit about how they operate. Everything is bottom-up in terms of design, development, and implementation. I guess this is due to no for-profit company owning the technology. Will the Second Life community really be the drivers for all of the open-source efforts, or does Linden Labs have its own agenda? I’ve heard some people accuse LL of simply looking for free labor from the community to help solve some of their problems with the Second Life technology. I don’t necessarily buy that.

LL has been talking about open sourcing Second Life for a long time now. Even though the article above paints a glowing picture…what’s the holdup here? I would recommend providing the development community the whole server platform and technology to experiment with. Some sort of affiliate program that requires an application and approval process. Get folks like IBM involved early so their technology folks can dive into the code. The time for talk about open sourcing is gone, just open it up. Even if it’s very limited to start with. I feel like LL is trying to exert too much control over this if they really want it to succeed following and open source model.

I was on www.secondlife.com today, and found information on something they are calling “Second Life Grid“. For long-time SL users, the Grid is what the entire server platform has been called for some time now. At the SL loading screen there’s a little box with information on the Grid, like status, current users, etc.

So what exactly is Linden Lab doing with this new program? It doesn’t look like I can actually purchase the server code and maintain my own server. I’ve glanced over the site, and I have found some information about APIs and service providers that I haven’t seen before…but that’s about it. One of my colleagues took a look over the site and uncovered what I didn’t see…

…this is a marketing thing. I’m sure “Second Life Grid” as a program has a few benefits, but it isn’t really anything new. I think this is just an effort to distinguish the original “Second Life” with “Corporate” or “Educational” second life. It’s all still the same Second Life, but by framing it under a different name/different program, Linden seems to be attempting to legitimize SL as a business and education platform. Will it work? I guess time will tell. My gut reaction is that this is something they should have rolled out years ago, not when companies are supposedly leaving Second Life.

I normally wouldn’t post this here, but since this is the second time around for the job posting and we’re all excited and antsy to get rolling on some things…

Serious game developer position at PSU

Great culture, good group of co-workers, lots of prototypes, and lots of fun. Feel free to email me if you have any questions or would like to know more.

Back to your regularly scheduled blog posts…

The semester is in full swing, so my posts have been lacking a bit. I have a lot of things I’d like to think through and write about, but I’ve been stuck in my office playing catch-up 2 of the 3 days this holiday weekend. As I work with some other folks here at PSU to build an educational gaming initiative, I keep thinking that an early push of the initiative will be small, educational flash-based games that follow in the mold of what many people call casual games. As an xbox owner, I have access to MANY casual games via xbox live (in addition to demos of upcoming games and some other goodies). So I was very interested when I recently came across a growth chart for xbox live:

This somewhat supports an earlier post that claims casual gaming is extremely popular.

But wait a minute, GameDaily claims that ~30% of xbox owners don’t even KNOW about xbox live:

The casual gaming market continues to grow, but there still seems to be a rather large awareness gap. If this gap closes, will we see the true explosion of the market many experts predict? Personally, I think we will, considering that many gamers are getting older and have less time to devout to gaming. Also, with devices becoming more portable AND powerful, it will be much easier to game on the move.

So where does this leave gaming in education? I think I’m going to continue to push for flash-based prototypes as our first projects for the Educational Gaming Commons at PSU. Games where students can enter, interact for 15-30 minutes, and get out, having accomplished something in the game, received feedback, and (hopefully) learned something along the way.