USF School of Nursing Class in SecondLife

Today Dr Susan Penner of the USF School of Nursing invited me to visit her class's SecondLife projects.

I was thoroughly impressed by how much this professor and her nursing students were able to create in a few short hours on SecondLife. What made it especially impressive was the fact that Dr Penner had only a few months experience on SL and her students had never used SL before this class.

Last February, JJ Drinkwater, CeAire Decosta, Rudolfo Woodget and I presented a workshop about using SecondLife for the faculty at the University of San Francisco. Dr Susan Penner was among the faculty who attended this workshop, and she decided to incorporate SL into her next course

In September, I visited her first inworld session. None of her students had ever used SL before. She provided them with premade avatars and brought them inworld as a group during a regular class session.

They behaved like typical newbies, mostly trying to figure out how to walk, run, and change their appearance. SL and the USF computer network were not very cooperative, and they kept crashing.

Frankly, I left thinking they weren't going to be able to accomplish much, using SecondLife as just one aspect of a one-semester course.

Today I was invited to view their class projects. I was blown away - these total newbies, most of whom spent less than 20 hours inworld, had created interesting projects with good builds.

How did Dr Penner accomplish this? She used one of SL's major strengths - the willingness to share, teach and help that is such a striking part of our SecondLife culture. She teamed her students up with experienced SL builders, who were happy to share their knowledge, teach basic building techniques and help with the more advanced aspects of each project. This allowed her students to create builds that went far beyond what most could have accomplished in a single semester.

Here's what I saw:
A tatoo parlor that dispenses information about Sexually Transmitted Diseases. San Francisco recently started dispensing this type of information if real life tatoo parlors, so this build couldn't be more timely.








A tent that provides one-stop preparation for health workers being sent overseas in an emergency. Here they can get their inoculations, arrange their visas, and obtain other necessary information and equipment. If such places don't already exist in real life, they definitely should.









An ambulance that displays slides about the F.A.S.T. protocol for assessing trauma. FAST is a set of observational tests that are used by paramedics and first responders. Dr Penner created this project, working alongside her students.











An informational build for expectant mothers. It includes billboards about such topics as nutrition, fetal development, and government assistance programs for pregnant women and young children. In real life, a set of posters like this would be a wonderful addition to a medical clinic or WIC intake station. It's not possible for many nursing students to visit these facilities in real life, so visiting them on SecondLife is a useful substitute.

JISC & EDUCAUSE

Two major reports about virtual worlds and education

1. EDUCAUSE Review - Back to Virtual School
http://connect.educause.edu/er

Review by Lyr Lobo
http://ctusoftware.blogspot.com/2008/09/educause-reviews-back-to-virtual-school.html

2. JISC - Serious Virtual Worlds
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/seriousvirtualworldsreport.aspx

Author: Sara de Freitas

Publication date: 3 November 2008

Publication Type(s): Reports

JISC theme(s): e-Learning¹

The Serious Virtual Worlds report focuses on virtual worlds for educational uses, and explores the ‘serious’ – as opposed to leisure-based – uses of virtual worlds.

Internet Librarian - Implementing Web 2.0 at a Library

Looking back, it seems like I was so focused on my presentation that I missed a lot of excellent presentations at this conference. Too bad it wasn't on the first day instead of the last day. :-)

Implementing Web 2.0
The presenters spoke about how they do this at the Columbus Public Library.
I thought their job titles said it all, actually-- I don't think any libraries had job titles like this as recently as five years ago.

Joy Marlow - Digital Experience Analyst
Sam Davis - Applications Programmer

Challenges
Selling ideas to administratiors and staff
Your personal learning curve & your staff's learning curve
Keeping up with new technology
Bring customer along – if they don’t know how or don’t get what they want, they won’t use it
You’re at the mercy of 3rd party vendors & content providers – ex. Using twitter for updates on your site, when Twitter is down, your updates won't be visible to your staff and patrons
Terms of Use – copyright – for example, you are required to show attribution if you use blogger, google maps on your website
Unclear strategy – who will do it (implement) what will you do, how does it fit in, how does it fit into brand

Solutions
Engage your staff
Their staff is using the training program developed by Helen Blauer – Learning 2.0 – 23 things
Response has been very enthusiastic. They put short videos up on their staff website about people who are using the new technologies and how they are using them.
Engage your customers – Powertools page (blog—post “what technologies are you using, what would you see use do?)
Library toolbar
Believe in what you do – show your passion, to aqdministrators, to customers
Beta – experiment – Their toolbar is in beta, so people know it’s a work in progress, solicit feedback from customers, perpetual beta?

Tips and tricks
Prototyping – create working models of your applications, tools – give people something they can put hands on, look at – Cigtywaall – large multitouch stouch screen == Helsinki Finland – users can interact, move photos around, crop them, interactive—mulyi-touch, multi-functional – put prototype together using youtube videos, took cardboard bos, laptop, vwebcam

Let it be torn apart, get feedback, empowers customers, let’s tool keep making itself better

Don’t be afraqid to fail
Some of this stull won’t work

Keep up with the literacy

Library4joy
Monkey10@gmail.com


Sllverramtruck
silveramtruck@gmail.com

Internet Librarian - Branding

Greg Schwarz spoke about branding. I'd expected to hear about branding a library or organization, but this was about managing your perosnal online identity. It was besed on Greg's experience with his online identites of Planetneutral (blog) and gregschwartz (twitter).

Identity has two components:
What I say abut me
What others say about me -- this is the more important**

You do not own your online identity – but you do have ways to influence it

Personal branding – stuff you do to define who you are

Managing your online brand
1. Have a homebase. May be a blog, a website, a Ning. If you want to have your own domain, purchase your domain today, don't wait.
2. Own your username -- use a consistent username across the sites
3. Aggreagate your lifestream – provide a single place where somebody can go and find everything you do online – some sites that work well for this are Friendfeed, libraryland
4. Join the conversation – get online, get involved in various media
5. Follow what others are saying about you—Some ways to do this -- Google blog alerts (Google will email you whenever a blog mentions your name), technorati, twitter search feeds
6. Be authentic -- be yourself
Excellent presentation!!

Internet Librarian 2008 - Mary Ellen Bates

Mary Ellen Bates introduced a number of Internet tools that can be used to improve online searching.

GoogleTranslated Search
Allows searching in other languages
Very useful for those of us who only read English

Google Timelines has been improved
Now has authoritative dates
Gives timeline of mentions of word or phrase in Google news
Useful because you can limit your search to the specific time when a particular topic might be in the news

Google Graphing the news
Looks for frequency of a particular topic in news
#times people searched for wd or ph
Shows news volume
Shows where you were when you conducted the search
Relative # of mentions of search term by city
Useful for seeing when people cared about a topic

Yahoo SearchAssist
Gives suggestions for related or complimentary search terms

[yahoo brackets]=words in brackets must appear in the same order, but may have unlimited words in between

Yahoo Glue
in.search.yahoo.com
Google India's search result interface
Groups search results into related sections
Wikipedia box is by itself
Images in right column
Major websites such as How Stuff Works may be broken out (sites vary with query)
Blogs are broken out
Search results are listed

Live.com product reviews
Includes user reviews--broken out and classified

Live.com Prefer
Allows you to add an extra word to change relevance ranking
Does not change results
Ex: hybrid cars prefer convertible
Not an and or an or – dies not limit or expand - just re-sorts the search results

Searchme.com
Can help disambiguate works with multiple meanings
Ex: sun – breaks out astronomy, astrology, Sun Corp, computer, business, stocks

Powerset.com
Runs on Wikipedia
Another sense-making engine
Extracts meaning
Contains, makes, crops
Automatic search algorithm
Can be used to expand or narrow search based on meanings shown
Recently purchased by Microsft

Searchcrystal
Visual
Metasearch
Groups keywords in search results
Almost like a tag cloud
Can show where to go next – use as first tool

Carrot2.org
Lets you choose the clustering algorithm
Gives up to 400 search results (Normal is 100)
Default is Lingo algorithm, or you can choose from a list
Each algorithm gives somewhat different results

Silobreaker.com
Aggregates current news and tries to make sense of it
Shows hotspots on map
Related concepts
Background fact sheets on popular topics
You can narrow to just news on a particular topic (Environmental Science)

Searchcloud.net
Research engine
You input your search terms into a cloud
Larger the text you put your term in = the more important that term is to you

Loki.com toolbar
Used to locate public wifi networks near you
Looks at your ip addres & locates other public wifi networks
Does not run on Firefox 3

Surf.com
Web 2.0 rsearch engine
Runs a metasearch on web 2.0 tools
Gogleblog search, youtube, technarati, etc.

Twing.com
Searches discussion boards

How to find conference buzz
Figure out blog tag for this conference
Search technorati

Spokeo
Aggregator – pulls together everything you say about yourself in various media
Put in email address
Shows items about you from blogs, photoshop, sales on Amazon, flickr, Amazon wishlist, yout ube, Facebook, etc.

Internet Librarian

I'm at the Internet Librarian conference in Monterey, California. Oddly enough, the wifi in the Monterey Conference Center is terrible. I'd hoped to live-blog some of the speakers, but there was no connection available for any of the sessions I attended. There seems to be a good one up here on the 3rd floor of the Portola Hotel, so I hope this will go through properly. They announced that they will hold the next Internet Librarian here too, so I hope there is better wifi available for that one-- seems like it would be a given for an Internet conference.

There have been some great speakers here. Howard Reingold gave the keynote address this morning, speaking about how the web, cell phones, instant messinger, etc. connect people. He spoke about "flash mobs" where people use IM, Twitter and other online connections to organise action groups. Most of what he said was already familiar to me, because I follow him on Twitter andrecently heard him speak on SecondLife. But it was marvellous to hear him live.

Oxbridge Opens Very Soon

Desmond says Oxbridge may open for new avatars as early as next week. I am now faculty for the university group -- along with everybody else in Caledon who wants to be.

Reading the Names at 911 Memorial

On Sept. 11, I read the names of the dead at Hope's 911 Memorial. SL was being awful and logins were closed. Somehow I managed to slip in, but most of the other memorial participants didn't arrive until around 10. (It just occurred to me that perhaps being a premium member paid off here.)

Since nobody was there who knew what I was supposed to do, I improvised. Found a list of the names on the web, sat down on the stage (after some hesitation) and waited to do my thing. It was a really long list -- I had forgotten how many people died that day -- over 3000 names.

This was a commemoration of the police and firefighters. Chipmunk Zhang read several poems in memory of her brother, who died in the World Trade Center. Then I got up and started reading the names. Because sit and stand animations weren't working properly for me that day, I flew up and hovered a few feet above the podium.

Long, long list - divided into sections - with people's ages and occupations as well as their names. Names from nearly every ethnic group I could think of. All kinds of occupations. Police. Firefighters. Soldiers from the Pentagon. People on vacation. Many people from one financial organization - that company must have had one of the floors the planes hit in the WTC. Old people. Several students travelling with their teacher. A mother and her children, aged 8 and 3.

I came to the end of the list of Confirmed Dead, and then realized that there was also a list Reported Dead, and it was even longer. Section after section -- think it's finished and then realize there is another one yet to come. It went on and on.

It was an amazingly moving experience to read that list. Turned out I was only supposed to read the names of police and firefighters, but I'm very glad that nobody told me that until after I had finished. I hope they ask me back to do it again next year.

AJCU Virtual Reference

I've started doing virtual reference again for our library consortium. I'm only doing it one hour per week, which is much better than two. Finding it much easier now than before, I think probably because I'm much more comfortable in text chat now.

The first week I got two questions, handled both quite easily, received much gratitude from the patrons. (When I asked one if he'd like me to stay around while he tried using a database for the first time, he was almost pathetically grateful. He was a really nice young man, probably a freshman doing his first ever research project.) Second week was totally dead, no action at all.

It's interesting to remember that the original reason I got into SecondLife was that I wanted to do virtual reference here and compare it with doing it for AJCU. Maybe someday I'll actually do that. :=)

Aug. 30 -- Offline Day

Today was the first Offline Day, a new holiday that was devised by my friend Bucky Barkley. As you might expect, Offline Day is celebrated by not touching a computer on that day. I made it until about 10pm, then succumbed and got online. Withdrawals weren't too severe -- overall it was a nice peaceful day, quiet, a bit boring -- at some point it dawned on me that this was what I typical day was like before I discovered SecondLife. :=-)

Aug. 28 - Inquiry Based Learning in SL

At this week's InfoLit meeting, North Lamar discussed Inquiry Based learning in relation to his teaching in SL (see http://educatorscoop.org/).

In RL, North is Joe Sanchez, a PhD candidate at Universityof Texas Austin. He has a unique teaching style - he uses the principles of Inquiry Based Learning to encourage his students to develop and implement a project that is meaningful to them in sl. Rather than set up exercises to teach things like building, he mainly allows the students to learn whichever skills they feel are necessary to do a good job on their projects.

The class divides itself into project groups, and each group receives some land (I think he said a 1024 parcel) for their project. They are free to do whatever they wish with the land, including terraform it. Some past projects have included holding an "SL Idol" competition (which of course required learning how to build the stage and auditorium, how to stream a live performance, how to publicise and manage an event) building a lasertag facility (required learning about different types of sl ballistics, how to build the course, how to set up a business) and several service learning projects for sl nonprofit groups.

There are common areas on North's island too, including a river (with a supply of innertubes for tubing down it -- he sometimes holds class while everyone is tubing), a carnival (including several rides and a shooting gallery), an auditorium, meeting rooms, a plaza area. He also makes parcels available to other educators at a nominal rent.

Book Discussion: Coming of Age in SecondLife

On Sunday, August 24, the Steelhead Public Library sponsored a talk by the author of the book Coming of Age in
SecondLife, which is published by Princeton University Press.

The book's author, Tom Boelstorff is an anthropology professor at UC Irvine and editor of the journal American Anthropologist. His book is an ethnographic study of SecondLife, done in the same vein as classic ethnographic studies like Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa.

The transcript from this discussion is now online in Sky Qui's Blog - http://slresources.blogspot.com/2008/09/bukowski-discussion-published-online.html

The discussion was held in the Virtual American Anthropologist Amphitheater on Anteater Island, the UC Irvine Library's campus in SecondLife. We had over 50 people, which is a large crowd by SecondLife standards. SecondLife was very crowded that day and they had closed logins shortly before the discussion started, so many more people tried to come and were not able to get in.

I acted as moderator, using my SecondLife avatar Riven Homewood. Tom was quite impressive as he fielded questions and masterfully managed the chaos of a large online discussion done in text chat. We had a marvellously intelligent international crowd that included several anthropology professors and graduate students, and all in all it was a most interesting conversation.

The transcript will be published later this week in one of the major blogs about ethnography, but if you'd like a copy now please email rivenhomewood@gmail.com.

20-somethings and SecondLIfe

Very interesting thread going on among the blogs, about why young people don't like SecondLife

Alan Tan - 004: The Devil's Advocate
http://www.metanomics.net/07-aug-2008/004-devils-advocate

Prokofy Neva - Why The Kids Aren't Allright
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2008/08/why-the-kids-ar.html

Roland Legrand - How We Should Encourage Cheating Youngsters
http://twurl.nl/rtqsk3

Riven Homewood - Reply to Alan Tan [long]

Roflcopter Robonaught wrote:

> I do not wish to go out and find something to do, I have to do enough
>searching in the real world. I want to be entertained. Virtual worlds are
>supposed to be an escape from reality – Second Life is too close a parallel to
>the real thing.

Yes, I see your problem. SecondLife is all about finding something to do - it does not set up any entertainment or quest for you. You have to make your own. It appeals to creative people who like to build things and role play with their avatars. It appeals to people who like to make their own entertainment, rather than be entertained.

>As I have observed, the social dynamic that makes Second Life so
>disagreeable to myself is the underlying presence of a
> parent / teacer / >boss – child / student / employee relationship...
< I work for Cornell and... my avatar and behaviors are a reflection
> of my school and self...

Here again, we come back to SecondLife being what you make of it. If you are a student, a teacher, an employee or a boss in SecondLife, you will be in this relationship. If you choose to make your avatar a parent or a child, that is the relationship you will have.

This is why many people have multiple avatars for their multiple roles. The freedom to do this is part of what makes SecondLife so fascinating.

>During my earlier days in Second Life, I was chastised
> for having an avatar that was too other-worldly
[I'm told his avatar was a full-sized dragon]
> ...Additionally, I was also told not to disturb in-world meetings
> [by bursting] into dance while my supervisors were voice chatting.
> To be honest, receiving these reprimands made me feel childlike
> and inexperienced.

Sorry, that's because you were acting inappropriately for the role your avatar was in. Yes, one might say you were behaving in a childlike manner, in a way that showed your inexperience with both sl and rl expectations about professional behavior. That's all part of growing up. :-)

I've been to meetings on sl where we danced and chatted at the same time - it's a matter of what your organization thinks is appropriate. There are "dress codes" for appropriate avatars in various sl situations, just as there are expectations for appropriate dress and behavior in rl situations -- or in other virtual worlds such as World Of Warcraft or Everquest. If you choose to show up looking somewhat unusual and behave in a different fashion from those around you,you
are defining your avatar as an eccentric person. Might be good, might not be acceptable. This is one place where alternative avatars come in very handy.

Thanks for a very thought-provoking post! My guess is that in the future you may find sl more interesting - perhaps once the grapics catch up to what you have found in other games that don't do real-time animation, perhaps once you have sufficient life experience to value creating rather than being entertained. I've had the same experience you have of finding it's easier to plan a collaborative project on Skype - but in my case, having "met" the person on sl first was what made it easier for me. If you don't get the "talking to a bunch of ghosts" feeling online, then perhaps you don't need virtual worlds at all. You've given me a lot to think about.

DLS Retreat

The DLS Retreat is over! And it was quite successful. SL was a pig and kicked me out just as I was starting my demo, then my laptop wouldn't talk to the projector, but it all came right in the end. V & E were able to get in, so everybody gathered around and looked over their shoulders while I fussed and fiddled. They appeared to have a great time showing off their avatars to people who knew much less than they did. My work is done :-)

SL Education - Using Multiple Intelligences

Tuesday August 5
Real Life Education meeting at InfoLit School\
Demonstrated a built that illustrates Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences. Unfortunately, I came late and missed the talk - perhaps I would have gotten more out of the build if I had heard it. Fascinating concept - various workstations that will appeal to each of Gardner's various intelligences - numerical logic (a suduku puzzle), art (a pile of colored blocks), nature (animals and plants), kinesthetic (acrobatic animations), etc.

Fascinating idea, although I think the builds could be more creativly implemented. But I got the impression that this is a first draft and perhaps more creativity will come in time.

Something like this would make a great playground for SL beginners.

Stepping Into Literature Conference

I attended the Stepping Into Literature Conference on Monday Aug. 4 and Wednesday Aug. 6. This was an online conference about using SL to teach literature. The reason I went both days was that they had technical problems on Monday that prevented me from experiencing some of the events properly. In addition, I spent a while helping Vicki, who was attending also.

The highlight of Monday was a discussion about Grapes of Wrath at Rollig's sim, Only Yesterday. Rollig did a great job as discussion leader and had a very clever presentation object. It was a pile of cubes, arranged like building blocks, with different text or picture on each visible face of each cube. She had them rotating too, but rotating objects in the center of the discussion always make me dizzy and I don't think that was a good idea.

Wednesday was far more organized and went very smoothly. We had an awesome discussion group - we spent about half the session discussing Snow Crash and the rest discussing teaching in SL.

Great opening talk by xx about how she uses SL to teach literature and how other people are using it. Excellent panel discussion on Wednesday with Rocky, Cindy, Rollig and some other people.

There was also a presentation by an experienced SL developer who had some creative presentation objects on display. Turns out she is coauthor of the book I just bought on building and scripting. Also an old friend of Desmond's - he says Caledon will be featured in her next book, which is an introduction to SL for business people.

Vicki was unable to get her Voice working, so couldn't hear the talk. I took her to Oxbridge (less lag there and I wanted her to see it) and tried to help her, but no luck. When I asked the chat, the consensus was that she probably didn't activate her headset before opening sl. I'm not sure whether she was impressed by Oxbridge or not - not sure she really got it.

After Vicki left, I flew around Oxbridge taking photos. Saw Desmond Magic working, but didn't bother him. He sent me an offer to join the Oxbridge group - I was the third person to join.

Showed Sprout to Mindy on Thursday - she's already created a Sprout for one of her friends. Now if I could only figure out how to embed it in the blog. Bucky says Sprout is using Flash to create it's widgets, btw.

InfoLit School - Blogs

The InfoLit meetings resumed today after a summer break. We discussed blogging and shared experiences and tips.

At work, we had a Skype conference call meeting and planned the schedule for the DLS retreat. Participants were Pam, me, Sarah Jo, Sandra, Vicki and Eric.

Web 2.0 Tools for Educators

Another workshop that was one screen shot of a web 2.0 application after another, this time in SL for 2 hours. Done at Iste in sl voice.

Hope showed me the Lady Liberty sim and told me of her plans for a Sept. 11 event there. She wants to give September Project in SL a featured place in it. I hope I can pull this off.

CARL North Conference - Mashup the Library

A very intense day at Santa Clara University. Began with a presentation about the Horizon Project and their annual report that profiles important new technologies. Raymond Yee explained mashups and how they are created. Then came several workshops that showed screen shots of the websites of various web 2.0 mashup creation devices or websites that use mashups.

One of the most interesting features was an unplanned discussion of Encore, a web catalog add-on that provides a tag cloud to search on. The cloud for each item consists of a) every keyword in the title and lcsh 2) User-defined tags. The users must provide their university id and/or library card number in order to contribute tags, which essentially eliminates frivilous tags. You can drill down by selecting an item, selecting its tags, and following the trail. This provides a sort of boolean search capability. Also met Agnesa Cappalini, whom I have known on sl for some time.

Educause Round Table - Libraries in SecondLife

Attended the Educause Round Table because Loreli Junot was speaking about libraries in SL. Unfortunately, the people at the meeting preferred to talk about their own ideas rather than listen to Loreli. Rather sad to hear people saying "What we need is...." when it was often something already available from ALS or elsewhere.

However, I think Loreli, DaisyBlue and Krull were able to get the idea across that ALS has some awesome services to offer and it would be an advantage for university libraries to join their cooperative reference project. Krull passed out a free search tool that looks very useful. Saw Sheila Y there.

Poster Session at ALA

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Just got back from Los Angeles. The American Library Association conference was at Disneyland. (No joke.) JJ Drinkwater and I did two poster sessions about the Steelhead Public Library and the Caledon Library. Very well received - talked to many people who knew a little about SecondLife and a few who were actually using it.

I also had the opportunity to meet someone I had known inworld for sometime. That was a mavelous experience, and I hope I'll get to meet more of my sl friends as time goes on.