I’m a bit of a bowerbird and collect things on my travels around the web that I think might be useful or interesting (preferably both). I keep my video links at a site called Vodpod (www.vodpod.com). I’ve created a site within my site where I will keep my collection of video links that relate to this project – http://theavatarproject.vodpod.com/ - please feel free to browse…
Cheers
Deb
I’ve recently become part of the The Avatar Project team and I thought I should introduce myself. My name is Debbie McCormick but you will notice that my ’screen’ name is ‘Seeker Esparza’; Seeker is my avatar in Second Life.
I’m a PhD student at Monash University. My research background and interests are the interrelations of personality, identity and avatar customisation in virtual worlds. Although I’ve got a broad interest all virtual worlds I mainly ‘play’ in one called Second Life.
One of the main reasons I focus most of my research on or in Second Life is the support I get from being a member of the Second Life Educators (SLED) group. The group consists of more than 4,500 members, most of who are actively involved in education and/or research activities in or about Second Life. The mail discussion group is prolific, averaging around 900 posts per month . The number of educational institutions or their representatives that are conducting classes or research in the environment also continues to grow from a handful of pioneers in 2004 to more than 200 universities and colleges from around the world in 2008. Notable educational institutions with a presence ‘inworld’ include Harvard, Columbia and Princeton Universities in the USA; Lancaster and Leeds Metropolitan Universities in England; the University of Edinburgh and the University of Paisley in Scotland; the Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology (NMIT) New Zealand; Monash University, the Universities of Southern Queensland and Sydney, GippsTAFE and Swinburne University of Technology in Australia.
In May 2007 the inaugural Second Life Best Practices in Education: Teaching, Learning and Research conference attracted 1,300 attendees from all over the globe and thirty academic presentations were conducted by participants from countries including Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States. The conference was conducted entirely ‘inworld’ (in Second Life).
A solid base of research literature is being established and compiled (Annotated Bibliography of Second LifeOnline Educational Resources). Notable publications include a comprehensive report by Dr. Megan Conklin (2007) entitled 101 Uses for Second Life in the College Classroom that tables her experiences of planning and conducting lessons in Second Life and provides tips for planning and conducting educational activities and; a report on an Australian project called Virtual Worlds – Real Learning!(McPherson and Jolly, 2006) that was conducted in 2006 by GippsTAFE in Gippsland, Victoria. The excellent report from GippsTAFE provides a detailed perspective of both local and universal issues with specific reference to conducting an educational activity in Second Life.
My work on The Avatar Project will be to provide advice and assistance on research design and data collection, and to coordinate the collaborative production of project reports and papers. I will be writing something each week on this blog about what I’m doing so please feel free to add comments to any of my posts.
Annotated Bibliography of Second Life Educational Online Resources, PEPPER, M. ed., Purdue University, Website. http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~mpepper/slbib
Conklin, M. S., 2007. 101 Uses for Second Life in the College Classroom, Elon University, Elon, North Carolina. http://facstaff.elon.edu/mconklin/pubs/glshandout.pdf
McPherson, G. & Jolly, M., 2006. Virtual Worlds – Real Learning!, GippsTAFE, Victoria, http://www.flexiblelearning.net.au/flx/go/home/projects/2006/newpractices2006/pid/368
There is so much happening at the moment with the project I have started a blog where I can post all of my work, http://vuavatar.blogspot.com/
To summarise what is happening at the moment in the field….
- We are working with the Skoolaborate network of schools within Second Life.
- This includes projects such as a machinima theatre with a Japanese school, a ‘mood ring’ which captures students emotions about what they are doing, and a virtual mall where the kids will create and sell their own products.
- I am also creating a comic book type lesson and working on our activity and research framework with our new researcher Debbie. This should evolve over the year into a comprehensive lesson plan which can be modified to satisfy various mental health outcomes.
- We have a new adsl connection in at Debney Park and will be commencing classes over the coming weeks (machinima).
- We have a new teacher/counsellour called Grace who will be helping us in the field.
- I have continued to work on www.avatarproject.org, there is now a gallery here – http://www.avatar-project.org/?q=node/20
Now that we are able to work with young people in Teen Second Life for the Avatar project, we are facing what may well be the biggest issue of the project: how we approach working with under 18s in that environment. It’s coming to the fore now that we are involved in the Skoolaborate partnership, which is run by secondary school teachers – and also because we’re doing the intensive two weeks at a Western high school with a very diverse student body.
Questions come up like: how much freedom should we allow in the world? Should we let the kids try out the virtual world as they want to? Do we ban any desire to create and play with weapons And if so, at what point? How much should we try to steer activities and interactions? How do we avoid too much censorship of young people’s self-expression? (etc etc)
I think this is especially important for us because we’re not secondary teachers. Our work with VU’s TAFE students has worked well because that’s more or less our home turf, and they’re young adults who are seen as mature enough to guide their own decisions. But I think it’s a lot more fraught when dealing with younger folk.
We want our activities to be a combination of responsible and real – to recognise and work with what young people are into, yet not fall into traps. Our next steps will be to discuss this with VicHealth and the teachers we’re working with and I imagine will form the basis of some kind of position statement from us about this.
A little bit of info about our website at http://www.avatar-project.org
It is now set up as a drupal portal designed to make catching all of our data as simple as possible.
This includes;
Another quick update, there really is so much in the works at the moment it’s hard to go through it all. In brief;
- We are close to completing our ACTIVITY/EDUCATION/RESEARCH framework, which plugs directly into the desired outcomes in the Vichealth framework. This will also allow us to form partnerships in all three areas. To summarise what is happening in those areas;
- Activities
We have a range of activities planned which address many of the individual intermediate outcomes in the Vichealth framework, as well as educating people up to the point where they can truly immerse themselves in this new environment and express themselves.
We are talking to the City of Melbourne about working on the Future Melbourne project with them, something we did quite successfully with TAFE students this year as a trial. The results of this can be seen at http://www.melbourne2051.com. We will also be teaming up with Skoolaborate, a preexisting international Teen Second Life community which has many group activities(international schools are collaborating to build everything on the islands, including several we are taking in.)
- Education
We are piloting the program at a Northern School over the coming weeks after testing a lot of the lessons all year in classes at Vic Uni as well as at the Western school.
Now that we have a clear curriculum of activities we are in a position to match them directly with the desired learning outcomes in these schools.
There are at least two more schools willing to take part in the program, and more who are enquiring, I don’t think too many schools would be saying no at the moment.
I also have a meeting with an educational partnership group who may be interested in assisting us to extend the program to other schools.
- Research
Dr John is working on researching our activities, as well as the methods of research. The framework we have built will allow us to also get a lot of other researchers involved across a variety of areas, all supporting each other. We have very considerable interest in this area, and several meetings over the coming week.
All are deliberately small to protect the identity of participants.
This is about the field experience we have had so far.
So far we have worked with two main groups. The first group was in the Western suburbs and consisted of kids who had dropped out of high school. When we told them we would be working in Second Life, a few of the kids were quite excited, mainly at the prospect of making money.
One pattern was immediately clear, most of the guys wanted to belt around shooting each other, whereas the girls in the class spent much of their time making their avatars look prettier. Most of the students responded very well to us being their, and appreciated it, but then started to lose interest due to the technical hitches we were having. It will be good to return there next year now we have the full mobile lab ready.
The second Northern school we have had a slightly more positive experience which is ongoing at the moment. Many of the kids there are well versed in games like World of Warcraft and Halo, and one had even been in Second Life before. The immediate level of skill shown by these kids (who are turning up voluntarily in their lunchtimes). A couple in particular, a girl and a buy(who have a temperamental relationship) have both shown a keen interest, they are both smart, but I believe they also possibly come because it gives them a way to socialise.
I am getting along very well with all of the students, the environment at the north school is fantastic, with supportive staff and a creative educational culture which has the kids wanting to learn. It has certainly changed my perception of public schools. The future projects we have planned for this Northern school included a machinima theatre and production studio, as well as working on the Future Melbourne project building what they would like to see as part of a Future Melbourne. The students are excited about this, and we will be doing a two week intensive shortly during which we will begin these activities. The kids attitude towards the research aspect of what we do seems to be fairly casual, I think most don’t really care how things get to them, just that they do, and a few consider us to be ‘the guys from Second Life’ which although inaccurate is not such a bad thing.
More to come shortly, I have a lot to catch up on now I can log in.
This post is about a few of the technical issues we have been through, which has basically been how we have trialled the program this year to try and establish a presence in what is new territory for youth and technology in Australia. To our knowledge, we are the only group in Australia who can give teens(14-17) access to the Teen Grid of Second Life, and this has been quite an interesting journey in itself.
Our first experience was to trial teaching Second Life out at a Western School for 16-18 year old school leavers. The general idea was that they would be an ideal group to engage with and put into a new environment. Most of the kids had heard of Second Life, and were in particular keen on the money making element of it. Working with very small samples using our avatars, an immediate trend developed where the males were shooting each other, and the females working on their avatars.
We then ran into several issues as we tried to move beyond a basic demonstration and involve the kids on a deeper level.
These issues included;
Bandwidth – It was so bad that many of the students avatars were appearing unclothed (not so much naked as like a blank barbie doll) and movement within Second Life was impossible.
Graphics cards – The computers were not really good enough to run Second Life, and due to a combination of borderline graphics cards, limited RAM and slow processor speeds they crashed often.
Unfortunately what this meant, was that the experience the kids had was not very engaging at all, very similar to trying to use the internet on a 56k modem. Many were migrating back to the net during class, playing flash games and the like online because at least they ran properly (Pacman was one example). Myspace was also commonly used.
Other issues which were going to effect us continuing the program included;
The School network in Victoria has the ports Second Life requires blocked (security reasons) meaning that generally, high school students cannot access Second Life.
Second Life itself had no provision for Australian teens, meaning we had to get our own front end registration page developed, allowing us to approve and register teens. (We have had this created, still a few bugs but it’s getting there and will be incorporated into the website).
Our conclusion from this experience was that we needed to look into sorting out a ‘mobile lab’ system which would allow us to take Second Life wherever we went.
At that point we had one wireless broadband modem, which we traded for a couple of 3g wireless modems, which have proven much quicker. We currently have 7, and will be getting more to equip schools which have sufficient facilities so they can access the Avatar Project Island.
I think one of the things that perhaps needed a change in mindset was just how close to the cutting edge we are, and how much that is going to cost us in terms of the technology. Initially we were looking at venues which could handle Second Life, even Internet Cafes, I think all of us thought we could find a solution, but in the end we just had to do it all ourselves.
The other thing in relation to having the mobile lab was to get 5 laptops (four more) so that we didn’t have to rely on the school’s facilities. What this means now is that in conjunction with the schools who do have the facilities (one Northern School is ordering graphics cards) we will be able to engage a reasonable community of teens in this virtual world across several locations.
COLLECTING DATA FROM SECOND LIFE
(Just the technical side, there is a lot more data collection happening ‘physically’ through Dr. John Martino)
Collecting data from within Second Life has also been quite interesting.
Initially the idea was to monitor the text chat from within the virtual world, as well as avatar visit times. We have set up a feed which collects this information from Second Life, and emails it to the Avatar Project website where it is stored in a hidden database.
However the issue with this method of collecting data is, it doesn’t catch terribly much for us at the moment. All the people we have engaged so far have been in the same physical location, meaning they just talk rather than use text chat, and if people do use the text chat, they will use private messaging which cannot be ‘collected.’
The visit times will obviously prove more useful in the future, and the text chat logger can be used for things like meetings and group forums, however we needed more focussed ways of collecting data which was relevant to the key themes and outcomes in the Mental Health Promotion Framework.
The approach that we have ended up with, based on some ideas from around the global SL education community as well as the project so far and some classes we have done this year at Victoria University, is to run projects which are directly linked to those key themes and outcomes.
For example – Lessons
Basic lessons include;
Placing a photo of themselves within Second Life, and taking a ’snapshot’ of their avatar in front of their real life photo.
Basic building exercises, which include building a house, building scripted objects like spinning globes, and gradually learning to build over several weeks. Any interested student so far has been suprisingly quick at picking it all up.
Building something they would like to see in a Future Melbourne. Then…Working with the City of Melbourne to have young people create a virtual Future Melbourne in Teen Second Life, based on what they want in the Future.
This project will achieve many of the programs outcomes, involving the young people in community and group activities, and giving them a sense of civic engagement, as well as valuing diversity and controlling one’s life.
Students from my Interactive Storytelling class are just completing a similar project (an evil Melbourne) – I will post more details about that when it is complete, within a week.
Machinima cinema
A Northern School will be building a machinima cinema where their students work can be exhibited, culminating in an Virtual Film Festival for teens later next year (2008).
I still have to post about the actual human experience which I will do tomorrow, hopefully that’s a lot of the tech stuff out of the way.
Today Dale (our Second Life builder) and I discussed ideas for extending the usefulness of our work in Second Life, based on both our Avatar Project activity and the multimedia classes we are running in Second Life. Some of these are:
