Website

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;

• A calendar of events
• Blogs for participants and teachers to post images quickly and simply
• A ‘Field Report’ form which can be filled out by teachers after each class.
• Details on the Avatar Lessons and Research, which will be updated extensively over the coming weeks, allowing Avatar staff, educators and researchers to collaborate creating an extensive ACTIVITIES/EDUCATION/RESEARCH framework.

Update

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.

Some images from the field

All are deliberately small to protect the identity of participants.

Field experience so far

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.

Tech Issues and Collection of Data from within Second Life

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.

Ideas for furthering of mental health and well-being aims

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:

• using Second Life to work with young people who have a hearing disability, with other hearing-disabled young people acting as mentors. This idea came about through our current work with a very talented multimedia student who has such as disability and who has done some wonderful work in Second Life
• Creating specific tasks within Second Life that refer specificially to mental health and civic engagement outcomes, such as creating a virtual time capsule exploring the current state of the world, the environment, and life for young people in these times
• Enhancing civic engagement by exploring visions of the future. For instance, one of our computer games classes is creating an “Evil Future Melbourne” in Second Life with a dark take on the city, parking inspectors etc and models of buildings like the Flinders Street station (it’s on the Victoria University island in SL if you’re interested). To that end we have made contact with the City of Melbourne with a view to deploying Second Life as an engaging way for young people to feed into the CoM’s Future Melbourne strategy (http://www.futuremelbourne.com.au/) described as: “a process for learning from the past and looking to the future to build a shared vision for the city. Through Future Melbourne, the City of Melbourne and its partners (including you) will develop a plan to help us achieve our shared vision.”

Layers of chat

One interesting observation from the project thus far is how many layers of chat communication are deployed by young people who use Second Life. There are at least three:

• the in-world public chat, which only works when one virtual character is in the vicinity of another, and can be seen by others in the world. Our observation is that this chat is used as a form of introduction, to break the ice with another character, and once a connection is made the conversation moves to a more private forum. What is interesting is that this seems to parallel behaviour in other environments, such as the making of connections in web forums that then move to Instant Messaging platforms for further conversation
• the in-world private Instant Chat, which does not depend on vicinity of the avatars to work, and cannot be seen by others. This is used to continue private conversation by two avatars who know one another
• external chat services such as MSN Instant Messenger. We are finding in the classes we run in Second Life that young people sometimes tend to defer to these services, even when used with other people who are also in Second Life with Second Life chat is available. We speculate that this may be because external Instant Messaging is ubiquitous and frequently used by young people, so it’s a familiar and established form of communication, with contacts and communication channels already set up. It also reduces the need to ’switch hats’ and duplicate communication environments - all contact can be conducted via the IM panel, whether with in-world friends or those outside the SL environment

Pilot stage initiated

The “pilot” phase of the Avatar project has commenced at a location which gives us access to young people from a range of socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds. We intend to work through both technical and research issues at this site, before unrolling the project to a number of locations. The location we are working in will give us an opportunity to engage with young people who are already motivated to explore virtual environments such as Second Life and World of Warcraft, as well as a number of young people who are only becoming aware of this new experience.

Researching mental health in a virtual world for teens

Our experience with Teen Second Life login processes suggests that we are probably the first Australians to work in this teen-only environment. That’s quite a unique, unexpected and exciting position to be in. But it also raises some interesting questions and possibilities for research, including:

• how do we frame our research when there are a lack of precedents in this area?
• how does a Second Life-type environment differ from other technologies in terms of how young people use it to construct/augment their identity and relate to others?
• what’s the impact of virtual worlds on life in the real world for young people?
• and what methods do we use to research this, given that environments like Teen Second Life carry with them a different set of constantly evolving tools and restrictions (eg ability to export transcripts of written chats/actions vs movement towards voice chat that doesn’t generate transcripts, ability to conduct in-world surveys and interviews and their merits/issues) as well as what mix we should engender between data collected from real and virtual contexts?

There’s a lot to think through now that the real project action is about to begin.

We’re in!

A breakthrough this week after a frustrating period of waiting - we are finally able to get our young people into Teen Second Life. TSL is the makers of Second Life’s ‘teen only’ virtual world, where we have bought an island.

As a result of Second Life’s age verification processes not working for non-US folks, we’ve needed to engage a developer who specialises in providing custom login processes. He has now finished his work, and we’re now officially ready to start working with our young people, and gathering research data.