New mesh avatars

(Written in September 2014, edited/pictures added March 2015)

The semester has just begun, and I'm pleasantly surprised with the gratitude I've been seeing with students, unsolicited. I get thank yous from students, sometimes at the end of semesters, though, there have been years when such is not expressed.

But this very first week, I've had several online students thank me for the checklists I set up for the weekly work, and for the helpful organization of my Desire2Learn site and with my online assignments. And emails thanking me when I send out reminders.

I'm not saying this hasn't happened before. But it just seems to be taking place more frequently, especially in the first week, than I recall taking place in previous years.

But that's not really what I want to focus on with this entry.

Linden Lab last May introduced new standard avatars that use mesh rather than prims for skins and clothing. Fitted mesh makes the avatars look more realistic than the previous default avatars, which are still available, but labeled "classic."

So, that sounds beneficial for new users, such as students starting a new semester. Yeah, well, not so much.

Here's the problem. They are very difficult to alter. One of the tasks that I have students complete for their orientation is to grab some free stuff at the Virtual Ability Island and try some new clothes or accessories.

Doing so has never been a problem in previous semesters. The instructions Virtual Ability Island display are clear and easy to follow, and the avatars are easily manipulated. Furthermore, I gave them the opportunity during an early scavenger hunt to go grab some free clothes, hair and avatars at the University of Cincinnati Bookstore (which has since disappeared :(.

This semester, though, was problematic. With these new avatars, changing shapes and clothes is very difficult. Students found it near impossible to manipulate their avatar and make it their own.

Now, I'm not having them change their avatars for spurious reasons. Based on my experience, and on research (more later... meanwhile, here's a more casual but interesting blog posting in Scientific American: "My So-Called Second Life: Are You Your Avatar?"), residents who bond with their avatars become more invested in them, connect more fully with them, and thus have a richer experience in world. And for an online class where we meet two hours a week minimum, that's really important. When the class begins to become stressful (and it always does--it is college, mind you!), students who are comfortable in their virtual skin are much more likely to stick it out and use the class meetings to their advantage.

Next semester, I think I'll have everyone grab the classic avatars, until the mesh ones are ready for prime time.

Update: Spring 2015 semester, I did ask students to go classic, and the customization of avatars during orientation went much smoother.

Roger and Me

A couple weeks ago (to be precise, on 6/17), Roger Ebert tweeted the following: "Find me a person who would value any video game above 'Huckleberry Finn,' and I'll show you a fool." As you can imagine, gamers lit Twitter, his blog, and their own with a wildfire of responses (one of his blog postings had over 4000 comments!). And then finally, Ebert relented, admitting that he shouldn't really be commenting on video games when he has had little experience with them.

The discussion led me to thinking about my own experiences with Huck Finn and video games.

My first memory of Twain and Huckleberry Finn go back to Christmas 1965, when I was in third grade, and my family lived in the Sierra Nevada foothills, the town of Oroville. My grandmother and grandfather Lyons had given me a handsome edition of the book for Christmas, and my father read it to us, one of the only times I remember my dad reading a book to his four children. I especially recall my father almost rolling on the floor laughing when reading the chapter "Was Solomon Wise?"

Jump ahead a decade to my first year in college, a few years after my father's death, a year out of high school, when I had always planned on majoring and working in the sciences, probably some form of physical chemistry. What I found, though, in that first year at Diablo Valley College, was that I really didn't want to pursue science. The work just didn't interest me as it had when in high school, for some unfathomable reason. I even took a disliking to math while taking a trig class, something I had thoroughly enjoyed up to calculus in high school.

It wasn't until I took a class on Mark Twain the second semester, that I realized my interests were much more focused on literature than on science, that I was much more interested in reading about science than in doing it. I was more engaged in works of imagination than in works of the physical world.

Now jump forward another fifteen years. My oldest son at ten years old bought a Nintendo Gameboy with his paper-route money. A number of evenings after work selling real estate, or just starting my career in teaching in community colleges, I would sit on our couch surrounded by my four children as we all watched me maneuver Mario through the little screen images of Super Mario World, jumping, running, flying, knocking turtle shells, and so on. All of us were immersed, engaged in that little 2-3 inch screen, watching that little plumber negotiate the obstacles of a rather unfriendly world.

Now was that video game as rich an experience as reading Huckleberry Finn? In many ways, of course not. A simple game on a little screen does not compare to the rich world along the Mississippi River filled with round characters that Twain creates. Or of any of the rich narratives that my children and I experienced together as I read dozens of books aloud to them. But in both cases, father and children experienced a world of imagination together, laughed and held their breaths together, talked and enjoyed being with each other.

You see, I'm convinced that the use of imagination in placing oneself into an virtual world, or as Tolkien calls it a secondary world--being immersed, lost in, enveloped by that world--is the key to engagement in a number of media. One doesn't become engaged in page after page of words, tiny screens of choppy images, models floating through a star scape on a black and white TV--even the most sophisticated imagery available today on an HD TV or digital theater, whether in video games or film--without placing oneself imaginatively into the midst of that world, becoming immersed in it. One cannot be surrounded by a virtual world literally. One can only imagine being so.

Consequently, the idea that children playing video games are mindless vegetables compared to those who read I find wrongheaded. A child cannot become immersed in a video game without using his or her imagination any more than he or she can with a book.

And I think that's the key to success for MUVEs, MMOGs, virtual worlds--being able to believe, again as Tolkien says, while in the world, that what takes place is reasonable given the initial setup of that world. I rationally recognize that my avatar in Second Life, Profdan Netizen, is not me, it's a blob of pixels on a server. And I know that anyone I interact with in SL is one removed from their avatar, just as I am. But with my imagination, I secondarily believe, and am hence immersed in that secondary world while I'm there, and hence can experience it as I would a rich novel, a vivid video game, or a well crafted movie.

But I also see, as I contemplate my relationship with Huck Finn and video games, that social interaction is crucial to the experiences. My father reading to me, my mother buying me books, even when it wasn't a special holiday (I remember one afternoon coming home to find three paperbacks arranged carefully on my bed--the Lord of the Rings). Reading to my children and playing video games, from Gameboy to Nintendo in all of its variations to Playstation. Although reading and playing video games often are solitary affairs, just as often they were social events in my family. The communal nature of collectively exercising our imaginations and entering a secondary world together magnified the immersion--same is so with watching TV or going to a movie together.

Jump ahead another twenty years. I now find myself working with students in a virtual world. As I've mentioned in earlier entries, I've taught online for a dozen years in the 2D world of the Web and learning management systems like Blackboard and Angel. All along, I've found the lack of space in the online educational experience to be a serious deficiency. Why? Yes, I've been able to work on writing with students as a community through 2D apps. But I've found the experience to be detached, imaginatively shallow, no sense of place. A big part of it has to do with the likelihood that who we are, what we are, what we do are all mightily influenced by geography. As Annie Dillard mentions at the beginning of An American Childhood, "When everything else has gone from my brain--the President's name, the state capitals, the neighborhoods where I lived, and then my own name and what it was on earth I sought, and then at length the faces of my friends, and finally the faces of my family--when all this has dissolved, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that." I've always thought that having an online world to work in, much like the worlds of a video game (hopefully more friendly than Super Mario World!), would enrich the experience, help students enjoy more fully the class, and give them an imaginative anchor--a topology of place--that would keep them in school more effectively than does 2D online learning.

Social interaction and imagination--both bring us back to virtual worlds. Both are essential to the richness of Second Life and other MUVEs and MMOGs.

Some students get imaginative/social interaction right off with Second Life, many don't. Part of it, I think, is the newness of the medium, much as many students didn't get working with a community of writers online twelve years ago. But I'm wondering what I might do to help students recognize the MUVE as a place of the imagination that will build community and exercise mental skills which improve their writing.

Face it, without a well developed imagination, one cannot write effectively.

Orientation for First Year Composition students

This last Tuesday, I held my first orientation session for WRIT 121 students on Second Life. After going over some reasons why we're using SL, I had them all visit the Virtual Ability Island sign in web site.

One of the problems I find with helping students start up a new account in any online application is that in order to be familiar with the process, you have to do it, and it's often difficult to reapply after having done so. I've avoided creating a new avatar that I'll never use just to show others how to do so.

Which leads to the problem we encountered. I assumed that if you signed up for SL through Virtual Ability Island, that once you had created your avatar, it would be dropped onto Virtual Ability Orientation Island. Well, I missed something, because when students signed up. there was no link to jump to the VA Island. So I had students open the SL viewer and log in. They were sent to a public help island and couldn't get off, even if I gave them the coordinates.

I tried different things, such as giving them the slurl and a TP as an attachment. Neither worked. The only thing that did was my offering a TP to each individual avatar.

So it took quite a bit more time just to get them to the orientation island. Once I got them all there, things went smoother, beyond the occasional scream and panicky request to help someone redress their naked avatar!

Most students got through the orientation fine, but many spent quite a bit of time adjusting their appearance and I had to goad them to move on. The good thing, though, is that everyone seemed to have a good time figuring things out.

No pictures--I was too busy putting out fires in RL and SL!

Notes from a conference

Earlier this week, I attended the East Carolina University conference, "Virtual Worlds in Education," which took place in SL. What follows are some notes I took while participating, notes in various states of development and commentary, along with a few snapshots.

11/10--first session on Digital Cinema, waiting for it to start 16 minutes in. Finally someone shows up and puts a slide up on the screen, "The Aesthetic Camera: Introduction to Cinema Arts." Chatted with a techie through the first half of the session, trying to figure out why I wasn't getting any audio from the speaker. Logged out and then back in. That worked--Mencius Watts (John Filliwalk, Ball State) showing video equipment you can use to record in SL, dolly, steadicam, boom. Students can collaborate in using equipment to make movies. Sounds like it would be a lot of fun!



Also mentioned a NY museum in SL that has over 100,000 items in a database. Worth checking out, at Brooklyn Is Watching.

1:15--an informal forum about using SL for credit classes. I didn't take any notes. I did, though, take a snapshot:



2:30 RIT Island teaching projects--Katie Sismondi (Katie McDonald) presenter, took participants on a field trip where we teleported to RIT Island:



and looked at three projects created for students:

engineering--tensile tester simulation
math--equation editor
Java--multithreaded server

This is the tensile tester simulation.

This is a floating platform where a group of students can meet and work an equation editor that displays on a screen over their head.



These two shots are of the multithreaded server display.

All three were hands on--in other words, you could test or use the objects. The tensile test simulator was particularly created for first year engineering students so they could experiment with the strength of different metals years before they'd be allowed to touch the actual multi-thousand dollar equipment in RL. The equation editor was set up to work with groups, though they're still having problems with getting it to work right. Sounds a lot like our math instructors at LCC and their difficulties with equation editors in Blackboard and Angel.

3:45--another informal forum, again on teaching in SL. I tried to attend other forums, but no one showed up for them. Basically, it was a time for instructors to share what they were doing. One avatar mentioned that filesharing is difficult in SL. Another suggested that Netmeeting and flash video used together is faster than SL. And another mentioned the use of Adobe Connect for web conferencing. However, many argued that the 3D presence of land, buildings, objects and avatars created a social presence and engagement that couldn't be duplicated by 2D applications.

11/11--12 p.m. "Enhancing Social Context for Learners at a Distance: E-mmediacy Strategies in Second Life"--the Second Life URL (SLURL) for the session on the program was wrong, so it took 15 minutes to find session.



E-mmediacy--feeling connected with students and instructor in a computer mediated environment

The presenter (Patricia J. Slagter van Tryon) asks, "What problems have you encountered with feeling connected with each other in an online class?" She gave a list of reasons, which I didn't jot down. One not mentioned is that students don't want "connectedness"--some just want to do the work and get out. These students dislike synchronous participation and want only asynchronous, and time spent of "team building" they resent.

One thing she mentioned that seemed reasonable is that "episodic immediacy is necessary to create community." It's not enough to interact, both with instructor and each other, in the beginning of an online class. It has to take place throughout the semester.

2:30 p.m.--"Credibility in Fantasyland: Realists among Fantasists, a Problem for Educators in Virtual Worlds"



An interesting session, though the presenter, S.A. Mousalimas from Oxford University, read Powerpoint slides, and wasn't very generous with specific examples. He also got rather flustered from our asking questions.

His main point is that many come to virtual worlds to escape the real world, and sometimes have difficulty with reconciling their use for real world work. This isn't a problem in games, such as World of Warcraft, but can be a problem with Multi user virtual environments (MUVEs) when education might be the purpose.

An even more interesting issue he brought up is that SL sites and objects must be evaluated for credibility, just as one must do with research found on the Web, that an SL land owner can create something that looks good, authentic, and appears to be backed by legitimate cultural or scholarly expertise when in actuality he or she may have no real expertise or background. Or it could be fake on purpose, to deceive others, as is the case for the Martin Luther King website created by the white supremacist group Stormfront.

In other words, he cautions against fake education sites or fake cultural sites, such as Native American sites that are created by people with no Native American heritage. He mentioned one authentic SL resident, Nany Kayo, Native American, citizen of Cherokee Nation. He was very vague, though, on what was considered non-authentic. He first suggested that only those who are registered with a tribe are authentic, but being part Cherokee, I know full well that many with Native American heritage never registered for various reasons, such as not wanting to be shipped off to Oklahoma!

He did give one example from the 1980s where, in a multi-user dungeon (MUD), a male psychologist pretended to be a female doctor and counseled women online.

Educators need to verify authenticity and assess credibility in virtual worlds before sending students. Or even better, have students find evidence of credibility to evaluate the effectiveness of a site.

He also suggested that educators should spend ample time in world before bringing students. When pressed by yours truly what "ample time" meant, he suggested six months. The more time I spend in SL, the more I agree. Otherwise, using SL in education will be haphazard. And six months sounds about right--that is, unless you're on sabbatical and are able to spend more time per day than otherwise!

3:45, final informal forum which was pretty well attended.



One avatar suggested developing notecards of how to do stuff to hand out to students when they get stuck. Another suggested the Second Life Wiki and YouTube videos as excellent tutorial tools. And even another suggested using Global Kids PDF tutorials (though I've yet to be successful in finding what he or she meant). Finally another mentioned the use of Fraps for capturing machinma (video/animation of SL activities).

So overall a worthwhile conference, especially since this was the first conference in SL that ECU had hosted.

Entry point in Second Life

Adding 2 gig of RAM made a big difference in roaming around SL. I am now able to move around, watch buildings rez (appear) in reasonable fashions, listen to live music at the Blarney Stone pub in Dublin,



explore some education sites, such as Angel Learning Island and Terra Incognita, without any interruptions, get roasted slowly on a rotisserie at the West of Ireland island,



and still have email, and music playing in the background.

However, with continued research and exploration, I'm finding the whole virtual world situation quite overwhelming. Here's a video that shows screenshots of 50 different virtual worlds currently operating or in private Beta:



Obviously, the development of virtual worlds is very much on the frontier. But they seem to be expanding exponentially, as is suggested by the term metaverse. Though metaverse basically means a 3D world that has "no specific goals or objectives," and is usually meant to describe a self contained world, like Second Life, it seems actually to be morphing more into the expanding landscape of multiple virtual worlds, including massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPG). This exponential expansion leads to a steep learning curve for those just getting started in considering their use in education, at least it seems so to me at this point, even with my sabbatical opportunity to devote significant time to exploration.

What I'm having most difficulty with is an entry point into using SL for online classes. As I mentioned in an earlier posting, Sarah Robbins requires students to use SL, and to meet as a class twice a week, minimum. I understand her reasoning--again, if students aren't required to use it, they won't--and I agree. However, making SL the primary "place" for the class means that the instructor has to have significant experience with the application. Now, I don't have a problem with getting to that point as an instructor. However, I've found--both for myself and other faculty who aren't ubergeeks (and I mean that in the most respectful way possible!)--that playing with online tools, software, applications gradually is the most effective way of getting my feet wet. Then from semester to semester, I add more where I see benefit.

I did so with discussion board, chat, sending documents, assignments on the web--through DIWE, AltaVista Forum, Blackboard, Angel and so on. And I've always encouraged other instructors at LCC just to start simply as an entry point into incorporating online applications into their classes, trying one thing in Angel, such as posting assignments, or playing with a discussion forum and then adding another the next semester.

So can one do so with SL? What is the entry point into using the application among the other online tools an instructor has at his or her disposal? That's part of what I need to discover in the next week or so.

Second Life and Twitter

I've been researching the two ends of the social networking spectrum this week. On one end is the one-note wonder of Twitter, a form of microblogging that does one thing--allows users to broadcast their response to one single question, "What are you doing?" And in 140 characters or less.



On the other end is Second Life, the 3D immersive world where users can explore an online environment with an avatar, like a video game.


(from Oakton Community College web site)

I've been playing with Twitter the last few weeks. As is mentioned by several who try to explain Twitter, most don't get it at first: who cares what you're doing, or what I'm doing. And each tweet (post onto Twitter) often does seem inconsequential. But by watching the stream of tweets over a period of time, one develops a sixth sense about one's friends, as Clive Thompson at Wired puts it. Here's an interesting metaphor he uses:

"It's like proprioception, your body's ability to know where your limbs are. That subliminal sense of orientation is crucial for coordination: It keeps you from accidentally bumping into objects, and it makes possible amazing feats of balance and dexterity.

Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination."

Also, there are a couple of Twitter tools that are fascinating: Twittervision, which allows you to see what people are tweeting all over the world, and Twitter search, which allows you to see what people are tweeting about a particular subject right now. If you want an active search right now, just type in Sarah Palin!

Education-wise, I haven't really wrapped my head around how I might use Twitter, though I did just think of a way to use Twitter search, to see if an issue that a student might want to write about is being discussed in our society right now. And there are a number of suggestions posted on a couple blogs: AcademHack and and Web 2.0 Teaching Tools that I'll likely explore more fully later.

Second Life (SL) is much more complex, of course, and central to the issue of online education since it creates a virtual world within which to operate, well beyond what course management software (CMS) does, as I've mentioned before. It has the potential to create a sense of place and embodiment that CMS's cannot even approach. There is a scad of stuff online about education in SL: Second Life Education or SLED has an official Linden Labs wiki of educational resources. And Angel has their own island where faculty can go to explore the use of teaching in a virtual world.

I watched with particular interest a lecture given in SL at a conference about education by Sarah Robbins, an advocate for SL learning for the last couple years. She argues that the use of SL can enhance student engagement and hence foster deeper learning and better retention than what takes place in a typical CMS online class. I've had a suspicion for a number of years that a more immersive, less desk-top, environment would do so. I had pursued the possibility of using MOOs in online classes to enhance a sense of there-ness, but always found the learning curve too steep to walk students through for a completely online class.

So in October, I expect to spend quite a bit of time in SL, both for further research--I've found a good number of sources are "in-world"--and to see if I find the learning curve doable.

Also, I'd really like to see how community colleges do this. Robbins works at the university level, speaks with and meets each student in SL before they can register, advertises the class as an SL online course, and hence can require a certain level of computer equipment, especially the need for high speed Internet. Also, she in essence teaches the class synchronously. In other words, students are required to show up two nights a week and participate in class, just as they would in f2f.

Obviously, many CCs don't have quite the flexibility she notes. I do, though, think that our administration would be open to some experimentation, especially if it's linked to engagement and retention. However, our institution's disdain for synchronous online learning would have to be overcome. Also, Robbins suggests that an instructor would have to require SL in order for it to work. If you make applications that are central to the activities of an online class optional, they will not be used. I'm curious how CCs deal with requiring higher end equipment and plan to explore more fully community colleges and community college groups that use/promote the use of SL.

Creepy Treehouse vs. Functional Mall

I've been exploring web 2.0 in a scattershot manner this week (I warned you!), reading about Facebook, exploring ning, comparing delicious with diigo and playing with goodreads.com. But I do keep coming back to the issue of social networking. I at some level understand the use of social network sites, such as Myspace.com and Facebook as a pastime, or a way to keep in touch with friends and family, though I've yet to try either (I will soon, both for the needs of this project, and so my children will quit bugging me to get on Facebook!). And virtual worlds like Second Life take such interaction to a new level with a more immersive experience, reminding me of a nascent virtual reality found in the Tad Williams' Otherworld novels.

But my overriding question--what has this all to do with education? Here's a quotation from an Inside Higher Ed article "Will Colleges Friend Facebook?" that deals with the issue:

"Online social networking and 3D simulations between faculty and students may help colleges and universities foster a stronger sense of community in the class, regardless of the physical limitations imposed by class size, or the interpersonal limitations contingent upon traditional markers of experience and identity through race, class, gender, etc." (my italics)

One of the complaints I've always had about course management software, like Blackboard or Angel, is that it's disembodied, that students have no sense of place with online classes. Even with the most well designed class in a CMS or elsewhere, be it blog or wiki or open source spaces like Moodle, students interact with a "desktop" of some sort rather than a room or a landscape.

Yes, they do interact with others through discussion boards or chat, but again, there's no sense of place as we have with brick and mortar campuses and classrooms.

Can social networks improve that sense of place? Well, I plan to deal more with that question later, especially when exploring Second Life. But the other aspect of the issue of using social networks in education is that expressed through the metaphor that became quite popular in the last few months, that of the creepy treehouse.

Here's a definition from Jared Stein:

"A place, physical or virtual (e.g. online), built by adults with the intention of luring in kids" and "Any institutionally-created, operated, or controlled environment in which participants are lured in either by mimicking pre-existing open or naturally formed environments, or by force, through a system of punishments or rewards."

In online education or with the use of online technology in the classroom, a creepy treehouse would be when the professor or institution tries to coopt social networks or tools that students already use on their own time. So if a professor requires students to "friend" him or her in Facebook, that would be considered for many a creepy treehouse. If an institution or CMS presents closed, locked down versions of web 2.0 services found on the web, such as blogging or a wiki in Angel, rather than using such naturally online, then that could be a creepy treehouse. Many seem to find Blackboard to exude creepy treehouseness, but that's to be expected since it's the Microsoft of CMS's.

The concern has been that many educators are beginning to proclaim creepy treehouseness as an excuse to avoid using web 2.0 tools/applications with students, sort of a luddite backlash.

Therefore, Michael Staton came up with the metaphor of the "functional mall." In a mall, young people, old people, middle aged and children all coexist and participate in the activities of a mall. They may use it differently, and at times they may interact with those in other age groups, but often not. He suggests that social networks operate more in this manner, especially as they mature and seek to expand their audiences, as Facebook is doing, to include every age group. Thus, social networks can accommodate learning groups, such as online classes, in ways that are not so creepy treehouse-like.

The key seems to be to use Facebook or social networking in a way that is not required but as another way to communicate. As one instructor notes, "What I tried to do was not to make it just something to study, but to make it something practical so I tried to incorporate as much communication technology in the course as possible." The same article presents research from the Pew Internet that suggests why using Facebook can be beneficial: "Teachers 'are able to leverage a tool students already use instead of asking them to learn how to use a separate application.'"