Thursday, October 16, 2008
Evan Leek of MIT (still What is Web 2.0 and What Does it Mean for Education)
His focus has been on creating a common denominator for distributed members of the MIT community to reconnect and interact with folks and events on the main campus. Aiming at folks who are working or studying abroad, on sabbatical, etc.
Mainly talking about Second Life, but uses virtual worlds, and all of today's topics apply to virtual worlds in general.
We're going live! Let's hope the demo gods smile on us.
Logging in. He polls the room; about half of us have logged into Second Life.
He's now in the MIT Sim. It's been months since I've tried Second Life, but it looks like it's running better on Macs now than it had last I tried it.
(Wonder if my account is still active?)
The virtual MIT has a project attempting to transfer residence hall identities online.
Currently showing a virtual conference room with a live quicktime stream of Leek's presentation right now. So a virtual Leek is watching a streaming Leek. Good proof-of-concept.
Large amount of video lag; not a SL-specific issue, but the amount of pit-stops video has to make cause these issues (and need to be taken into account).
Back to the presentation.
UPOP (Undergraduate Practice Opportunity Program) -- allows students to simulate engineering circumstances. Virtual simulation of a company that dealt with a takeover and reshuffling, allowing students to deal with shifts in engineering goals.
Stuff learned from sim: Can be applied to some (but certainly not all) real world events. Need to find best real-world events and focus on them. Students and faculty were skeptical of the tech, but not scared. System needed improving: Video-latency, tech issues, no prior-consideration for coreographing of interaction.
Need to replicate interaction in real world, note types of interactions so that they can be seamlessly integrated in virtual world. Must get to the point where the teacher isn't sitting there, orchestrating action.
Big win: Re-introduces the importance of space into discourse (aside: I'm now thinking of the use of virtual reality and realspace in David Louis Edelman's books), which video conferencing and the like had eliminated.
Q&A:
Q: What E-portfolio tool should one use?
A. (Batson) Digication (from RISD -- http://www.digication.com/). Notes that there are 35-40 big ones. Notes that Sakai has a built-in one as well.
Q: Long, long question, but the gist is, "we need a lot of infratructure for virtual worlds or web 2.0 learning, whereas a real-world meeting can be better controlled." Valid point about the number of points of failure.
A. Correct, and notes the problems with ubiquity, ephemeral sites, etc.
Q:. Does one need to build a virtual equivelent to physical room?
A. No (notes that avatars can be seahorses, whatever), and a virtual room can be a grassy patch, etc. But there are social interactions that necessitate certain environments. A virtual-boardroom with chairs makes sense, even though avatars don't get tired of standing up. Notes that personal space applies to virtual worlds, too. Cost of a building: $3 (way cheaper than the real world).
Q: Honestly, I couldn't understand the question through the accent.
A: Seems to be a discussion of best hardware to optimize audio and video issues. Turns out that a $30 Logitech mike has been a godsend. Pipes audio separately from video, using the avatar's voice-chat over IP (which has very little lag), and the audio is generally more important that the video, but they're working on that as well.
Q: How much time would it take to create a room like the MIT conference room.
A: It gets easier each time (naturally), but there's a learning curve at the front end. No actual answer, though. Does note that there's a reason that people can get paid to create virtual items and buildings. This includes the types of video streams, etc (essentially, a virtual infrastructure).
Q: Empire State College person notes that their average student is 39 yrs old and not as familiar with web 2.0, and that their instructors are adjuncts. How do they get on board like younger students and full-time students.
A: No immediate solution, but notes that collaborative ideas pre-date Web 2.0 (the Eportfolio example Batson gave applies here; could be done with simple offline papers (and, in fact, was done without an Eportfolio; it was just a Portfolio)).
Leek notes that he had a one-night-a-week class at Emerson last year on urban planning with a lot of older students (30-65), and they picked up SL pretty solidly. 75-85% were able to use SL from home, and all were doing stuff in the class itself (which was set in a lab).
Q: What kind of skills are used for SL?
A: Leek had been using Maya (and doing computer animation) for a while. Yeah, that's not so much going to work for me. He did note that you learn what you do as you need to do it, so each project requires more knowledge. Notes that there's a great knowledge-based community, with a mailing list, etc.
Break time!
His focus has been on creating a common denominator for distributed members of the MIT community to reconnect and interact with folks and events on the main campus. Aiming at folks who are working or studying abroad, on sabbatical, etc.
Mainly talking about Second Life, but uses virtual worlds, and all of today's topics apply to virtual worlds in general.
We're going live! Let's hope the demo gods smile on us.
Logging in. He polls the room; about half of us have logged into Second Life.
He's now in the MIT Sim. It's been months since I've tried Second Life, but it looks like it's running better on Macs now than it had last I tried it.
(Wonder if my account is still active?)
The virtual MIT has a project attempting to transfer residence hall identities online.
Currently showing a virtual conference room with a live quicktime stream of Leek's presentation right now. So a virtual Leek is watching a streaming Leek. Good proof-of-concept.
Large amount of video lag; not a SL-specific issue, but the amount of pit-stops video has to make cause these issues (and need to be taken into account).
Back to the presentation.
UPOP (Undergraduate Practice Opportunity Program) -- allows students to simulate engineering circumstances. Virtual simulation of a company that dealt with a takeover and reshuffling, allowing students to deal with shifts in engineering goals.
Stuff learned from sim: Can be applied to some (but certainly not all) real world events. Need to find best real-world events and focus on them. Students and faculty were skeptical of the tech, but not scared. System needed improving: Video-latency, tech issues, no prior-consideration for coreographing of interaction.
Need to replicate interaction in real world, note types of interactions so that they can be seamlessly integrated in virtual world. Must get to the point where the teacher isn't sitting there, orchestrating action.
Big win: Re-introduces the importance of space into discourse (aside: I'm now thinking of the use of virtual reality and realspace in David Louis Edelman's books), which video conferencing and the like had eliminated.
Q&A:
Q: What E-portfolio tool should one use?
A. (Batson) Digication (from RISD -- http://www.digication.com/). Notes that there are 35-40 big ones. Notes that Sakai has a built-in one as well.
Q: Long, long question, but the gist is, "we need a lot of infratructure for virtual worlds or web 2.0 learning, whereas a real-world meeting can be better controlled." Valid point about the number of points of failure.
A. Correct, and notes the problems with ubiquity, ephemeral sites, etc.
Q:. Does one need to build a virtual equivelent to physical room?
A. No (notes that avatars can be seahorses, whatever), and a virtual room can be a grassy patch, etc. But there are social interactions that necessitate certain environments. A virtual-boardroom with chairs makes sense, even though avatars don't get tired of standing up. Notes that personal space applies to virtual worlds, too. Cost of a building: $3 (way cheaper than the real world).
Q: Honestly, I couldn't understand the question through the accent.
A: Seems to be a discussion of best hardware to optimize audio and video issues. Turns out that a $30 Logitech mike has been a godsend. Pipes audio separately from video, using the avatar's voice-chat over IP (which has very little lag), and the audio is generally more important that the video, but they're working on that as well.
Q: How much time would it take to create a room like the MIT conference room.
A: It gets easier each time (naturally), but there's a learning curve at the front end. No actual answer, though. Does note that there's a reason that people can get paid to create virtual items and buildings. This includes the types of video streams, etc (essentially, a virtual infrastructure).
Q: Empire State College person notes that their average student is 39 yrs old and not as familiar with web 2.0, and that their instructors are adjuncts. How do they get on board like younger students and full-time students.
A: No immediate solution, but notes that collaborative ideas pre-date Web 2.0 (the Eportfolio example Batson gave applies here; could be done with simple offline papers (and, in fact, was done without an Eportfolio; it was just a Portfolio)).
Leek notes that he had a one-night-a-week class at Emerson last year on urban planning with a lot of older students (30-65), and they picked up SL pretty solidly. 75-85% were able to use SL from home, and all were doing stuff in the class itself (which was set in a lab).
Q: What kind of skills are used for SL?
A: Leek had been using Maya (and doing computer animation) for a while. Yeah, that's not so much going to work for me. He did note that you learn what you do as you need to do it, so each project requires more knowledge. Notes that there's a great knowledge-based community, with a mailing list, etc.
Break time!
Labels: Nercomp
# posted by Adam Smith @ 6:34 AM 
