SecondLife

What a great conference!

This was the first time I managed to attend (and present at) HighEdWebDev in Rochester, and this was really time and money well spent.

• The organizers did a great job at planning and organizing the whole event (although a lapel microphone would have been a great addition for the “soft-spoken” presenters like me — not everybody can be a 6-foot guy with a big voice)
• As you’ve been able to see this year’s guest bloggers managed to post about most of the 13 sessions we scheduled to be blogged — even before the end of the conference — like real pros. Kudos to Martine, Dimitri, Jonathan and Seth!
  
  Dimitri, Jonathan, Julie – a reader – and Martine (Seth isn’t on the photo)
• The only presentation about SecondLife was given from SecondLife using a phone connection with the speaker based in Sao Paulo, Brazil. I wish the presenter had included a small tour of the SL island on which the presentation was given, but this was definitely a bold move of the chair of this track to schedule this type of presentation (in a conference that isn’t specific to SL, that is).
• Mark Greenfield from UB explored a new frontier by picking a different style of presentation this year: a 6-minute intro supported by a timed slideshow and followed by 45 minutes of exchange with the audience. Very interesting concept and a big success as this presentation won the best of track.
• Susan Greene, webmaster at Housatonic Community College, presented a very interesting poster session (these are like a big school science fair, but for web folks — great concept by the way) to explain how she uses the course database to output at once the online catalog and the print catalog in Quark in 3 or 4 easy steps. Very, very, very smart and… cost-effective.
• Mike Dame from Virginia Tech gave his great keynote at lunch on October 16 (if you missed it, this presentation is available for purchase on-demand as part of Crisis Communication 2.0 Week, a 3-webinar series by Higher Ed Experts), exactly 6 months after the Virginia Tech Tragedy. I also attended a great panel discussion about the use of technology in crisis communications by Mark Lawrence (Cornell University), Mark Greenfield (University at Buffalo), Steve McConnell (UC Berkeley) and Chris Nixon (University of Arkansas).

Last but not least, I managed to meet with a lot of you. This was really fun to be able to put faces on names. I know that I also missed a few of the people I really wanted to see, but I’m sure there will be other occasions.

There’s still time for your institution to sign up and you don’t even need a campus in SL to participate.

As of today, the following 20 institutions have expressed interest in participating in this virtual college fair organized on the Teen Grid of SL:

• Front Range Community College, Colorado
• Bradley University, Illinois
• Florida State University
• Montana State University
• University of Kentucky
• Johnson and Wales University North Carolina
• University of North Carolina at Pembroke
• Central Piedmont Community College North Carolina
• San Jose State University California
• DePaul University Illinois
• Palm Beach Atlantic University Florida
• Vassar College New York
• Beach College California
• University of Oxford UK
• Bowling Green State University OH
• University of Southern Queensland AU
• Queensland University of Technology AU
• Monash University AU
• Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education
• Western Illinois University

Who is behind this first college fair in SL? Kelly Czarnecki, a librarian at the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County. She manages the Eye4You Island and is the driving force behind this project organized by a group of volunteers.

Beth Kraemer, a member of this group who works at the William T. Young Library of the University of Kentucky, answered the questions I had about the college fair.

1) Why did you decide to organize a college fair on the TG? What are its goals?

This isn’t the first time a college fair on the teen grid has been discussed, but it is the first time that it is actually going to happen. The original idea came from the teens on Eye4You Island on the teen grid. I think this is a wonderful project for Second Life. The virtual environment will allow teens and representatives from colleges and universities from all over the world to interact with one another-and no one needs to leave home!

2) How many SL teen residents do you expect for this college fair? Do you have an idea of their interest for such an event?

This event is a first, so there are a lot of unknowns. We are still soliciting speakers, representatives, and content to make the fair as enticing as possible. It is definitely a bit of an experiment this first year, but the idea did come from the teens themselves. So we are hoping for good participation, but we’re also expecting to use what we learn this year to make an even better event next year.

3) How do you cover the costs/support this venture?

The three participating islands (Eye4You, Skoolaborate and Global Kids) are providing space for the fair events at no cost to participating institutions. The only cost to the institutions themselves is the background check (if they want to bring a visiting avatar to the teen grid) and cost associated with building the objects for their display table, which is relatively small. As far as the folks putting the fair together, we rely on generous donations of time by the volunteer teens and adults. We have also had specific donations of resources for the fair, such as support for an ad in the Metaverse Messenger provided by Lorelei Junot from Info Island.

4) If an institution doesn’t have a presence in SL, does it still make sense to participate?

Absolutely! The purpose of the fair is to connect teens with information about real life colleges and universities. We have several ways to participate. Some things may be easier for an institution with SL experience, but institutions without that experience can definitely participate. They may not be able to send a visiting avatar to the teen grid but they can still interact with the teens in real time, by using chat facilitated by SLoodle. Or they can just provide information for a display table. We can help build display objects for the fair, for any institution that doesn’t have someone to do the building. We can work with them to find a way to participate!

Lately, I’ve read more and more negative comments about SecondLife. Many inside and outside of higher education have questioned the return on investment of SL campuses for universities and colleges as Jeff Young from the Chronicle of Higher Ed wrote a few days ago in the Campus Wired Blog:

More than 100 colleges have set up some kind of presence in Second Life, according to officials at Linden Lab, the company that runs the environment. But are those campuses attracting enough visitors to make the investments worth it? Earlier this year we published an article and a video tour of Case Western Reserve University’s virtual campus, which it used to give tours to prospective students. But during more than a month in which Case Western students were on hand to show folks around, only 40 people wandered by, according to college officials.

Perhaps that’s enough to make it worth the effort — they did get some news-media coverage, after all. Are any college officials working in Second Life starting to have second thoughts?

While I don’t think institutions should bet all their marketing (or academic) dollars on SecondLife, I definitely think SL offers a very interesting and rich platform for distance learning, but also for any types of learning that can’t take place easily in the real world.

As regular readers know I’ve been following the latest developments in crisis communication for a while. I just wrapped up a feature article about the topic for University Affairs to be published in the October issue of this Canadian magazine.

Thanks to UA editor Peggy Berkowitz, the article will also include some reporting about an emergency training exercise that was conducted on August 15 at The University of Western Ontario – that was 2 weeks after I submitted my final draft.

At Western, the exercise had some consequences for the campus community: University Drive was closed during several hours.

This is one of the reasons why these drills can’t be run too often on real campuses.

But, what about on virtual campuses?

If your campus has already been replicated in SecondLife, it wouldn’t take much (ok, you’d have to train your emergency team to move around in SL) to schedule these trainings there.

I knew emergency response training was already taking place in SL when I started to write this post, but I stumbled upon a great initiative by Idaho State University while searching for a couple of examples.

The Idaho Bioterrorism Awareness and Preparedness Program (IBAPP) and the Institute of Rural Health at Idaho State University launched a few months ago Play2Train, a virtual “playground” to run emergency response exercises:

This virtual environment spreads over two islands Asterix and Obelix (65536 x 2 sq. meters), with one island dedicated to a virtual town and the other a virtual hospital. The design of this virtual environment is influenced by dioramas frequently used by emergency services to support their tabletop exercises. A diorama is a partially three dimensional full-size replica or scale model of a landscape typically showing historical events, nature scenes, cityscapes, etc. for purposes of education or entertainment

What they are doing is really great (I’m embedding below the 16-minute video where Ramesh Ramloll, the project manager of Play2Train, explains what it is and what it can do):

Now, if it were possible to “unpack” — on any SL university campus — special crisis/emergency scenarios leveraging what has been done on the Play2Train islands, this would provide the next best thing to these emergency drills that have become so crucial for institutions after the Virginia Tech Tragedy.

Don’t you think so?

I usually don’t cover vendor-related news, but BlackBoard has really done a nice job using YouTube to promote an upcoming conference to a specific audience while surfing on a very popular phenomenon, i.e. the growing popularity of Second Life in academic technology circles.

I came across this video titled “Adventures in First Life Redux” on Educate/Innovate, Blackboard blog.

At 2 minutes 30, it might be a bit long. However, Adrian Alleyne, its creator did capture the gist of what can make the whole SecondLife experience a bit awkward (avatars typing in the air when they exchange instant messages, bumping in each others or pieces of furniture, sitting on tables, etc — would have love to see some avatars flying but the BB team probably didn’t get the budget for it ;-).

This video (301 views at the time of this writing) could go viral – at least in the circles it targets – and generates some buzz (hey, it got a post here). The only catch is that you really need to have tried SecondLife to understand the whole video.

A very interesting example. What do you think?

This month, in my Internet Technologies column for University Business, I discuss what SecondLife, the 3-D virtual world, can offer to higher ed institutions.

The best way to understand the possibilities of Second Life is to sign up for a free account. You just need to pick the name of your Second Life avatar (the first name is up to you, but the last name can only be selected from preset options in a drop-down menu), your date of birth (it will “validate” your adult status) and an email address on this registration page. Then, the SL client application needs to be downloaded and installed on your computer.

Once everything is installed, just open the application and… start walking (use the arrows on your keyboards), you’re on Welcome Island.

You will be offered the opportunity to change your avatar’s appearance and a few tips on how to move around and interact with objects or people. Don’t forget to try to fly and take a few snapshots.

After this initial introduction, you can find interesting places to visit by using the SL client integrated search engine or browsing the selection I’ve prepared for you, available at www.collegewebeditor.com/visitsecondlife.

You should also request a free guest membership to the NMC Campus. By becoming a NMC guest, your avatar will be able to take part in their public events. You should visit NMC campus as it is enabled to offer the integrated SL voice chat feature.

And, if you want to chat further about the possibilities of SL for institutional advancement, admissions or alum relations just send an in-world message to Karine Apogee, my avatar’s name.

My third UB column for 2007 is now available in the June issue as well as online: “A Second Life for Higher Education?”

If you are a University Business reader who has just discovered collegewebeditor.com, welcome! Don’t forget to subscribe to this blog via RSS or email.

If you have any questions or feedback about the blog or the column, feel free to email me at karine@collegewebeditor.com .

I’ll post the interviews I did for this column in the next few days.

I don’t know if any of you got a chance to pop up in Second Life last Friday as I suggested in my last post.

I did (and I have a snapshot to prove it ;-).

I spent about an hour listening to the presentation by the IBM folks after walking through the poster sessions. I also took the opportunity to make a small donation to the Memorial Hokie Fund Spirit in-world via one of the donation boxes available in Second Life.

The conference was really interesting and fun at the same time (check out the Flickr photo pool), although I had to admit that I finally decided to follow the afternoon sessions on Second Life Cable Network due to technical problems I had with the audio channel.

Anyway, if you didn’t get a chance to check out this international conference organized in Second Life last Friday, you can have a look at the following presentations made available by some of the keynote speakers:

Engagement in SecondLife Learning, Sarah Robbins, aka IntelliGirl (Ball State University)

Loyalist College Experience in Second Life, Ken Hudson, aka Kenny Hubble (Loyalist College)

The Salamander Project: creating a Community of Practice to make a searchable database of Learning Objects in SecondLife, Jonathon Richter, aka Wainbrave Bernal (The University of Oregon)

Conference proceedings will be made available in the future in RL and SL.

Sorry for the short notice, but I completely missed the boat on this unique, exciting and FREE event happening in Second Life tomorrow: Second Life Best Practices in Education.

Whether you have an SL avatar or not (if you don’t, you can sign up – it’s free), this is a great opportunity to get up-to-speed on what some of your faculty members might be doing / will be doing soon in the popular 3-D virtual world.

The program is available online (all in Pacific time) and includes the different sessions/presentations and the direct links (slurls) to the conference locations.

Since it’s an International conference with speakers in Australia, Europe and North America, the program spams from 12AM to 11PM.

If you have any interest in SL, that’s also a great occasion to actually see what the 3-D virtual world can do in terms of professional development and networking.

I’m going to try to drop by tomorrow to listen to a couple of keynote speeches. Maybe we’ll meet in-world. If you see my orange jacket somewhere at the conference, come say “hello.”

In a previous post titled “Professor Wesch from KSU featured in a great video report from The Chronicle,” I raved about the first online video report produced by Jeffrey Young, Web Editor at The Chronicle:

Produced by Jeffrey R. Young, the video report does an excellent job presenting Professor Wesch’s work at KSU as well as his famous YouTube video about Web 2.0.

So earlier this week, after watching his second online video report about Case Western’s SecondLife campus tour, I decided to email him to see if I could learn, for you my dear readers, more about about this new initiative from The Chronicle and… I just got a reply from Jeff!

How do you produce your online video reports?

Our video reports attempt to use the latest easy-to-use Web and multimedia tools to tell stories in ways that we can’t do in print. We’re using screen-capture software, Web cams, and digital recorders connected to the old-fashioned telephone to collect information — editing it all together in iMovie or Final Cut Express.

What type of topics could PR professionals working in universities and colleges pitch to get a chance to see their institution featured in one of these online video reports?

We’re looking to do more of these on a variety of topics, though for now technology is the main focus. The goal is to choose topics that benefit from showing and telling, and that are focused enough in scope that they can be addressed in 5 to 7 minutes.

I’m just back from a short and random tour of campuses in SecondLife. I typed “university” and “colleges” in the search engine of the application to see what any regular visitor will find.

My journey took me to a few different places including the SL Island of Vassar College. On Vassar Island, a small but nice campus, visitors are invited to sit in a red and black flying saucer (well, not exactly, but that’s what I thought about when I saw it the first time) to take a guided tour of the premises.

During the tour, I was told by my flying machine how the institution uses different spots of its SL island such as the castle or the media garden.

Once the tour was over, I left a note on the comment board where visitors can leave notes for Bret Rydell, the SL name of the person responsible for this island – another very neat way to offer interactivity even outside of business hours.

BTW, if you haven’t read yet, Sardionerak’s report about Australian SL campuses, you should as he does a great job comparing three different ways to handle an SL presence.