Speaking of funding bodies, a few words on getting funding for your virtual world teaching, learning or research project…

Virtual World Watch is approached by funding bodies on a regular basis to assess (or mark) virtual world proposals. It’s unpaid work, but we don’t mind doing this particular task. It’s a way of keeping up to date with what people are doing, and what they want to do – funding willing – in the near future. And it’s good for virtual world projects, as it means that at least one person marking the proposals won’t have an inherent bias or hatred against this particular technology.

It’s also interesting to see how, or if, people can make a persuasive argument for using virtual worlds in some aspect of education. Funding proposal writing is analogous to making a case (prosecution or defence) in court; instead of referencing old judgements and decisions, the academic author references old articles and related works.

But persuasive or not, there’s a more explicit instruction to mark according to “Value For Money” when assessing funding proposals. Not surprising, really. Funding bodies, having been frightened by the demise of bodies such as BECTA, need to watch their backs and prove – as best as they can – to government types that what they are doing is essential, efficient, and VFM. These times we live in.

I’m also unbiased when I mark. As said, I don’t have a bias against virtual worlds – and some other markers definitely do – but on the other hand, I’m not going to A-categorise your proposal merely because you’re using Second Life or OpenSim. It doesn’t do anyone any favours in the long run.

So here’s 20 bits of advice on the things I often look for when marking funding proposals for UK teaching and research funding bodies (when these things are permitted within their criteria):

1. Does it actually follow the call? If the call asks for innovative projects to increase the teaching effectiveness in the mathematical sciences, and most of your proposal and funding request involves building an underwater teaching room, then you may want to rethink.
2. Proof. Got any? Here’s the good news – virtual worlds have been around long enough now for there to be relevant reports, papers, articles that you can mention and reference. Try the CORE database, or a few of the links from here, for starters.

   

3. As a side-point, if you can find a body of relevant, strong proof that is both qualitative and quantitative in nature, then this seems to make some proposals especially persuasive, and will appeal to more markers.
4. That Value For Money thing. Do you really need a five figure budget to go to lots of (s)wanky overseas conferences to promote your project, or are you trying it on? Can’t you promote it by, erm, doing demonstrations in-world, or by using social media, blogging, or other online methods?
5. Similarly on the VFM front, the old “Director: 0.2 FTE” entry in the budget. If you don’t say how the director will be spending his one day a week (and “Directing” is not enough), and what his experience with virtual worlds in education is, then it’s difficult not to assume that this is budget-bloat. The UK academic community is small, so when a professor who is well-known to be a luddite to the extent that his secretary types his emails for him is down as a virtual world research director, the words “raised” and “doubts” come to mind.
6. “Virtual worlds are a fantastically spectacular multi-dimensional reality space which hyper-inflates the ability to learn to previously unimaginable peaks…” – this is one of the reasons why virtual world sceptics get annoyed and start ranting all over Twitter. And, on this, they may have a point. Most funding proposal calls have a page or word limit. Filling your proposal with unproven hype-fluff leaves less room for the persuasive stuff. Because hype-fluff is empty, and not persuasive.
7. OpenSim, Open Sim, or Open Simulator. Don’t really care which you use, so long as you stick to one all the way through your proposal. The same goes for other terminology with multiple variations.

   

8. Make allowance for unexpected reactions from the research subjects. You often don’t know how they will react to e.g. using Second Life for the very first time. Don’t assume that they will all “take” to it; they won’t. Be honest, realistic, about this.
9. If you are going to nail your flag to the mast of one particular virtual world, justify why. Note that Second Life can cause mixed, and occasionally negative, reactions in markers, while worlds such as OpenSim – if explained well – can often seem a prudent choice for an academic project.
10. If your academic institution has successfully completed several projects that use virtual worlds, mention this somehow. It implies that your institution is one where this kind of activity can take place.
11. Don’t make jokes about e.g. students changing their hairstyle in Second Life. It’ll only remind some markers of a few of the things that can happen in that kind of environment. Humor shouldn’t be used in the limited space of funding proposals anyway (and I’m puzzled that it’s increasing and not decreasing) as it’s both subjective and risky.
12. If you need to build something in a virtual world, then fine – but note that some funding proposals expressly will not fund that particular activity. If you do it, make sure it forms a minority of the budget, is fully justified, (re)uses cheap or free artifacts where possible, and has some post-project legacy.

    

13. And, and I still find it hard to believe I saw this, do not put an “avatar clothing budget” in your funding proposal. Someone in the funding body will read it, think you are taking the p***, and reject it. It’s happened. I have no sympathy.
14. But – and related to the last two points – if you can reuse artifacts that already exist in virtual worlds, then this is a plus. Reuse and recycling, virtual or not, are all good plus points. It’s that Value For Money thing again.
15. The IPR of what your project produces. Can your deliverable be used by other institutions? If so, is it free, restricted, costly, or what? Would people want to use it; prove demand, if you can.
16. Yes, if you’re going to use Second Life or (especially) Blue Mars, you need newish kit. Justify it if you need it – but don’t put in for the total amount. The funding body know you aren’t going to use it just for virtual world work on this project, but for all manner of other things as well.
17. Show initiative with your project coordination. If you have a geographically dispersed project team, or an advisory board, then holding all the meetings in-world and therefore not needing to pay travel expenses, is a bonus and shows that you have confidence in the technology. And that you’re tight with money. Funding bodies like that.
18. If you are converting funding into a virtual world currency, be really careful how you mention this in the proposal – if you need to mention it at all. It makes a lot of people uncomfortable, as they suddenly have images of it being spent in sleazy “cybersex”, due to some vague article they vaguely remember reading in a discarded Daily M@il on the train several years ago. They are also wary of anything that could be twisted by a newspaper into a headline which looks like they are “wasting taxpayers money”, which is a PR disaster. Yeah – rule number 1 of funding; never cause a PR problem for the funding body.
19. Has the funding body funded relevant virtual world projects previously? If so, mention them and show how you will build on what they do. The same funding body people could be involved in assessing your proposal, so they’ll feel a bit put-out if there’s no recognition of what the body has done previously. This has sunk otherwise good UK virtual world proposals – plural – over the last few years. It doesn’t take long to see what the funding body has previously funded.
20. Do not reference either Tron, or The Matrix, in every virtual world funding proposal you submit. Why do you keep doing this? It does not help. You know who you are.

Additional reading

You could do far worse than start with the JISC guide to bidding to grant funding. Yes, it may appear basic but it’s full of common sense, and even the old timers can drift, forget the basics, and get bewildered at their funding application hit rate falling.

Look out for ReLIVE11 on Twitter, using #relive11, and on Flickr (pictures will be posted during the conference).

Watch the keynotes – Robin Wight, Andy Piper and the panel session of Bill Thompson, Ian Hughes and Rebecca Mileham – live as they happen.

Hang out at the conference cafe opening in Second Life on Open University 2 Island, at http://bit.ly/oGFEDH.

Immerse yourself in the launch event, a classical music concert on Open University 2, from 8-10pm (UK, 12-2pm SLT) on Tuesday the 20th of September. No registration is required for the event, which is free and open to everyone regardless of ReLIVE physical attendance (subject to island capacity). This event is provided by Music Island Concerts – please see below for more details.

Music Island @ Sea Turtle Island was founded in 2007 as an artist collective by a small group of international professional and amateur classical musicians and music educators. The initiative is led by Kate Miranda/SL, a Canadian arts administrator, who has provided administrative and promotional support for the project since the founding. Educational projects have included music appreciation sessions, performance practice for community conservatory students & college students, and professional development opportunities for professional musicians. This session will consist of two musical performances interspersed with comments from the artists about the works and their experiences as professional musicians performing in Second Life. To listen to this session you need to ensure that your Second Life viewer is enabled to listen to streaming audio in preferences.

Additional Music Island Information:

Music Island Livestream – archival video stream & live events on the web
Music Island YouTube Channel – archival video
Virtual Concerts in the Park, Kate Miranda, Journal of Arts Management (2009)
Lessons from Four Years of Concerts in the Park, Kate Miranda, (unpublished) scheduled for publication, fall 2011
Second Life makes classical fans feel at home, John Terauds, Toronto Star 2009

12 pm (noon) Young Zeid (Xi Yang, RL), violin

Xi Yang began his distinguished music career when he was a student at the Conservatory of Music in Beijing, China where he studied both violin and viola Performance. He had his first solo debut when he was 9 years old. By the age of 12 he made an average of 200 solo appearances a year in China. He won the National Violin Competition in Shanghai and made his solo debut with the Beijing Philharmonic Orchestra. He then, toured China with the Beijing Youth Symphony as a soloist and concertmaster. At the age of 17, he was a semi-finalist in the prestigious Jacques Tibaud International Violin Competition in Paris, France. The youngest violinist entered the competition for that year which earned him a place in the Encyclopedia of Chinese History.

Arriving in the United States, Mr. Yang won a National Strings Competition in Arkansas and has performed numerous solo recitals, chamber music concerts and gave master classes to young string players from many public schools and colleges. A graduate of Indiana University School of Music, he studied violin and chamber music ensemble, from baroque style to modern composers, under the guidance of James Buswell, Nelli Shkolnikova, Josef Gingold and Rostislav Dubinsky. “Mr. Yang has all the ability and potential to become one of the greatest solo violinists in the world today…” ( Isaac Stern 1987, Indiana University )

Mr. Yang was the Principal Violist for the Florida Philharmonic Orchestra, Florida Grand Opera and the Principal Viola with the Symphony of the Americas. He is also the Assistant Concertmaster and a guest conductor, soloist with the Raleigh Symphony Orchestra. A well established violinist and violist in the Triangle area and beyond, his students are age from 7 years old to adults. He is a member of the Arcangelo Piano Quartet and Duo Appassionato.

Fostering the next generation of musicians is important to Xi Yang. He is the founding music director and conductor of the Youth Symphony of Florida.

1 pm SLT Sandia Beaumont, piano

Sandia Beaumont is a classical pianist and harpsichordist from France who has been performing in Second Life for several years for her own enjoyment and personal professional development. Second Life has allowed her to explore repertoire that her professional life does not. This year she has performed several concerts with organist, Shprav Oodles, recently performing the Mozart K.488 Concerto for piano and organ at Music Island.

* * * * *

Poster presentation Friday 19th November.
04:00 SLT (12:00 GMT) – 05:30 SLT (13:30 GMT).

A number of staff from across Schools and Departments in Glasgow Caledonian University engaged in our accredited learning and teaching programmes, Transformational Change Projects, RealWorld employability projects, Caledonian Scholars and Associates and Caledonian Academy PhD students will be presenting a range of posters in the real world.

A number of these posters (and their presenters) will also be available in Second Life. Posters will highlight findings from action research projects, developmental projects and research projects that have been undertaken in a variety of topics impacting on learning, teaching and assessment here at GCU.

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Glasgow%20Caledonian/120/141/23

The posters will become a permanent fixture so you don’t necessarily need to come at this time. However, the authors will not be there.

There’s some details on the secondlife.com blogging area about the new pricing. In a nutshell, as of the start of 2011, Linden Labs are removing the education and non-profit discounts.

This is, obviously, a development of interest to current, continuing, and thinking-about education users of this particular virtual world. Stay, and swallow the increased price? Move to OpenSim or some other virtual world? Discontinue (for existing people) or not use a virtual world at all (for thinking-about people)?

There’s some ongoing debate about this on the JISCmail Virtual Worlds mailing list. Please do join in and chip in with your opinions.

In addition, Rockcliffe University Consortium will be hosting a public forum on the impacts of the Linden Lab pricing policy on Wednesday October 6th at 12 noon (Virtual Worlds This Week). Part of the discussion will be to help determine a constructive manner of feedback to Linden Lab as to the impacts of their announcement of the removal of the educational / non-profit discount. All are welcome to attend.

Rotunda (seats 150 so lots of room) – SLURL: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Rockcliffe%20Library/229/26/25

Getting your project/institution listed is dead simple – just visit www.daden.co.uk/bsf/ and follow the link to the entry form – it should only take a minute or so to complete. We are interested in how virtual worlds are being used both for science research and for science education/communication/outreach. For our purposes a virtual world means a space which is a multi-user virtual environment (MUVE), with each user being represented by an avatar who can communicate and interact in-world, and where there is a shared sense of place and time.

We are also looking for some good images to illustrate the project page – so please add a link to a good image as part of your form submission.

We hope to run a virtual safari as a fringe event as part of the Festival – if you’d like to take part in that then please let us know.

If possible please make your entry by 10th September so that we can get the map ready for the opening of the Festival.

Many thanks and we hope you can find the time to participate. If there is enough interest we hope to keep the directory and map running permanently as a resource for virtual world users and researchers.

–

Andrew Jinman
PIVOTE Product Manager
Daden Limited

E: andrew.jinman (@) daden.co.uk
W: www.daden.co.uk
sl: http://www.slurl.com/secondlife/daden%20prime/160/184/26
SL IM: AndrewDaden Eiren

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At UWS we are continuing to use virtual worlds across teaching and learning and research with limited activity in commercialisation. The SLOODLE project was funded by Eduserv until October 2009 – and I’ve been working on grant proposals since then (waiting to hear back from one currently… fingers crossed.) Current students in my Introduction to Virtual Worlds class include some members of staff, so I’m hopeful that this will make it easier for us to expand our use of virtual worlds in subsequent years – while informal staff workshops have been held in the past, the irregular nature of those made it difficult to sustain interest and growth.

I was disappointed when Metaplace closed at the beginning of the year – as we had used it previously (although not heavily) and it was enjoyed by students. SmallWorlds fills a similar niche – but without the opportunities for content creation. It does seem to have a stronger business model though, so for people looking for isometric, flash based virtual worlds for online discussions and activities, it should do the job. Like Metaplace, it seems to lack some of immersive qualities of a 3D virtual world – but some students do take to it.

Classroom chat

The new viewer for Second Life (Viewer 2) does look like it will make life easier for newcomers to Second Life. While it has its own issues, I am hopeful that it will help overcome some of the initial challenges. But when it comes to new user experience, Second Life could really learn a lot from SmallWorlds – which is full of ‘quests’ and challenges that introduce users to the worlds and features of the interface. But they have improved a huge amount – including improved lists of recommended locations to visit.

Finally, I am still making good use of Second Life’s ability to bring people together across large distances. I’ll be giving several talks this semester to student and professional audiences worldwide, and have scheduled virtual guest talks for my own students. Students at UWS will also be involved in an online virtual cultural exchange with students at San Jose State University in the US – a programme which is currently in the final stages of planning.

Ian can be followed on Twitter.

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The pressures of running a large undergraduate provision have left little time for virtual worlds lately. However, having ultimate responsibility for the learning of 330 students does tend to focus the mind on the practicalities of scaling up the use of virtual worlds in a real world educational context. Motivated by its potential scalability and configurability, I have redoubled my efforts, and have finally got my OpenSim grid up and running. It’s currently only running behind the University firewall, but it’s working exactly as I had hoped. I can pre-register all of my students, which cuts out the nightmare prospect of a Second Life registration session multiplied by 330. I can get student’s real names floating above their new avatar’s heads, which helps them to make the connection between avatars and their real life puppet masters, and avoids premature fantasy identity overload. I can avoid the complications of noob-learners making fools of themselves in front of rude strangers and, most importantly for design students, I can get them building things straight away.

I see OpenSim as a means to an end, rather than the end itself. It will provide me with a safe training space – a studio space – for my students to mess about in and learn the ropes. I’ll then encourage any intrigued students to venture out into a truly massive multiuser virtual world like Second Life. I don’t think I’ll need to hold their hands in the same way that I did when we all jumped straight into Second Life in the early days. Once acclimatised through fun-time in the OpenSim playground, students should be able to confidently explore Second Life and beyond without a tutor cramping their style. They can always ask for help if they need it, and we will provide guidance and coaching as we do for all our students, but they will be in control. They can go where they like and do what they like, just like in real life. We will encourage them to report back on their discoveries, if they are relevant to their learning. They can show us snapshots of their exploits, and they can quote freely from their chat-logs as they reflect on their learning. They can even log-into our OpenSim studio and discuss their pseudonym’s exploits with their real life virtual friends and tutors.

I am of the opinion that students should have access to a private, institutionally managed virtual world, which is linked to their authentic, accountable, assessable and accredit-able enrolled identity, but should also be free to roam a public virtual space in whichever manner and attire they choose.

In the last week we have begun to open our OpenSim platform for student access here at Bromley College. We thought it would be a good idea to have a record of their progress in the virtual world, and so we have launched a new blog: http://bcopensim.blogspot.com.

Please feel free to visit and comment.

if you have any particular questions or requests then again please feel free to contact either Clive Gould (Clive Pro) cliveg (@) gmail.com or Barry Spencer (Vega Starlight) barrys (@) bromley.ac.uk

The PhD thesis, under a Creative Commons licence, of Dr Aleks Krotoski is available through her website; there’s some interesting wordles on there as well. Go here:

http://alekskrotoski.com/post/academic-dissertation—social-influence-in-second-life-social-n

(Shortened URL) http://is.gd/75yo9

(It was thanks to Aleks showing me around Second Life several years ago that I had the ‘Aha!’ moment, so without her there may not have been a Virtual World Watch and accompanying snapshots.)

Aleks is a media and Internet journalist for The Guardian, and a presenter on what many regard as the best TV programme on video games to date (BITS). She tweets, and is also the presenter of The Virtual Revolution, the forthcoming BBC series about the Web:

Nottingham has been in Second Life for just over a year and now has 2 islands:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/University%20of%20Nottingham/100/122/22

Both teaching and research activities have taken place and this year a research project organised by one of our medical students – focused on placebo in a doctor-patient style consultation – is being supported as well.

We are keeping an eye of other virtual worlds and have participated in some conversations between Kings, Brunel and the Open University around next steps.

We have a dedicated area on our island to support information skills training called the ‘Library Garden’. The Library Garden is an interactive learning experience for students to explore on their own, with a librarian or as part of a lecture. There are a number of pathways within the garden leading students to different activities. One pathway advises students about the research process from finding research partners and working collaboratively to finding information and publishing research in a variety of ways. Another path covers basics such as reference styles.

We also have areas supporting pharmaceutical lab simulations, virtual maternity wards, virtual wind farms and interactive performance spaces for active learning environments. Interest in language teaching is also popular, with an Arabic course run in Second Life.

We demonstrate Second Life through our e-learning community group meetings, one-to-one support, groups presentations plus releasing podcasts. To support the developments, a Second Life steering group was established, with members drawn from Schools, International Office, Marketing, IS, Learning and Teaching committee and the Student Union, the group provides guidance and advice on future development activities.

To help staff and students get used to Second Life, we have prepared support materials on our e-learning support web pages, el@n, (http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/elan/yourquestions/), as well as offering training courses in Second Life. There is also an orientation platform and a public Sand Box on the island, with examples and tutorials to help new users get to grips with the building tools available.

We don’t see Second Life as necessarily a recruitment or marketing tool, due largely to numbers visiting. A closer analogy for us is the ‘holodeck’ in Star Trek, a user defined space which you visit for an immersive experience. This has guided projects supported and our developments.

We have also opened an Open Educational Resources area on our island to start sharing much of what we develop openly. We already share quite a bit and see it pop up in other HEI’s spaces from time to time.