The IS Cream Van is parked in Holyrood Park (Vue South), Second Life at: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Vue%20South/112/159/21. Please feel free to visit. If you would prefer a tour then contact Frank Lassard in world. Photos of the IS Cream Van are available: http://www.flickr.com/photos/flittleton/sets/72157622651729745/

We would kindly ask you to take time to complete our project survey. The aim of this survey is to gather views on whether there a role for Information Services in virtual worlds, and if so, what should it look like. The survey results will be incorporated in reports on the IS Cream Van. This survey is completely anonymous. Any identifiable information will be removed prior to reporting. This survey will take @15 minutes to complete.

The survey is available at:
https://www.survey.ed.ac.uk/is-cream-van/

If you would like to know more about this or any other Virtual University of Edinburgh project then please contact fiona.littleton@ed.ac.uk or visit http://www.vue.ed.ac.uk.

(Please feel free to pass on to colleagues you think might be interested).

Thank you,
Fiona

Fiona Littleton
Educational Development Adviser for Virtual Worlds
University of Edinburgh

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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.

Shelley Hales and Nic Earle from the University of Bristol report on this JISC-funded project for snapshot #8. The project also has a blog, and can be visited in Second Life.

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At the university of Bristol we are currently running a project, ‘Resurrecting the Past: Virtual Antiquities in the Nineteenth Century’ the first phase of which was funded by JISC as part of their ‘Enriching Digital Resources’ theme, a strand of their ‘Digitisation’ programme. The team is Shelley Hales, a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Classics & Ancient History and Nic Earle, University E-learning Co-ordinator from the Education Support Unit. We have built a virtual 3D model in Second Life of the Pompeian Court from the 1854 Sydenham Crystal Palace. The Pompeian Court was a complete life-size model of an ancient house from Pompeii, housing a collection of copies of Roman paintings. Our Model is designed to bring together a digitised collection of the material contained in the Court alongside an archive of material pertaining to it, and we are designing interface techniques to enable researchers, community groups, school and undergraduate students to engage with and use the Model for their own needs.

We have chosen a virtual environment, and Second Life in particular, to rebuild the Sydenham Pompeian Court because it allows us both to recreate and to study a point of comparison with the social and reproductive techniques of the Crystal Palace. Just as the Crystal Palace was considered in 1854, Second Life is both a massive social experiment, bringing together diverse users, and a testing ground for new approaches to education, entertainment and enterprise. The Model takes advantage of the use of avatars both to populate the space and to allow users touring the Court to interact with us, other visitors and the objects on display. It also seems to us that the questions of authenticity and of the responsibility of reconstructors raised by virtual models echo questions faced by the creators of the Pompeian Court in the Crystal Palace. The project allows us to think about the links between content and the mode of its delivery.

Within the university we’ll be mainly using the Model in a third year Classics module on the reception of Pompeii since its rediscovery in 1748. As well as being used in the classroom at Bristol, the Model will allow Bristol students to collaborate with undergraduates studying a similar module in Liverpool. As a teaching tool, the Model offers an opportunity for students to experience the spatial effects of a Roman house and provides an introduction to the ways in which Pompeii has been displayed in museum settings. Most importantly, the Model provides an opportunity for students to assess the ethics of reconstruction and, through physical engagement with the act of reconstruction, to reflect on it both as a conceptual and manufactured process and as a finished product specifically of Victorian England or of 21st Century digital technology.

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UEL School of Health & Bioscience

I wrote the last report at the end of an intense period of development during which we had worked with an external developer (Gemixin Ltd) on the school’s newly acquired island UEL HABitat to produce more sophisticated versions of an existing laboratory and Crime Scene house and, in particular, to create a new polyclinic for use by a range of healthcare students. We are now in a period of consolidation where the focus is on essential maintenance, creation of learning activities, orientation of staff and students and, most importantly, on more in depth evaluation than has been possible hitherto. We are also looking seriously at the possibilities for sharing our resources with the wider education community as well as collaborating with other institutions on new ventures.

The Second Life laboratory learning activities have been compared to an equivalent Flash version and the conclusion, not surprisingly perhaps, is that students can benefit from either type of application but have a preference for Flash because of its immediacy and straightforward operation. However more work needs to be done in this respect in that a Second Life laboratory may well have learning benefits beyond procedural learning once students are familiar with the operation of Second Life.

Herbal medicine students have been using their area of the polyclinic for a few months as an aid to developing clinical reasoning skills. Feedback is generally positive though some struggle with the environment and quite a few do not have home PCs with the correct graphics spec for SL. The physiotherapy area will be offered to students studying a respiratory module in late April / May once we have completed some necessary revisions to the web based back end editor that enables staff to add cases. It will be subject to formal evaluation during this time – the study has yet to be fully specified but will be focussing on confidence building in students prior to going on clinical placements in intensive care and high dependency units.

We are in early talks with another HE institution to develop the podiatry area of our polyclinic, so watch this space. We are also interested in collaborative arrangements to increase the number of patent cases in all areas of the polyclinic, the creation of good cases being a very resource intensive process.

For further information on UEL HABitat, including slurl, see blog entry:

http://blog.uelconnect.org.uk/hab/2009/11/27/current-state-of-play-on-second-life/

School of Psychology

The school now has conference and tutorial facilities in dedicated buildings on UEL’s main island. Some staff have recently started offering tutorials on a range of topics – take up has been variable but one member of staff managed to attract 23. Plans are in place for a conference later in the year at which third year students will present their final year research projects, subject to successful acceptance of abstracts by a conference committee. In other words, Second Life is being used to give them experience of academic conference processes prior to exposure to the real thing.

A pilot study of Psychology staff perceptions of SL as a teaching medium is currently underway. Participating staff take part in two semi-structured interviews pre and post their SL tutorial session. In the first interview staff are asked broad questions regarding their views of the advantages and disadvantages of using Second Life as a teaching environment and in the second about their actual experiences of teaching in Second Life. The interviews will be transcribed and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) employed to uncover themes within the data.

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Void, a performance company based at University of Worcester, is exploring how Virtual Worlds are changing the nature of storytelling in a new Second Life library project called The Void Library, that has been built above the University of Worcester Island. Visitors are able to access books, listen to stories and experience narratives appearing out of thin air as their avatars explore the multi-levelled virtual library. The Void Library is based on ideas from a short story by the Argentinean writer, Jorge Luis Borges, called ‘The Library of Babel’. This story tells of an impossibly huge library which contains every book which ever has, or could be, written – the only problem is there is no means of anyone finding any particular book and lifetimes are spent fruitlessly searching for meaningful information among the baffling array of texts.

The Void Library in Second Life explores the difficulty of meaningful choice in an environment of abundant information. It provokes some serious and playful questions about just how stories can be experienced in digital environments where the acts of ‘authoring’ and ‘reception’ are similarly challenged. Visitors are allowed to glimpse real texts, lift books off shelves and sit down to read them on comfy chairs. But The Void Library is also a perilous space and it is quite easy for avatars to fall from the building to the distant ground below, or to get sidetracked into stories that seem to be continually changing in a space that mutates with every visit.

The Void Library project, which has been funded and supported by the University of Worcester, was initially presented at the International Conference on the Arts in Society in Venice last July. It will feature in an article about narrative development in Virtual Worlds to be published later this year in the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media and Performance.

The Void Library was made by Liz Swift and Peter Ireland . It can be found at http://slurl.com/secondlife/University%20of%20Worcester/192/215/23.

So kudos to Andy, Pete and Ed for their Heineken ethos (i.e. refreshing the projects other funding bodies cannot reach).

So, what next for Virtual World Watch? Well, it’s carrying on through 2010 and 2011, at least. VWW is a part-time service run by one person, so it doesn’t cost megabucks to run. There’s sufficient momentum in the use of virtual worlds within UK academia, and enough interesting things happening (not just technically and academically, but socio-economically) to make it worthwhile. And it fits in with my business plan for the next few years.

Anyway, having previously worked on one too many digital info projects which are gathering dust online, it’s nice to see how long such a project or service can be kept active, useful and relevant for.

Funding and advisory group

To maintain perspective (as opposed to one person going off on his own tangent) and replace the support and steerage Eduserv have given over the years, an advisory group of academics is being formed. These people will, well, advise VWW on what it does and what directions it takes, as well as advise on the political situations that regularly face VWW. Academia. Politics. *sigh*

Funding. The initial temptation was to change the name to the “Bank of Virtual World Watch” and approach HM government for a multi-billion pound bailout. This seems to work for others. Instead, VWW is keen to try different models of funding for this service, so the rest of 2010 and 2011 gives plenty of opportunities for this.

Current snapshot (number #8) and other reports

VWW is currently working on three reports/snapshots in parallel. This is not good

• Report: “What is virtual world research? What is it not? Hmmm?” The troublesome hangover from the end of last year, which has turned into a reflective piece about the nature of virtual world research. This is (finally) coming out very soon. Thanks especially to contributers who wondered what the heck happened to their submissions.
• Report: “Swimming to Jerusalem: four years of virtual world trend-spotting.” Partially a “final report” for Eduserv, and partially a reflective piece on the last few years of watching trends and developments. Out at the end of March/start of April.
• Snapshot #8 of virtual world use in UK higher and further education. Also out at the end of March/start of April, the final snapshot under Eduserv funding.

On that last report. As ever, many people have submitted for snapshot #8, and it’s nice that there are a few new people who have submitted for the first time. Though you’ll have missed the draw for people who got theirs in by the end of February, VWW can still take submissions for this snapshot. The final deadline is the end of Sunday March 14th.

Seoul

Future snapshots: 2010 and 2011

After snapshot #8, VWW is settling into a bi-annual approach to snapshots; one at the end of the academic year (June-ish), and one at the end of the calendar year (December-ish). This has the advantage of putting about 6 months between each; one of the main problems with the current compressed cycle is contributers passing as they haven’t had enough time to do significant ’stuff’ since the last snapshot. And they’re probably quietly fed up of being asked every few months.

So, the snapshot schedule for the rest of 2010 and 2011 is:

• Snapshot #9: June/July 2010
• Snapshot #10: December 2010
• Snapshot #11: June/July 2011
• Snapshot #12: December 2011

Presentations

VWW is out and about doing presentations in the near future:

• Birmingham, UK 18th March: Virtual Worlds in Education Forum
• University of Sheffield, UK 18th April: Department of Information Studies
• Coventry University, UK Spring (date tbd)
• University of Michigan, USA Summer (date tbd)

Want VWW to come and speak to your posse? Here’s some details.

Book

Steady progress is being made on a book about the use of virtual worlds in teaching and learning, based on the last few years experiences in the UK and other research, teaching and use elsewhere. The proofreader and a few reviewers are lined up, and we seem to be pencilled in for a December 2010 release to the masses, just in time for the Christmas book market. Now you know what to get for that aunt who sends you a hand-knitted Rupert Bear jumper every single ******* year, even though you are 41.

Also putting this in writing is another incentive, as I know that if I don’t produce it, there’ll be reminders on public twitter from certain people (hard stare in general direction of Teesside ).

Other stuff

There’s some other stuff that may be produced by VWW, that the advisory group are and will be chewing over; it will be good to reflect on the past few years work first though. Everything, including the book, will go up on, or via, this website.

That’s enough for now. A big thank you to the many UK academics, and other people, who have contributed to the snapshots, Flickr group, and other materials over the last four year. To infinity, and beyond…

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Councillors Barry Hunt and Tommy Evans of Skinningrove had been talking to the Police about community policing issues and anti social behaviour. Last year these two had appeared in the Second Life Movie “Skinningrove Welcome to the Future” about the refurbishment of Skinningrove Jetty. I was asked by Cllr Hunt to meet with Sara Graham, the Crime & Justice Coordinator at Cleveland Police HQ and talk about ways of getting the community policing message across using community media. What everyone really wanted was another Second Life film and with the date for the annual community animated film event at Saltburn Community Theatre coming up this seemed to be the ideal date and venue to aim for. I said “we should have started six months ago” but nevertheless agreed to give it a go.

We applied to Northern Film and Media and the UK Film Councils, “Social Impact” fund to run the event and I’m pleased to say we were successful. Meanwhile we started to develop the script and scout locations in Second Life. We had decided to go with “The Force is With You” for our title and to adopt a Star Wars theme, but to avoid copyright issues the villain was cast as “Arthur Vador”. Several suitable locations were found and I sought out the owners of each and asked permission to film. This is not strictly speaking necessary but it’s a good policy and we got some additional assistance from some Sim owners including members of a school Sim performing as “extras” for us. The script was a slight concern to me and I said to our partners, this is a good and serious message but we have to also entertain, where are the gags? Luckily the script was approved by the police with only minor alterations and we were good to go. Police officers including Inspector Charlie Bell voiced their own characters and pupils at Whitecliffe Primary School provided the voice characterisations of the children in the film. Naturally Tommy and Barry played themselves again.

There was one set we had to build and this was Skinningrove Village Square. This was built on a sky platform high above Teesside University’s “Teeslife” with some excellent help from the Institute of Digital Innovation’s DLab. I’m sure Barry and I came close to arrest for suspicious behaviour several times as we measured out and took pictures of the real location in order to build the virtual one.

Community workshops were held to produce the scenes and all but one scene was in the can by Christmas 2009. There are several hilarious out-takes that may one day see the light of day. Then in January 2010 Barry and I attended a Grundvig workshop in Vienna. With a screening approaching in early February I was obliged to edit many scenes in my hotel room whilst at the 2 week workshop. We kidnapped some of the delegates of the workshop who “voiced” one of the scenes from the film.

This can be seen here: http://tvcm.co.uk/animation-event-goes-international/ Trouper 1 is played by Markus Petz from Finland, Trouper 2 by Thomas Chepaitis the Minister of foreign affairs of Uzhupis Republic (Lithuania) Arthur Vador is played by me, Steve Thompson and Barry Hunt is camera operator.

In the background is Laura Pakalne, Senior Officer in the Public Relations Department in the Ministry of Justice, Latvia who was most interested in working with the British police and the movie production team on more collaborative projects. Markus delayed his return to Finland to travel to Saltburn to assist with a hook-up with Latvia during the event on February 11th.

The community animation event (Animex Fringe) in Saltburn on Thursday 11th Feb was a tremendous success. The Mayor of Redcar and Cleveland Cllr Brian Briggs launched the evening event preceded by a Mayors Reception for cast and crew from the film. During the matinee and the evening performance last years Mayor, Cllr Mike gave a presentation explaining how he had launched the Skinningrove Jetty film last year and then gone on to appear in a Second Life Movie himself, “Supermayor”.

The matinee was a full house with children from Whitecliffe Primary and Saltburn Primary attending. The event included animations produced by the children of Whitecliffe Primary on the subject of Rain Forests and sustainability. With help from Markus Petz we hooked up with children and police in Latvia during the matinee. There were around 80 people for the evening event which we also “Blogcast” for the enjoyment of people around the world. As well as the hook-up with Latvia, the event was followed by people in Greece, Lithuania, Poland, Turkey, Sweden, Finland and elsewhere in the UK. We even made it onto Latvian National TV!

Naturally, the big event was the premier of “The Force is With You. On his return from Vienna Cllr Barry Hunt was elected Mayor of Loftus and in this role as well as that of an instigator and star of the film gave the final address and announced the first screening of the new film. It was extremely well received by the audience as well as the police for whom it was a first screening too. They had placed their reputations in our hands and were well pleased with the outcome with Inspector Charly Bell particularly pleased with the dashing matinee idol hero he had become on film: http://tvcm.co.uk/the-force-is-with-you-2

You can relive the event on the blog at www.saltburn.org.uk or if you really want to re-run the event in the order it happened you can follow the blogcast here (it builds slow but quickly gets media rich) – just read each page, scrolling down and then click “older entries” at the bottom.

Steve Thompson, Institute of Digital Innovation, Teesside University.
S.d.thompson@tees.ac.uk

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.

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This academic year at Bromley College we have moved away from using Second Life to trialling OpenSim.

We have production and test Linux servers running OpenSim 0.6.8 and staff and students have access to OpenSim, both from within College and externally.

We have found that two of our computer rooms already have graphics cards which are Meerkat compatible and are converting two more rooms of PC’s by adding appropriate graphics cards.

Using a standalone installation of OpenSim means that it is much easier for us to provide and control access to the MUVE. Although OpenSim is currently in in alpha we have found it works well in the classroom environment.

This academic year we are using/planning on using OpenSim with two groups:

1) National Diploma IT year 2 – Developing and assessing skills in Object Orientated Programming.

2) FdEng Software Development year 2 – Investigating Web services practically as part of a Database Development course.

I am continuing to maintain the Linden Script exhibition in Second Life on Hyles Infopoint. However I have also ported it to OpenSim to help our students learn LSL. Additionally, I have made the exhibition available as a download so that others can install it into their own OpenSim standalones.

For more information please visit our blogs:

http://bcopensim.blogspot.com/
http://www.linuxtraining.org.uk/blogger4.html

Virtual World Watch can take submissions into the early part of March if you are pressed, but only stuff submitted by 11:59pm on February 28th 2010 will go into the VWW “Lottery of Riches”.

Thanks for all submissions,
Virtual World Watch