Building

Despite not leaving home I seem to have had a presence at NECC08, being mentioned for helping Peggy Sheehy with her building for the Story Tellers at short notice, plus a mention at the viral PD tools talk and attending a 3-hour "flat classroom" workshop online.

Comments from other folks, particularly Komputer Merlin suggest that Desi and I were mentioned in quite a few other places as well, and certainly Kom was keen to introduce us to several new ISTE members one night of the conference.

I ought to say that most of the building for the storytellers wasn't done by me - I was in the middle of two very urgent projects when the request came through. That said, a lot of the texturing, particularly in the garden (top picture) and huge amounts of scripting; parceling of land; setting up, converting and streaming media; converting sound to usable Second Life™ formats; sign-writing etc. was done by me in the background. Perhaps ironically, despite having almost no prims I rezzed, about 90% of what you see in the garden shot, and some of what you see in the school shot is my work. The video we were shown of the kids' reaction to their build arriving in Second Life was great.

But it's really the workshop I attended I want to think about. I'm going to sound critical - although hopefully constructively so. It's always easy to criticise of course and I ought to be the first to say I've never done a live workshop with extra online attendees before, so kudos to the presenters for being brave enough to give it a go.

I suppose one of the first things to highlight is the need for preparation. I've observed, professionally and otherwise, a fair few classes in my time and sometimes you can't tell a well prepared class from a poorly prepared class if we're honest. However, you can always catch an unprepared class (unless you're working Learning Support in which case most of them are unprepared because the student never wants to do today what you agreed last week). But, if you're inviting an online audience making sure your camera is somewhere is can see the screen you are using for presentation, can see the speakers and the mic can relay the speakers voices clearly ought to be automatic. I struggle to hear at the best of times, but the back channel chat was of the order of "OMG can you hear a word she's saying?!" from everyone and although we could mostly see the speakers, there was a light beautifully set up to give glare across 75% of the screen so even seeing the slides was frankly impossible.

Part-way through the presenters set up a chat room that we could try to use. Why not before they started though? It was useful for a while, although as soon as we were shooting off doing the activities, it was yet another tab to remember to flick back to.

The activities showed signs of needing more preparation in at least four ways too:

• Making groups on the fly becomes tricky when you've got a mixture of RL and online attendees. Perhaps setting it up so there are a couple of RL groups and a couple of online groups, rather than groups spread across RL and online who struggle to communicate would be a smart move?


• The instructions for what to do, where to go etc. need to be clear. There were no links to the relevant pages, they relied on you, if you were a virtual attender, being able to hear someone saying where to go - but it was very hard to hear what was being said even for those with good hearing. It was ironic that one of the bits that came through really clearly was the (for me at least) totally superfluous description of how to use your wiki well - including mentioning making navigation simple and clear, yet the presenters failed to achieve this.


• It wasn't clear either that the presenters had thought through their activities. Find and present news about outsourcing in education. Do this in a style that is "fun" and engages the users in play. What age group? Tools for play made available? Time to stop and think, or a mad rush to get it done in the time for the workshop? You guess...


• I'm good at multi-tasking, but the need to flick between wiki pages, google/search results pages, streaming workshop page and then a ning page - OMG. Please someone give me £10,000 so I can buy a really big new computer with at least 3 monitors. One poor little 19" monitor just isn't big enough to cope with it all, although a 19" monitor is a nice size for my visual field as I can scan across it all comfortably without moving my head and with the ability to focus at any point on it comfortably and quickly.

I wish I could come away feeling positive about this workshop. It has reinforced to me the need to make sure you get the preparation work done, and for a big conference presentation perhaps that old chestnut of a run-through to shake out any issues too, and a really strong need to stop and consider screen real-estate that you expect your users to utilise when teaching online. Here's hoping that if I ever get asked to do something like this I remember these lessons.

Sometimes being a builder and scripter for educators in Second Life™ leads to the oddest requests.

This, for example, is a British domestic gas meter. The kind of thing I have in a cupboard in the corner to meter how much gas my hot water boiler and central heating use (not so much central heating in mid-May in a heat wave it has to be said).

This little beasty isn't made of sculpties (although I did try a new tool called SLOFT to make one, which is going to be the subject of another blog post sometime, and it might still get a sculpty overhaul) but the counter and the spinning dial both work properly. There are issues which will be detailed much more fully on my upcoming portfolio description.

This isn't a vanity build either, this is a strong educational tool. One of my contacts in Second Life teaches plumbers, and one of the things they have to do is use gas meters to measure power consumption by appliances. Touching the meter will allow you to start a test, measure (just like IRL) the time for the dial to rotate (randomly generated in the appropriate range by the script) and then calculate the power consumption in kW. You then touch the meter again, give your answer and it instantly checks from the stored data if you are within the allowed 5% error range. If you are it tells you so, if not, it tells you both the time you should have recorded and the number of kW you should have calculated from that.

The upshot? The students get instant feedback and the ability to determine where they made their mistake: in the timing of a rotation or in the calculations if they got the time correct. Although this was a one-off, I'm hoping to get various other builds of a similar theme from this group in the months to come.

UPDATE: You can see the main entry for this project now.

You might already know, but we rebuilt Dante's Inferno and Linden Hills. You can see some pictures over here.

I've also written about what we did and why on my website.

In both educational terms, and in terms of my general satisfaction with the build, I think we've had an improvement. Of course you would hope to do that in a rebuild, but we had more of a rebuild than most educators, or builders, routinely get, because our entire sim had to be packed up and put away, then reopened and built.

This allowed us an unprecedented level of choice in the design process. Not entirely by chance Desi and I were also asked to sit on panel for an American Gothic Literature class and answer questions, both about the literature and the creation of builds to support learning it in Second Life™ earlier this week. This has led me to ponder the process a bit, and so to blog about it!

For our builds, the core question is always "Does this support the educational outcomes?" Things which are cool, or hard to use, or distracting we try to cut out. Of course, we don't succeed in meeting everyone's expectations, things that work for us might be terrible for someone else, but by and large you can do that. Any teacher does that in planning a class or a resource, at least you hope so!

The next element is "Does this promote immersion?" Immersion is a harder thing to measure of course. But you can promote immersion by combinations of the look, the sound, the colouring, the way in which you move around the space and probably other things. If you're doing a Poe story or the works of Poe, you don't build a light, airy hacienda, you build somewhere dark, looming and angular. You don't add sound effects of children playing on a summer's day, you add chains, heartbeats, screams. You don't have a big open space, you have something that's quite hard to navigate around, or at least with nooks and crannies. (There has to be a limit to hard you make it to navigate, because you want people to use it and explore it after all, unless you make that the challenge.) If you are going to have a screen to play streamed movies, you don't have it look like an ultra-modern plasma screen, you might go for "mad scientist" screen (although that's not really Poe's thing) more reasonably you go for something like a portrait on the wall.

The next element, which crosses over the first two is the content. This is both the educational and the building and scripting content. Is clicking a sign to get a notecard immersive? Is it educational? Is stopping to read the contents of a webpage either via llLoadURL or HOAP as that develops, immersive? Is it educational? Is having the house talk to you spam or educational? The answers aren't easy here, and we use all of these techniques and more to achieve our builds, because sometimes the best thing you can do for the educational side of things reduces immersion.

The final element for us is making it stand alone. Not all of our builds aim to achieve this. Some that do aim for it, achieve it easily, some don't do so well - and we revise them if it doesn't impinge on their use for teaching.

With Literature Alive! we are aiming at a class-space. Students are encouraged, often even expected, to come back alone, but they are not expected to dive in totally unsupervised and learn everything without some guidance and support. Assignments may be based in Second Life or outside Second Life, but by its very nature Literature Alive! is not in the business of teaching building and scripting, it is in the business of teaching literature and engaging with literature. If there is a choice that makes it easier for a random visitor to do things, but detracts from its use in class, supporting class, then we won't take that option. (We might well look for an option that tries to make it easier for a random visitor AND aids teaching in class though.)

If you visit the Inferno we provide the text, we provide activities on each circle, we provide numerous chances for you to pick up overall guidance, and to get advice about what to look for on each level. These add to both teaching and enabling the random visitor to learn about the Inferno.

The Linden Hills side of the sim is, however, harder for a random visitor to get to grips with, by and large.

Why? Well, although I've done most of the building and scripting, the content, and particularly the educational content, is largely provided by the students we've taught.
Did they do it how we would have done it? No, of course not.
Did they learn more about what was going on? Well, some have done really well, they've read Linden Hills and are explaining elements relevant to their section. They have learnt about The Inferno and are making links to the poem as well. Some have done less well, and have tried to avoid reading the book and/or the poem and rely on notes, web-based summaries and the like.
But, has it improved the use of the space for education? Yes, undeniably. For students that put in any effort at all, they have the benefit of trying to teach part of the book. Is there a teacher out there that doesn't believe that the best way to learn a subject is to be asked to teach it? I'd be surprised if there were. If you're in any doubt, have a look at this table. Practice by doing is hard for literature... "Just go and write a book about the evils operating within African American culture" isn't really an option for a class. But, teaching others gives us that same 90% retention level. It also, of course, gives you a chance to practice by doing before the final examination too. Students get feedback suggesting they've got the wrong end of the stick, suggesting they need to cite sources, include page numbers and/or line numbers and the like. They're all "soft" skills that you expect students to have at college level, whether rightly or wrongly, but that you can point out and give them a chance to correct so they remember come exam time. They're not only learning about the material by teaching, they're learning about the skills that are expected in the course by practice in a real (or a really virtual) setting. Excellent.

Sorry if you visit and don't get a good feel for Linden Hills, the focus is always on the teaching, and teaching the class comes first, and it has achieved that aim. It is possible we'll revamp the Linden Hills side of the Inferno once class is over in order to make it more accessible.

I've been having fun building, lots of fun building over the weekend. With Beth I built Bailey's Cafe and Brewster Place two more Gloria Naylor books - although less intense builds than Willow Springs. I'll let her photos do the talking. They were fun, and fairly fast to put up, although prim limits chopped us down from the 7 storey builds initially requested. I need to texture some bricks with graffiti for the end wall tomorrow, and I think we might be tweaking a bit, but the bulk of the build is done.

It's not all literature stuff though - I've also finished a build for Second Nature (that's Nature magazine in SL), making a water purification plant for their water science sim, and adding to it, from my background, some stuff about traveler's diarrhoea. It's fun, although I'll have to talk to the guy that asked me to build it, to see if he's happy. But, before he gets to feature creep it, here's what it looks like. You can visit it here

It's been another fairly insane week with one thing or another.

Beth is running an open-access American Literature course in SL. I will be attending as an "interested other" rather than studying for credit. The class will mix SL-heads like me (some of whom may be signing up for college credits for it), and RL students from her college, some of who will doubtless be taking their first steps in SL with their first class. This has lead to two things:

1. Beth and I rebuilt her AmLit classroom. I promise I didn't suggest this (OK, I suggested a garden or forest theme), but Beth was unhappy with the classrooms approach and wanted something open and untraditional.
   
2. I started a commonplace, or commonplace book for the course. Given I'm not doing it for credit I have a sneaky suspicion I'll pass on the essay writing - I can hear Beth sighing in relief too, one less assignment to mark each week - but I've blogged about a commonplace book class already and I want to see how it works in practise.
   

Having rebuilt the classroom into a forest, Beth ran a class there yesterday (to educators rather than students) to see how it went. We had an interesting mix of people show up: One of Beth's former RL students. A Chinese teacher very new to SL, and although with good English not fully fluent. Me, fairly conversant with SL I'd hope, but not conversant with studying literature, nor particularly with American Literature (although there were parts I recognised), another SL-head of US origin so more used to the cannon. She's blogged about it and we've had some inworld discussion about it, so I won't record that here, save to say when I described her as a "grit in the oyster" style teacher, she liked the allusion!

I need to blog about citing and copyright and things. I wrote about it on SLI, but think it could do with an entry here too, where it will have a slightly different tone. I'll add that to iGTD now.

I've also started some pages with learning skills resources. So far there's a General dyslexia page and a writing sentences page. I plan to add some numeracy resources, writing frames, referencing references, "what does this question word mean?", revision tips and notetaking tips pages. I'll happily add others too, if there's a need that I spot, or that you'd like to see addressed. Currently the pages need some work to have an index and probably a column setting for easier navigation. Currently I'm keeping ownership of the pages, but I will consider duplicating them on a wiki for more general access and commenting too. If you'd like to suggest changes or improvements, please comment here, or email me.

Fingers crossed I polished off a land management system for Sudane. It was working smoothly until I realised I'd missed one part from the specs. Changing everything for that has proved... messy. Lots of knock-on effects. Having, in the previous paragraph, commented about exam technique, at least peripherally, that old saw of "read the question properly" is rather strongly in mind. It applies quite well here too... D'Oh.

Finally the photos of the big fight in the Monday night RPG I blogged about have come through. I need to upload them and so on, and will add them to that page, and to a new entry for those that don't want to plough back. I'd do it now, but I have a class in 10 minutes and I need a coffee and some loin-girding first.

Over the last few days I've built a women's studies classroom and several scripted goodies to help teachers. They're in beta-test atm but should be out soon.

I've also agreed to help organise the First Annual Best Practises in SL conference with Beth and to help run an in-world workshop at SLOAN-C ALN in November.

Keep your eyes peeled for goodies, the current list will be a tour guide system, which will probably be out tomorrow. It lets the guide set up and lead tours quickly and easily, and should make it easy for the tourists to follow. Then we have a low lag bullet pointer. That's basically finished, but I need to write the help card. Finally a tool I developed on the spur of the moment to meet a need (there are good points to being a scripter) and developed quickly from there. I was teaching essay planning to a dyslexic learner, and I normally start with a two part planning process, spider diagram, then plan in order. It lets dyslexic learners, and others, work more freely - they just smack ideas out more or less without structure, then loosely link them, then take their ideas and develop them into a structured plan that they can write to. Easy, right? But how do you do a spider diagram in SL? Well now you can (well will be able to when it goes on sale).

This will go to be part of a dyselxia resources page I'm planning to write too, and maybe a tool towards a presentation at the SLBest Practise conference.

With some muttering (we decided on Friday that the original specs were too primmy and I was going to rescript to a different method with the same quiz progression, then came the "Can I have it by Sunday, please, for a conference?" line) I produced a quiz system for Beth and Jean-Claude based around J-C's Unreal Tournament quiz.

You can buy your own system now on SLB, SLEx and in world in several places. NB, this doesn't contain J-C's chemistry textures: you can set your own textures up to make the quiz relevant to your teaching needs. It comes in a couple of versions too, one (the one J-C uses) where the questions are totally randomised - which is obviously good for some things, and one where you have some structure (useful for things like common spelling mistakes and other applications) - the right and wrong answers are displayed in a group so the same things come up together, but their position on the answer board is still random (so they can't learn "next one is bottom left" and must actually look at the boards).

Jean-Claude was happy with his quiz and has blogged about using it at the ACS conference.

This is it in action:

Finally remembered to grab a picture of Io as it is today, and added it to the Io of Old entry. There's a few bits that don't come out too well (the windmill has a dome on it for example) but the contrast is quite extreme.

You can also see what I've spent half of my day doing: the tower on the corner of my house is now, externally at least, complete. The windows at the bottom might change, not decided what's going into that space yet. Internally there is work to be done still of the texturing kind but the building is pretty much sorted.

Doc showed up too, and we caught up on gossip. It was good to see her again and chat, and bitch about this, that and the other.

To round off a good afternoon Wales stuffed England too. Shane Williams had a shocker, but everyone's allowed one every now and again. I've been a fan of Stephen Jones, and in fairness to him he's never had forwards all performing as they did today (that's not quite true, they performed well against France, it's just France were a better team, but this time the forwards didn't let England be better than them anywhere around the park), but despite that I think his international days may be over. Hook just looks the part, and makes smart choices. Even when England tried to fight back he kept them pinned back and slotted the points over to keep the scoreboard looking good and moving along.