Liquid Learning

Waiting for myself

An interesting moment in transgressing my own boundaries between self and avatar. Rarely have we appeared together and here only in the name of science.

This video came about from a little research that was carried out in advance of an upcoming, 7th July, symposium that we will be presenting to a remote audience in Kuala Lumpar. We cannot be there physically so my question was, if we decide to use Second Life in what ways can we create maximum social presence?

I am an immersionist, that is I let StevenW build his own space inside SL, yet I am interested in ways to move information in and out of Second Life, punching holes through the membrane and linking in-world and out-of-world experiences. The porosity of SL has changed over time with channels opening for blogging; twitter, web-browsing, SL to Flickr, audio, facebook links, and streaming video. Taking the scenario of a face-2-face conference blended with SL participants I took a peek at the different ways to stream live video into SL. Inspired by posts from both AndyPowell and Rob Smart's blogs I set up a quick trial with Veodia, knowing their live video webstreaming service is now available for free and is offered in a format compatible with Second Life.

So how was it? Well simple, so simple I was left wondering what the catch was, bandwidth issues aside. Here is a quick run through of the steps I followed:

• Opened an account with Veodia, a straightforward exercise;
• Clicked through the screens to start my first broadcast;
• Pressed the appropriate button and let my Apple MacPro do the audio-video and capture;
• Previewed the stream to check I was on air and then copied the rtsp URL provided by Veodia from the live broadcast page;
• Launched Second Life;
• Made a coffee while I waited to get in-world ;)
• Knocked up a quick media screen, set the textures and then pasted the rtsp stream URL into the land parcel settings;
• Pressed the media player button in SL;
• Bingo, there I was alive and kicking in the virtual universe.

Whether we will use this for the symposium I am still unsure, my preference I think would be to have the audience streamed into SL so that we have some sense of those who are watching and listening in the conference room. Testing the set-up with fellow panelists uncovered three issues that are driving me away from using SL as a conferencing tool:

• First and most obvious is the heavy bandwidth requirements for this configuration and the related issue of delay, around 3-5 seconds, between the capture and delivery of the video stream;
• Second is the lack of status or feedback indicators, the kind of thing you find when using a tool like Elluminate where you can ask the audience questions and get feedback through a series of emoticons that includes useful items like the 'hands-up' attention grabber;
• Third follows a similar line and concerns the difficulty in providing a mechanism for live audience participation. Setting up a back channel would be an ideal solution and making use of the main SL chat window would be the natural place for this. Yet to my knowledge it is still impossible to remotely work with SL chat so delegates would need to log into SL if they wanted to use the chat window. The option of using a lightweight client such as AjaxLife might be a solution, if the audience all have SL accounts or deploying a non-integrated chat client bought in through the in-world media browser. Both options are still not ideal.

There is perhaps a fourth reason, intimated at the start of this post, the separation of avatar and typist. My avatar and me do not appear in public together, or least not very often and somehow that feels right. The quandry of where to post snapshots of us both together, Flickr seemed at first the obvious place, confirmed to me that despite the fuzzy boundary between real and virtual identities they remain in many aspects decoupled. SL is a different space and there exists a differentiated person which goes someway to explain my discomfort in completely collapsing our two identities.

How tall is tall in Second Life?

Well about 202m if you are given 15 minutes to build a tower and you have the physics switched on. That was the challenge I presented to all the avatars who came along to the SL social event organized during the Emerge online conference (23rd to 25th June). On paper (or notecard) a simple task and one that was reused from a teaching activity designed for the OpenHabitat project by Cubist Scarborough. In virtuality it was a more challenging competition than I envisaged.

Building in SL requires a number of skills: knowledge of the client interface, the ability to interpret the ‘build’ dialog boxes, good camera controls and a design based visual grammar that can adjust to a 3D working space. Complicate this mix by making it a cooperative task and the constraints of SL as a tool for collaboration start to become uncovered. The permissions structure in SL means that object sharing is problematic and needs to be solved if team building is going to be effective. To progress, clear communication channels between avatars needs to be established, not a straightforward matter when the main chat window is clogged with the noise from competing parties busy issuing each other instructions and encouragement.

From my perspective as judge and referee it felt like 15 minutes of mayhem. Thankfully, towers did appear out of the chaos and the most productive builders were those who in the end chose to go it alone. It was also a great insight into how to design a creative activity for a virtual environment such as SL. The issues that needed to be addressed (and were forgotten by me) were around scaffolding the activity – ensuring there were a set of baseline competencies in place from which creativity could emerge. Next time I will make sure:

•    the instructions (and supporting resources) are given well in advance to allow the less experienced participants time to brush up on the skills that will be needed. A few Torley Linden tutorials would have been handy here;
•    time is allowed for thinking and communicating strategy and possible approaches to the problem;
•    that I do not shift everyone from one venue to another and breakup the natural conversational flows that are developing, in this case moving people from the social area to the building area;
•    that if possible everyone is assigned to groups in advance and are not distracted by what can be a tortuous process of forming teams.

Second Life can be deceptive. On the surface it presents itself as an environment that can be interpreted by understandings from the real world. It can seduce one into believing that ‘teaching’ practices that work on the outside can be readily transposed inside. It is a sobering experience when the particular constraints of SL kick back and even the best-laid plans begin to unravel.

Thankfully here the entire session did not go completely awry and towers were wrought from SL’s basic prim set.  Congratulations to Art Fossett who was awarded the winners prize – a ‘Ruth’. Of course we will be expecting him back next year, or perhaps at the next social, to defend his title.

See the full photostream here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevenwbohm/tags/towers/

and other snaps here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cubistscarborough/tags/em0608/

MUVEs and Second Lives

This was a presentation given at the annual King's [College London] Institute of  Learning and Teaching conference, a mainly internal affair aimed at highlighting current educational research within the institution and disseminating good practice. The talk itself formed a general, if critical, introduction to Second Life as a social virtual world and articulated the abundant issues that make SL a challenging yet compelling arena for teaching activities. What was noticeable when putting together these slides was just how *much* is going on in SL, to the extent it was difficult to capture the richness in a short session like this. One of the key threads that ran through the talk considered how the first phase of simply diving in-world and trying things out is being extended by a second phase of serious research activity - evidenced by the number of grants that have been  secured by new projects such as MUVEnation, (Open)Habitat and LLL3D. Some of the early empirical data gathering that I have carried out with fellow researcher Margarita Perez-Garcia has been a study of the non-formal learning opportunities made available to SL citizens in the form of hands-on workshops. The emphasis in this work has been to explore how teachers in short duration SL competency building classes have appropriated virtual spaces and have made use of tools and techniques that may be valuable in understanding what good practice is in MUVE-based teaching. The slides show the culmination of the preliminary data analysis in the form of a taxonomy of practices and a matrix that elaborates four areas of teaching that are formed by axes addressing control of the environment and pedagogical approach. The conclusions are that good practice in these workshops is exemplified by maintaining a close control over the teaching space combined with a reflective and  process orientated  teaching approach.

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Loving your avatar: identity, immersion and empathy

At the Berlin Educa Online conference back in November 2007 I started to tackle the problematic issue of identity and identity play in Second Life. I have been consistently fascinated by what I consider one of the key attractions and confusions of SL, namely the ability to slip into another shell and build a unique presence - within what is arguably the richest and most diverse virtual setting at the present time. A large topic for a short talk - so I took a particular focus on one aspect of avatar identity: how we develop a ‘relationship’ with our avatar. Relationship may sound like an odd word to use but I choose this deliberately as for me it captures something of the  discourse that we often read when we talk about our second lives or indeed the characters we build within other online worlds (see ‘Alter Ego: avatars and their creators’ http://www.alteregobook.com).

From  analyses of blog posts and mailing lists, interviews in-world and face-to-face workshops, and from my personal experiences I discovered common threads that run through many narratives in the evolution of avatars. A number of critical points in the development of this relationship over time could be clearly identified in this mapping activity:

The graph 'Development of avatar identity and empathy in MUVEs' is the visual result of this mapping activity and gathers together these key moments along a continuous time-line that stretches from the beginnings of entering the world of SL to the point of rupture where a second avatar may be spawned to cope the complexities of changing identity in-world. The x axis time-line is plotted against a y axis that I have called 'investment' and represents not simply the amount of time we invest in 'working' on our avatars but also the sense of empathy we begin to develop with our virtual other. Running along the time-line there are two drop-out thresholds marked towards the beginning of this path, where technical, competency and 'care' barriers if not surmounted often result in no further or very limited in-world activity. Beyond these points we trace multiple and changing trajectories that reflect the often complex relations we build with our avatar. On the right-hand side three phrases of being in-world are marked out: exploration, professional activity and playfulness which as can be seen in the detailed description below as often antagonistic to one another:

1. Technical and competency threshold: The early technical and competency barriers can undoubtedly be severe for many, to the extent that even when a powerful enough graphics card and a connection with adequate bandwidth have been located, newly formed denizens enter the world only to find themselves trapped on orientation island. The competency requirements for SL are often understated and form a bewildering mix of manual dexterity, games-based visual grammar and client interface navigation that demand serious and determined attention to master. In a recently published student survey, Steve Hornik posted a reflective response to what were in effect a series of negative comments on the use of SL in his accounting course that illustrate just how frustrating to students these early steps can be:
   
   

   "I did not use it that often because it was hard to understand and was too slow on my computer. I could not grasp how to use it well."

   "Honestly, I got so confused trying to simply walk and talk to people that I just ended up getting frustrated."

   Such comments serve as a reminder to all of us who are rushing forwards to introduce such cutting edge technologies into our learning and teaching settings. This situation is not atypical as Judy Robertson reports in a recent post where she came head to head with the technical difficulties that can plague efforts even at the institutional level:

   "We have two multimedia labs full of computers which are meant to be our souped up fast computers for this module. Alas, these computers meet only the minimum spec for SL but not the recommended spec. This is the difference between a happy well adjusted lecturer and a raving maniac. The computers keep crashing. Sometimes they run terribly slowly. And to add to the circus, there were intermittent network problems. The upshot of all this was that the students got frustrated."

2. Threshold of care:  One of the most difficult moments to pin down in the process of building a virtual identity. It marks a fuzzy boundary beyond which we begin to feel an emotional pull towards our virtual self and yes, we start to care about our avatar. Our creation has become an entity, even a personality, in its own right. How does this happen and how is this possible? The clearest way of understanding this process is one that touches mainly, though not exclusively, on the concepts of social and cultural capital: the building of friendships and connections; becoming part of a community; purchasing artifacts that increase our avatar's aesthetic appeal; a variety of other cultural exchanges and physical engagements that can be as simple as building ones own in-world residence and holding a house warming party.
   
   
3. Schism: As our in-world interactions become more elaborate and diverse a moment is reached where we feel a tension between our single avatar and the multiple roles that our virtual self is able to adopt. We may exist as both a playful representation of our selves alongside a virtual presence that is comprehended as an extension of our professional lives. SL offers a vast range of highly developed sub-cultures and communities that are fun, enlightening and self-revealing to explore yet these require a level of engagement that does not always sit easily with a professional demeanor. Spending time as a neko, vampire, furry, Gorean slave or participating in other roleplaying spaces that  have corresponding dress-codes, social norms and modes of behaviour may begin to sit uncomfortably within the embodiment provided within a single avatar.
   
   
4. Managed instablity: This describes the ongoing flux between playful and professional modes of in-world existence that is, for example, revealed in lengthy discussions amongst educators (cf. SLED list) of what represents a professional appearance in SL with questions posed that tackle seemingly mundane issues of where to purchase 'correct' outfits for teaching and the 'correct' anatomical and visual configuration we expect of students, visitors and tutors alike. As 'AJ' comments (reproduced with kind permission from an original SLED list posting) this in-world tension may result in real-world action:
   

   "Beyond the psycho-babble, the reason for more than one avatar was quite simple.  At the point where my employer, a state institution, began paying the bills for my work as AJ Brooks, I felt it necessary to have a second avatar.  First off, I felt it was the ethical thing to do. Second, I wanted a CLEAR distinction between what I was doing for work and what I was doing for myself, on my own time."

   
   
5. Multiple avatars: Diverse personal definitions of self and approaches to this play/work border are clearly visible in SL profiles. Statements are found that on one hand appear to mark sameness - 'I am my avatar' - and yet on the other hand celebrate difference and possibility - 'Keep SL in SL and RL in RL'. The struggle to stabilise the tensions between multiple modes of existence within a single frame can lead to the spawning of a second avatar - a blank persona that can act as a safety valve allowing these multiple states to co-exist. Multiple avatars in effect offer multiple channels for reflecting the range of roles and identities that we take for granted in our everyday existence. This can be a liberating experience for many as it suddenly frees the creator from the behavioural pressures that dominate formal settings even when they are translated into our virtual and imaginary worlds. Multiple avatars also form part of a strategy for addressing digital reputation management issues that are currently underexposed but of increasing importance to those of us who live and work in virtual spaces.

Many of the moments described above are particularly well summed up in the SLED list post below, reproduced with kind permission from 'AJ', who describes the reasons behind the creation of his small team of avatars:

"I have three avatars. AJ Brooks is my first avatar, 1st rez date coming up in January.  This is the avatar I first came into SL with and to this day use AJ for all things work related.  AJ has never really been one to "socialize" as some of my non-education friends do, such as going to clubs, puttering around, etc...  I did, of course, visit a number of places when I first came in and didn't have a "home", but now when I go out to visit someplace, at least as AJ, it is purely business.  AJ's base of operations is the CHSS Island and is normally on from 9-5 M-F, except when needed for teaching purposes (I use AJ as the avatar for my classes also) and for conferences, etc...  AJ looks a bit like me in so much as I tried to keep facial features similar, height, and hair color also, although I will admit that he is slimmer and a bit more chiseled than I. Very recently, having run out of groups, not being able to drop any more from AJ, but needing to work with faculty, etc..., I needed to start a third avatar, an alt that would be purely a "CHSS Island maintenance guy".  I've shared land ownership, buildings, etc..., plus use that avatar for creating groups related to CHSS business.  This avatar is currently a cyborg but could certainly take another shape, but would probably not be a human form.  This is purely a utility.
Wealthy Mizser is my second avatar and owns an art gallery on Avendale called The Gallery Beleza at Avendale and also own a home on Nevi, which is also one of the five sims that make up the Avendale community.  Wealthy is usually on after 5pm and on the weekends.  Wealthy is blonde with blue eyes has a body worth every linden (as opposed to having to slave for hours at the gym, which is very non-virtual), and is definitely the one to attend a party or other social event, or even to poke around places around SL that really have nothing to do with The Gallery."

Where next? This study marks the starting point for a series of other ongoing investigations that include a review of the social nature of profile building in SL as well as a more detailed engagement with competency frameworks. So ... more to come.

Assessing factors in the introduction of ICT in formal settings

This is the final tool that was released during the 6th Open Classroom Conference in Stockholm. In many ways this is also the most accessible and purposely so as it forms the final stages of actively assessing and identifying major factors in the introduction of educationally orientated ICTs in formal settings. The tool was developed with and first documented on 'espheres identitaires' by Margarita Pereze-Garcia.

The wheel itself is I think fairly self explanatory. It works as a spider graph and in this particular version the factors are broken down into in four categories or dimensions:

• Institutional profile
• Learner profile
• Teacher profile
• Teaching and learning profile

Download ICT_Introduction_Wheel.pdf (155.6K)

Each of the major categories contains a set of factors that impact on the successful integration of ICTs. These factors are individually assessed by marking each of the axes using a rating of high medium or low in terms of postiveness or readiness of each variable in relation to the technology or intervention in question. Once built the spider diagram visually uncovers weak areas and possible barriers to ICT implementation. As a further note it is important to be reflective in this kind of exercise and appreciate the subjective position given by our personal experience and perspective - each of us clearly act and work within our own particular context and therefore maintain what I would describe as a partial perspective. This becomes evident as we find there are some dimensions where our evaluations will be limited – places where it is difficult to make judgments and where we may need to gather further information. The completed wheel can be utilised to build a list of barriers to the successful introduction of ICTs and help build a coherent strategy for overcoming them. Within this list of ‘action areas’ we will also discover points where personal influence is limited and to mitigate these barriers we may need to engage the support of other actors.

This is version 1 of the tool and a newer version will be released shortly where each of the four categories can be assessed within an independent wheel. We also hope to build up a number of comparative case studies where we can start documenting recurring issues, barriers and solutions across differing technological deployments.

Literature reviewed during the creation of the tool:

• The ICT impact report by EUN
• E-learning Nordic 2006 - Uncovering the Impact of ICT on Education in the Nordic Countries
• The impact of ICT in schools - a landscape review by Professor Rae Condie & Bob Munro with the collaboration of Liz Seagraves & Summer Kenesson
• A Framework for Leading School Change in using ICT: Measuring Change by Sue Trinidad, Paul Newhouse & Barney Clarkson
• ICT: Using indicators to assess impact of ICT in education

 

Visualising a 3D matrix

What is the best way to represent 3D in 2D? This was one of the difficulties expressed in feedback from the Stockholm workshop where the 'interpreting technologies in use' diagram was presented: an analytical matrix comprising x,y, and z axes and offering descriptors that span active to passive, isolated to social and formal to informal. It is not a simple process to create a legible and visually attractive representation of a 3D matrix on a flat page. This is probably why in my original working of this diagram the formal to informal polarity was not included as an axes even though it is more than ever a vital part of how we interpret our use of technologies - as a brief aside I feel this dimension to be particularly relevant when we consider how emerging  Web 2.0 technologies, that are in their wider internet usage largely informal, change in style and nature of their usage pattern when placed in more formal settings ... such as education ... a good example being the institutional deployment of blogging tools.

With the three axes to deal with during the workshop one of the participants, Per Filipsson from the Nationellt Centrum för Flexibelt Lärande put  forward some rough sketches and in a series of emails since the Open Classroom Conference he has kindly sent me the digital versions which are both excellent and engaging representations, thanks Per:

Vision one: 3D matrix for 'interpreting technologies in use'

Vision two: 3D box for 'interpreting technologies in use'

 

Making the right MUVE

After a squeezing a few free minutes this morning I have found found time to publish the first set of slides from the Open Classroom Conference in Stockholm held in October 2007. The workshop itself focussed on using the tools that I have described in my previous two posts and included work on identifying critical factors impacting on the introduction of ICTs into educational settings that has been initially presented here by Margarita Perez-Garcia on her personal site, 'espheres identitaires'.

Workshop presentation: Making the right MUVE:

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How do we interpret technologies in use?

This is the second in a series of tools that were released at the October 2007 Open Classroom Conference in Stockholm, alongside the socio-technical activity tool that was described in my previous post. It has benefited immensely from participant feedback during the workshop session and what feels like a finished version - or at least a version that is ready for further comment/criticism - is presented here.

The development of the tool stems from my own engagement with the integration, embedding, deployment, evaluation - pick your own circumstance – of technologies in education. An ongoing and not necessarily simple process that requires some understanding of how we actually use technologies or perhaps what is more easily described as a sense of what technologies become, defined by their patterns of use. This is something I recognise as complex relationship between design, affordance and appropriation. The 3D matrix I have drawn provides a mechanism to come to that kind understanding by deploying three descriptive polarities that run from informal to formal, active to passive and isolated to social.

How does it work in practice? Well my feeling is that this tool holds a number of possible uses by providing insights into how a technology is understood in terms of its current configuration or context, its desired or imagined configuration and as a comparator to the originally designed possibilities that we imagine programmed into the technology. By examining technology use across these dimensions the matrix provides not only a sense of the learning spaces we create but acts as a tool for identifying change processes. If we place our ‘technologies in use’ on the grid and find they are not acting in the areas we either anticipated or desired then we can begin to question how we might shift their position. In other words, explore the change processes we need to apply. The tool is in this way designed as complementary to the socio-technical activity tool, as these change processes will generally be identified as aspects within the three triangles of technology, literacy and pedagogical approach. For example, moving blogging from an isolated and infrequent enterprise to one that is active, social and community based may require: technological action such as a commitment that blogs will be maintained beyond the life-span of a particular course; a literacy intervention so users understand blogging as a genre and the possibilities for network building via by RSS feeds and blog rolls; and finally a pedagogical intervention where blogs become an active site for formative feedback and critical commentary.

Finally it is worth making clear, though I think this is already implied in the description above, that technologies within the matrix are not meant to be fixed but rather mobile and subject to change and may also occupy multiple sites depending on the perspective and context of use. There is no essence to the technologies themselves, except for an associated design value, and so we can see technologies as maintaining variable amounts of interpretive flexibility (Pinch et. al.). As technologies penetrate and spread in use then they tend to become understood more in terms of both the affordances of the technology and the context of use itself. To take blogs again as example, then one reason for their success as an emerging technology has been this very flexibility in that they can be interpreted and therefore used in multiple ways.

Once again I am happy to hear any comments on this work.

References:
Pinch, Trevor J. and Wiebe E. Bijker. "The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit Each Other." Social Studies of Science 14 (August 1984): 399-441

Evolution of a socio-technical activity tool for ICT in education

The socio-technical activity tool was developed while traveling back and forth between various European destinations. It started as a partially sketched exploration into the factors that impact our decision-making processes when we come to choose, or indeed evaluate, what might consider as appropriate technologies for enhancing learning and teaching. At the beginning the aims were 'simple', asking myself straightforward questions regarding the major factors or dimensions that we should consider in these decision-making processes.

 

The tool has now developed beyond these initial doodlings to something far more concrete ... forming the centre piece in the first session of a double workshop at the October 2007 Open Classroom Conference hosted in Stockholm. It was held up for public scrutiny alongside a number of other tools (see Prism(lab) and esphères identitaires) that have been developed with Margarita for exploring  the relationships within educationally orientated socio-technological systems. The current version comprises three triangles representing the key dimensions of technology, literacy and pedagogical approach that converge on the central notion of a decision activity which could be, for example, assessing the appropriateness of a particular tool in a particular educational setting. Each triangle is surrounded by a neighbourhood of descriptive sub-factors or variables:

1. Technology {Functionality, Cost, Infrastructure}
2. Literacy {Knowledge, Skills and Competencies}
3. Pedagogical approach {Context, Policy and Strategy, Purpose}

What I like most about the diagram is that as a visualisation tool it seems to work. It must be conceded that there is no simple solution to describing all of the actors and interwoven nuances that converge on decision making processes for ICTs in education but the diagram leaves open multiple interpretations and I think holds enough flexibility to be read in several ways. The key though is activity and the critical central tenet is being able to move oneself towards a position of making reflexive decisions while at the same time providing a balance between pragmatism and the naturally ecological or organic framework within which these decisions exist. More often than not our technological choice-making processes are driven by the ideal of finding good 'fitness for purpose' and yet through a set of these often complex and sometimes unacknowledged factors we can find ourselves making choices that are skewed by instinctual understandings. Here then, the socio-technical activity tool provides a reflective device for interpreting our actions.

An occasional paper detailing this and other tools developed for the workshop will be published shortly on the Prism(lab) research site and include complementary work from Margarita Perez-Garcia. And just for the record I am also including a snapshot of those early doodlings.

 

Virtual environments and game-based learning

These presentations form part of a double workshop given alongside Margarita Perez-Garcia at the recent 6th Open Classroom Conference held in Stockholm from October 24th to 26th 2007. The title for this particularly lively session was “Second Life beyond the hype: taking real world education into virtual spaces, a recipe for failure?”. Audience participation was high and the discussions that precipitated from each of these position pieces provided valuable insight into how and where educators see the current state of play with regards to using MUVEs (such as Second Life) in educational contexts. As with all emerging technologies, the understandings elaborated during the one and half hours stemmed as much from reflections on technology i.e. metaverses in use, as from the design principles that lie behind many 'narrative free' virtual world offerings. In light of this, much of the session concentrated on pragmatics, taking apart the current rhetoric on MUVEs that seems to promise a 'do anything', 'be anything' alternative reality.

 

Presentation 1: Virtual vanity: sex, shopping and reputation in Second Life

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Presentation 2: MUVEs: technical state-of-play and their future potentialities

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Further details of the workshop and other resources can be found on the newly launched Prism(lab) site.