Thankful for a Metaverse Community

If you’re tired of social distancing, read on for my long over due update from the metaverse. These are all examples of what a great community of educators is available to you right now, from the safety of home.

Thankful for Our Community gathering, in Second Life.

The Friday before Thanksgiving about 30 or so of us gathered for the Non-Profit Commons Thankful for our Virtual Communities event. Everyone present represented one or more of the many different non-profit community organizations that are active in virtual worlds. It was an opportunity to connect with people we don’t always get a chance to see, and also to share what our organization is up to. (When you become a citizen of virtual worlds, you quickly come to realize how many different people, organizations, and events there are going on. There are far more places to go, people to meet or collaborate with, or events to attend than any of us can keep up with on our own!)

I live alone, but I don’t ever feel lonely because I spend a lot of time with my colleagues. And make no mistake about it, virtual does not make the relationships any less real!

Día De Los Muertos exhibit in Second Life

Día De Los Muertos exhibit, in Second Life

On Halloween, I put up a public exhibit for the Second Life community; a Día De Los Muertos scene honoring some of those we lost in 2020. When you land at the exhibit you are greeted by the serene sound of crickets, frogs, and the occasional hoot of an owl in an otherwise quiet small cemetery. I created several altars that represent not just one individual, but whole communities who have lost important people that represent them. Among the photos were George Floyd, Lorena Borjas (Mexican-American transgender and immigrant rights activist), civil rights icons John Lewis and C.T. Vivian, the legendary Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and at the center altar there is an image of the COVID19 virus, representing the many people lost to us this year globally from the pandemic.

I created this exhibit because I think virtual community is now more important than ever, and coincidentally I have a great example to share of the kind of impact this kind of thing has on me and others. When I went in to get the above screenshot of my exhibit for this blog post, here’s a comment that was waiting for me:

appreciation comments screenshot

Thankful for Appreciation

Now can you see why I’m so passionate about virtual worlds? But wait….there’s more!

December Virtual Events in Second Life

My colleagues and I from SJSU’s Virtual Center for Archives and Records Administration (VCARA) and the Community Virtual Library are doing our 3rd annual live reading for this month’s Dickens’ Project. Seanchai Libraries started the Dickens’ Project in Second Life in 2008, and it’s an incredible themed interactive experience offered each year in December. There are more than 60 hours of events at the Dickens’ Project; parties, role play and readings, ice skating, dance performances, live musicians etc. There’s lots of educational and interpretive content related to the Victorian era, and of course about the literature of the day.

The VR Exploder’s Club

Last month our VR Exploder’s Club went back into to AltSpace VR, since it had been quite awhile since our last visit there. A new friend I’d met at a VR conference, Bruce Wolcott from Bellevue College’s XR Lab, also joined us for this outing. In fact, I took everyone back to my favorite exhibit from the Burning Man event because I had been so impressed with it. (It was as moving as I remembered, and my colleagues were also wowed.)

Host a Party in MoHubs for Your Holidays!

Burned out socializing in Zoom?! Mozilla Hubs is just about the easiest and most fun way to quickly get into a virtual environment with up to about 20 other people or so. (Roughly 24 people max can be in the same Hubs room at the same time.) Nobody needs to download anything either. Talk about a perfectly easy way to have a holiday party with your friends!

In fact, I recently built a bunch of virtual rooms for the networking portion of an event for the College of Business. I had help with a handful of other colleagues to be room hosts,  because we had rooms for all the different student teams. It was awesome to see students so engaged in conversation, sharing links with each other to their LinkedIn accounts, and even throwing emojis around so they would bounce off the floor (I didn’t even know that was possible!).  You can take a look at Mozilla Hubs for yourself anytime, just click on this eCampus Mozilla Hub room. (Hint: Make sure to actually enter the room. Check out this tutorial page to see how easy this is to get in and navigate around.)

my avatar in Cheers' Gallery

My avatar, in Cheers’ Gallery

If you want to learn more, be on the lookout for my upcoming workshops. The screenshot above is from a photo gallery I created for an instructor for his students final showcase. Rooms like this are really easy to create, and the holidays are a great time to play around with this technology. Imagine…you could create a room to meet your friends and family in-world with just one click of a button! You don’t even need to create an account, you just click to create the room and email people the link to it! 

Want a customized room for spring semester?  Let me show you how easy it is, or maybe I could just give you one of mine. Email me!

OpenSim Community Conference 2020

Alice in Wonderland seating area

Themed seating area I created for our presentation at OSCC 2020

Speaking of Mozilla Hubs, I’m excited to co-present (along with iSchool’s Dr. Marie Vans) this month at OSCC about the work we’re both doing with this particular platform. But the title of our event should tell you of our ulterior motive, since we still both find OpenSim to be the best virtual platform overall for use in education. Our presentation is on Saturday December 5th, and it’s called Using Browser-Based Virtual Environments as a Gateway Drug to get People Hooked on Virtual Worlds. Marie will be sharing an example from her students this semester in her VR class, where they went into a bunch of different environments to evaluate them. (One of her students is building a working model of the Gutenberg press in…you guessed it, he chose OpenSim!)

It’s not too late to register and attend the conference, but I’ll write a debrief and post a link to the recording of it next month when it’s available. We’ve got a great themed seating area I created, and we’ll be suitably dressed to match. (This community appreciates creativity, so it will be a lot of fun! And I’m sure you’ve figured out the theme from the picture above, and the fact that my Mozilla Hubs avatar in those other pictures is a grinning cat!)

Finally, I also continue to work with Eileen O’Connor from SUNY Empire State College in New York, and am on the steering committee for her nascent Institute of New Paradigms think tank. Currently, my colleagues and I from INP are talking about coordinating a panel to present about our work specifically in OpenSim, and trying to target VR conferences in 2021 where virtual world educators are not as well represented. Eileen is also presenting at OSCC, along with one of her former students, Scott Dolphin.

Well I’ll wrap this up by saying that I continue to be surprised (and disappointed) whenever I attend boring Zoom based conferences, especially when it’s a conference for immersive learning tech and all around me are people who consider themselves knowledgeable about the topic without ever having been in OpenSim or Second Life. I can’t help but shake my head. What a missed opportunity, on so many levels!

Virtual Reality vs Virtual Worlds Smackdown!

Bethany's Avatars: T-Rex & "Tiny"

Bethany’s Avatars: T-Rex & “Tiny”

I recently joined my Community Virtual Library and SJSU’s VCARA colleagues at a fun event held at iSchool Island in Second Life. We held a Virtual Reality vs Virtual Worlds Smackdown Debate, complete with our impressive avatars ready to duke it out for the audience!

Our sparring was moderated by Dr. Valerie Hill, the director of the Community Virtual Library in Second Life, Avacon, and Kitely. We each had five minutes to speak, and then five minutes to refute our opponent’s position on the most important criteria for immersive environments (as recently identified in an unpublished VCARA survey). The criteria include:

  • Persistence
  • Accessibility
  • Open Educational Resources (OER)
  • Community of Practice
  • Building Independently and Collaboratively

Alyse Dunavant-Jones, the co-director of CVL, argued that  “VR is the future, and the future is now!” while embodied as an enormous fire-breathing dragon. I was embodied as a fearsome Tyrannosaurus Rex, arguing that virtual worlds have a much longer and proven history, and still offer a tremendous opportunity for immersive learning. Our avatars were actually so big, we traded into smaller sized ones while standing in the boxing ring to speak. As Alyse spoke she was embodied as a human-sized Gecko in the boxing ring. My T-Rex avatar loomed ominously outside the ring, growling of course. When it was my turn to speak I changed into my “tiny”, a cute black kitten with a fierce attitude. I was fearless of Alyce-as-dragon flying overhead! 

The event concluded as a draw, with both sides conceding that there are benefits and drawbacks to each. Also, it’s critical that pedagogy remain central. It is not enough to merely learn how to use the technology. The main takeaway I wanted to leave with the audience with is that regardless of what platforms we may use in the future, designers of any immersive learning activities have to be familiar with the long history of virtual worlds in education. More importantly, they should already have hands-on experience in virtual worlds. 

Check out more pictures at the VCARA blog post about the event. Anyone interested in networking (and having fun!) with educators in virtual worlds should contact Bethany at eCampus to learn more!

Immersive Learning Research Network Conference 2019

The fifth annual Immersive Learning Research Network conference was held this month in London, England. This conference brings together an international group of developers, educators, and research professionals from a range of  disciplines who collaborate to develop the scientific, technical, and applied potential of immersive learning. In particular, conference participants share their research in an ongoing effort to continually examine the elements that create effective immersive learning experiences. 

I had heard about the conference from one of the organizers, Jonathan Richter, who had presented a keynote at the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education conference in April. I had presented at that in-world conference. Jon had let me know that there was still room for poster presentations at iLRN19, so I had the honor to represent San Jose State University at an international community event.

Bethany at iLRN 2019

My poster synthesized research on the affordances of virtual worlds, and my experiences as both participant and in-world builder for the last year and a half. All of the conference events were great, but I was particularly inspired by Jim Purbrick’s presentation Lessons Learned in Virtual Worlds. As a former developer for Second Life, (and current engineering manager of Oculus VR in the UK), Jim articulated the increasing importance of understanding the social aspect of collaborating in open virtual worlds. Of course, I think the best way to do that is join the educators and librarians who have been holding events and conferences in virtual worlds like Second Life and OpenSim for the last 10 years. So if you have any such interest, do let me know!

If you’re interested in the research, the conference proceedings (linked here) contain 18 final papers selected from 60 submissions. These papers fall into seven different categories; STEM, disciplinary applications, special education, history, pedagogical strategies, immersion and presence. I’ve also linked here to a PDF version of my poster. (From the QR code on my poster you can access additional information and videos about virtual worlds I have posted on Canvas.)

I hope San Jose State will have an even bigger presence at the conference next year, when it will be held in June at Cal Poly San Louis Obispo! 

OpenSim Community Conference 2018

Bethany at OSCC 2018

This is a good follow up to Yingjie’s previous post about the upcoming Immersive Learning Institute for 2019. As I wrap up my thoughts on my conference experiences for this year, I’m most delighted that I was able to attend the sixth annual OpenSimulator Community Conference 2018 on December 8th and 9th. This was my second year attending this virtual world conference, and it allowed me to network with educators, artists, and others from around the world, all of whom are passionate about this open source alternative to a virtual worlds platform such as Second Life.

Presenting in a Virtual World

This was also my first time presenting in a virtual world! Originally I was to co-present with a colleague, Dr. Valerie Hill, the director of the Community Virtual Library (CVL). Valerie wasn’t able to attend, however, so it gave me the opportunity to introduce myself to this community, and tell them about CVL’s plans for a hypergrid resource library on two different virtual worlds that are using the OpenSimulator platform. As the project lead, my presentation included screenshots of the two buildings I’ve put in place where all our content and resources will be housed, along with the portals that allow for visitors to jump easily from one virtual world grid to another.

Bethany presenting at OSCC 2018

Hypergrid?! Hypergridding?!

Since the concept of hypergridding is likely to not be familiar to you, here’s a simple explanation. There are many virtual worlds built on OpenSimulator, and those worlds can be on anybody’s computer or server anywhere in the world. So if virtual worlds are like 3 dimensional websites, hypergridding is the protocol that allows a user to jump from “website” to “website”. Instead of just navigating the different pages of one virtual world, a visitor is empowered to travel from different computers or servers to another.

While there is a bit of a learning curve, and the technology is still kind of wonky, I think of open source virtual worlds and hypergridding as kind of a 2.0 mashup of the internet and social media. It’s every sci-fi geek’s dream –  the emerging metaverse!

The Future Present: Rockcliffe University Consortium Conference November 2018

Winter for eCampus staff is a great time to catch up on our own professional development, and earlier this month I had the opportunity to attend this conference in San Francisco with a variety of participants who are involved using virtual worlds in education. One the best things about this conference was the smaller size compared to other ones I’ve attended. It was interactive too, we use a conference app to communicate and a communal Padlet for reflection on the sessions. Basically, it was like a two day breakout session with passionate and creative educational professionals, and I got to meet and network with old friends and new!

I was delighted to be able to finally meet (in-person) my mentor and the Director of the Community Virtual Library, Dr. Valerie Hill. I also got to meet the CVL’s Co-Director, Alyce Dunavant-Jones who just graduated from SJSU’s MLIS program that is also connected with CVL. (In fact, Alyce also posted about the event at the SJSU School of Information blog.)  I met Val and Alyce last year at the OpenSim Community Conference and I’m delighted to be co-presenting with Val for the same conference next week!

In addition to learning from a variety of different sessions, I loved getting to know some of the amazing instructional design team from University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. I also got the chance to  meet and extensively mingle with the leadership of Rockcliffe University Consortium who sponsor many of the conferences related to virtual worlds and education. As with Valerie and Alyce, some of these people I’ve met in-world at one event or another, and meeting in-person was just like meeting an old friend!

I also met Renne Emiko Brock who teaches multimedia studies at Peninsula College in Washington and we immediately “clicked”. She has worked with Valerie before, and I’ve seen her present in-world on several occasions. I immediately recognized her because she looks the same as her avatar! Before the group dinner together on the second night, Renne, Val, and I began talking about me making a visit to Washington this summer to visit both of them, and for the three of us to co-present on our overlapping projects at one or more conferences in 2019. So here’s to the authenticity of in-world relationships, and some exciting times ahead in virtual worlds and education!