SLENZ pilot progress
An outsider’s view …
The creation and melding together of the design and development phases of the SLENZ pilot programmes has proven a slightly more difficult process for the SLENZ team than initially envisaged.
“We are making progress, albeit slower than I anticipated or would have liked,” joint project leader Terry Neal (pictured right) said recently. “The focus over the last couple of weeks has been agreeing the processes, terminology and templates that will enable us to work together effectively for the design and development phase of our project.
“Once we have finalised these, we then need to use them,” she said.
From the outside – and part of my brief is to view the project from the outside – one of the difficulties facing the team producing the three pilots – in midwifery, foundation learning and Second Life Orientation – has been the confusing number of platforms (Second Life, IMs, blogs, emails, googledocs, wikis) being used by team members to disseminate their ideas to each other.
Although the pilots are still at an early stage it appears, at times, that team members are not talking “in the same virtual room” although this is probably through no fault of their own, and is possibly a feature of every virtual world “team” effort as opposed to VW individual efforts. The problem is, however, that the oft-quoted proposition that in virtual worlds the learner is more important than the teacher/researcher/creator might be forgotten, with ever-widening, more ambitious ideas being put forward and the possibility that the goals of the pilots might be buried by words.
This is not to say that the ideas are not excellent, but at times, in my view, grandstanding, reinventing wheels (a New Zealand habit), and widening the scope of a pilot, rather than containing it, can reduce the effectiveness of a project and lead to the initial aims and goals being, if not forgotten, glossed over.
The problem appears to be compounded by the fact that SLENZ is a temporary team with the members physically removed from each other who, once the project is over, will go on to do their own things: the academic life blood after all might be said to be publishing papers and individual recognition.
Significant milestones
Basically, I believe, as team members, we need to recognise that each of us will get something more valuable out of the collaborative team effort, rather than from our individual contributions, if we get onto the same page and work in the same virtual room with the same language, even if on different campuses and with different world views. We will also lessen the workload.
As Neal said in her most recent project update, and this probably applies to all virtual world collaborative education projects, “We need to effectively refine and merge … and agree our terminology because (we) are using quite different terms for the same things.”
Despite the difficulties the team has already achieved some significant milestones with its initial reports and discussion documents – the SL Literature Review, written by Dr Ben Salt (research and evaluation), Dr Clare Atkins (joint project leader, pictured lower right), ) and Leigh Blackall (learning designer), is being picked up by a noted peer-reviewed virtual world journal – and obviously will achieve other major milestones in the future.
Despite my criticism of the proliferation of communication channels the documents I am alluding to are worth reading, and contain good ideas for anyone working in education or doing research on the creation of learning opportunities in MUVEs. With the team currently concentrating on the midwifery project Blackall has posted his thoughts on the overall process at
http://learnonline.wordpress.com/2009/02/04/producing-educational-resources-through-second-life/
and at (
http://learnonline.wordpress.com/2009/02/09/slenz-midwifery-ideas-for-stage-1-virtual-birthing-unit/
); Atkins has used googledocs – although some are not publicly available at the time of going to press - to share “SLENZ User story Stage 1″ (
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dcr62szf_4gnvmm3mg&invite=c7c87wm),
drafted guidelines (http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dj2k8bp_19dk3m4vfx&invite and a template) and a technical specifications document (
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dj2k8bp_20cnsg5hc2&hl=en
); and Sarah Stewart (lead educator) has put the midwifery pilot into context by detailing what she and her colleagues know of their students, such as learning preferences, motivation and access to technology, and clarifying what the learning objectives will be for each stage (
http://sarah-stewart.blogspot.com/2009/02/thinking-about-stage-1-of-second-life.htm
l) and (
http://sarah-stewart.blogspot.com/2009/02/context-of-midwifery-education-and.html
)
Unenviable task
There already has been agreement between Atkins and Todd Cochrane (developer) on such things as a template, naming conventions and version control, both within and outside Second Life.
Despite the “foundation learning” pilot appearing to be on hold while the midwifery pilot has taken precedence, Merle Lemon (lead educator) has been busy talking to the other academic collaborators to enable her to feed their needs into the pilot as well as determining how to make intra-team communication more effective.
The next major step, according to Neal, and one might say unenviable task, is for Atkins to translate the thinking of various members of the team on the birthing unit into the technical specifications/production plan for further development of the guidelines for the birthing unit and templates.
Salt has done an initial draft of the evaluation process and is currently completing it in more detail.
Finally, according to Neal, the team needs be ready to seek ethics approval in March.
Neal concluded, “While our process and template decision-making is taking longer than I had anticipated or hoped, it is worth taking the time to get this right and will set us on a stronger course for the next 11 months.”
-written by Johnnie Wendt/John Waugh
ESSENTIAL READING!
Are avatars really useful?
This is essential reading and I really mean essential. Even if you don’t read another thing on your computer this week there are two articles/blogs that as an educator you must read.
I referred to one in my previous blog (SLENZ Update, No 44) by Caleb Booker ( ROI in Virtual Worlds 1 – Why Webcams Fail (
http://www.calebbooker.com/blog/2009/01/27/roi-in-virtual-worlds-1-why-webcams-fail/
)
The second is his followup, ROI in Virtual Worlds – Anatomy of an Avatar (
http://www.calebbooker.com/blog/2009/02/03/roi-in-virtual-worlds-anatomy-of-an-avatar/
)
His thoughts, which he is the first to admit are “off the cuff”, make sense to me on a variety of levels. They are easy to understand and they mirror my own virtual world reality. That said, they also provoke considerable thought, and I would think will provoke lots of valuable discussion if not changes in attitude.
ROI in Virtual Worlds – Anatomy of an Avatar, is the second of a series dedicated to answering why virtual worlds are a good alternative to existing technologies; and how one can best get a Return On Investment (ROI) from virtual world ventures.
Booker argues initially that avatars yield returns on several levels: 1. They allow people to “see themselves” taking part in the experience; 2. Your perception of who is participating is greatly enhanced; 3. Open and honest communication between employees is greatly facilitated; 4. You always have an ice-breaker; and 5. You’re always ready for work.
Later in a reply to a comment from Nic Mitham, of Kzero, he simplifies this in a business environment to: 1) Real user engagement; 2) Increased customer contact;3) Improved employee relations; 4) Easier initiation of sales contacts; 5) Happier, more productive employees.
And I’m also indebted to Booker for the following link from Collegehumor.com which compares avatar creation on the Wii, PS3, and Xbox 360 consoles.
He comments, “their observations are brief and superficial but what I like about it is that this is very much the knee-jerk reaction from outside the industry echo-chamber -you know, the place where customers come from!”
Ten facets in 70 VWs
Sarah Robbins (SL: Intellagirl Tully) (pictured at right), as part of her dissertation research, has noted 10 specific facets that occur in the 70 virtual worlds that she has studied over the past 18 months. She has published her useful chart of them here:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pgKqGR6eOiPOKjMG9f856Sw
For more info about the facets:
http://ubernoggin.com/archives/383
Robbins (www.ubernoggin.com and
http://www.intellagirl.com)
is a PhD candidate, Ball State University and director of Emerging Technologies, Kelley Executive Partners, at Indiana University.
The top 11 according to…
Promoting his new ebook , Virtual Worlds for Business Nick Wilson ( pictured) of CleverZebra.com has released an interesting teaser identifying what he considers the top 11 virtual worlds technologies for meetings, training and 
collaborative work which he believes will change the way we work.
http://cleverzebra.com/virtual-worlds
There are some “old” standbys on the list and some interesting and unusual new choices: his reasons for his choices are thought provoking.
His list includes: ActiveWorlds, OLIVE, Protosphere, Quaq Forums, Second Life, web.alive, Multiverse, OpenSim, Project Wonderland, 3DXplorer, Vastpark.
Filed under: Education, Education in Second Life, SLENZ Project Tagged: | 3DXplorer, ActiveWorlds, Atkins, Ball State, Blackall, CleverZebra, Cochrane, Foundation learning, Kelley Executive Partners, kzero, Lemon, midwifery, Mitham, Multiverse, Neal, OLIVE, OpenSim, Project Wonderland, Protosphere, Quaq Forums, Robbins, SecondLife, SL, Stewart, team communication, Tully, Vastpark, Virtual Worlds, web.alive, Wilson
Hi John, thanks for reporting on some of the progress we have made in SLENZ, it is good to get an outsiders view, even if it is perplexing. Unfortunately we can’t reference the Google Group or the GoogleDocs because they are closed and inaccessible to people not in the project. Funny that.. tax payers project it is and all. But your blog, my blog and Sarah’s blog is accessible, and so your reporting has verifiable references at last. I’m not sure I follow your opinion that we have a proliferation of channels. Your blog has been quite central, and the more you report on the project, the more central it becomes. In a single post you have brought together all significant work from the last week. Where else do we have such a collation? We have an incredible number of GoogleDocs I have lost track of which ones are active and which ones aren’t getting worked on anymore. I have a terrible feeling that the GoogleGroup emails are not getting read by everyone all the time (speaking for myself, it is very hard to keep track on SLENZ emails while I’m in the head space of clearing out 100s of general work email. Setting aside time to read your blog and others is much more focused. As for “grandstanding” and “widening scope”, I’m sorry you see it that way. From where I sit, we are totally in line with the exact same things we discussed at the face to face meeting. Unfortunately our efforts of recording and documenting those discussion were not successful and we all are left with different ideas of what actually took place there.
But as Terry and other makes pains to point out. This project is to determine a good process amongst other things. So we have some good things to report on in terms of that particular outcome. Thanks to your blog, we have a central place that points to at least some of that progress.
Leigh,
Thanks for your remarks. I realise some of the googledocs are not available but believe those that aren’t will be made available in the near future. Although you do not accept there is a proliferation of channels your difficulty keeping up with googledocs or the googlegroups e-mail channel, and other people’s difficulty keeping up with the succession of blogs etc would suggest to me that it would be better to have one organised channel that everyone uses for project activities. That said, I believe the issue is being worked on and that SLENZ has recorded some remarkable achievements in its short history, some even sparked by what I referred to as “grandstanding”. However, i do know that some members of the team have felt slightly frustrated by what they see as delays in getting into action as it were.
I believe, as part of determining a “good process”, this perceived communication problem must be sorted out: I am sure that it bedevils most if not all “team” efforts in creating learning opportunities in virtual worlds as it often does in real world pilots: everybody has heard of the horse designed by a committee and called a camel, even though the camel is best for purpose with form following function. *grin*
If SLENZ can come up with an answer to the communication problem I think it will have provided added value to the project for all VW educators.