This time round the snapshot will cover Ireland as well as the UK. The main body of the snapshot will be based on self-reported activity, so get working on your submissions and send them to John before the November 14th deadline.

More info here. Prize for the wittiest contribution, apparently.

I’m just back from vacation, trying hard to catch up on emails, but hopefully manage before too long.

If Linden Lab had focused on helping make virtual worlds take off– make them more useful by providing functionality people wanted and needed, working on interoperability so that people could take their Second Life accounts to and from software that was developed not only by Linden engineers, but by everybody– I predict they would have done a whole lot better. Their already existing audience would have given them a leg up, and would have kept them a leader or at least a major player. Yes, they would have been helping “competitors”, but by raising the profile, utility, and popularity of virtual worlds in general, they would have helped themselves.

And now the other big news… Mark Kingdon, Linden Lab CEO, will himself be leaving the company – with co-founder Philip Rosedale returning to the fold to take over in his stead. Philip announced his return on the SL blog, here. The general perception is that Mark’s strategies for the Lab generally failed (for example, the cancelled SL Enterprise solution), and also managed to alienate many members of the community. Can Philip turn the ship around and regain some love for the lab? Time will tell… but his initial post is heavy on the technology and relatively weak on the community side:

Our thinking as a team is that my returning to the CEO job now can bring a product and technology focus that will help rapidly improve Second Life.  We need to simplify and focus our product priorities — concentrating all our capabilities on making Second Life easier to use and better for the core experiences that it is delivering today.  I think that I can be a great help and a strong leader in that process.

Image: VWER Panel, taken by Olivia Hotshot

The panel featured Chris Collins/Fleep Tuque, Anthony Fontana, AJ Kelton/AJ Brooks (Chair), myself, Ken Hudson/Kenny Hubble and Jon Richter. Sarah Robbins was sadly unable to make it

We all seemed to have high hopes for the potential of Augmented Reality and mobile technology to enhance and extend the capabilities of virtual worlds – though I felt there to be a lot of uncertainty about how exactly the very different worlds of mobile AR and desk-bound virtual worlds will best be meaningfully and usefully merged. Charles Stross’ “Halting State” presents one picture, but still a little way to go to get there.

From M Linden’s blog post a few things stood out:

• Chris and myself were both excited by the prospects of an improved API for communications between SL and the web. Currently a large degree of hackery is required to connect web 2.0 applications to SL – the app might provide a simple API, but to connect that to SL almost always requires creating an intermediary service running on a server to act as a go-between.
• M’s predictions for 2020 were a mixed bag. Some outlined systems that are perfectly feasible already, or have already been demonstrated (The VUE group at Edinburgh have demonstrated video/virtual conferencing already, along the lines M suggests might happen in 2020: ‘Walls in your office become portals to the metaverse’)
• “Second Life is galactic.” Some discussion here, that is Linden Lab want this outcome then they will have to work hard to ensure that SL makes itself an essential hub world for the growing number of other virtual worlds out there. Second Life is currently a de-facto standard – with the largely compatible OpenSim being one of the main competitors. Can Linden Lab pull off this feat?
• “Second Life becomes a standard in business, education and government.” Well, it already is largely a standard for virtual worlds – simply because it is the dominant virtual world. Again, the issue for 2020 is whether SL will stay that way…
• “SLHD blurs the distinction between real and virtual.” This is possibly the only area where M actually makes some far-sighted predictions. And what he is looking to is virtual world technology that provides the physical sensations of the places, objects and avatars one interacts with. This IMHO is something that will remain in the research lab, demonstration systems and theme park – I don’t see this as being a regularly used technology to access virtual worlds by 2020. If nothing else, it goes against current trends towards more mobile uses of technology, and increasing access via mobile and low powered devices.
• M also suggests that improvements to content management and protection are in the pipeline – this comes a little late for many inworld vendors whose hard work has been cracked and made freely available due to flaws in SL’s security and copy protection mechanisms. (I am talking here about scripted objects, where the scripts themselves should be secure – an inherent feature of digital technology such as SL is that it simply is not possible to prevent theft of textures and 3D data for models – as this data is required by the client to render content. Scripts are supposed to be secure – but have not been.)

In discussion I made one prediction for next year that I’d like to withdraw – I said that at the first VWER meeting of 2011 we’d almost certainly meet in SL, not some other virtual world. It’s still most likely place to hold the meeting – but an OpenSim grid now how to be a very strong second place contender.

It was a long and free flowing chat – apologies if I’ve missed out your personal highlights!

First up, Virtual World Watch released the 7th in the series of reports surveying use of virtual worlds in UK further and higher education – get it here. The other report is the SLOODLE project’s final report to Eduserv. No, SLOODLE isn’t ‘finished’, the project is continuing – although the pace of development may be slower until additional funding is secured.

More on the report here, on the SLOODLE blog.

The VirtualWorldWatch reports are also Eduserv funded – and will happily continue for a while yet. John Kirriemuir has done a good job reading through a large number of responses, seeking out commanalities and identifying current issues. From the summary on the VWW blog of the latest instalment:

Overall, the picture is one of more virtual world activity in UK academia than in previous years.

…

While cases of virtual world use in academia have steadily risen, evaluations and evidence of their effectiveness has been fragmented and low-key. Though the same observation could be leveled at many other technologies – take a bow, Virtual Learning Environments – used in education.Many academics – possibly a significant majority – are still wary, sceptical or openly hostile to virtual world use in education. More visible proof of where it works may swing the more open-minded of them. With the mass of teaching and research activity currently under way in higher education, it’s only reasonable to hope for more (and better) evaluations, and clarity concerning where virtual worlds can be put to good use and where not. For proof, evidence, data and convincing arguments, 2009 to 2010 feels like the year of virtual world expectation.

Second Life simulation role-plays

Ken Hudson from Loyalist Border College in Canada both talked about and demonstrated how they have been using SL in training students for Canadian border guard work. They built a detailed model in SL of a nearby border station between the US and Canada, and prepared a number of interactive scenarios including scripted elements to generate car license plates, model documentation, alerts and more. Trainees were given relatively minimal instruction in SL – all students using the technology for a specific simulation only, not to build, travel round the grid or go shopping. All students were given a uniform and were helped in personalising their avatar. Beyond this, they simply needed to be able to move their avatar around and sit in place. More here. A good paper and shows that Second Life can be used as an effective simulation platform aside from the more common constructionist approaches typically seen.

Feedback to Linden Lab
The subtitle of this session was “What would educators like to see in the next 1-3 year time frame”, and I had the pleasure of moderating this session alongside Jonathon ‘Wainbrave’ Richter and Chris ‘Fleep’ Collins. I appointed myself to the role of note-taker for the session.

There is a risk with a feedback session like this that it can turn into just a big gripe session, as everyone sets out their own personal issues and problems – and potential for the tone of the session as a whole to be very negative. To keep the tone light, I thought we might try and write a letter to the Lindens, from one family to another. From the SLED family to the Linden family:

Dear Lindens,

Hi, how are you? We’re doing great, the kids are well. Having a blast with Second Life.
We’ve really enjoyed the better support over the past few months. Second Life is really the great for debating with small groups of students in depth – the Socratic model lives and is embodied in Second Life. The cost is fantastic! Open source too. <applause!>
We love telling all our friends about how great Second Life is, telling them about the wonders of exploration and experience that go on there.

However…

Which was where we started to get into more serious issues, but still keeping the tone light.

I’m sure I heard the odd chuckle from the room as I translated the feedback into buddy-speak, so it seemed to work. You can read the full letter online here, and contribute to ongoing discussion here on RezEd.

Playing DJ with Jonathon Richter’s mp3 Collection

How often do you hear Megadeath’s ‘Peace Sells’ followed by Olivia Newton John getting ‘Physical’? Why on earth would I play those? More to the question, what are those tunes doing in one man’s mp3 collection? Can you make the connection between this and this?

SLED Sparks

SLED Sparks challenged presenters to do 20 slides in 2 minutes. This was one of my favourite sessions – you got a real quick hit of what people were upto, and time to follow up with speakers after. I think the 2 minute deadline seemed quite steep, but the session definitely worked. Perhaps a little group time for questions after? The video of this session is on the wiki here.

Brief highs and lows:
High: White Russian ice-cream slurpie. Mmmmm.
Low: Not seeing more than 3 square blocks of Tampa. What’s Tampa like? I have no idea.
High: Soooo many great people to meet from the SLED community
Low: Soooo few of my non-education SL friends being there. Where was everybody?
High: Eating quality food in an American Diner in Splitsville – Second Life’s most popular bowling alley. Here is a picture of Gia in Splitsville in SL while in Splitsville in RL.
Low: Not seeing all the sessions I wanted to see
High: Not being hit by Hurricane Hanna
Low: Missing most of the machinima program. Both in terms of machinima submitted and talks scheduled, the program was a lot smaller this year than last, but with representatives from some of the worlds top machinima groups present, the quality was way up.

First up, its worth considering what type of event SLCC was. This I hope will be useful in helping people think about what kind of event SLCC should be.

Convention not Conference

It wasn’t an academic conference, though it did have an education track. It wasn’t a business conference, though it did have a business and commerce track. SLCC was a volunteer run Second Life fan-convention. If you have a look at the coverage in the last edition of the popular Second Life digital newspaper Metaverse Messenger (a mixture of good and bad reviews) you’ll see the barest of mentions of the education track.

In discussions, people have compared SLCC against big education conferences and even big media events. SLCC is more like a (smallish) Science Fiction convention than a conference. (At this point I’ll have to admit that I’m a SF fan, and have not only attended, I’ve helped out at a number of conventions) At a conference, delegates get lunch and coffee. At a convention, the fans buy their own drinks and snacks between events. Conventions commonly have packed timetables, but work on the principle that fans won’t attend all sessions – the social areas (bars) tend to stay busy throughout.

At SLCC we had something like a conference being run inside a convention, but it still wasn’t an academic conference. The over packed timetable was largely my fault (I have to get better at rejecting proposals!). Some educators were shocked not to get coffee for free, I doubt many of the SL fans in attendance expected to get coffee. Many were surprised that lunch was provided.

The significance of the difference between conference and convention? Simply that I think they have different norms, and the people turning up at SLCC had some very different expectations. A valid question is to ask which set of norms should SLCC serve?

One event – Many Tracks, Difference Audiences

This year SLCC had four tracks running throughout – Business, Education, Machinima and Social. From what I’ve gleaned in feedback, there has already been quite a few good ideas about having a mixture of 2-day, 1-day and 1/2 day ‘tracks’, however that works out. I’ll admit that cross-track integration did not work out as had been hoped at first. I think the communication across track organisers broke down to some degree, and perhaps we need a different approach next year.

Barry Joseph’s Non-profit meta-track was able to thread its way across all four tracks, but I know that some educators wanted more cross-over. One question is, to what degree should an education track engineer this cross-over versus simply leaving people free to choose which events to attend? I can understand that some didn’t want to miss programming in the education track, and were disappointed not to have time for the other tracks. Should we have a lighter timetable next year, or try and spread it over an extra day (make Friday a full day) to create more space?

Another issue that I was aware of before this years SLCC, and which perhaps should be considered more widely, is that one of the main sponsors of SLCC is an ‘adult entertainment’ company. There is no reason why such a company shouldn’t sponsor SLCC as a fan convention – but having such a company as a very visible sponsor, along with the prominent emphasis on fun (this is a fan convention, remember) has some consequences. Several attendees were denied funding because SLCC was seen by college administrators as being a fan event. I also know of a few people who were not at SLCC because they were denied funding. The ‘leather and lace’ masquerade in particular was something college admins could object to.

As the process of seeking a location for next year’s SLCC starts (see the blog, here), I know a few people have suggested in emails that a college should host – as they’ll certainly have the bandwidth. Before you submit a proposal for a particular college, check that they are OK with hosting a mild-bondage themed party and with alcohol being served. [Aside: the party wasn't really that risqué, it seemed pretty good fun and I did spot quite a few of the educators present in fancy dress!]

How can we both meet peoples wishes for a more integrated programme with a need to somehow separate the education track from content that’ll give your Dean a fright?

Discussion vs. Presentation

This was mentioned a little previously, so I’ll limit what I have to say about it now. I really hope that next year the education track is more open, with room for more formal and informal content. This will most likely require either to run across three days (we need more breaks than we had this year!) or to use two or more rooms for the track. There will be situations where people are forced to choose between multiple events that they would like to attend, but I’d rather people had this choice than were left thinking at some point that there was nothing they wanted to see or participate in.

I also should have given better guidance to some of the panels – in my mind panels would have had short presentations, and lots of room for discussion and audience participation. But this remained in my mind, as I didn’t explain this to panel moderators – and so some panels ended up with almost no time for questions or discussion.

Money, Money, Money

Hotels cost. Bandwidth costs. A lot. Hotels and conference centers typically charge a hefty premium to conferences and conventions for networking. As far as I am aware, TFU were refunded a significant portion of this due to issues this year – but obviously this was not known when budgeting. I think SLCC individual fees were probably near the limit of the costs that fans are prepared to pay (see the editor’s comments in the Metaverse Messenger). Depending on which field of academia you are in SLCC was: expensive; about right; or maybe incredibly cheap. For example, I’ll be attending a two day conference next month that will charge me over $700 in attendance fees. And probably won’t have free wireless either.

SLCC cannot charge fans significantly more, so how can they meet the demand for very-high bandwidth wireless networking, audio streaming of all tracks, lunch and coffee, more rooms and more more?

One option is to charge a premium on people wanting to attend particular tracks. This is possible, and I’ve been to events where it is done. Also requires additional organisation of volunteers to enforce. Especially if only those paying for the education track get the free coffee. This could also be used to finance printed proceedings.

Increase the sponsorship fees? This might be a simpler route. Increasing the number of sponsors would be less effective – as the lower cost sponsorships included free passes, the amount of money raised by these over memberships alone was quite small. Would enough organisations pay up if the lead sponsor fees were doubled? Can we squeeze Linden Lab to pour a lot more money into this? I don’t know.

Options

One option for next year would be to have a Second Life Education Workshop that is organised as part of the SLCC – but which is separated in a number of ways. It could start a day earlier, and cost more to reflect this. On this one day, multiple tracks could be organised and breaks, networking and coffee provided a-plenty. A separate web-page could be created for registration – and with a separate list of sponsors.

People might find that getting most (maybe not all) of the education out of the way before the fun stuff begins gives them more time, not less, to mix with the other tracks.

Or we could abolish tracks altogether, and have a tagging system for talks. While there would be multiple events happening at any one time, it would be up to the presenters and convention timetablers to tag individual items as ‘RL-Education’, ‘Machinima’, ‘RL-Business’, or whatever.

Discuss

In the end, what counts is what kind of education content do you want next year at SLCC, and how you think it should sit with the rest of SLCC.

Your comments welcome. There will also be an in-world SLCC review discussion in Second Life next week, Tuesday 18th, at 2pm SL Time (10pm UK) at the Muriel Cooper Coliseum on NMC Conference Center:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/NMC%20Conference%20Center/68/209/22

The essential caveat is that I personally might not be in a position to make anything in particular happen – I haven’t run any of my ideas past the TFU board, and have no idea as yet what they might think of them. All I can do is see if we can build consensus about what we want and report that to the TFU. Then they have to struggle with budgets, projections, costs, venues and so on to try to deliver as much as they can!

A busy trip over. My visit to SJSU’s School of Library and Information Science is at an end. During the course of the 10 days, I met up with Steve Sloan: SJSU Tech on a Mission. He kindly collected me from SFO – and we had a great chat about the use of blogs in the classroom. It’s clear that assuming that all youth take the same approach to technologies such as blogging is a misconception – for journalism students, blogging has a great deal more relevance than it does to many computing students.

I visited the Center for Technology in Learning at SRI Ltd., where I gave an impromptu presentation and got to pick some minds. In our efforts to build a community around Sloodle, who better to get advice from than the people behind Tapped In – an international online community of teachers. The Centre is also a partner in Learning in Informal and Formal Environments (LIFE). LIFE are similarly interested in ways to support the development and sharing of educational tools within Second Life – on the surface quite simple, but which can be complex when issues relating to updating and networking with developing platforms are introduced. Hopefully there is room to learn from one another here. I left very optimistic that we may be able to pick up a good number of pointers and some very good advice from the center. And that was only my second day in San Jose.

Wednesday, and a visit to the amazing Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Nicely symmetrical as my trip is being funded by the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland. Jeremy Kemp & I were able to chat with Toru Iiyoshi, the director of the Knowledge Media Laboratory. Many thanks to James Morgan for helping to set this up. Again, I think we came away with some great advice. Then we rushed back to SJSU for my presentation to the SLIS faculty – which went well, with a packed room plus a busy audience in Second Life. Apologies to the Second Life audience – for reasons unfathomable, it appeared that perhaps as many as half of the Second Life audience had problems with the video stream.

During my talk, Jeremy pulled objects out of his inventory from time to time that helped illustrate in 3D what I was talking about. I think he coined the term ‘PowerSpace’ for this – combining text, audio, perhaps video, and 3D objects to give a presentation. Kind of Powerpoint++. I’d expect to see more tools supporting this kind of presentation inside Second Life soon.

Then SJSU SLIS officially opened their Second Life island. Again, an busy room in real-life, plus a busy and well attended party in Second Life. The Second Life party was particularly well organised – with a lot delegated to student guides who did a great job of arranging entertainments and taking people on magic-carpet tours.

Thursday, I sequestered myself away to catch up on writing. Thursday evening I was very kindly invited to a faculty meal at a local steakhouse. I can honestly say that I have never in my life seen such a large steak. Or such a large portion of cheesecake. So who do they think they are kidding by offering three kinds of artificial sweetener for the coffee?!?

Friday, a trip to San Francisco, and a brief and pleasant visit to Linden Lab, chatting to Claudia and to some of the developers working on web-interoperability projects. Claudia has been a fantastic proponent of Sloodle – and it was good to be able to discuss our ideas for where Sloodle goes next and to get feedback from Linden Lab.

Monday & Tuesday were more about writing up all that was discussed over the previous week, and trying to do some forward planning. Managed to meet up with Edmund Edgar – who has been very busy coding, experimenting and supporting end-users get to grips with Sloodle – in-world and chat on Skype. Also a few discussions with some people who are using/experimenting (or planning on using) Sloodle. As much of this as possible has ended up in a discussion forum posted in the news forum on Sloodle.com.

The key challenges this is hoping to start to address are:

• Establishing Sloodle as an entity
• Establishing guidelines and supporting processes for developers
• Making it easier (& more rewarding?) for people who want to join the project and want to be able to contribute

I think more than a few points from the discussions earlier in the week made it into this document in some form or other.

No time to list all the exotic foods ate, or noxious drinks tasted at Jeremy’s behest…

Another ed tech blog. Includes a short article on Sun’s Second Life/Open Croquet/Qwaq like MPK project – which I’ve been meaning to write more about.  They’ve saved me from having to.