On camera controls and field trips

Camera controls, I think, are the best invention in SL: we all love them and use a them a lot, either to look closer at a picture or a text, or move around without having to keep pressing the keyboard arrow to walk (and admit it, also to spy on our neighbours   )

Yet, they are the worst enemies of collaboration and communication in SL.

Let’s see why. Imagine we are in Real Life. We go together to visit an art gallery, a museum or a nice building as a part of a learning activity. We get in, and since our teacher knows that not everybody has the same pace or interest when visiting such places, he tells us that we have 30 minutes to have a look around. To make the visit more interesting he can ask us to chose one piece of art we like and to be prepared talk about it to the group later, or if a guided visit is planned, to start thinking about possible questions we would like to ask to our guide.

People start moving around and it’s very probable that small groups will form. Since we are social animals, it’s very likely that some discussion or interchange of information and opinion will start while the small groups move around the gallery or museum. There is communication, then, and collaborative thinking since what the people beside me are telling will somehow produce a reaction in me: make me notice a detail I did not see at first or make me think about something I was not aware of at the beginning.

The teacher, on his part, will see what we are concentrating our attention on at each moment, and may be could go from one group to the other, to encourage or participate in the debate and may be add here and there a piece of information, thus stimulating further the conversation among the students and avoiding to “lecture” his students.

Let’s see now the same situation in SL. The teacher and the group walk inside the gallery, museum or whatever. The teacher ask the students to look at the art pieces and chose one they like in order to talk about it to their classmates or to ask questions about it to the teacher/guide who will explain something later about the artist/place.

Everybody stay stuck where they are and start moving around with camera controls. Nobody knows what the others are looking at nor where they stop because something struck their eyes. No spontaneous communication is possible. Although we are all in the same space, there is not “shared space”, since the space we feel we are in is it delimited by what our eyes see, and we are all seeing different things, ignoring where the others “are” at the moment.

As the silence starts to be heavy the teacher, who don’t see them moving, does not know if people did understand the task. He cannot intervene to encourage discussion or to add some little pieces of information and he is strongly tempted to break the silence by filling it, lecturing the students…. But this was not the aim of the activity he had planned. His encouragement to move around and look at things are seldom followed, because students are actually “moving around” with their camera controls, so they do not see why the teacher is asking them to do what they are already doing.

The solution could be:

a)      to abolish camera controls   …..impossible in SL

b)      go all together around the place and stop all together in front of different art pieces. It works, but it tends to be more teacher leaded than what we would like, and less student centred than what we aspired to. As well, since when Mr. teacher is present we all aspect him to “do things” and not us, the conversation lead (and load) will often fall on him.

This is what I learned while organising art exhibition in 2008, and what remembered when visiting an art gallery in 2009, where we visited in group the gallery and I asked in turn the students to chose an art piece and to discuss it together.

Yet, I do not know how and why, I forgot it completely when carrying out our visit to the Assisi Cathedral, where everybody just stood at the back of the church and nobody really knew what was going on. Since I’m still hitting on my head with a pan for my mistake, I decided to write it down, to learn a lesson and to remember it, and hoping that my experience will be somehow useful to other teachers who are planning similar things.

Pyramidoodle, the kick off of a new project

Clicca sull'immagine per vedere le altre foto di Fiona

On Thursday I was invited by the Italian group Pyramidoodle, hosted on the beautiful Solaris Island, to present a little thing I prepared for my Italianiamo activities and share with them the experience and some reflections.

Pyramidoodle is one of the multiple expression of the Pyramid Cafè group and its aim is to encourage the use of 3D and virtual environments (Second Life, OpenSim among others) to help organisations, groups and educators to meet and share their knowledge in an informal and playful way.

I’m very glad to have had the chance to see them in action from behind the scenes because they gave me a lesson on how to organise an event.

In my, by now rather long life in SL (I will be 3 on the 11^th of November) I’ve never took part to anything so well organised (and it is to be said that I worked for almost a year for one of the biggest language school in SL).

Beside being connected in streaming to multiple places in SL, we were streamed as well in Opensim. Nothing was left to chance: each member of the organisation team had a defined role: Fiona was taking photos, Crisma was recording the event, Junta was typing what was being said for those who could not hear it while Zogia, Salazhar and Magicflute were introducing the project of Pyramidoodle and the event itself.

A part some little technical problems (what would be the fun in SL if one knew that everything will work perfectly?) due to the number of avatars participating, the event went on pretty also thanks to the collaboration of all the attendees.

The closing of the evening with small talk and playful improvisations was particularly pleasant and gave us the chance to know each other a bit more.

If you have time (it’s quite long) you can see here the video shooted by Crisma.

italian machinima (1)

for further information: http://npirl.blogspot.com/2009/09/sneak-peek-feature-length-machinima.html

By the way, I discovered that there is an Anna Begonia’s sosia among the actors.

At least they go to the same hairdresser.

if you want to see all the photos: http://picasaweb.google.com/evolutie/Volavola#

A trip “abroad”

Recently I discovered that Philip Rosendale, the founder of SL, claims that meetings in Second Life are better than real life because there’s no threatening eye contact. It was a real satisfaction for me, you know. I do not find eye contact “threatening” but I don’t see the reason of it in virtual world. I do not feel that we need eye contact in order to communicate and to understand each other in SL. On the contrary: I have  a confession to make. Shhh.. don’t tell anybody, but in SL I actually never stare at peoples faces:  I love camera controls: I look around, zoom in on a detail of your t-shirt, then, if I’m in a new place, I start exploring the land around me, go back to your face to notice that you changed your eye colour, position the camera so as to have a general view of the group and can see who’s talking at each time, then spin around, etc. etc. Does it distract me? Not at all: I’m listening and interacting with you… It’s like drawing on a napkin… it helps me concentrate.

So, when fellow educators in SL say that they would like to have facial emotions… well, I do not see the point. If we are talking I can hear your main facial expressions in your voice, if we are writing, we will add emoticons and lols to our chat.

Limitations sometimes are useful, above all for language learning. If you do not agree, try to think about the last time you helped someone in SL to perform a task: you had to use a looot of language, and to be very precise. And the person you had to help had to help you to help him describing in detail what the problem was, what he or she wanted to achieve, what was on his/her screen etc.

Let’s think now what happens in RL if someone ask me for help to do something? Mhm I guess that I would show him how to do it, and then ask him to repeat the task, correcting him here and there. Very little language involved though.

I’ve been thinking this over again this afternoon, after I closed my Novicraft session.

I was invited along with some colleagues by Paul Sweeney to take part in a Novicraft virtual team building game, and asked to download the program.

Since, according to my grandma I’m very curious, and according to Alpha Lorgsval, a good virtual friend of mine, I’m very impatient, immediately after installing the program I jumped in to have a look around.

I‘m well aware that people usually like what they already know and miss those things that they already have and that therefore I  would tend to compare it with SL and that I would be very critical, at least at first.

The first thing I noticed was… no pigtails!!! Nor red eyes!!! Unbelievable! This game cannot be good if it does not let you have pigtails and red eyes!

Ok, Antonella, take a deep breath, calm down and go on: this is not SL, this is not SL, this is not SL. Understood?

The commands to move around were very easy to learn, and very limited too: walk, turn, jump, mouse look, normal look, open inventory, interact with an object and… that’s all. NO TELEPORT? How can people move in a virtual world without teleport? This is not going to work.

Then the big day arrived. There were we: three from Paul’s team, HP, a Swiss management consultant and Lotta’s avatar, representing Novicraft. We introduced ourselves. Before leaving us alone Lotta checked if we all understood our task: we were prisoners, and we had to escape.

We spent two hours overcoming physical obstacles (and without flying my dear!), being blind and letting other guide us (no camera controls! No way to have a peek at what’s going on around you!), deciphering together how to make things work, how to fulfil the tasks assigned to us (without even being able to pass object to the others or to rez them inworld to study them together). We discussed, made hypothesis, coordinated ourselves and talked, talked, talked.
The two hours seemed minutes, we had great time, our team worked together smoothly and we all felt deeply satisfied when solved some of the puzzles.

So maybe it’s time to put some more limits in SL to let people talk and reason together instead of simply clicking.

If you are intereted in Novicraft, check this: NoviCraft: virtual world team building

On avatars

I’m reading the blogpost Is your SL avatar a projection of yourself? by Shirley Williams and reflecting on my relation with Anna Begonia. I’m one of those who talk about their avatar in 3rd person. Anna Begonia does not resemble my cellular self at all: she is a brunette, wears pigtails, has red eyes and looks much younger (and thinner) than me. On the other hand, I usually say: I met Carol, I talked with Misy, I was interviewed by Cvetcka students, I’m working on a new activity for Italianiamo. So it’s a case of mixed identities .

This week I’ve actually been thinking a lot about avatars and the importance they have in our lives (both SL and RL): a friend of mine and former colleague woke up one day to discover that he did not have anymore access to his avatar. The company he was working with and who owned the avatar decided out of the blue, without even bothering to tell him, to deny him the access to his avatar. Normal, I would say, if this happened when he stopped working with them, less normal if it happens 8 months afterwards.

When he warned me that he wasn’t anymore himself I was shocked. For how things happened, and because I realised that he was loosing not only his inventory but, more important, his contact and his “name”.
Name in SL is very important, it’s how people know you, is what people know about you, it represents you much more than in RL: in SL you can change aspects but people will recognise you by the name. Your SL name is your reputation and in some cases of very well known people is a sort of brand. I will buy a scripted object from Eloise Pasteur, go to an event organised by Dudeney Ge, read with attention a blogspot by Tateru Nino because I know their “brand” means quality. I trust them even though I do not know them personally and in many cases I don’t know who they are in RL.

To think that now another person can go around with the name of my friend (although I hope with another aspect, since the avatar face resembled very closely my friend’s) gives me creeps, and I understand how students once felt when they discovered that an avatar they were very found of was actually another person (I think the original one left because she was sick of delayed payments). It makes me simply dizzy to think that I cannot be sure of the person beyond the avatar, but yes, this with avatars owned by companies and school can happen.

When I was working for Languagelab I was told that I was to use a company avatar. I understand the reasons, and I even found the idea very practical but I was very annoyed to leave Anna Begonia at home. She was the one that got me that job, wasn’t she? And she had been around Languagelab for quite a while, developed a relationship with students and co-workers, she had a character and I’m very fond and proud of her.

To prepare me mentally and to make the change less abrupt to students I made another avatar. I did her rather ugly, with a big nose and a pronounced jaw. While I was making her I did not love her at all… it was something forced on me, it was an idea I did not like but understand and that it was my duty to accept.

The funny thing is that when I was going to choose a skin for her I did not stop until I found something that made her look rather pretty. It was as if in the process of making her I developed a sort of affection towards this new and unwanted representation of myself, as if she came to live and I couldn’t be cruel to her and make her ugly and nasty.

And yes, she wore sort of pigtails and had red eyes.

Luckily Languagelab never managed to make us all a company avatar and I did not have to contact all my friends and coleagues in November 2008, when my collaboration finished, to warn them that I was not anymore myself.

In memory of old times I add here a Languagelab video documenting classes and citypeople activities from October/November 2008.

burglar buddy

An artist friend of mine was totaly disappointed when burglars visited her house and did not steal any of her works. It seems that to have one’s art work stolen adds up to your value.

In this case, I cannot complain. Yesterday while I was teaching some basic SL skills to a group of newbies someone stole almost all my brand new portable tutorial. Almost all because they left the room we were in, at least. But it was a big surprise for me when I said: let’s go to the next room… and we had the sky above us, and the sky below us… Not a big problem, since I rezzed a new one, but I think it’s rather representative of the culture of some people in SL: not sharing and collaborate with others but simply stealing.

As well, it was very annoying to have the staff of the sandbox to question us when we arrived (Who were us? was it a group? What were we going to do? and then they started sending their group to everybody…) I thought sandboxes were place anyone could use freely, with some norms, of course, but not a place where you feel intimidated or where to hunt for newbies to add to your group (and probably spam with notices ever after).

Lesson learned: when one brings inworld a group of newbies, only in well known sandboxes.

Here are the builder buddy that I made lately.

A place on your own

I’ve been always openly critic to those who owned many sims. I’ve been even critic to those who owned one single, simple, tiny little sim. “You have the whole world to explore! There is no any need to own land. Land owner are usually more than happy to let you use their land for education!” I was crying aloud from the top of my inexperience.
One year later I’m the tenant of an office, shared with a colleague and dear friend, and two little potatoes field (someone prefer to call them launchrooms, but mines are really bare potatoes field).
I rented first the office. I wanted to try to play media and where I worked at the time I did not have that permission, and I wanted to put some freebies in a very well known online shop, therefore I needed a small place to put the boxes. We rented our office for 3 months, and in that time I came to appreciate so much the community, the well runned sim and the chance of working on my own, with no one coming to chat with you (yeah, yeah, SL is a wonderful social place, but it’s impossible to do anything interesting if one spend its entire time chatting around) that we kept it after the summer.

My second estate ) was offered for free by an enlightened educator. I wanted to start a personal project and needed Italian learners: the best way to find them in the vast immensity of the metaverse  was to publish the weekly meeting time and day in Events, and wait to see if someone dropped by. I could not use my little quiet office for that purposes or the quietness would have disappeared soon after. Here again I found a nice community of educators and I really enjoyed my stay. Unluckily, we had a bad griefers attach and it was decided to let in only those belonging to the group. A very understandable decision, but I wanted something open to everybody, where everybody was always welcome to come and have a look, or take part in the activities.

Therefore I started looking for another place (and as soon as I found it and paid 3 months in advance, the previous place opened the sim again to everybody… la miseria!)
My third potatoes field is not for free but is cheap, and the owner is a nice guy who lives and let live and gives you even terraforming perms (that I tried out immediately, but very, very warily, thanks to Bea experience.

To have a place on my own is very important now for me and I could not go without it. And not only because it’s a meeting point for my activities, it’s also a place where I can learn a bit to manage a bit land, how to tackle griefers attacks (3 in 11 months, each on a different estate, yes griefers are not a legend) or how to play media. It’s also a place where learners can rez and run scripts, where I can leave material for those who want to come back to rehearsal some of the vocabulary, or a place that they feel they can use also when the activity is over.
But I’m still very critic with those who own kilometres of land and use only a tiny part of them ;o) Is it a contradiction?

Living in an English-speaking virtual world

I was talking with Salahzar Stenvaag, one of the most active avatar in the Italian community and a wonderful and generous scripter and teacher. He was telling me of his new Blackboard for the Portuguese language (you can get your copy here https://www.xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=1502539 for 0 Lindens), and we were talking about the problem with different languages in SL.

If you teach a language that has characters or signs that are not present in English, you probably already faced the problem: accents and some characters (ñ, ç to make just two examples) are not available, and… well, people coming to your classes or activities are interested (and have the right) to see the correct spelling words. I guess that the problem for language that do not use the Latin alphabet is even more serious.

If you enjoy some “do it yourself” activity in SL, Salahzar you can try to make your own board following the instructions here http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/XyText-UTF8 and the supported characters here http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/block/index.htm.

And now a good news for Italian teachers and students: soon, very soon we will have the Italian version of the viewer!!!

WiAOC 2009

In may I attended for the first time WiAOC. I did not have much time and I had to select only few events, all of them very intersting.

Here are some pics.

Iffaf presented the project of her univerisity and there was an interesting discussion on self access material in SL.

I rally enjoyed the Cristina Papp’s presentation on achieving a balance between the learning style of students and the teaching style of teachers. Very interesting, one of those things that make you think. And very well presented too ). You can see the slides here.

Some classmates at Muvenation presented a series of interesting tools. I have only one complain: it was at 8.00 am on Sunday!!

I gave a small workshop on some scripts that can be usefull for teachers.

I also attended some presentation and unconference in Elluminate. I knew the tool but had never seen it in “full action” before.

Very interesting was the unconference of Graham Stanley on Games and language learning. You can see (and listent to) the recording of the session here.

Some questions on SL

A friend of mine gave a brief introduction to SL to his English classmates. They are in the last course and the whole class would like to find a way to keep in contact and practice some English together. My friend wanted to see what his classmate thought about meeting in SL.
They asked him some questions, and he’s asking me in turn.
1. How long does it take to learn how to use SL and to create your profile?
2. Why did you start playing this game?
3. How can I make money with Second Life?
4. Are you registered on more virtual nets?
5. Are there people addicted to Second Life?
6. How did you discover Second Life?
7. What are Snapshots? And tags?

Since I was asked in English, and my answers were going to be in this same language, I decided to post it here.

Let’s start:
· How long does it take to learn how to use SL and to create your profile?

These are two questions! You are cheating
Let’s see: how long does it take to learn how to use SL?
It depends. To learn the basic skills in order to be able to move around with a certain ease one or two sessions of 1 hour are enough. To learn to do everything you can do in SL…. well, it’s a Second life long task.
About the profile: usually people discover the profile and fill it after they have been in SL for a while. It’s not fundamental, but it’s important. It helps you connect with people with your same interests, and gives useful information to start a conversation with someone you meet for the first time. To learn to fill it you just need to click on everything and see what happens or ask a friend to help you.

· Why did you start playing this game?
Hem Hem, Second Life is NOT a game . It’s a virtual environment: no points, no predefined tasks, no princesses to rescue or monsters to slaughter.
Do you want to know how did I ended up in Second Life. It’s a long story, I warn you.
In 2006 I attended a course on e-learning at UNED (a Spanish online university), and in the forum someone talked about 3D. I did not have idea of what 3D meant, and I asked. They send me a link to a 3D page: a very simple hut with people inside. I got a flash. I immediately saw the huge potentiality of 3D for language learning and I bought “The Sim 2” (and detracted it from my taxes, since it was for “study purposes” ).
I wanted to see if it was possible to use it in class (in case we ever had a working computer to use in class) to recreate everyday situations and therefore to practice that language that we seldom cover in class (think about it: we often talk about big issue but never say “please pass me the bread”).
However, I was not satisfied. Firstly, only one person at a time could move around the “puppets”, communication was poor and in a Sim-language. Situations were predetermined and not very realistic… That’s when I started to hear about Second Life. But, if I had to listen to what paper said, it was a land of sin and vice, full of unknown dangers and freakies.
It was only when Reuter opened an office in SL that I summoned up some courage and created my avatar. The rest of the story can be read here: http://aberriolo.wordpress.com/2008/11/09/eureka-01/

· How can I make money with Second Life?
I answered this same question thousand of times. All newbies (new users) ask it.
Ok, let’s say: the easy way to “make money” is to look for money trees and go camping.
Money trees are trees where money grow… Yes, in SL there are trees where new users (only new users) can take money. They give out “banknotes” of 1 linden (that’s the name of Second Life’s currency). And then there is camping. Let he who never camped throw the first stone. Camping means to sit or dance in a place for ages and get rewarded with few lindens. In old ages, when I was young and inexperienced, camping was paid something more, but now the average fee is 1 linden for 15 minutes. Now, let’s see if one can get rich in this way: 1 euro = 356 linden. Well, I’ve never been good at maths, but I do not see the business here.
So, who’s really making money in SL? Those who work seriously in SL: builders, scripters and companies that offer services to other companies, all people highly skilled who know very well SL and how things work there.
For normal users, like us, to get rich in SL is very unlikely. But, cheers up: you can do thousands of very interesting things in SL without spending a single Linden.
Ah.. was forgetting: they say that also “escorts” make money in SL, but you have to be skilled and gifted to be a good escort, too ;o)

· Are you registered on more virtual nets?
I guess that with “virtual nets” you are meaning virtual worlds. I put my little virtual feet in some of them, beside Second Life: There, Twinity, Metaplace, Exit Reality, Cyberlandia, and some others I do not remember. But apart from opening an account, get in, feel lost, don’t know where to go, what to do, how to move, how to speak and feel (in some of them) the pressure to “buy, rent, buy” I did very little. It’s an healthy practice I recommend to all those who are “old avatars”: it brings you back to the newbie state and make you understand better the difficulties a new user have to face.
At the moment the “other” virtual world that arouses my attention is Cyberlandia, an all-Italian Opensim experiment.

· Are there people addicted to Second Life?
Of course there are people addicted to Second Life, and to shopping, mobile phone, alcohol, nicotine, coffee (try to stop drinking coffee and you discover that coffee is very addictive, with a very bad physical withdrawal syndrome), sex, work, the internet on the whole, e-mails, legal and illegal drugs, etc.
Does it mean that we do not have to go shopping, have a mobile phone, drink a glass of wine or a cup of coffee, have sex, go to work, surf the internet and check our mails and take a (legal) drug when needed?

· How did you discover Second Life?
See: How did you start to play this (sic) game?

· What are Snapshots? And tags?
Snapshots are… snapshots You can take photos in SL: here you can see some nice place in SL. To take Snapshots is very easy, it’s free and can be fun.
I do not really know what you mean with “tags”. May be you are referring to what every avatar has written on its head. Each avatar has its name floating above itself. It can also have the name of a group it is belonging to. Each avatar can belong to up to 25 groups, and thus get informed about the activity they organise.