Another Long Goodbye

The 4-Sim Shakespeare Theater

I wish I had started blogging earlier in my virtual life because it seems like a lot of the educational and arts regions I have enjoyed and appreciated over the years are leaving SL these days.  I end up feeling like an undertaker, visiting and writing about regions whose owners have announced their exit just before the pixels get swept off the giant SL map and disappear forever.  But I'm going to write anyhow about the demise of the 4-Sim Shakespeare Theater (4SST) and Primtings Museum, both creations of the talented and creative Ina Centaur.  If Linden Labs has any collective intelligence at all (and that's a big if), they will maintain these builds and find a way to use them even if Ina isn't paying tier anymore.

According to Ina's valedictory note, the rent on these regions officially ran out on October 29, 2011.  Like so many other not-for-profit ventures in SL the expense of maintaining these cultural centers was just too much.   It's a combination of the sponsors/owners being hit hard by bad economic times coupled with Linden Labs' scrougish and short-sighted decision to end the non-profit discount for land ownership.  And, of course, people in SL aren't as generous with tips or ticket purchases as they used to be.  Ina's got a whole long bill of other particulars against Linden Labs too; if you're curious about them send me an IM inworld and I'll forward her public note to you so that you can read the litany for yourself.




The 4-Sim Shakespeare Theater

View of the 4SST stage from the seats

Linden Labs isn't exactly speedy about cleaning up un-paid-for prims, so as of November 6 the two builds were still around and I was able to go over to the 4SST to take a last look and and get some pictures.  Over the years the 4SST has put on professional productions of Shakespeare and has provided an educational venue for a lot of literary and arts activities.  I still marvel at the meticulous detail of the build, both inside and outside.  I'm also still struck by the extent to which one cannot take two steps anywhere around or inside the theater without running into a donation kiosk with ugly floating text above it appealing for donations.  I don't doubt that Shakespeare probably had his version of tip jars around the Globe back in the 16h century, but it depresses me that funding became such a major hassle that it ended up detracting from the artistic ambience of the theater.  I remember coming to productions and finding it difficult to find the vendor sign that would give me a program among all of the pleas for financial donations.

Sere on stage at the 4SST

Primtings Museum

The concept of the Primtimgs Museum was a stroke of pure genius: enlist SL's best artists to recreate or improvise on some of the best known paintings and sculpture in the world.  Rather than trying to use 10,000 words to capture the experience, I'll let my pictures do the talking.

You've got your classical statuary ....

David by Timmi Allen

Pieta by CHUCKMATRIX Cli

And your U.S. artists ....

Sere sitting in Tezcatlipoca Bisiani's interactive 3-D version
 of Edward Hopper's "Night Hawks"

Bryn Oh's 3-D depiction of George Bellows' painting
"Stag at Sharkey's"

And even versions of the European masters ...

Sere being examined in Nahasa Singh's interactive 3D version of
Rembrandt's van Rijn's  "A Lesson in Anatomy"

Dekka Raymaker created two 3D version's of van Gogh's "Vincent's Room."
The one on the left uses some of the classic SL Library textures.  The one on the right substitutes flat color.

And there is an excellent display of builds based on surrealist paintings ...

Kacy Despres' 3D interpretation of Max Ernst's "Ambiguous Figures."

Blue Tskuki's perfect interpretation of Rene Magritte's "Time Transfixed."  The display even includes
a sit vantage point which moves the viewer's camera to the exact location depicted in the painting.

This is one exodus that a lot of people are really going to miss and it's got me in a funk for sure.

Are You Happy?

It turns out that being in a virtual world really does make people happy.  Edward Castronova and Gert G. Wagner have published a paper in Kyklos (Vol. 64(3) August 2011, pp. 313-328) that presents real data that shows that "among Second Life users, satisfaction with their virtual life is higher than satisfaction with their real life", and "that people in certain life situations, such as unemployment, gain more life satisfaction from 'switching' to the virtual world than from changing their real-life circumstances."

I've been saying right along that one of the biggest benefits of doing education in SL is that (after one gets over the newbie period) it's just plain fun.  If you do it right, a virtual world experience can make you happy, and happy students learn more.

Finding a Linden When You Really Need One

This year's Second Life Community Conference (SLCC) recently took place in San Francisco, and Linden Labs unveiled a new set of staff members who are assigned oversight of various interest communities within SL.  And guess what?  After at least six months of wandering alone in the wilderness, we've got a new guy on the block who's in charge of education.  That would be Geo Linden (geo at lindenlab dot com).

Geo's got a tough row to hoe.  I won't even mention the loss of credibility and trust among the educational community that Linden Lab suffered as a result of its decision to change is educational pricing policy last year.  Nor will I mention the unspeakable firings of both Pathfinder and Claudia Linden, Geo's immediate predecessors (a large hiatus intervening).  The educational community in SL is likely to be skeptical at best and downright mean and surly at worst.  I hope that he not only establishes some credibility within our community but that he also is an effective advocate for us within Linden Labs.

~~~
P.S.

Hamlet Au (New World Notes - August 15, 2011), a former Linden himself, suggests that if you have to contact Geo (or any of the other Linden area honchos) you do so by email rather than inworld communications, and that you follow a few basic commonsense principles for effective and efficient communication:

• Clearly convey your point in the subject and the very first sentence of the e-mail: Failure to do so increases the chances they'll miss the reason you're writing.
• Keep your first e-mail under 250 words: Anything longer is a strong incentive to reply at a later date (or not at all.) If they want more details, they'll ask.
• Include your SL name and real life name in the e-mail: I'm amazed at how many people fail to include their SL name. I also recommend including your real name to establish your credibility and seriousness. Generally speaking, professional content creators should not tether their brand to a single platform. Address Lindens as peers, not fans, and they'll treat you as such.

Come to think of it, the first two bullet points are good rules for communicating with anyone who gets too much email and doesn't have enough time in her or his day to respond to everything -- like the dean or president of your university.

11 Tips for Successful Virtual Education

So you've decided to use Second Life to do education, have you?  You've probably forgotten how hard it was to learn everything you know about doing things in SL and how long it took.  So you if you're actually going to go through with this inworld educational project, it's going to take quite a bit of planning and work.  One of the best and most succinct lists of things to do to insure success was published in Hypergrid Business recently.  So I thought I'd pass along the link:

http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2011/08/11-tips-for-successful-virtual-training/

The Realm of the Otherwise Impossible

Pioneers Over C by Gore Suntzu (on display at Ars Simulacra)
Photo by Serenek Timeless

One reason to be in Second Life is to explore the Realm of the Otherwise Impossible (ROI).  The virtual world permits exploration of all kinds of ideas that would be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve in real life.  This, I think, is why virtual reality has such potential as an educational tool, but it requires educators to stop thinking about the things they could or already actually do in conventional educational settings and begin thinking about all the things they wish they could do but can't.  I'm sure I'll return to these educational themes many times in future posts, but for the moment I want to talk about the ROI in the visual arts in Second Life.

Cosmic Spectroscopy by Gore Suntzu
Photo by Serenek Timeless

Even though the arts community in SL complains often about lack of Linden Lab support for the arts, there actually is quite a lot of art in SL.  Many artists are adept at digital, 2-D image creation, and one can buy all manner of digitally rendered pictures to hang over the couch on one's SL livingroom wall.  Some of those I like, but the majority of them bore me.  To my eye, the most interesting examples of virtual world visual arts are those with which the viewer can interact -- walk through, climb on, fly around -- many of which do not have any physical presence at all because they are composed of particles of light rather than prims.  They combine the best of color, form, and motion to convey an idea or mood.

As in real life, artists with big ideas need lots of space to create and display their work.  And that requires financial resources which artists often don't have a lot of.  But there have been SL patrons of the arts who have offered the arts community both sandbox space and gallery/installation space for their work.  So it is with some dismay that I learned today that one of the biggest patron of the arts in SL, IBM, is closing up three of the regions they have used for many years to sponsor the creation and display of visual art.  You can read more about IBM's announcement in Hamlet Au's New World Notes post yesterday.

Kaleidoscopical Humbugs
Art by Gore Suntzu
Photo by Serenek Timeless

One place in SL that continues to show some of the best art in SL is Ars Simulacra, sponsored by the New Media Consortium.  The region complements the smaller 2- and 3-D shows at the adjacent Aho Museum.  Large works of art are displayed throughout the lushly forested, hilly Ars Simulacra region, with larger immersive installations high up overhead on sky platforms.

Curator Tayzia Abattoir has an eye for talent and right now the show is Kaleidoscopical Humbugs featuring the work of Gore Suntzu.  The show is best viewed with the sun setting on midnight, which allows the region to come aglow with color, ephemeral shape, and motion.  Simple pictures can hardly do the work justice - the pieces vibrate and pulse!

Why is this show a fabulous example of the Realm of the Otherwise Impossible?  Let me use Gore Suntzu's own words from his notes for the show:

"My prim abuses are unreal prims sculptures made with sculpties andwith some little scripting to make them alive.  Do they have a meaning? I don't know, but if the music is nice, the moon is full sometime it can happen that they catch the mood of the people that are looking at them

For me is more an act of exploration looking for a symmetrical dynamic pulsation."

Gore Suntzu's own gallery, Ye Olde Prim Abuser Shoppe where you can buy many of the smaller pieces in this show, is in a much smaller region, so it's no surprise that his notes for the Ars Simulacra show express appreciation to Tayzia "for the opportunity she gave me, it was lovely to be able to work without the fear of running out of prims and with no pressure and deadlines!"

We should all thank Ars Simulacra for making it possible for all of us to experience the Realm of the Otherwise Impossible.

Kaleidoscopical Humbugs
Art by Gore Suntzu
Photo by Serenek Timeless

Not So Abyss-mal After All

Hooray!  On April 1, I got an inworld notecard from Yan Lauria and his co-developers, Vianka Scorfield and Draceina Pinion, telling me that the Abyss was back after about a 36-hour absence.  It restarted in collaboration with JAMSTEC, NOAA, Science Circle, and the Open University of the UK.

I went over this morning (that's me up above waving to you from the welcome area) and it's all there except for the Deep Sea Exploration Dive that I couldn't find last week either.  But they have added a new Cetacea exhibit up in the Sky Gallery (http://slurl.com/secondlife/Second%20Earth%203/189/68/1102), so I took a picture for you.

Don't miss seeing the Abyss Observatory.  The old SLURL stills works, but if you don't know it click on the following: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Second%20Earth%203/214/35/23

Falling into the Abyss (Temporarily)

Among the sadder pieces of news to hit my inbox recently is a short post on the SLED forum from Hajime Nishimura (Yan Lauria in SL) that the Abyss Observatory will gone from SL for awhile.  For those of you who’ve never been there, the Abyss Observatory is an interactive educational region focusing on earth sciences with an emphasis on oceanography.  It will no longer be sponsored by NOAA, but is moving to sponsorship by a Japanese research university.  The transition hit a road bump due to the earthquake in Japan earlier this month, so plans are being made to backup the exhibits before the anticipated closure of the current sim on April 1.


I explored the Abyss pretty thoroughly last summer and was very impressed, but I went over today to take a last look at the current version and take some photos for you.  When it gets back online the Abyss is not to be missed.  In addition to giving visitors a great look at deep sea marine science and underwater exploration, it also has some fabulous exhibits on the physics of wind and meteorology.

Meteorology Exhibit Photos by Yan Lauria

Unfortunately it seems that the simulated deep sea dive part of the exhibit has been taken off line since last summer.  I can only hope they put it back when they get their new sponsorship because it was one of the best immersive simulations (and I’m not at all sorry about that double entendré) I’ve ever found in SL.

The Abyss Observatory folks promise to be back in SL with their excellent exhibits as soon as they can, and I’ll post the SLURL for you when it’s back up and running.  But if you are curious about what you are missing, check out their website at: http://chikyu-to-umi.com/abyss/index.htm.  And while you are at the website, don’t miss the part of it that gives links to related earth sciences exhibits in: http://chikyu-to-umi.com/abyss/abyss_link.htm.  Let's hope the Abyss Observatory is back in SL very soon.

 

Finding the Right Skin (Part 1): The Problem of “Uptime”

If you pull up my Second Life profile you’ll see that I was born on October 15, 2007.   In SL terms that’s an eon; it's such a long time ago, in fact, that any reasonable person would want to know either why it took me this long to finally start blog posting or why I’m even bothering to start a blog right now after not having one for so long.  The answer is that, as everyone knows, you can’t blog well if you don’t have the right skin.  Frankly folks, it took me this long to find that skin.

Now anyone who’s reading this probably already has some experience in SL and knows that it requires a significant investment of time and brain power just to be able to use the interface to move around without running into things, to figure out how to listen and use voice chat, and to get streaming audio and video to work.  That doesn’t even to begin to scratch the surface of the time it takes to learn to create content and get oneself looking like anything other than a total noob.  It’s what I call “uptime” – the time it takes to get up and running sufficiently skillfully on a platform that one can begin to use it unselfconsciously and creatively.  I can pretty much trace the course of my uptime just by looking at the skin I was wearing at various times during the past 3+ years.

My first skin was the skin that the LL gods gave me at birth, and which I had for over a year and half.  In 2007 one entered SL with freakin’ ugly skin, but since it was frustratingly way beyond my skill level to so much as lurch my avatar around the New Media Consortium’s orientation plaza, I logged off after 20 minutes and didn’t come back for a year and a half.  Skin problem solved.  I’ve learned since that this kind of reaction is not all uncommon among academic folks like me.  As much as our students often react badly to SL being so difficult to learn to use (and Iggy O. has a thought provoking blog post on this topicl), I think it’s even harder for educators to deal with.  When you're used to being an authority on a subject it’s hard to imagine teaching students in SL with any credibility at all if you look like a loser and keep running into walls.

Fast forward to the spring of 2009 and I found myself in receipt of an offer I couldn’t refuse.  The program officer of the organization that funds my RL research told me that he expected to see my virtual keister planted in a seat for a 1-hour session that was part of larger conference on virtual worlds the MacArthur Foundation was holding on its new SL island.  (By the way, that island is no longer in SL.)  And so, over the course of a couple of days, I managed to lurch through about 60% of the NMC’s orientation material, find myself a free change of clothing courtesy of NMC, change my appearance to something I thought looked better, and set off to discover the wonders of education in a virtual world.  My uptime was just beginning though: I’ll confess that I spent that entire hour at the conference reading the open chat trying to figure out what all the typed comments were about.  I had no idea that I even needed to activate streaming audio to hear the program.  Even if I had known what my problem was, I would have had no clue that day how to fix it.  Worse still, would you believe that I actually went out in public looking like this?

As with all high-end educational technology platforms an educator just has to reach a state of détente with SL and accept that it’s going to take a huge amount of uptime before anything educationally worthwhile can be accomplished.  I found some decent looking skin a month or two after that MacArthur conference, which was about the same time I figured out how to resize and reposition clothing.   So I began to tour the “educational” places on the LL Showcase that summer and began to see how educators are using SL.  I found a few places I liked, and one region in particular that seemed congenial enough that, by November, I started to learn to build stuff in order to contribute to the group educational effort there.  Okay, I’m a slow learner – it only took 2+ years since my SL birthday to get to that point!

Since that time I’ve spent a lot of time talking with the educators who have visited our educational region (it’s on ISTE’s board of places for educators to visit), finding out what they want and need out of SL, visiting many other regions in SL that have been designed or are being used for education, talking to the designers and users of those regions, watching what works and doesn't work educationally in a virtual world, and also being a voyeur on the Virtual World Educational Roundtable website.  I’ve even begun to visit some of the educational areas in other virtual world grids. 

The Right Skin

Just a month or so ago two important things happened to me nearly simultaneously.  I decided that I had developed enough of an overview and knowledge base of what educators are doing in virtual worlds that I could begin to write about what it all means.  And a friend sent me a skin that she had won on a Midnight Mania board that she couldn’t use herself and thought I might like.  You can see it right here.  It is the perfect skin for me, which I know because the first time I wore it in public (and even though my profile says I’m a college professor) two guys I’d never met before hit on me.  So here I am in the blogosphere, bringing the perspective of someone who has studied human learning and cognition scientifically in RL for over, ... um … well, for a really long time.  I’m finally in possession of the right professional and avatar skins to do what I came into SL to do: write about what works and doesn’t work when it comes to education in a virtual world.