In the past few weeks I’ve participated in two virtual conferences; following are my notes.
On May 13 the Digital Library Federation sponsored a tour of the Harvard College Library’s presence in SL (http://slurl.com/secondlife/iCommons/157/87/29). Carrie Kent/Carrie Pennell, who built the Library, led the tour and answered questions. I think I heard her say the Library took several hours to build, and the total cost was $20 — some of the furnishings she bought, some she made — and of course, that doesn’t include the cost of the island itself. There are books available, created with Thinc Book (http://thincsl.com/category/products/thinc-book/), as well as access to Google and the Harvard online catalog. She also showed us the Manuscript Room, a collaboration she has undertaken with a Harvard faculty member (http://slurl.com/secondlife/iCommons/220/107/302). She discussed how the Manuscript Room might be used to bring scholars widely separated in the real world together to examine and discuss rare manuscripts — which of course might be physically located at another distant location. In a notecard she writes:
“In a 3D educational immersive location, it is easily arguable that for some people, access to materials of the time represented may increase the reader’s ability to contexturalize materials. So, if I create an environment that represents a certain 19th century New England village, and allow you to enter a house, walk up to a desk, and you can then read digitized copies of the original Emily Dickenson poems…as you look out her windows, see her gardens…perhaps you will understand her poetry just a little more.”
With Thinc Book we are seeing the development of easy and powerful tools for multimedia publishing.
On May 21 the Internet2 Teaching and Learning SIG and MAGPI sponsored a videoconference to hear updates on two projects. The first was an update from Margaret Corbit, Cornell University on the Taxonomy of Virtual Worlds Workshop held March 12 and sponsored by NSF (http://view.scicentr.org/workshops/taxonomy/). The workshop focused primarily on K-12 education and addessed questions such as:
- What would the ideal systems for STEM learning look like?
- In particular, what are the best ways to manage tasks specific to education, such as social interaction, student assessment, teacher support and development?
- How do we address issues of access, usability, system architecture, intellectual property, user identity and security?
- What tools are currently available for assessment and what do we need?
- How do we match software to teaching strategies?
(A blog entry describing the workshop can be found here — https://blogs.wharton.upenn.edu/staff/remurphy/2009/03/taxonomy-of-virtual-worlds-for.html)
Among the VWs discussed were Second Life, Cobalt (http://www.duke.edu/~julian/Cobalt/Home.html), Blue Mars (http://www.avatar-reality.com/), Active Worlds (http://www.activeworlds.com/), Project Wonderland (https://lg3d-wonderland.dev.java.net/), Digital Spaces (http://www.digitalspace.com/).
We were also given a tour of SciCentr’s Jumping Genes game
http://www.scicentr.org/Explore/VirtualWorlds/SciCentr/
And also of interest from this session was the Virtual Worlds timeline
http://www.dipity.com/WebHistoryProject/Virtual_Worlds
and the Virtual Worlds Almanac
http://vworld.fas.org/wiki/Main_Page/VirtualWorlds
The second report was on the Federation of American Scientists’s Medulla Project.
http://www.fas.org/programs/ltp/games/medulla.html
Medulla is an open source, collaborative toolset that has been developed to work on any/all VW platform. The tools allow users to:
- verify a user’s credentials;
- upload, access and store digital materials, behaviors and metadata;
- enable collaborative creation, modification and use;
- contact and manage development teams (linking subject matter experts to experts in creating virtual objects);
- peer review;
- rights management; and
- create and rate learning modules (e.g. activities with discrete learning outcome objectives) and assessments (e.g. a performance based challenge)
We were also given a demonstration of Discover Babylon, a joint project of the Federation of American Scientists Learning Technologies Project, UCLA’s Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative, Escape Hatch Entertainment, and the Walters Art Museum.
http://fas.org/babylon/
One of the things interesting about the FAS work is that they are preserving elements of the VW using DSpace (e.g., https://faslt.beacontec.com/jspui/handle/123456789/11), and are planning to create a mashup with Flickr that will make it easier to use Flickr images in a VW environment.
