Massively Multi-Learner Workshop

This workshop was one I attended last week (22nd March 07) at the University of Paisley and centred virtually (no pun intended) exclusively around SecondLife. I thought it covered some fascinating projects and ideas and so decided to write up my notes here on my blog rather than condemning them to my handwritten, archaic paper journal.
NB. A lot of these relate to Second Life spaces and are predominately for my own benefit.

If any of the speakers/organisers ever happen to read this and feel misrepresented then please feel free to contact me and I will happily edit my interpretation of events :-)
The overall themes centred around education and the role of learning in virtual environments. Unfortunately, the first scheduled speaker Carl Potts was unable to attend which was disappointing as the presentation was about World of Warcraft. So the first speaker was actually Dave Taylor from NPL, presenting Knowledge Transfer & Public Engagement in Second Life, where Knowledge Transfer means a knowledge that will cause receiving party to change or alter their behaviour. Dave's blog describes NPL's presence and work in SL much more eloquently than I can so I will not try and replicate it here. Suffice to say that my eyes were beginning to be opened to the possibilities of SL at this point, in terms of the Info islands and the New Media Consortium, Space Island Cluster - most of which I have still to explore! An interesting development with potential for my research is the current beta testing of spatialised sound and speech in SL, where stereo sound and volume is varied depending on the virtual source and distance from your avatar. One of the potential uses for this Dave cited is in learning languages where your tutor accompanies you to shops, restaurants etc., so you can practice your language skills. Final news flash - other species may be in SL in the near future... some form of primates I think.
Finally, I see the benefit of posting online - the ability to link! Aleks Krotoski (Social networking in Virtual Worlds) was the next speaker and you can even see her presentation slides online at SlideShare. She cunningly reminds me that the presentations were filmed and should be posted online shortly. However, here's a couple of notes from her talk that I scribbled down. Firstly, virtual communities can be places of ritual - soon after the July bombings in London a virtual memorial appeared on SL. Secondly, I found the sheer scale of her (phd) research staggering. Aleks has surveyed over 10,000 SL members and mapped their social networks. Even the small scale, localised versions she showed us onscreen were a tangled web of complexity. Just thinking about the wealth of data scared me! I suppose it depends on the depth of collected info from each member...
Schome from Peter Twining was the next presentation. Schome proposes a lifelong learning environment. Conventional style research (e.g. focus groups, interviews) with students and educators on improvements on education revealed little. So, how do you 'break free' and generate 'out of box' thinking? One solution is to use SL and provide lived experiences, where virtually anything is possible. How will these new forms of representation and information change us and the way we communicate? Part of the benefit to me of attending the workshop was discovering new (to me) web technologies - like a bliki (it's a blog with wiki features).
Laz Allen from TPLD presented Games in the Classroom. This was the only non-SL based presentation. An overall theme of the talk was that graphics (essentially 3D) don't matter to the users - the game play is what is important. Bad 3D graphics are more likely to turn players off than good 2D graphics.
Jeremy Kemp presented Sloodle - really interesting but not that relevant to my research I think. Slides online available here. I think it's like a SL version of Moodle...
Mike Hobbs discussed the possible use of SL in teaching programming skills to students. This seemed to be slightly constrained by the limited type of scripting available in SL (LSL - Linden Scripting Language). The aim in this project now is to teach programming design not how to code.
The most interesting and intriguing presentation to me was by Annabeth Robinson, entitled Integrating Second Life into Design for Digital Media. As AngryBeth Shortbread (SL) she makes virtual interactive art installations as seen on blip.tv and obviously in SL. Apart from this, what I found exciting was the way that she uses SL to teach students video production and animation skills. Animation skills can be taught through either using SL to produce machinima as a finished product or as an animatic, where custom animations can be created externally using Poser or something similar and creating the animation rigs too. Video skills can be learnt through scripting and storyboarding, shot composition & camera movement, sound design, production design (in terms of textures, objects etc) & directing skills (other avatars). Obviously one of the huge benefits of SL is the ability to create shots that would impossible in a real-world student film project sense (e.g. huge sets, stunts etc).
The final speaker of the day was Mike Reddy - Putting the Real in to Surreal. To be honest, by this point in the day my mind was a bit frazzled so my memories of this talk are hazy. I think it was quite AI and scientific - one of the PhD students is working on creating plants/flowers that mutate once copied and recreated.
All in all, interesting day - makes me want to use SL a lot more!! Now I just have to get a laptop so I can...