New World Notes

SL Users: Please Take This Survey from UC Irvine's Tom Boellstorff on Your Virtual World Usage During the Pandemic

Here's a fun short survey for SL users for a study on virtual cultures during the COVID-19 pandemic. (One of the questions above.) The study is led by my pal Tom Boellstorff of UC Irvine, who's easily among the most preeminent academics with a focus on virtual worlds. (He's the author of Coming of Age in Second Life, among many other related works.)

"I’ve been conducting various research projects in Second Life for almost 17 years now," Tom tells me, explaining the genesis of this study. "A couple years ago, I completed a study of disability in Second Life, and after that wonderful research experience moved on to some other projects (I’m actually finishing up a book on the Intellivision video game system from the early 1980s, which is great fun!) But then when COVID-19 hit, I decided to return to Second Life to see how COVID-19 is reshaping online interaction. I was lucky enough to get support from the National Science Foundation that means I have three wonderful graduate research assistants. Until next April we are conducting research in both Second Life and Animal Crossing. It’s a wild ride, setting up research with very little warning, but it’s been a great experience for all of us."

Here's the key questions Tom and his team hope to answer:

"The basic idea behind our project is that what people call 'social distancing' is really physical distancing. Online, new kinds of connections are being created. What are they, how are they working, and what lessons can we learn as it’s happening? In particular, the Internet isn’t a unified entity. Virtual worlds share some things with social network sites like Facebook or Instagram, with mobile devices, with online games, and so on, but there are distinctive features as well. What do virtual worlds specifically offer? What is the potential and what are the dangers? How can learning from what people are doing in virtual worlds help us better respond to the transformed lives we’ll all be living in the wake of COVID-19?"

Even better, Tom will share the results with New World Notes. More about the study here, excerpt below:

Industrial Design Students Still in COVID Quarantine Learn How to Prototype Real Chairs in a Virtual World

Gargoyle presents his chair design to students and instructors

Industrial designer Robb Godshaw was recently set to co-teach a class in rapid prototyping at San Francisco State University, when a somewhat inconvenient global pandemic broke out.

As originally planned, students would first learn how to use CAD software, and then learn how to use to computer-aided manufacturing software to actually create a full-size wooden chair via 3D printing and CNC machining. So at the end, each student would literally get to leave class with the chair they’d created from start to finish.  

That was supposed to be the “satisfying and empowering” portion of the semester, as Godshaw puts it to me, but the problem was, the university was (back last May) still in lockdown. “This made COVID especially frustrating,” he goes on. “I thought hard of what lessons students had learned in the previous semesters, and tried to find a way that some of those lessons could be learned virtually.” 

But where Zoom or another online video conferencing platform might work for most other subjects, his class needed some level of in-person teaching:

“There are students whose chairs suffered from serious structural issues, craft issues, aesthetic issues, ergonomic issues, and simple scale issues, as it is very difficult to know how large the chair you are designing on a computer screen is.”

That meant “finding a tool that would allow people to move in real space with human sized avatars that would allow for sitting and chatting”, but also didn’t necessarily require a new gaming PC or a VR headset. 

The online learning alternative he ultimately landed on, as you can see below, just turned 17 years old:

Educators Who Use Virtual Worlds: When Do You Want a Live Group Demo of Breakroom, the Free-for-Public Schools 3D Social Hub from Sinespace?

The developers of Breakroom, the new 3D social hub for remote teams from virtual world company Sinespace (a sponsoring media partner to New World Notes), are starting to hold live demos to companies and organizations interested in using the platform for classes, meetings, events and other online group activities. 

Brearkroom’s lead developer is Adam Frisby, a co-founder of OpenSim, and is free to use for public schools, so Adam and team are planning to give demos specifically catering to educators -- especially those already familiar with OpenSim and other virtual worlds.

Question is, when is the most preferred day/time for such a demo? The team is planning to schedule them on weekdays between 8am-Noon PST, but if there’s a strong preference for other time slots, they’ll try to accommodate some of those as well.

So please take this survey to help Sinespace schedule demos during the most preferred days and times -- and share this survey with any virtual world-based educators you may know!

In Coronavirus' Wake, Virtual World-Based Educator Using Both Zoom and Second Life to Teach Her Classes (Comment of the Week)

As educators discuss the appeal of Linden Lab's new post-Coronavirus land discount for schools, teacher and reader Kaylee West offers a unique perspective on using virtual worlds as a pedagogic tool now that her students can't be in the same room as her:

Like many other institutions during the COVID-19 pandemic we are using Zoom for live online classes, and Zoom and similar platforms are excellent for a lot of the teaching we need to do. However, they can't do what virtual worlds like Second Life can do (simulation and multiuser collaboration), so my SL lessons will continue.

For the first time, however, I won't be physically in the same computer lab as my students, but will use a combination of Zoom and SL to conduct the classes. Zoom, with its screen sharing capability, will enable me to brief students at the start of a lesson, and help them solve technical problems during the lesson, which is much easier if you can see their screen.

For me, this has been one big area that I would love to see better developed in SL -- some form of desktop or screen sharing. Maybe this takes development into a whole other technical area that Linden Lab can't support, but it would make the functionality of SL much greater for assisting students and newbies during lessons. Still, if LL wants SL to be able to compete with platforms like Zoom and Collaborate for certain types of interaction, they will need to look at features like screen sharing, etc.

Hopefully someone at Linden Lab notices that last request. Kaylee's been using Second Life as a teaching tool in her university for 12 years, and has noticed some interesting (and positive) advantages to that over the years:

Educators & Non-Profits: Will You Buy Linden Lab's SL Sim Discount Offer?

If you're in education or work for a non-profit organization and you're also interested in potentially using virtual worlds for your work, please take this survey. If you missed the news from last Friday here's the gist:

SL-Based Education Not Hurt by "Wokeness", But Institutional Indifference (Comments of the Week)

Great comment thread in response to one educator speculating that a very politically incorrect Second Life would never work as an educational tool on today's "woke" campuses. SL-based artist Nebulosus Severine says not so based on her personal experience:

So-called "woke" colleges (I attended one) frequently engage their students about society's dark sides, controversial issues, and problematic human behavior ON PURPOSE. It doesn't try to shelter students from them, it encourages them to face them & discuss things like this - that's kind of a big part of what being "woke" is about??

While I was still in school, we had several incidents with controversial groups on campus, including anti-abortion protesters who posted graphic images on large signs, etc. And we were all able to handle these things like civilized fucking adults. School staff made it a custom to alert students to events like these, so that we could choose to avoid them or not as we chose, because we're all grown-ass adults who have agency. And these controversial topics of discussion were the norm, not the exception. The process of becoming woke is to examine controversial topics, to try and understand them, not to run away and hide from them because they're upsetting to think about.

That sounds right, though there is a substantial difference between controversial groups on campus which students can avoid or engage with as they choose, versus what we were talking about: SL-based educational programs, where students might be required to share a (virtual) environment with these controversial groups as part of their necessary coursework.

In any case, Victoria Leavenworth, another reader with experience in virtual world education, argues that the real problem with SL-based education is the institution itself:

Educator: Second Life as a Teaching Tool Would Never Work on "Woke" College Campuses of Today (Comment of the Week)

Pictured: Gorean roleplay, one of Second Life's most popular roleplay subcultures

There's a very interesting reader thread on the recent Electronic Gaming Monthly article on Second Life as told through its old guidebooks. including this thought from "Iggy", who some ten years go, when SL had hundreds of "virtual campuses" owned by real life colleges and universities (up to and including Harvard!) was once among the most passionate educators advocating for the use of Second Life as a teaching tool in colleges:

VR Pioneer Hiring Developer for Texas A&M Research Project in Second Life

Jacki Morie, a VR pioneer, is looking to hire a developer for a research simulation project that her firm All These Worlds is  developing for the Health Sciences Center at Texas A & M, one of the world's top universities. The project in itself seems pretty interesting (more on that below), and it's also noteworthy that a major educational institution has been doing a project like this in Second Life in recent years.

The simulation is set in a warehouse (above) which has a number of hazard signs. "[W]hat they are actually testing is the efficacy of the design of the hazard signage, if one design alerts someone more to a hazardous situation than another," Jacki tells me. 

That's why she needs a developer with SL scripting experience: "Every machine has a set of coded functions. Some of the code needs tweaking. And they want 'explosions' if the procedures are done incorrectly, with the functions then reset so participants can try again." Any study with explosions is by definition awesome.

This is a very well-funded project, so the contract pays quite a bit -- details on that and how to apply below:

If You Want to Sandbox Build on Harvard's Second Life Sim, You Still Can

Click here to visit Berkman, sponsored by Harvard's law college of the same name, a mostly defunct educational sim once formerly used as a teaching resource for actual Harvard University classes from 2006-2008. I just visited its sandbox area to create and play with some prims, inspired to come there by a recent Twitter thread about defunct SL campuses for real colleges. Many of them still seem be in-world, albeit all but abandoned -- including the sim owned by the world's top university.

The mystery is why they haven't been taken offline. Either Linden Lab forgot they were there after they more or less ended the company's education outreach program -- or perhaps they're on an automatic payment system, and school accountants haven't noticed the bill? In either case, it's still there for impromptu sandbox building parties, or for creating new objets d'art you can show off to friends. "Oh this little thing? Just something I made while at Harvard."

In Experiment, VR Marginally Improves Learning in Minority of Volunteers

3D games and then virtual reality have long been touted as having the potential to be user-friendly "memory palaces" for educators, an ancient means of learning that today's students could easily use:

A variation of the "method of loci" involves creating imaginary locations (houses, palaces, roads, and cities) to which the same procedure is applied. It is accepted that there is a greater cost involved in the initial setup, but thereafter the performance is in line with the standard loci method. The purported advantage is to create towns and cities that each represent a topic or an area of study, thus offering an efficient filing of the information and an easy path for the regular review necessary for long term memory storage.

I've written about studies to see if this speculation is actually true, and now a University of Maryland study has some tentative results:

Both groups received printouts of well-known faces–including Abraham Lincoln, the Dalai Lama, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Marilyn Monroe–and familiarized themselves with the images. Next, the researchers showed the participants the faces using the memory palace format with two imaginary locations: an interior room of an ornate palace and an external view of a medieval town. Both of the study groups navigated each memory palace for five minutes. Desktop participants used a mouse to change their viewpoint, while VR users turned their heads from side to side and looked up and down.

VR did improve memory retention -- but only for a minority of volunteers, and only a little bit: