Reality, Virtual Reality, and a Real Fight for Equality

"If you don't create your reality, your reality will create you."
— Lizzie West

Reality

Our wedding is just a little over a week away! The plans are coming along, in spite of how busy everyone is. We changed our minds and decided to get married at home. Our dear professional Green Thumb friend Ms. V is generously donating her labor to pretty up the neglected garden. We've bought our wedding clothes, which will become our party outfits for the next N years. I still need shoes since my usual boots and beat-up sandals simply won't do, and maybe a sun hat. We've got the license. MG has been deputized as a marriage commissioner. The texts for the ceremony have been selected but the arrangement needs to be set. Etc., etc. There are so many details, and checking each item off the To Do list has been both satisfying and a relief. But mostly we are just deliriously happy that we get to do this. We can hardly wait to hear those words, "By the power vested in me by the State of California, I now pronounce you ..."

Virtual Reality

I wasn't able to attend BlogHer, the conference for women bloggers, in San Francisco today and tomorrow, but I registered for BlogHer in SecondLife (SL) instead. To prepare, I'd gone inworld for some pre-conference office hours where Gidge Uriza, a BlogHer08 volunteer and SL fashion blogger, graciously gave me a few fun pointers and a free makeover: skin, hair, shape and clothes. I picked up some free BlogHer t-shirts for my avatar to wear with her new jeans, and checked out the virtual conference schedule. This morning a shorter-than-planned meeting left me enough time to attend the "speed dating" style networking session where I got to credit Gidge for my avatar's new cuteness and meet a number of the other bloggers. We were all exchanging blog URLs, so I figured I'd better get in here tonight and get back to blogging. But first, at the end of my RL (Real Life) workday I popped back into SL for the evening festivities of dancing and chatting with Gidge and the gals. Great fun, and I finally figured out how to make my "Click to see my blog" button point here to Leaping Woman.

A Real Fight for Equality

The No on 8 campaign is getting underway. Last night I went to another meeting at the DeFrank Center and learned more about the campaign strategy, the areas where volunteers are most needed, and what we can do now. Of course the main thing to do right now is tell everyone I know that K and I are getting married and that California Proposition 8 on the November ballot threatens our right to marriage equality, and tell them how they can support us.

So I am telling you now. K and I have been together for over 17 years, through sickness and health, for richer and for poorer. As a matter of basic fairness we would like to keep the fundamental right we now have to choose who we marry, and to marry who we choose. If you feel that we should keep the right to marry, here are the things you can do:

• Go to http://equalityforall.com/ and sign up as a supporter.
  
• Volunteer for the No on 8 campaign. You can help even if you don't live in California.
  
• Donate money to support the No on 8 campaign (we're still working on that registry).
  
• Vote in the November election and, if you are voting in California, don't stop with the Presidential race! Vote No on Proposition 8 to say Yes to marriage equality.
  

My bride-to-be and I thank you.

Best Practices for Non-Profits in SecondLife

"... Second Life has the killer app, which is community."
- Connie Yowell, MacArthur Foundation

Friday morning I attended a panel discussion on Best Practices for Non-Profits in SecondLife (SL). Or rather my avatar attended, since the meeting took place "inworld" at the Nonprofit Commons in SecondLife. At least 86 avatars attended the meeting. (click here for pictures). The panelists were from Global Kids, Alliance Library Systems, InWorld Studios, and TechSoup (which runs the Nonprofit Commons in SecondLife). These were some of my takeaways:

• TechSoup's Nonprofit Commons project provides free SecondLife office space to nonprofits. They've outgrown their current SL space and they're creating a second one.
• SecondLife is not suitable as a nonprofit's sole community outreach effort.
• Several panelists emphasized that it is not necessary for a nonprofit to have office space in SecondLife. But if you do you then need to staff it for regular office hours. It's helpful to have scripted objects that report back to staff who has visited the space.
• A large event takes a lot of organizers and volunteers and a lot of planning and preparation.
• You have to both plan ahead and improvise for SL technical challenges. For this event there was an external website where you could listen if your audio stream wasn't working inworld, but the number of listeners maxed out the server and not everyone could get in. So some of the attendees typed highlights of the discussion in the text chat for those who couldn't hear. And of course the audio was recorded so a podcast could be made available (although it doesn't seem to be posted yet).
• You have to plan ahead for those who don't have prior SL experience. One best practice is to hold preliminary events in SL, like dance parties, where people can learn and practice their inworld skills. And don't require particants to register inworld; buying Lindens is too complicated for newbies.
• Avoid too much text on notecards; text is better on the web than in SL.
• Publicity: Big nonprofit events in SL get lots of press. Document compulsively to get attention outworld. All press, positive or negative, can create useful dialog. Machinima videos are great promotional tools. And don't forget to tag with 'npsl'
• The best way for a nonprofit to get started in SecondLife is to start attending the Nonprofit in SecondLife (NPSL) weekly meetings (of which this was one).

I plan to start attending those weekly NPSL meetings there to get a better idea of what other nonprofits are doing and ideas for what's possible. Added benefit: much of the discussion was useful for thinking about online communities in general.

For more information, check out:

• Podcast from this event (probably under Library; it wasn't up yet last time I checked)
• Chat transcript from this event
• NPSL: Nonprofits in Second Life blog and wiki
• Nonprofit Commons blog
• Rik Panganiban's report "Best Practices for Non-Profits in SecondLife" based on nonprofit track from last year's SL Community Conference
• Article about Macarthur Foundation's investigation into philanthropy in virtual worlds

No Title, No Quote

I've been sorely neglectful of this blog lately. I've been working a lot at ABI and, I admit, playing around other Web 2.0 media. Last weekend I spent several hours in SecondLife at the fabulous Sloodle Moot (see photostream). Then on Monday I succumbed to a monster cold that had been toppling one person after another at the ABI office.

The timing for this week's nasty cold turned out to be not half bad. First, because the weather all week was suitable primarily for arctic ducks. Second, because KFOG was playing World Class Rock A to Z where they go through their music library in alphabetical order. They started January 14 and are in the Ws so I suppose they'll wrap up over the weekend -- although they just started the What's and still have all the When, Where and Who songs to do. Not to mention all the songs that must start with You. As soundtracks go, it felt just right for my recovery.

Fun Fun Fun!

"I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day."
— E.B. White

The Black Bar glasses strike again: http://www.elfyourself.com/?id=1707052930. Thanks to Roxanne Darling (Beach Walks with Rox) for turning me on to this silly holiday fun. Note: Elf Yourself is spreading virally, so their server is a bit slow. If you get a server error, try again later. Or not, as your mood dictates. For more giggles check out JibJab including their musical year 2007 wrap-up.

Usually the holiday season is stressful with shopping and shipping to be done for both Chanukah and Christmas. This year, with more free time on my hands, it's been more fun and I'm enjoying making some of the gifts — using my quote collection for inspiration.

I generally have more fun reading online than writing. I'm up and running on Facebook now and hooked on Scrabulous and other applications. I poked around SecondLife some more and ended up becoming (even though I'm a newbie, just by getting there early) an officer of a new guild. It's hard to make myself stop and blog. I have the two next weeks off so I hope to catch up a bit on both learning SL and on my blog.

Strategies and Techniques for Implementing Social, Collaborative, and 3D Learning

"As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it."
— Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I'm belatedly posting some notes from an eLearningGuild online forum, Strategies and Techniques for Implementing Social, Collaborative, and 3D Learning, December 13 & 14. There were a lot of great and notable speakers from the cutting edge of technology-assisted learning. These are kind of long so I'm breaking them up into several posts, which will primarily be of interest to my colleagues in the learning professions.

The first morning the keynote was by Ray Jimenez, CEO of Vignettes for Training, Inc., who spoke on How to Integrate Social Networking and Collaboration to Impact Learning and Performance. He opened by talking about the variety of exciting tools that Web 2.0 provides (e.g. wikis, blogs, etc.) to help learners perform on the job and the common tension, in enterprise environments, between formal structured training and informal Web 2.0 learner-as-author content. He encouraged his audience of learning professionals to nurture the content creators among our learners. Ray posted some additional reference material to his blog including a free downloadable report with some case studies.

The next session I chose was Getting Serious about Virtual Worlds by Christian Renaud of Cisco. He cited some interesting figures from a study done by Pearn Kandola for Cisco on effective communications for geographically dispersed teams. For example, that it takes 4 times long to communicate a message electronically versus face-to-face. In SecondLife (SL), Cisco has a public-facing virtual campus, with meeting rooms, office space, a training area, and a theater-in-the-round. See http://blogs.cisco.com/virtualworlds for more information including virtual event dates. The major drawback of SL: there's no security system to speak of, so they don't use (or recommend) it for confidential information. The Virtual World Interoperability Forum working to de-risk this space.

Christian's thoughts on picking the right tool for an interaction:

• talk to a colleague quickly: telephone
• sensitive meeting: video conference if you can't meet live
• board meeting or close a big deal: telepresence
• pitch an idea: Webex
• disseminate your idea to 100s or 1,000s: webcast/podcast
• intimate gatherings with people you may not know: virtual worlds

One tool doesn't fit all, but they're working on integration between these so you can segue as needed. He said the best business use of a virtual world is when you have an intimate audience of people who can't meet physically and who either already trust each other or who don't require a strong trust relationship for the task(s) at hand.

He also mentioned the Mozilla-based Flock social web browser, and I'm giving it a try. But I'm so accustomed to automatically deleting all my personal info (cookies, etc.) when I exit a browser that it's hard to take the best advantage of its built-in features for social networking tools. I do like how easy it's to see status updates from Facebook and Twitter.

Also in attendance for this session was one of the other speakers: Tony O'Driscoll.

The next session I participated in was A New Model for Informal Learning: Communities 2.0 by Eric Sauve, founder and CEO of Tomoye Corporation and an author on trends and issues of Communities of Practice. Some highlights of his talk:

• Workplace trends driving social and informal learning
• Forrester says "More than 80% of adult learning takes place in informal settings outside the classroom, leaving only 20% for formal learning situations. In spite of the disparity between informal and formal learning in the workplace, corporations invest most of their budgets in formal learning."
• Eric noted we're just starting to find effective answers to this problem but it will change.
• Learners as source of content (YouTube-ification)
• Using the model of the Long Tail: while training organizations take on the low end, learners turn to their peers as the "Long Tail" of learning.
• The low end is time-consuming and costly, the long tail is fast, cost-effective, and validated by users.
• The learning environment, with best practices and supporting technology, becomes bottom-up and learner-centric.
• Validation Concerns
• For example: Are we creating value or compounding ignorance? Does the best or worst rise to the top?
• Collective Intelligence as a community validation method (The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki and Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs) says that a large group of peers is more effective at complex problem resolution than a small group of experts because in aggregate, the large group has more perspective and experience -- if you can capture it

• Linkages between formal and informal methodologies:

• as part of a blended learning strategy
• using community subject matter experts (SMEs) to validate courseware development
• point learning solutions for capacity building

• Biggest barrier to facilitating user-generated content: people untrained in instructional design have to think about how to be effective at generating learning content.

More on Strategies and Techniques for Implementing Social, Collaborative, and 3D Learning

"Potius sero quam numquam"
— Livy

Okay, I'm cheating and using a quote the second time (the first time was the English translation, "Better late than never" using Livy's Latin name, Titus Livius. But I couldn't find a more appropriate quote because I was going back over some notes from the eLearningGuild online forum Strategies and Techniques for Implementing Social, Collaborative, and 3D Learning, on December 13 & 14, 2007 and found more that I hadn't posted.

Intelpedia: Intel’s Use of Wikis to Support Collaboration and Enhance Learning
Josh Bancroft, Intel (his blog: http://www.tinyscreenfuls.com/)

Some of the best practices Josh used to get the internal Intel community to use the Intelpedia wiki (which probably work as well for other collaboration tools):

• Take advantage of naturally occurring opportunities to be a cheerleader for your wiki. When people complain about other collaboration tools in use, tell them why the wiki doesn't have that problem. When people email or mention a document, ask whether they'll put it on the wiki. And encourage others to advocate for the wiki so it's not just your voice.
• Any time you make a subjective rule about what can go in the wiki, i.e., what's "good enough" you dampen the wiki spirit that people own it and can make it what they want. Encourage people to submit useful stuff, organize it, garden to improve it and make it better.
• All information on the wiki has to be useful to at least one person, but because they want it to be encyclopedic, even vanity pages belong.
• All company security and IP policies apply to Intelpedia content as well, but they encourage employees to post everything that won't violate security concerns on the wiki so it will be encyclopedic. So as long as it's not breaking a rule they welcome people to add.

He talked a bit about why they chose Mediawiki ("it was good enough for Wikipedia") and recommended http://www.wikimatrix.org/ for comparing both open source and product wikis.

What the Heck is Facebook? Using Popular Tools to Train New Learners
Kristin Kahlich and Shon Bayer, Enspire Learning

Many companies have embraced elearning and sometimes simulations but not that many have embraced games, wikis, virtual worlds. Their main point was that employers and those responsible for developing training need to overcome those barriers, because the composition of the workforce will dramatically change as baby boomers leave the workforce and Generation Y enters.

Exploring Enterprise Virtual Worlds and the Metaverse
Ron Edwards, Ambient Performance, Ltd

A few highlights from Ron's talk ...

Corporate collaboration tool context: widely distributed teams, travel as both an expense and an environmental issue, recruit and retain 'digital natives'. Some of the solutions:

• Sun's mixed reality virtual conference room with both people on video and avatars online.
• Cisco partner network is now 3d; see http://blogs.cisco.com/virtualworlds/

Benefits of virtual seminars & conferences in SecondLife:

• You can see who's in the room in a richer way than a phone conference.
• Supports virtual breakout rooms.
• For security in enterprise collaboration you need a dedicated non-public platform or your own server inside a firewall.
• For identity,wrap 2D photos around avatar faces and wear avatar name tags.

For training, any one tool should be part of a mix:

• Virtual worlds are good for practice, role playing, sharing
• A blended approach might also include a SCORM trackable mobile procedural reference, hand-held tools with data analysis, decision support (e.g. Decisionability)
• Role playing is a sweet spot in virtual world collaborative learning.

There was some discussion of accessibility and the areas in which virtual worlds aren't there yet -- especially for those with visual impairment. One group had success with those who have hearing impairment. Training in a virtual collaboration environment can be more accessible than, for example, a ropes course. He showed an example of a real course that required learners to wade waist-deep across a stream.

In his opinion, the ramp up time to learn to use a virtual world application is about 20 minutes, less if you're a gamer. My own experience in SL has been that it takes longer to become either comfortable or proficient.

One of the attendees says there are some good YouTube videos by Torley Linden on building and getting around in SL. A bunch of us shared SL avatar names and got some momentum for an eLearning Guild presence in SL. There are lots of education activities in SL including AECT in SL (Association for Educational Communication and Technology).

Check out Wolf Quest, a learning-based game released by the Minnesota Zoo in December, as an of applying these tools for learning. And one more link of interest: Serious Games Institute, UK.

Ron feels virtual worlds will dramatically change the way we work and interact, but today's virtual worlds are like the horseless carriages that were the first automobiles. Gartner says 80% of us will be using virtual worlds by 2011.