SLCC08 Tampa Florida
From left to right: Phelan Corrimal (Rockcliffe), Buddy Sprocket (Sloodle), Pedro McMillan (Sloodle), Jeremy Kabumpo (Sloodle), Hawc Decosta (Rockcliffe)
(Image credit: fleep)

Track Sessions & Schedule

SATURDAY, AUGUST 14, 2010

Build It, Tweak It, Rethink It, Rebuild It: Building Gadgets and Games for a Virtual Campus

Anthony Fontana (SL: AnthonyFontana Chevalier), Bonnie Mitchell (SL: BonnieMitchell Miles)
Saturday, 9:30 to 10:00am – Whittier

In this session, Bonnie Mitchell and Anthony Fontana will discuss virtual objects and educational games built and scripted for use on the Bowling Green State University Virtual Campus in Second Life. These include a pre-SL 2.0 media viewer used for the 2009 SIGGRAPH Art Exhibit, an art gallery HUD, and a campus navigational HUD that were rebuilt post viewer 2.0. They will also discuss the development of “Mondrian Madness”, a multiplayer educational game based on the artist Piet Mondrian and the EarthDay/BirthDay Scavenger Hunt.

Anthony Fontana is an Instructor of Art and Learning Technologies Consultant at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Anthony’s pedagogical research involves web 2.0 applications and focuses on immersive learning environments such as Second Life and the way in which students engage in socially motivated peer production. Bonnie Mitchell is currently an Associate Professor at Bowling Green State University in the School of Art, Digital Arts, in Bowling Green, Ohio. Her research and creative interests include immersive interactive installation art, experimental animation, 3D special effects, interface design, multimedia development, and cross-disciplinary collaboration. Mitchell is a co-administrator of the BGSU Virtual Campus in Second Life and co-facilitator of the BGSU Second Life Learning Community with Anthony Fontana.

Virtual Learning System for Virtual World Education

Janyth Ussery (SL: JanythKU Techsan), Chris Gibson (SL: ChrisG Techsan)
Saturday, 10:00 to 10:30am – Whittier

Vushi Learning Network provides educators with an interoperable virtual learning system (VLS) to assist in teaching and learning within Second Life. In addition to many other features, the new learning system will allow faculty, staff, and students to securely review college and class information without leaving Second Life.

Janyth Ussery has 16 years of educational experience including administration, instruction, online course development and learning management system administration. Janyth is an experienced virtual world trainer, course designer and instructor and the first to earn a degree delivered primarily in Second Life. Chris Gibson is the Associate Vice President at Texas State Technical College with 15 years experience in education. Chris was the team lead and co-developer of vTSTC and is the Director and co-founder of Vushi.

Learners & Tigers & Prims – Oh My!: Going on Virtual Safaris with CLIVE

Ann Steckel (SL:Olivia Hotshot), Jonathon Richter (SL:Wainbrave Bernal)
Saturday, 11:00am to NOON – Thoreau

With a new Virtual Learning Environments taxonomy in the MERLOT.org learning objects database, The Center for Learning in Virtual Environments (CLIVE) is leading teams of designers, teachers, and researchers on expeditions into the virtual wilderness to discover great examples of 3D learning, document what they find, and put it into the searchable database for the SLED community and others to find and discuss the emerging evidence for what works in 3D teaching and learning. Come and find out about these Virtual Safaris, how they work, and how they might help to provide meaningful descriptions and access to the virtual learning designs we seek.

Ann Steckel is an Instructional Technology consultant at California State University – Chico, where she provides faculty training, technical computer support and instructional design consulting. She leads the MERLOT team on CLIVE Island to develop the “Virtual Safari” build serves on the planning team for the Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable. Jon Richter is a Research Associate for the Center for Advanced Technology in Education (CATE) at the University of Oregon. He is the Director of CLIVE and is conducting research into how virtual teams are collaborating to do real work, and is also involved in teaching computer programming and game development inworld for Lane Community College.

An Innovative Context for Teaching Counseling & Interviewing Skills in Second Life

Cindy Tandy (SL: Eve Maven)
Saturday, 11:00am to 11:30AM – Whittier

Learn how the presenter, with little building knowledge but with a willingness to think outside the box, created a simulation of a social services agency and has used it with 25 students for a semester. With rooms representing different practice settings (a situation impossible in the physical world), small groups or pairs of students are immersed in real-time dialogues. Each skill practice session that uses text (chat) results in a transcript ready for evaluation.

Cindy Tandy is an Associate Professor (social work) at Valdosta State University in southern Georgia. Her areas of interest and research include mental health, gerontology, and distance education including online teaching and Second Life.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Virtual

Kevin Feenan (SL: Phelan Corrimal)
Saturday, 11:30am to NOON – Whittier

This presentation talks about the concept of being virtual and what the implications are for education and knowledge development.

Kevin Feenan has been involved with Second Life since 2006 having developed Rockcliffe University Consortium from a very small plot of land to 11 sims today. Kevin is an MBA from the University of Toronto and has spent over 20 years in the IM/IT field.

VWER @ SLCC

AJ Kelton (SL: AJ Brooks), Ann Steckel (SL: Olivia Hotshot)
Saturday, 2:30 to 3:30pm – Whittier

This session will be a very special meeting of the Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable (VWER). The VWER has met in Second Life weekly for the last 2+ years. For this meeting we will meet simultaneously in Boston and in SL. The meeting topic will be an “Open Forum” for cross-world conversation and collaboration.

AJ Brooks is the Director, Emerging Instructional Technology for the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Montclair State University in New Jersey. He is the founder, and Chief Moderator, of the Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable and the coordinator for the EDUCAUSE Virtual Worlds Constituent Group. Ann Steckel is an Instructional Technology Consultant for California State University, Chico where she specializes in curriculum design that leverages immerging technology. Her current projects include running the Chico SL campus, designing and coordinating a multi-university service learning campus, and coordinating safari development and island redesign for CLIVE.

Teaching Teens in Second Life:No Avatar Left Behind

Peggy Sheehy (SL: Maggie Marat)
Saturday, 4:00 to 5:00pm – Whittier

The team process of creating a virtual presence for your school, the development of authentic, experiential, standard-based curriculum and implementing it with students in Teen Second Life addresses the NETS for administrators, teachers and students and is an innovative approach to a collaborative and all-inclusive learning community. Focusing on the process of developing constructivist learning in the virtual world, Sheehy will present the steps her teachers are taking this 4th year of teaching in Ramapo Islands on Teen Second life to translate their content into the virtual landscape. She will outline best practices that have evolved and the student responses to this 21st century pedagogical shift.

Formerly a professional musician, Peggy Sheehy serves as ITF/ Media Specialist at Suffern Middle School, in 2006 she established the first middle school in Teen Second Life: Ramapo Islands. Ramapo Islands now hosts over 2400 students and their teachers.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 15, 2010

The Six Learnings framework in action: Examples from geography education in Singapore schools

Kenneth Y T Lim (SL: Veritas Raymaker)
Sunday, 9:30 to 10:00am – Whittier

The Six Learnings framework was first introduced at SLCC 2008 as a way of helping educators and curriculum designers think about the pedagogical affordances of Second Life. This presentation will illustrate the framework by using examples of in-world interventions enacted by schools (Grades 7 through 9) in Singapore across a range of subject domains, including geography.

Kenneth Lim is an Assistant Professor in the Learning Sciences at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. He works closely with colleagues from the Ministry of Education in Singapore, and with schoolteachers and principals to co-design curricular interventions which leverage the affordances of Second Life for learning.

Experiential Learning Meets Market Research on the Teen Grid

James Fullerton (SL: Jimmy Veeper), Mary Ellen Gordon (SL: Pebbles Hannya)
Sunday, 10:00 to 10:30am – Whittier

Summary of the motivations for and process behind a project in which students from Southern Lehigh Middle School have been learning about economics by helping to replicate on the teen grid some of the research Market Truths has done on the main grid about the SL clothing and real estate markets.

James Fullerton teaches Social Studies at Southern Lehigh Middle School in Center Valley Pennsylvania. He is using Second Life to provide his students with opportunities for immersive learning, and is blogging about their experiences at: http://www.fullertonj.com/blog. Mary Ellen Gordon is one of the owners of Market Truths, which is a RL market research company that has also been doing research in SL since 2006. Mary Ellen Gordon has extensive experience doing academic research as well as commercial research for clients in the US, UK, and New Zealand. She also has extensive experience practicing and teaching marketing, and has a PhD, MBA, and BS in marketing.

Literate Games

Tim Maly (SL: Babbage Darwin)
Sunday, 9:30 to 10:30am – Imperial Ballroom

One of the struggles of building good educational content is making it engaging, something books and games have been doing for ages. Join us for a light-hearted look at the narrative possibilities of an interactive medium and some of the weird hybrids (successful or otherwise) that people have tried. Can we learn from history to make better learning materials in Second Life? (Yes.)

Tim Maly is the Creative Director at Pleiades, a company dedicated to using virtual worlds as a teaching tool. He co-cofounded Capybara Games, an award-winning indie videogame company. He writes for Quiet Babylon, a site about cyborgs, architects, and our weird broken future.

The Future of Virtual Worlds in Education

Andrew Hughes (SL: Andrew Hughes)
Sunday, 11:00 to 11:30am – Whittier

The virtual worlds industry is changing rapidly, with new technologies and new advances in virtual worlds happening almost daily. With all the new virtual worlds emerging, what effect do they have on the future? What technological advances can we expect to see related to social learning and formal education? This presentation discusses how virtual worlds are being used as a learning mechanism for educational institutions, and how several useful commercial virtual worlds, as well as open source virtual worlds, can be implemented in educational institutions..

Andrew Hughes founded Designing Digitally, Inc. which specializes in developing the virtual spaces needed to create effective learning environments. Andrew has extensive experience as an instructor at both the University of Cincinnati and at the Art Institute of Ohio – Cincinnati. Andrew also was a consultant for the Ohio Board of Regents and the U.S. Department of Education for the Office of Innovation where he helped to develop ground-breaking learning spaces for the K-12 sector.

PRIMative Cultures to Integrated Empires: Holistic Virtual Campus Development

Bonnie Mitchell (SL: BonnieMitchell Miles), Anthony Fontana (SL: AnthonyFontana Chevalier)
Sunday, 11:30am to NOON – Whittier

Great ideas begin with individuals but often take a community of minds to execute. Bowling Green State University’s Virtual Campus development involves a fully integrated community approach which involves faculty learning communities, student teams, individual faculty consultations, multi-disciplinary participation, administrative buy-in and external community involvement. This session will focus on effective strategies for holistic virtual campus management.

Bonnie Mitchell is an Associate Professor at Bowling Green State University in the School of Art, Digital Arts, in Bowling Green, Ohio. Her research and creative interests include immersive interactive installation art, experimental animation, 3D special effects, interface design, multimedia development, and cross-disciplinary collaboration. Mitchell is a co-administrator of the BGSU Virtual Campus in Second Life and co-facilitator of the BGSU Second Life Learning Community. Anthony Fontana is an Instructor of Art and Learning Technologies Consultant at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Anthony’s pedagogical research involves web 2.0 applications and focuses on immersive learning environments such as Second Life and the way in which students engage in socially motivated peer production.

Doing Ethnographic Research in Second Life

Daniel Schackman (SL: Marshall Curtiz)
Sunday, 2:30 to 3:30pm – Whittier

Scholars are beginning to research the development of culture of Second Life in ethnographic studies of its overall culture and of its subcultures. This ethnographic research builds on ethical procedures and standards established in studies of actual cultures by anthropologists, sociologists, and cultural studies and media effects scholars. What are the issues, concerns, and challenges faced in doing research on virtual human subjects in SL?

Daniel Schackman is an award-winning digital media scholar and Ph.D. Candidate in Mass Communications at Syracuse University. He is also a Lecturer in Communication and Media at the State University of New York at New Paltz. His dissertation research is a study of the Asian Indian Diaspora in Second Life, developing a theoretical construct of Virtual Diasporas.

Extension Virtual 3D: A New Kind of Experiential Learning

LuAnn Phillips (SL: Thynka Little)
Sunday, 2:30 to 3:30pm – Stuart

Cooperative Extension, a nationwide non-formal community education program in the USA, has been experimenting with Second Life since 2007, with a hub at the Virtual State Fair on Morrill. Some of the educator’s projects include the Liveability House, Life Cycle of the Japanese Beetle, and the Virtual Health Inspector game. Cooperative Extension as a real world educational model is in danger as budget cuts and staff reductions take a toll on its ability to work one-on-one with the public. In this session we will take a brief look at the learning theory behind extension education, at the efforts so far to introduce virtual worlds to the system, and ask for YOUR IDEAS about how virtual worlds might become a successful tool to help extension education grow and thrive in the future.

LuAnn Phillips is a consultant working for the National eXtension Initiative, an Internet-based educational partnership of the Land-Grant University system, specifically addressing technology-enhanced models of delivery for their Cooperative Extension community educational programs. LuAnn coordinates the initiative’s virtual world activities, including professional development, project management, building and design, and event planning.

Accessible Education in Second Life

Dr. Robert Vernon (SL: Gabrielli Rossini), Alice Krueger (SL: Gentle Heron), Eme Capalini
Sunday, 4:00 to 5:00pm – Whittier

This presentation will examine: o the context of accessible education in virtual worlds o 3 forms of accessibility in virtual world learning spaces o 4 main types of impairments that affect students in virtual worlds, and o some tools for addressing them. We will tour a sample SL learning environment that is optimized for accessibility, and answer questions.

Dr. Robert Vernon is a professor at the Indiana University School of Social Work. He has conducted numerous courses inside the virtual world, and sponsored graduate student projects in SL. Alice Krueger heads the Virtual Ability community of support for people with disabilities in Second Life. Alice is a former educator and educational researcher who has MS and an extensive spinal fusion. Eme Capalini is the Vice President for Development for Virtual Ability, Inc. She was the design/build lead for Virtual Ability’s Linden Prize winning New Resident Orientation Course on Virtual Ability Island, and the design/build team lead for the AVESS Project.

About the Track

The core purpose of the Education & Research track is to celebrate and share our learning experiences as educators in the virtual world of Second Life. We hope to offer an engaging program with many opportunities for learning, networking with each other, and exploring the innovative and creative ways Second Life is being used in education. From teaching and learning, to research, to building partnerships and collaborative projects across institutions, the educational community in Second Life is truly pushing the limits of what is possible with today’s technology.

Track Leader

The Education & Research track is led by Kevin Feenan (SL: Phelan Corrimal). Kevin has extensive experience organizing conferences including the Second Life Community Convention 2009, and the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education conferences in 2009 and 2010.