DAY 2: FRIDAY APRIL 24, 2009
Day 2 of the Immersive Education Initiative London Summit convenes at 9am on April 24th 2009 in the Wolfson Theatre in the New Academic Building at the London School of Economics.
DETAILS: Official announcement, online registration, maps and hotels.
SPEAKER TIMES AND ROOMS: Refer to the speaker's schedule program (A3 print format)
MUSEUM WEB 3.0: THE NEW FRONTIER IN EDUCATION AND ONLINE LEARNING
SPEAKER: Melissa A. Carrillo
AFFILIATIONS:
New Media & Technology Director, Smithsonian Latino Center, Smithsonian Institution
ABSTRACT:
The Smithsonian reaches well beyond its physical structures and offers substantial branding and education partnering opportunities. In this effort, the Smithsonian’s National Outreach campaign places great emphasis on its online educational resources. One such example is the Smithsonian Latino Center’s website and its new online initiative the Smithsonian Latino Virtual Museum (LVM). Within this online environment, we can reach far more people, and further explore issues of representation leveraging the success and popularity of interactive experiences particularly with younger audiences. The growth of the Web and related technologies such as Immersive Education enable new possibilities for sharing the Smithsonian’s knowledge from our collections and research in ways never envisioned when it was first created. Over the next several decades, the Institution proposes committing its intellectual and financial resources in the creation of a digital Smithsonian to support both the increase and diffusion of knowledge. The Smithsonian Latino Center is an active partner in this endeavor. Through a demonstration of work in progress, Melissa will illustrate how a collaboration with Ohio University’s Vital Lab resulted in the build and design of LVM in Second Life. She will discuss the philosophy behind the LVM design, content structure and navigation as it directly impacts and contributes to the creation of virtual spaces and processes that facilitate new kinds of interaction and learning. Melissa and her colleagues will give a live tour, demonstrations and unveil a machinima video of the three region LVM sim prototype which includes a central lobby, a music wing and expeditions wing. In addition she will discuss the importance of interoperable open file formats for virtual worlds and how standards being developed by the Immersive Education Initiative's Open File Formats Technology Working Group (OFF.TWG) and Library Technology Working Group (LIB.TWG) impact the future of LVM and other museum virtual worlds.
RESEARCHING THE PSYCHOLOGY OF VIRTUAL WORLDS:
CURRENT FINDINGS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS
SPEAKER: Richard Gilbert
AFFILIATIONS:
Professor of Psychology, Loyola Marymount University (LMU)
Director, The P.R.O.S.E. (Psychological Research on Synthetic Environments) Project
Co-Chair, Immersive Education Initiative's Psychology of Immersive Environments Technology Working Group (PIE.TWG)
ABSTRACT:
Richard will present the mission of The P.R.O.S.E. Project and describe an in-world research center where a program of empirical studies is being conducted to systematically investigate the psychology of advanced virtual worlds such as Second Life. Major findings from the first four studies (i.e., on Addiction, Identity, Relationships, and Sexuality) will be presented and methodological challenges in conducting scientifically-sound in-world research will be discussed. His presentation will conclude with a description of the next phase of studies to be conducted under the auspices of P.R.O.S.E.
SERIOUS GAMES FOR IMMERSIVE EDUCATION
SPEAKER: Sara de Freitas
AFFILIATIONS:
Director of Research, Serious Games Institute, Coventry University
ABSTRACT:
Serious games involve the use of electronic games technologies and methodologies for primary purposes other than entertainment. The purposes include education, simulation, team building, collaboration, social networking, and opinion shaping.
In this presentation Sara will give an overview of serious games with a focus on how serious games are used in the field of education. In addition to presenting several examples of serious games for education, Sara will give attendees an early look at new learning games that are now under development. She will conclude with case studies and an overview of the real-world results that have been achieved by students who have used learning games in and out of the classroom.
ADDING NEXT-GENERATION MOBILE AND VIRTUAL WORLD CONTENT REPOSITORIES TO EXISTING eLEARNING PLATFORMS FOR PERSONAL AMBIENT LEARNING: THE IRMOS PROJECT
SPEAKER: Fabrizio Cardinali
AFFILIATIONS:
CEO, Giunti labs
Chair, European Learning Industry Group
ABSTRACT:
The IRMOS Project (Interactive Realtime Multimedia Applications on Service Oriented Infrastructures) is a 36 month, 12.9 million Euro project awarded by the European Commission to a consortium of 13 leading European organizations to develop "real-time" interaction between people and applications over a Service Oriented Infrastructure (SOI) where processing, storage and networking needs are combined and delivered with guaranteed levels of service.
Within the scope of the IRMOS Project, Giunti Labs will develop one of the user scenarios for Extended Real-time Location Based Learning. Giunti Labs will integrate its HarvestRoad Hive digital repository and learn eXact Mobile Learning technologies with the Wonderland and Darkstar virtual world and collaboration platforms from Sun Microsystems, and run on top of the IRMOS SOI infrastructure. Blending Giunti Labs' Mobile Learning technologies and freely available open source learning platforms, such as Sakai or Moodle, the solution will constitute a real time “extended” location-based learning experience to learners residing in both real and virtual learning worlds.
Using the IRMOS-powered system learners will be able to meet in specific real-world learning hubs (such as museums, tourism destinations, schools, industrial work floors, and so forth) where they will receive location-based learning materials and community services that are geo-located based on relevance and context awareness. The real-time system will synchronize user interactions and information with a virtual reconstruction of the physical real-world environment, thereby empowering learners to meet with an augmented community of mobile and virtual visitors for an enriched learning experience.
The IRMOS Project has recently passed its first successful review in a plenary meeting held in Brussels, where the European Commission and an international panel of experts reviewed the first 12 months of result and achievements.
During his London Summit presentation Mr. Cardinali will give an overview of the project, including a summary of recent progress and future activity, and provide attendees with hands-on demonstrations of the current system.
EMBEDDING 3D VIRTUAL WORLD LESSONS INTO THE K-12 CLASSROOM
SPEAKER: Richard L. White
AFFILIATIONS:
Immersive Education Designer, Developer, and Researcher, Greenbush Southeast Kansas Education Service Center
ABSTRACT:
Rich will provide attendees with an overview of the ways in which Greenbush is embedding 3D virtual world lessons into the K-12 classroom, leveraging existing classroom hardware such as interactive whiteboards, to bring standards-based 3D virtual world lessons to students in engaging and powerful ways. Rich will also discuss Edusim virtual world lessons built using Cobalt and OpenSim, the Mobile Immersive Learning Lab project, and the newly developed CSI (Crime Scene Investigation) educational virtual world that is built on OpenSim.
OUTCOME OF THE TAXONOMY OF VIRTUAL WORLDS WORKSHOP:
COMMUNITY DISCUSSION ON K-12 EDUCATIONAL VIRTUAL WORLDS
SPEAKER: Margaret Deborah Corbit
AFFILIATIONS:
Director, SciCentr, Cornell University Outreach
ABSTRACT:
On March 12 and 13 2009, more than 60 people concerned with the use of virtual
worlds in K-12 science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields,
gathered at the University of Pennsylvania for a special workshop: Taxonomy
of Virtual Worlds. Participants represented software developers, educational
researchers and designers, teachers and other educators, and students.
From experience, educators have found that each virtual world system has
both attractive and detractive features. This is especially true for use in
K-12 educational settings. The goal for the two day program was to begin to
flesh out the landscape of educational virtual world applications.
The two main sessions began with brief presentations followed by hands-on
exploration and breakout session discussions. The first session focused on
virtual world platforms and the second on educational programs founded on
design-based research. Break out discussions focused on determining priority
audiences for a taxonomy, exploring approaches to its structure, and
identifying key properties that might help a user navigate to useful
information.
The challenge was to foster a community discussion across cultures, to bring
to light the difficulties associated with generating a useful
classification, and to achieve consensus on needs and priorities of the key
stakeholders in the community. As one of the participating youth pointed out
at the end of the second day "You are all saying the same thing, if you
would only listen to each other!"
This presentation will focus on sharing the outcomes of the workshop,
including a discussion of next steps in terms of developing a useful
taxonomy tool for the community and generating a formal input document to inform the Immersive Education Initiative's Metadata and Taxonomy Technology Working Group (MTX.TWG).
THE OPEN UNIVERSITY IN A VIRTUAL WORLD: SUPPORTING A COMMUNITY OF LEARNERS
SPEAKER: Anna Peachey
AFFILIATIONS:
Coordinator for Virtual World Activity, The Open University, UK
ABSTRACT:
Anna opens her presentation with an introduction to the Open University, an organization in the UK that supports 250,000 learners on a wide range of graduate and postgraduate qualifications. She then explains how the Open University has built its virtual world community using Second Life. The attraction of virtual worlds to many universities is in their immersiveness, where students can participate in activities that are expensive, dangerous, difficult or even impossible in the real world. Open University virtual worlds (specifically Second life) have instead focused on providing a social space where students can share a sense of physical co-presence, something that is second nature at traditional universities but only rarely possible among Open University students. Anna will explain that although the Open University community so far has centered around virtual halls of residence, the next steps are to provide a whole island that uses a village metaphor to model a physical world community. The presentation will give for a live in-world tour, and will allow plenty of time for questions.
VIRTUAL WORLDS TIMELINE (VWTimeline) AND VIRTUAL WORLDS IN LEARNING, A BRIEF HISTORY
and
NASA SPACEWALK SIMULATOR: A NEWLY RELEASED IMMERSIVE EDUCATION SIMULATION
SPEAKER: Bruce Damer
AFFILIATIONS:
President and CEO, DigitalSpace Corporation
Co-Founding Director, Contact Consortium
ABSTRACT:
VIRTUAL WORLDS TIMELINE (VWTimeline) AND VIRTUAL WORLDS IN LEARNING, A BRIEF HISTORY
The Virtual Worlds Timeline is a multi-organizational effort to create an online timeline of historic virtual worlds resources including documentation of platforms, user experiences, applications, events and people. The VWTimeline starts with the first shared digital worlds in the 1960s and carries on right up to today. A key goal of the VWTimeline is to provide an educational resource for researchers studying the history of the medium but also a repository of the best applications of Virtual Worlds for new practitioners which will aid educators in creating more effective learning spaces.
The project has signed up fifty experts in the history of virtual worlds has recently loaded 150 videos showing different historic environments and events into the Internet Archive. We also have built a scrollable timeline using a flash-based technology called Dipity.
NASA SPACEWALK SIMULATOR: A NEWLY RELEASED IMMERSIVE EDUCATION SIMULATION
Digital Spaces (DSS) is an open source, python-scriptable 3D virtual worlds framework built by DigitalSpace Corporation of Santa Cruz, California. DigitalSpace has been building virtual worlds applications since just after its founding in 1995 and produced the popular series of Avatars conferences for the Contact Consortium, the first non-profit community organization in the virtual worlds medium.
DSS has been funded by a series of NASA grants since 2000 to specifically provide a high fidelity, physics-rich virtual environment capable of representing spacecraft, astronauts, planetary and lunar surfaces and terrestrial applications for engineering, science and public outreach. The strategy for supporting the educational community is to work with NASA to provide qualified educational simulations, and to distribute the platform freely under open source guidelines to allow educational institutions and individuals to build their own simulations.
The newest DSS educational release is a spacewalk simulator for the upcoming Space Shuttle - Hubble Servicing Mission. Users can take themselves on the spacewalks the astronauts will carry out to replace parts in the Hubble Space Telescope and play a simple interactive game to find items hidden in the Shuttle cargo bay.
The future of the platform is driven by its adoption by NASA, K-12 and colleges, museums and home users as an environment to create ever richer simulations, both space and Earth-oriented.
STRATEGY FOR THE NASA-BASED MMO GAME ASTRONAUT: MOON, MARS AND BEYOND
SPEAKER: Daniel Laughlin
AFFILIATIONS:
Project Manager, NASA Learning Technologies
University of Maryland Baltimore County, Goddard Earth Science and Technology Center
ABSTRACT:
NASA Education’s Learning Technologies Project Office (LTPO), managed at Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), in conjunction with NASA’s GSFC IPP Office, is entering into a non-reimbursable Space Act Agreement (SAA) with a company formed by a consortium of private sector companies specializing in computer game development in order to leverage resources and provide the best possible product. Specifically, NASA is entering into a partnership with companies Virtual Heroes, Project Whitecard, and Information in Place to develop the NASA-based massively multiplayer online (MMO) game, Astronaut: Moon, Mars and Beyond. LTPO will also coordinate the engagement of educational design and evaluation experts consisting of curriculum content support, game design feedback, and access to the most current research pertaining to use of MMO games for educational purposes. A cooperative agreement notice shall be released during FY 2009. Proposals will be limited to higher education institutions, non-profit organizations, or consortia of organizations and institutions serving higher education. NASA subject matter experts will be enlisted to work directly with the developers and education experts on the project. LTPO hopes to stimulate greater interest in pursuing science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields of study and careers among young people through engaging game play, enhance STEM skills among players and promote the creation of an unprecedented research platform.
In this presentation Daniel will explain NASA's motivation to build the game Astronaut: Moon, Mars and Beyond, provide an overview of the game's key design features and goals, and give an update on where the game is in terms of overall development and launch plans. In addition Daniel will give an overview of NASA's virtual worlds strategy and how related projects such as the new NASA Spacewalk Simulator (see above presentation by Bruce Damer) fit within NASA's overarching strategy.
NO CLASSES, NO FIXED TIME TABLE, BETTER RESULTS!
SPEAKER: Shiv Rajendran
AFFILIATIONS:
Co-Founder, Languagelab.com
ABSTRACT:
Three years of research and testing has lead to a new model for a language school. Without traditional
classes or a fixed time table, students instead immerse themselves in a virtual city populated by native speakers. This new approach to teaching a language has resulted in rapid improvements in proficiency, far greater than achieved with traditional methods. In this presentation Shiv will provide an overview of this new model for learning languages, along with an overview of the results his organization has achieved by applying the model over the past three years.
BUILDING COMMUNITY: VIRTUAL HARLEM AND THE EVOLVING ROLE OF THE MODERN EDUCATOR
SPEAKER: Bryan Carter
AFFILIATIONS:
Associate Professor, Literature, University of Central Missouri
ABSTRACT:
Bryan Carter is an Associate Professor of literature at the University of Central Missouri. He specializes in African American literature of the 20th Century with a primary focus on the Harlem Renaissance and has a secondary emphasis on visual culture. He has published numerous articles on his doctoral project, Virtual Harlem, and has presented it at locations around the world. Bryan's experience with virtual environments began with his dissertation project in 1997; a recreation of a portion of Harlem, NY as it existed during the 1920s. The project, Virtual Harlem, was one of the earliest full virtual reality environments created for use in the humanities and certainly one of the first for use in an African American literature course. Virtual Harlem has been presented at venues in Paris, The Netherlands, Sweden, Hungary, and multiple sites in the US. In 2004, the University of Paris IV-Sorbonne, funded the development of Virtual Montmartre and Bryan was asked to be the project leader and was awarded the prestigious "Professeur Invite" from the Sorbonne to spend 6 months in Paris. This project realized itself in the development of an interactive Web Site and a small 3D recreation of the Lapin Agile, the oldest surviving cabaret in Montmartre which is still in operation. The evolution of Virtual Harlem was funded in 2006 by the National Black Programming Consortium and the Government of Norway with the development of Virtual Harlem and Virtual Montmartre in Second Life. These sites were two of the most important locations during the Jazz Age/Harlem Renaissance. Subsequent awards from the Sorbonne were awarded for the month of November 2008 and he has been selected again for the month of October 2009. Bryan has been teaching classes which meet totally in the virtual world for the last two years in his virtual classroom called "Virtual Harlem Books", which is located on the island of Virtual Harlem, and since 2005 in other parts of Second Life. The sim contains interactive activities created by students in former classes and those who have been part of collaborative groups with students from other universities in the US and overseas. Most recently on Virtual Harlem and Virtual Montmartre, students from the University of Paris IV-Sorbonne and those from the University of Maryland College Park are working along with Bryan's students to create interesting and interactive content. Come to this presentation to learn more about Virtual Harlem's role as a modern educational community.
PANEL DISCUSSION: BUILDING EDUCATIONAL VIRTUAL WORLDS
MODERATOR:
Aaron E. Walsh
Director, Immersive Education Initiative
Faculty, Boston College Woods College of Advancing Studies
PANELISTS:
Melissa A. Carrillo, New Media & Technology Director, Smithsonian Latino Center, Smithsonian Institution
Michael Gardner, Director, Digital Lifestyles Centre, University of Essex, UK
H. Nicholas Nagel, Faculty, Boston College Woods College of Advancing Studies
Richard L. White, Immersive Education Designer, Developer, and Researcher, Greenbush
Wesley Williams, Jr., Director of New Media, Boston Media School (Boston Public High School)
DO YOU HAVE A QUESTION FOR THIS PANEL?
Do you have a question that you'd like this panel to address during the London Summit? Please contact the Immersive Education Initiative Director (click on the Contact button here) to submit question(s) to this panel or email your question(s) directly to FEEDBACK @ MEDIAGRID.org. Anonymous questions are also welcome! Simply omit your contact information if you'd like to ask your question anonymously.
PANEL DISCUSSION:
ASSESSMENT AND PEDAGOGY IN THE AGE OF IMMERSIVE EDUCATION
MODERATOR:
John Carfora
Executive Director, Office for Research and Sponsored Projects, Loyola Marymount University
Board of Directors, Immersive Education Initiative
PANELISTS:
Aaron E. Walsh, Director, Immersive Education Initiative
Michael Gardner, Director, Digital Lifestyles Centre, University of Essex, UK
Jeff Orkin, PhD Candidate, MIT Media Laboratory
H. Nicholas Nagel, Faculty, Boston College Woods College of Advancing Studies
Sara de Freitas, Director of Research, Serious Games Institute, Coventry University
Anna Peachey, Coordinator for Virtual World Activity, The Open University, UK
Shiv Rajendran, Co-Founder, Languagelab.com
DO YOU HAVE A QUESTION FOR THIS PANEL?
Do you have a question that you'd like this panel to address during the London Summit? Please contact the Immersive Education Initiative Director (click on the Contact button here) to submit question(s) to this panel or email your question(s) directly to FEEDBACK @ MEDIAGRID.org. Anonymous questions are also welcome! Simply omit your contact information if you'd like to ask your question anonymously.
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