IMP Saturday Workshop

Interesting session today - I have come away with some good ideas to use in my own practice.

Something that will hone ILT skills AND (importantly in FE) give students an opportunity to examine and practice their speaking and listening skills is the activity that we did at the start of the day. In pairs, with one person in one room and one in another and using Skype via webcam and microphone, each pair tried to build the same shape using Lego in 10 minutes. This was a fully audio-visual exercise - and tested participants' use of language in order to see whether the shapes made by each member of each pairing was exactly the same (or, in my case, reasonably similar.) I think my plan to make a TARDIS was a little ambitious: other pairs went on to make simple animals shapes and were far more successful in cooperating to build the same result.

ICE House Project and General IMP Stuff

As an update on the last post - I've just been given a new 0.5 role as part of University of Plymouth / Peninsula Centre of Excellence in Teacher Training (CETT) and Cornwall College's ICE House Project (as web / VLE Developer). Click here for a link to the website that I will be working on and to find out more about the project. When I've made a start and know a little more about the project I'll add a bit more to this blog.

AND...WooT WooT!!!! The 2 Masters modules I did last year with the University of Exeter have been APLd across to the IMP, so I now have 60 credits towards my Masters (was concerned that the 2 modules I did with Exeter last year may not be valid in some way, and that I had possibly wasted a year. But no!!! Woohooooo!!!)

So...now to start thinking about what I am going to do with this module...

...I really want to see whether the Second Life / web 2.0 PTLLS I've just started teaching is going to successfully deliver real world teaching skills that can be transferred successfully into a real life classroom. As part of this pilot I have already arranged interviews (to be carried out at the start, midway point and end of the course) with a few group members to talk about their experiences on the course (be they good or bad). However, though I know that this is something I want to investigate, I'm not sure how I'm going to go about doing this. I guess it's going to involve questionnaires and a mix of discourse and data analysis and I also think that I am going to need to deliver the course a second time to a different group - but this is something that can be firmed up in a tutorial - so for now I'll carry on delivering it, making notes along the way.

IMP Blog Post: How I use ILT in my Practice

I'm going to continue my blog with posts relating to the University of Plymouth IMP module I am enrolled on ("iLearn"), so this is a continuation of my experiences as a student, this time on a second ILT-based course. This also gives me a chance to kick-start this blog again, as it's been dormant for about 9 months! (I finished the MUVEnation course, so stopped using the blog and moved to "Posterous". BAD Bex!!!)

I'm still a Lead Teacher / Learning Technologist at Cornwall College's School of Education and Training and still teaching PTLLS, DTLLS and the Level 5 Diploma in Teaching English. Rather than write a lengthy (and possibly dull) narrative examining all the stuff I do that involves ICT and ILT, I'll do some bullet points:

• Project Manager of Cornwall College Island in Second Life
• About to deliver the first (ever I think) Initial Teacher Training course that uses web 2.0 applications like Flickr and Skype, cloud computing, moodle and Second Life and has no face-to-face content at all. This I think, will form the basis of my research paper: can teaching skills be taught in Second Life then transferred into as real life classroom by trainee teachers who have never met their tutor? We start in two weeks, so this blog should be a useful place to record what is happening!
• Administrator for Cornwall College's moodle site, setting up courses for staff and delivering training (again to staff) at beginner and intermediate levels both face-to-face and using GotoMeeting
• Run a PTLLS and the Level 5 Diploma in Teaching English as blended learning courses, with one third of the content delivered in the classroom and the remaining 2 thirds on moodle / Twitter
• Deliver ICT / ILT training to staff to improve their personal ICT skills and think about how to use ILT effectively and imaginatively with their own students.
• Also collaborating with the University of Glamorgan to develop electronic graphic novels as learning resources for HE students who find academic writing, referencing, research and study skills hard to get to grips with. I am hoping to develop an iPod Touch/ iPhone app. that will display these graphic novels aspart of this project...but need to learn Objective C and Cocoa programming in order to do this...(gulp)

I'll add to this post if anything else crops up or springs to mind, but for now I think that's it...

Terrified of Terraforming

Cornwall College Island is starting to shape up. Julala Demina (a colleague of mine from Cornwall college - the corporation's e-learning manager - Julia in RL) and Bex Mavendorf have spent a lot of hours after work and at weekends building, playing, demolishing and re-building and things are starting to take shape.

Click here to see slideshow of progress so far

We are nowhere near finished - and what we've done is only a representation - a draft copy - made from things we've begged, borrowed, stolen and rezzed ourselves with no money.
However, now that my boss had had a look around and agreed with our plans we have been promised some funding to replace our representations with better versions of what we have there already. So it's goodbye freebie Pirate ship...and hello Onedin Line!!!

One should never rest on one's laurels though. Yesterday, it went horribly wrong. I was tinkering around on the island - re-arranging bits and pieces, moving objects, just sort of pottering...when I noticed that a huge bit of the island (one of the corners) was underwater (which is how the island had been baked in the first place - but I was in one of those curious moods fuelled by a Bank Holiday "free" day off and too much chocolate). I thought it would be a good idea to do some terraforming, and raise the area so that I had a smaller island next to the main island...I had lofty ideas of making a small version of Brunel's Tamar Bridge to join the two, so adding to the Cornish theme of the island.

I selected the area I wanted to terraform, set my "move land" slider to the halfway point, clicked on "raise land", pressed "apply to slected area"....and the land rose a little bit, but not enough as it was still submergedunder water. So I clicked again. Twice, randomly, whilst watching an episode of Ashes to Ashes that's I'd recored the week before and not paying the sort of attention that terraforming warrants.

Suddenly I started geting an avalanche of messages telling me my objects were being returned to my inventory after going offworld. The avalanche was so big, the system had to disable itself for 10 seconds while more messages came in and objectsd flew back into my inventory. For a second or two I wasn't sure what was going on, and couldn't see what had happened, so I decided to fly upwards to see what was happening. That's when I saw the the whole island had turned into one ENORMOUS mountain. Everything was buried under hundreds of feet of virtual granite.

I felt physically sick. All the hard work Julala and I had done (a good 80-100 hours) had gone in two stupid, thoughtless clicks. I clearly hadn't checked to see how much of the island I had highlighted to terraform (assuming arrogantly that I had only highlighted the tiny corner I wanted to raise) and had clicked twice in quick succession without checking how much the land was moving by. Worst of all...there didn't seem to be a simple"edit-undo" facility that undid something as severe as this.

I IMd Julala immediately to tell her what I had done, and she was amazing - she flew into SL within minutes landed on the island and started telling me that it wasn't a problem, not to worry about it and that, as we were going to effectively rebuild everything soon anyway, it didn't really matter. We had agreed last week that we needed to do some major re-terraforming to make, for example, sweeping cliffs as opposed to the odd "Sugar Loaf Mountain" cliff face we had made, and there was even talk of buying another island or homestead to join on to the island to make some seriously dramatic (and massive) landscapes (soemthing Cornwall is famous for). She said that the hours we'd put in hadn't gone to waste becauuse we had both learnt a lot about building, landscaping and managing land and to log out and try not to think about it.

I logged out and went to Twitter, thinking that this was a great opportunity to "say what I was doing":

Just destroyed Cornwall College Island on SL by setting the area I wanted to terraform incorrectly. There goes 2 months hard work!

After a few minutes I got a couple of responses from fellow Twitterers (who were also Second Lifers) who suggested I contacted Linden Labs and ask for a rolback. I didn't know that this was even possible, so suddenly I had a gleam of hope! Logging into SL.com as my ALT (and island owner) Hebask Falconer I set up a ticket, explained what I had done and when I had done it and asked whether the island could be rolled back to a couple of hours before it had all gone pear shaped. (Or mountain shaped).

At 6.30 this morning, I got an email from Linden saying the following:

Hello Hebask,
Thank you for submitting your rollback request. Typically we would not be able to approve a request such as this. Rollbacks are a recovery method for catastrophic loss due to means outside of your control rather than an 'Undo' due to errors made in the region. However, I have decided to approve this request as a One Time Courtesy Rollback. Cornwall College has been rolled back to Mon May 4 05:24AM PST.
Have a terrific week :)
Izzy Linden

The island is back to how it looked before I started playing with underwater corners. Rarely have I felt such relief...however, this story has made me reflect about building in SL to an extent I hadn't before:

• Terraforming is NOT an easy thing to do - it is better to make tiny changes in small areas and build upon them slowly and carefully than to try to save time by thinking it best to highlight huge areas of land and terraform them in one fell swoop.
• If terraforming CONCENTRATE. Do not have the television on or partners, dogs, kids or anything else running around the room. Do not have the telephone switched on or the new Metallica album playing at 1,000 decibals.
• If you are lucky enough to own an island complete all terraforming first and do the building "stuff" ONLY when you are happy with what you have done to the island's geography. That way you lose none of your precious building if it all goes wrong, and can simply revert / take back to the baked state in which the island was presented.
• If you make a mistake it's not as easy to repair as simply clicking on "edit undo" (as you would in "Word"!)
• Make sure the positions of objects are locked: this will also stop random visitors to your land accidentally moving / deleting / stealing your objects
• Linden Labs were really kind to let me have this one-off rolback - but it IS a one off, so making stupid errors and asking to tavel back in time to before it all went wrong isn't something that can be requested - or done for you - at the drop of a hat.

The repercussions, even after a successful rollback, can be quite big too. I may have everything back to how it was now (I tentatively logged in after getting the email this morning, just before going to work, and was so pleased to see every picture back in its frame, every building back in it's position and every hillock exactly where it should be), but tonight I have a meeting at 8.00 GMT on the island with the the rest of the project development group (those who are watching development go on but not doing any of the building themselves) - and I actually feel a little embarrased at making such a stupid error and am terrified of terraforming. Not sure if I can look them in the virtual eye without cringing...but I hope this stupid phobia goes, or my life as an avatar will be severely stunted.

Mid Course Malaise?

There's a definite malaise. I just can't seem to find the motivation to crack on with muvenation stuff. Am starting to feel like I'm drifting off the radar.

It started last Sunday, when I tried to get my holodeck scene to work. Having followed Shirley's tutorial to the word, this happened:

The scene skewed 90 degrees to the left, so it sat half-in and half-out of the holodeck. Not only that, but when I packed it back up again and then re-rezzed it (by selecting the scene from the holodeck menu) it had been deleted from the holodeck's scene inventory completely. This was a bit of a pain as it had taken a while to arrange the scene, add scripts to objects so they became object-givers and tip-jars, add textures to the slideshow presenter...so I tried it again. The scene was skewed in exactly the same way. I thought that maybe by turning the holodeck around to fit the scene I could sort of fix what had happened (lateral thinking? Bodge up?!). This worked until I tried to re-rez the scene...and found it had deleted itself again. AAAAARRRGGHHH!!

So a week later I go to the sky platform to try again, realising that in the intervening week I just haven't been able to engage with Second Life at all. I've been inworld, but have been aimless. I haven't been able to face the holodeck in case it all goes wrong again. I then notice that my teleport taxi has vanished from my platform, so I can only get back to muvenation island by using a landmark (or re-rezzing the taxi from my inventory). I get back to the island...then notice that my door on the teleport wall has also gone missing.

I've left a message on the technical forum on moodle - have I been evicted? Expelled? Booted off the course?

Busy!

I haven't added anything to this blog for a few weeks. There have been quite a few developments, some good, some not so good, and time has run away with me. (I was at a conference a few days ago when I heard one of the speakers, when told that she only had 5 minutes left to wrap up, say "ah - time is hunting me" which has really stuck with me as a beautiful phrase).

Cornwall College Island has been taking up lots of time, to the detriment of the muvenation course. I've been keeping on top of the coursework and tasks, but extracurricula stuff such as weekly social meetings inworld, hanging out on muvenation island and working with fellow muvenationers at the VWBPE conference have had to go so that the college's island can start taking shape. I don't want to give up the course - I am finding it very useful and am still having a great time working through it- but at the moment at any rate, my Second Life priorities have changed.

Anyway...true to form, gotta go. Am trying to get to grips with holodeck scripts, so will add photos to this post when I've got my head around them...

My Workshop - Reflections

PREPARATION

I really had no idea what to base my workshop around, but realised that I really enjoyed building stuff after attending a workshop based around building a valentine’s day bench, so decided to do something in a similar vein, using the way the bench workshop was delivered as a template for my workshop’s design.
I started playing in the MUVEnation sandbox and remembered the “ice house” I’d made a few weeks earlier, so thought that I’d use the same basic design to make a treasure chest. I wanted the lid to open and close, and I’d had some issues with the script that opened things (again, while trying to add a door to the Ice house – the whole building had rotated rather than just the door), so thought that by trying to get the script to work this time I’d not only solve my personal scripting issue, but end up with a workshop that hopefully honed a variety of useful SL skills such as:
· duplicating and linking prims
· typing in specific measurements to make shapes that fit together neatly and rotate to a very specific angle and for a specific purpose
· Had interactive elements , again referring to the lid properties
I made a treasure chest / trunk, jotted down the measurements, then went to the “script me” website to generate a script that would open and close the lid. Through trial and error I realised that I only needed to add the script to the specific part I wanted to move – the lid – and that I could do this to linked prims by ensuring the “edit linked parts” option was selected on the editing pane and that I highlighted the lid as being the area I wanted to add the script to. This answered my earlier “ice house” scripting problem, and was a proper “eureka” moment.
Now I had a workable trunk and my hastily scribbled notes, I typed out a set of more definitive instructions. I made a third trunk using these, and was able to fine tune the instructions as I worked.
Now I knew what I was doing and had instructions the workshop needed some structure. Thinking back to the Valentine’s Day bench building session I’d attended, I decided that it would be a good idea to give participants a folder containing a notecard with the same step-by-step instructions as I’d written, a treasure chest texture that I found in my inventory and a copy of the script that would make the trunk lid open and close. I dropped this in my ALT’s (Hebask Falconer) inventory but found that he couldn’t accept it – I hadn’t altered the items’ permissions so that anyone could accept copies and modify them, so worked out how to do this in each item’s “Properties” settings. When I offered Hebask the folder again, he was able to accept it – I then ran through the instructions I’d written once more using Hebask to make sure the texture and script still worked.
I wanted to add an element of differentiation to the workshop so decided that participants could either use the texture given to them at the start of the workshop or select a colour and level of shininess from the default colour palette. I then had a go at making treasure from a single prim made into a coin, given a golden sheen from the shininess and texture menus and copied and linked repeatedly until I’d made a pile of coins. I positioned this into the treasure chest, added a bottle and a goblet I already had in my inventory and linked the whole lot. Adding treasure meant that I now had an extension task at a higher level, so I wrote instructions for this, pasted these into a notecard and added this to the participants’ folders. I then rezzed a basic (and very small) dessert island and put the treasure chest containing treasure on it, along with a mail box I had used in my Travel Guide activity at the end of last year. Participants could leave comments via notecards in the mailbox after the workshop, so I emptied out the cards that had been put in at the end of the previous activity, made the mail box smaller, changed the textures, and then linked this to the island too.
I was really getting into the whole pirate thing, so I typed “free pirate costume” into the search engine and managed to locate some pirate shirts and pants, an eye patch, a rapier and even a cigar. As I was changing my appearance (again, in the MUVEnation sandbox) I ran into another MUVEnation member and jokingly remarked that I needed a parrot to complete my look. We checked my inventory, and found a parrot (though how or when I picked up a parrot in my travels Lord alone knows!). I managed to attach it to my shoulder and position it so it sat realistically, and a few days later my MUVEnation colleague sent me a script that made the parrot repeat things that I said randomly.
I advertised my workshop on the wiki, making sure the time I set was accessible in SLT, GMT and CET. I had my participants’ folders with notecards containing trunk and treasure-building instructions, a trunk texture, lid script and one gold coin. I had a Word document with instructions that could be copied and pasted to the local chat banner. I had a pirate costume, a miniature desert island and a selection of trunks of different colours and textures, one with treasure in. And I had Eric the parrot, complete with his repetition script. The final piece of the puzzle came when I read about someithng called a “Speakeasy HUD” in another course member’s blog. I had one of these in my inventory already (honestly – days of picking up freebies has obviously paid off), and read the instructions to check how to add my instructions. Now all I had to do was wear the HUD and click on it whenever I wanted a line from my instructions to be delivered via local chat.

THE WORKSHOP

I allocated 10 participant places for the workshop and I was really pleased that they filled quickly. The workshop was advertised on a separate discussion thread that formed part of the activity 2 forum, posted in the events calendar on moodle and advertised on the timetable for workshops page of the MUVEnation wiki. I was surprised at how many hours I had spent preparing and thinking about the workshop and how as it came closer I began to get more and more nervous. I dreamt about it at night, and spent the whole day of the workshop getting more and more nervous. It pre-occupied my thoughts and by early evening I have to admit that I was starting to think of ways to get out of doing it! I spent the day on SL, panicked when my avatar stated playing up (Sod’s Law), ran through everything about 6 times to make sure everything ran like clockwork, and at 6.00 GMT I logged into SL for the final time, put on my pirate costume, sat Eric the parrot on my shoulder, flew to the MUVEnation sandbox and began to set up my desert island and demonstration trunks.
Twenty minutes before the workshop was due to start 3 participants turned up – all were lovely, said the pirate costume looked cool and immediately made me feel at ease. (My fellow MUVEnationers are all so supportive – this needs to be metioned)
However, by 7.00 – kick off time- nobody else had arrived (even though 10 participants and one non-participating observer had booked places), and my five past I felt that I needed to start as I didn’t want people to be hanging around. I handed out participants’ folders (and was relieved when they were accepted without any permissions issues) and told the group via local chat the following (by copying and pasting each point into the chat banner):
· Today you will use building skills to make a treasure chest (trunk) with a lid that opens and closes when touched. You should all have a folder with a script, a texture, a coin and some instructions in it.
· The workshop should only take about half an hour to work through, and at the end if you are feeling confident there will be an extra activity at a slightly higher level you can choose to complete.
· It will be best if you all form a semi-circle around me so we can all see and hear each other.
· I will be using local chat to give you all instructions. Click on Communicate at the bottom of your screen then click on the local chat tab to read these. You can then scroll through instructions if you get lost.
· You can also IM me if you have any questions or need any extra assistance. I will try and answer your questions as quickly as I can.
· Would anyone like to work in a pair if they aren’t feeling very confident?
· Okay then shipmates...here we go...
At this point, as I attached the speakeasy HUD, I noticed that participants were already starting to make their treasure chests. I started to issue instructions, noticing that a couple of group members were further ahead than the instructions issued via the HUD...then realised that they were obviously using the instructions on the notecards they’d been given rather than the ones appearing command by command via the local chat. This, and the disappointment and odd sense of failure I was already feeling because only 3 participants (plus one latecomer) had shown up threw me, so I felt a bit cast adrift...especially when I noticed that the participants were all working at a completely different pace to one another; one was racing along, already linking prims and adding the treasure chest texture, one was not far behind, the late comer was catching up rapidly, but one was having trouble and needed some assistance. I went over to her and offered to help, and a fellow participant copied her basic trunk shape and gave to the troubled group member who had somehow managed to taper her prim so it had taken on a rhomboid appearance-something easily done, but that I hadn’t accounted for in my preparation . I returned to issuing instructions via the HUD, but had now fallen so far behind that whenever I issued a command I was concerned that participants would be confused by having too much information thrown at them out of sequence-they were all at different stages anyway, so this would no longer be a satisfactory way of running the session.
By now I felt that I was losing control and actually started to feel very hot and stressed in RL – I could actually feel sweat rolling down my back, though luckily, my discomfort couldn’t be seen in world!
I had to make a decision – and that was to detach the Speakeasy HUD and stop using it and to continue to allow participants to follow the notecard instructions at their own pace. As they did this, I walked around the group and offered praise, encouragement and assistance as an when required.
One very positive aspect was that participants were all really happy when their treasure chest lids opened. One had trouble getting the lid to rotate as opposed to the whole chest – my own experience with the “ice house” meant that I could give instruction via local chat, and her lid opened correctly afterwards. Two made treasure from the coins and extension task instructions and had already added the texture given to them at the start of the workshop to their completed treasure chests, so the differentiation / extension activity worked. However, one had trouble with adding her script – this was because she had been given a trunk base by another participant but the permissions hadn’t been altered so that she could modify it. I quickly dragged a completed trunk from my inventory, unlinked the prims, separated trunk base from lid and re-linked their constituent parts, changed the permissions and deleted the script and textures so that I had templates of both parts of the trunk that could be given to and modified by anyone, but the participant said that she had to leave because she needed to make dinner (it was now after 8.00 GMT) and that she would use the instructions she’d been given at the start of the session to try again in her own time. I am now quite concerned that her confidence gas been knocked because everyone else finished their trunk: non-verbal communication isn’t easy to read in world, so whether she was genuinely happy with the progress she’d made and really did need to head off to make dinner or not I do not know.

REFLECTION

CURATE'S EGG - "Something which is part good, part bad; a mixed bag. (Phrase Finder, 2000)

Like the Curate’s egg, the workshop was good in parts but I felt that it unravelled in others
· It took about 20 hours to plan and fine tune and an hour to deliver. Not a good ratio. I’m guessing the balance will get better with practice
· That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy the planning process and also enjoy a few eureka moments / improve my building and scripting skills at the same time
· I was really disappointed with the poor turn-out and still feel that this is, somehow, my fault.
· The Speakeasy HUD is a brilliant device – but I didn’t use it properly.
· It may have been that I tried to put too much in the workshop – building, linking and duplicating prims and adding scripting elements may have been just too much
· The extension activity was a good idea
· Giving participants all the stuff they need to complete the build in their own time is a good idea – after we’d finished and I was clearing up a few MUVEnation members arrived to practise their own workshops, and I was able to give them copies of the workshop folders too.
· Getting participants to work at their own pace via a notecard with instructions whilst facilitating rather than instructing works – but probably only because the group was so small. Larger groups would possibly need either two or more facilitators moving around the group or a more didactic approach
· It may be an idea to give notecards out at the end of the workshop so participants have no choice but to follow the teacher’s step by step instructions-if the group was bigger, this may work well
· It’s not nerve wracking once you start – participants are very supportive
· I really enjoyed it – now that I’ve had24 hours to reflect and the immediate feelings that it had been a complete disaster have gone, I can honestly say that I had a great time delivering the workshop – and that there were bits that did work well

I’ll add to this post when I’ve had some participant feedback...

UPDATE (01/03/09)

Feedback from participants was very positive: maybe I was being overly critical and hard on myself, possibly because this is how my role in RL has made me (which is no bad thing). The participants seemed to find the workshop useful and genuinely enjoyable, and lack of numbers was down to the session being run on a Sunday evening and because I didn't send group notices to remind people when it was.

Subsequently I ran the workshop a second time (without the Speakeasy HUD and as a completely self-paced session) on my skybox, and participation was much better (see image below). Participants were more critical too, and made some good points: namely that my notecard instructions were hard to follow layout-wise: each instruction was bullet pointed and should really have been numbered, and text was densely packed so it was hard for participants to re-visit specific instructions if they needed to back track. In the future I shall space each numbered instruction out, as this simple format change could make a big difference.