Virtual Meetings in Second Life with Gentle Heron and Real World Meeting Coverage at United Nations

We had a special guest meeting in Second Life with  Gentle Heron where we had a chance to learn a great deal about how people with disabilities are able to use second life. She pointed out that from her avatar you would never know she sits in a wheel chair and is living with Multiple Sclerosis.

During this meeting we learned more about how people with disabilities are able to use virtual worlds. In some case they are able to travel virtually to other worlds. There was a box in the center of the room that contained a number of virtual destinations we could travel to. I found it interesting how teachers could use Second Life to share with students and also rules related to youth.

For example you must be 18 years of age to access Second Life. There is a limited option for 16 year old youth where they have limitations to what they are able to access. In addition there is potential to have place in world where younger children can access but with strict limitations to the region specific to their special access.

We also had another guest Esme who many of us had taken course with previously. Gentle Heron was curious about Jokaydia grid. I believe Jokaydia was a great place to begin and learn many skills in a relatively close environment. Rarely did we find visitors or distractions. It was described as sandbox. I see the Second Life world is much more developed with a greater number of visitors. It was noted that this could be a way to meet people speaking other languages. Portuguese surprisingly was a top language along with Spanish and English. Gentle Heron noted that there were also a lot of German speakers.

When I arrived to the destination I found a couple of characters and as we all had new names I asked it they were here for class. Then one spoke Spanish and I realized the other who was trying to communicate was not a native English speaker. As it happened one stumbled into our meeting and when addressed they did not respond. Suddenly there was a lot of loud background music as the visitor had their microphone with music piping through unknowingly and apparently efforts to speak English did not connect. I do think they realized they had landed in the middle of a meeting then left.

The lesson here was to be aware of your surroundings. I t was interesting to listen to Gentle Heron who brought back memories of a good friend who had MS. At work we pay attention to accessibility and have frequent meetings that require attention to details and access.

She mentioned Education initiatives from Australia and this week at work we hosted a forum on education with very special guest speakers to include the former Prime Minister of Australia, the Director of CERN along with many different panels and advocates for education.

I was working as a Photographer at this event where a colleague Frances from IISD took this image. I am actually seated at the table in the center. It is interesting to note that this room is accessible with ramps to take you to the podium on the dais. You can follow this link to see where I work this is the news group IISD that covers our programs http://www.iisd.ca/hlpf/2015/

HLPF 2015 participants heard a keynote address from H.E. Julia Gillard, Former Prime Minister of Australia,and Chairman of the Global Partnership for Education.

You can see examples of my photos on the slide show of our offices web here https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/

Note the photos on the slider change as the images from the High Level Political Forum is what I had been covering.

The connection here is that all the speakers were stressing the value of education especially to starting early and the value of ICT. Internet Communications to play a bigger role in our work and the key to success is education. Virtual meetings now take place using Video Teleconference as the image below the Secretary General participate in our meeting held in NYC while he was on mission in Norway

L-R: H.E. Prime Minister Erna Solberg, Norway; UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon; and H.E. President 

Paul Kagame, Rwanda, adressed HLPF 2015 via remote video from Oslo, Norway

We could have meeting virtually as avatars. I think the possibilities to level the playing field could provide new solutions by removing cultural bias and eliminating hierarchy.

Second Life Adventure

First visit to a new land in Second life

Second Life is the new destination for this traveler. The move from Jokaydia was not too terrible as there were familiar controls. It seems  a lot of learning from travels to Marlboro Island were transferable. What was new is that there were a lot more visitors to interact with. I surprised that I found myself being a but shy as I did not really want to start up conversations with others. Actually I was more concerned about too much time being spent hanging out. It is unfortunate but reality for me is I simply don't have much time to socialize and have to focus on lessons and assignments. What immediately did get my interest was how there were groups socializing. Then is became a bit strange and it seemed like people were partnering up like at a night club. In this case there were Spanish speakers  - Hola, que tal. I thought wow what I great way to work on my Spanish then realized it was more like these two were in dating mode. I then thought maybe I can meet some Serbo Croat speakers another time but for now I need to focus on assignments.

A view from above

Exploring a new Island 

As part of a choice assignment I visited a Virtual World developed by NTID the National Technical Institute for Deaf which is part of the Rochester Institute of Technology. As I was a student at RIT and later had done some work on the campus located in my home town I was looking forward to meeting other travelers.

I also thought what a great opportunity to interact with deaf as we could chat via text. It was a challenge to learn how to communicate using sign language. Today we could easily text to have conversations and share information. Unfortunately this virtual world created to share learning on the subject of Physics was no longer supported since 2011.

Example projects of physics

The familiar brick paths from the real world campus with a message regarding status. Sadly I did not find any visitors and took a visit to the facebook page that only had a few likes. 

A Virtual Guest speaker in Jokaydia

During the second meet up this week we had a guest speaker. It was nice to meet Esme who I know as Jane Wilde from a previous course. Jane has moved to Oregon from Vermont where she was teaching at the Marlboro Graduate School.

I had attend a class on Educational Technologies which she stated could be better named Educational Pedagogy. This class was packed full of information. It was not a surprise that hew presentation would be compelling.

As luck would have it the as any of you may have experience in real life there is always problems with projectors when giving a presentation.  The virtual machine seemed be advancing on its own or by an unknowing classmate accidentally. As she move through the presentation we were all not seeing the same slide at the same time.

We did get to learn about Jokaydia and its founder and how the project is supported. As an open source project we could download our own version and set up our private world. The world exists on a server and Imprudence allows us to access the world.

It was noted how we have been having issues with rezzing and how this could be a resource issue. We learned the site is hosted on a server in Australia and that the previous class had much better loading and not all the same issues we were experiencing. Our tour guide Tis commented on how we were meeting at the camp fire unfortunately we could not see the fire and could actually be standing in it.

As you can see from this image some avatars came across as a blur or ghost of an image.

We learned that the US Navy had used virtual worlds and good reasons to do so were that you could experience something too expensive or dangerous without fear of real injury.

She also discussed other platforms such as second life where there were many users online at any given time. Noting that these worlds could be for mature audiences at least in high school age.

A surprising example of a virtual travel was how she showed a drop of water and how you could enter it from a virtual world to have an inside look. A more intimate example had to do with traveling as sperm where she said there were four virtual seats to share the journey with others. I could not help but think of a scene from a Woody Allen Movie

Adding Gestures - time for cheat sheets?

We had an extra meetup in Marlboro Island. In this meetup we did not have an actual agenda. Surprisingly we were able to learn a great deal.

Many of us were a bit frustrated about not being able to use gestures and animations. We were able to check our inventory and the learned how to add the gestures by activating them and saving them.

There were choices that had to be made about how and where to load the animations or gestures. We also had to rename them otherwise you would find yourself with a lot of items titled new gestures.

After loading a bunch it got pretty confusing as you could not tell which one was which. Out tour guide went over the steps but it had been a while since learning them so it required a bit of recollection.
 In this image you can see how the visitors were gifted a box of gestures oddly they came as something to wear. For me I had access to about 20 gestures but it required them to be activated.

Once the were activated you could click on them to play them or type a forward slash /name of gesture hit enter to activate.


After a little practice we were able to float in a yoga pose, do a number of dance steps, back flips, hand gesture like waving, fist bumps, one two punches and more.

Here you can see a box of animations. Some of us did not res. I was able to most avatars. The sound from some were louder than others. When first arriving it took a while for the campfire to res which seems now to be typical.

As for learning there was good social cognitive experience. I think I would need to return again after a good night rest to use retrieval to own the patterns practiced or learned is this meeting. As there was a lot going on with many trying to learn techniques this may be a good opportunity to leave artifacts that we can return to perhaps we can create a virtual cheat sheet for visitors classmates or future travelers to build on?

Latest Meet ups

I am enjoying becoming a virtual traveler. We have had a couple of meet ups and it impressive to see how different the avatars are. It seems we are now getting to move quite a bit better. Unfortunately we had an issue at one of our meetings where Marlboro Island did not res properly. This provided interesting social interactions as we could see and not see others nor know where we were. As we were to meet at the campfire you could have been standing in it.


In the next meet up we went to the purple mats worked together as a group building items. We were able to take blocks and change their shape, color and add texture. In addition we added scripts and were able to have object rotate.

It was important to note like in the real world we should police our environment and take any objects with us. We now had storage bins as we were unable to access our portfolio boxes. The new solution seems elegant. I was able to place a chair from my inventory and have a comfortable way to sit and recline.

In the next trip we visited several destinations. The first spot had the sounds of seabirds as we appeared to be at a coastal property overlooking a landscape that reminded me of Newfoundland. At this location we could only text chat. The quiet visit was a good way to take time to read the information available where we visited.

A second visit provided a chance to test more physical skills including boxing and Capoiera. We did a bit of jumping and I found myself a top of a wall that reminded me of walking atop a construction site. This site and plenty of how to instruction and worth returning.

The last stop we were able to see the work of others especially from youth. Our virtual travels are something to look forward. I like meeting in a group and observing. I need to ask others how they are able to perform actions.

I did take more photos and was able to find them on my hard drive as my PC stored them in a folder labeled 2014, something I am trying to understand why.

Learning to Fly

It was a nice change to actually be able to access the application having switched from my Mac to my PC. I was able to may things after a quick tour from a friend. What concerned me was how others and students could have the same problems. I quietly consider myself to be more than a newbie around computers but will be the first to admit I have a lot to learn.

Hopping from world to world was very cool and when we had our virtual meet up it was quite impressive to see everyone and a big surprise to see fancy dance moves, back flips and muscle poses. I had been to shop and enjoyed adding to my inventory especially the prices were unbeatable $0.00. Then the trip to Marlboro Island was very nice. It was disappointing that it did not res during our meetup.

I did work through the challenges and at this time need to go back and change the face of my portfolio as directed. I was able to upload an image from my computer but not able to add it a face. I think some of the techniques we are being asked to do may come more natural to a digital native than to this digital dinosaur.

I am happy to report I was able to access Marlboro Island and it did RES. You can see the snapshot here.

I was able to modify my appearance and having the ability to chat with voice was very nice as my typing can bit wonky.

I now have a bit of an inventory of stuff for a home and think that may be a good project to get some land.

I also liked looking at the lesson on the virtual boards for math class. I could see ways to integrate this into my web classes. I was also surprised to see how accessible the code was for scripts which made me think there are a lot of opportunities to learn and teach programming.

I think this week has made some very good progress in class. Yesterday we had a meeting at work with the management team for Games for Change http://www.gamesforchange.org/ along with graduate students and instructors from Lehigh University, Marlboro Graduate School, and colleagues from the United Nations to include an ambassador and we launched a project to build a game to teach about Sustainable Development Goals. Thing are moving along quite nicely and my virtual world new experiences are very helpful.

Oh let's not forget learning to fly - this is just plane fun to soar above and circle the lands like an eagle in the sky. For no reason it can be a joy to just fly around an explore and maybe find someone to interact with. This is a welcome break from the daily toils.

Games and Simulation

This semester I am starting a new subject learning about games and simulations. We are starting with a new tool Imprudence which has been a bit of a challenge. I have been able to modify my character.

This subject comes at a very good time for my work project and my Capstone. I don't have any gaming experience which I am in need of for both projects.

My Capstone is to create a tool to inform educate and inspire people about a set of goals being developed at my work that have to do with Sustainable Development.  I shared an example of a presentation a classmate gave using Inside Disaster about the earthquake in Haiti.
http://insidedisaster.com/haiti/experience

Colleagues at work agreed this would be something we could model to educate people about the Sustainable Development Goals SDGs. We took the idea to the Director of the Division and are working on developing the first module.

I found Jane Mcgonical's TED talk a great inspiration. It prompted me to but the book http://www.amazon.com/Reality-Broken-Games-Better-Change/dp/145583291X



This week we will be meeting with colleagues from work who are also working on using a game for learning and have three members of the Game for Change team attending our working group http://www.gamesforchange.org/ We spoke with Susanna Pollack Friday and she will be facilitating our workgroup.

I am excited about learning more about gaming. To date though my initial efforts with Jokaydia seem to be a solo effort. I expect once I view tutorials things should improve in my virtual world experience.