Week 5: End of Tour

In our first five weeks, we've had a very fast introduction to a wide variety of different sorts of information environments - from email and chat to threaded messaging, wikis, blogs, other Web 2.0 apps such as del.icio.us, Flickr, LibraryThing, audio/visual such as Elluminate, and virtual worlds via Second Life (though there are many others: Active Worlds, HiPiHi, There.com, etc.) This was designed to give students a wide exposure to various possibilities for choosing and designing projects. I've been hearing back now from students with proposals and there's a range from virtual reference question-answering and administration in the Internet Public Library, through various projects involving social networking projects in MySpace and Facebook, web-based digital library collection-building and pathfinders in the IPL, and virtual worlds projects in Second Life.

This week, we had a wonderful class tour of Rachelville on Imagination Island which was created by Rocky Vallejo and Cindy Elkhart, in honor of the memory of their daughter Rachel. There are many different and innovative ways in which information is presented there in experiential ways, and Rocky showed us how to wander and touch, explore, discover, and imagine information services and resources in this new type of environment. Rocky and Cindy talked about how volunteers have helped in building resources and exhibits, and the need for volunteers with children's literature, youth services or school media expertise. We ran out of time before getting to the library at Mythica, which has collections of fairytales, fables and mythology, but the direction would be to walk from the plaza area down toward the graystone-thatched cottages, and take the flagstone path that goes off toward the right (east). You come to an area where there are cottages around a pond, and the library is there by the rental board.

We now get to halt our frenetic pace of discovery and spend more time on reflection. What are the implications of all these different technologies for information services and resources in virtual reference environments? What have we learned from our explorations? We'll consider and reflect in our upcoming class sessions, and in the “Exploring the Information Environment” wiki short paper due by midnight on Monday, Oct. 15, in which students can take a particular information service or Web 2.0 resource and explore it in more depth.

Class photos are now up from our Second Life sessions (see link in Course Menu or in the Course Library.) We talked a little in the Secret Garden about our thoughts and reactions to Second Life as an information environment, and about communication in this environment, and I demonstrated a bit about sound and animations; I'm no expert there at all, but tried to give a sense of what this could be like if someone with actual talent at this really worked at stringing together gestures, sounds and animations. (I waved, said, "Buh-bye," then did a backflip, a forward handstand into an arch and back again on my feet, then did the kata forms. I cannot do this in real life - well, maybe the "Buh-bye" part.)

Two more 'interface' areas where I find that I have teaching difficulties using Second Life: the Communicate 'improvement' introduced recently has been awful, since now all instant messages to me from individuals and groups appear only on tabs on a gigantic, long box thing. If I try to watch them all, it takes up my whole screen so it blocks out the entire virtual world; even then I still can't see all of the tabs that are blinking at me for attention and apparently at least once, I missed a student's IM plea for help because of this. So in my opinion, this "improvement" is a step backward in usability.

Also I can't figure out the right setting for "names." With 20 students, if I have names showing "Always" for everyone, there's just a vast swirling sea of names obscuring the screen which I can't really fit to the right avatars in the crowd anyway. If I set to 'Show Once' or 'Never,' then I can't see someone's name and group affiliation when I need to know it; clicking on someone to view their profile doesn't tell me their role/title within a group (this problem came up because a student team approached me with a question while I had names switched off; I couldn't tell which team was approaching me and when I tried clicking a person, it gave name and group - the group we are all in - but not role/team; I had difficulty trying to get names switched back on; finally I just gave up asked, "sorry, which team are you?" which I'm sure was a tad disconcerting.) I think in retrospect that names off for a tour works fine to keep your vision clear (you can click on a person to get their name as needed), but later for individuals/groups coming up with questions, switch General Preferences back to 'show names always.' Clunky, though.

I do have to give SL some performance points though. Turns out that in another class which was supposed to be meeting online in Blackboard at the same time as ours, Blackboard chat wasn't working ... but Second Life was up and running just fine and our class tour went forward as scheduled. So, chalk one up for SL this time.

Week Four: Class in Second Life

At SLCC 2007, Philip Linden (RL: Philip Rosedale, CEO of Linden Labs) got a big laugh from the crowd by whipping open his jacket to reveal a T-shirt emblazoned with "missing image." He also commented about how the real world is not shut down for repairs on Wednesdays.

So naturally my class was assigned to Wednesdays 6-8pm (3-5 pm SLT), as this is just the way my luck has been running this semester; and on our first day of class in Second Life which had been scheduled a month in advance on our calendar and which the students (some of them anyway) had started preparing for in advance, Linden Labs took the grid offline for a major upgrade/fix which caused everyone to have lots of difficulty and delay in logging in. In fact, our main guest speaker from Clearwater Public Library did not arrive until after our class had already left for our next destination. [BTW, looks like something about 'rotation' broke in this upgrade, causing problems with 'sit' scripts.]

Some students also had not been reading emails or class discussion board postings or paying attention to the information given out in class - as expected - and so had failed to post up or email me with their SL names, which meant that I could not add them to our class group or give them landmarks in advance for our SL destinations; this inattention, however, backfired on them when they found themselves unprepared, lost, and not receiving instant messages that everyone in the class group was receiving. I spent a fair amount of my time in the first part of class teleporting in students as they fought their way through the upgrade and into SL, which probably looked to the rest of the class like the professor gazing off into space or putting hands on hips and staring at the ground, followed by strange avatars dropping from the sky, sometimes even landing on top of another avatar's head. Then when we all teleported via landmarks to the next destination, the students who had not emailed or posted their SL names were left behind and had to be individually teleported.

So one problem I note about SL for educational uses: everything in Second Life is built around the idea of consent; you choose to give out your SL name or not, and if you don't give your name, I can't "find" you to offer friendship or group membership; if you give your name, you still must choose to login and accept a 'friend' request or 'group' membership offered to you or not; likewise I can offer you a teleport, but you have to accept it when I offer; so everything requires active participation, and my observation was that inattentive students who didn't actively participate and pay attention to class ultimately had a more difficult experience with SL than those who did. Now you can argue that's a choice that they made for themselves - and I agree - but it still impacts the rest of the class as it means the professor has to be spending extra time solving problems that should not exist, which detracts from teaching the other students. You could get around this by having a "stationary" class - have all students go to one place and stay there for the duration. The tradeoff though is that you're not taking advantage of one of the main affordances of SL ... to move, to travel, to see more than just one 20m space.

So that was one of my observations about teaching in SL this week; the other was that it's much like teaching in live text chat (which I already had much practice in as it's one of the things I was interested in learning upon arriving here; FSU's College of Information professors are very skilled at teaching live online in text chat.) I had it all prepared just as I would for a text chat class session, except with the added functionalities in SL of being able to throw a Powerpoint (texture) up on a giant whiteboard for everyone to see, and being able to also demo it myself live. We did a building exercise, walked over to see a gadget for building, lined up together to take a class picture (and how cool is that, distance students scattered all over the world being able to 'meet' and take a class picture together), and then everyone also got to meet in their groups. Meanwhile I walked around paying all the students $20 in Lindens, since they have free basic accounts and it takes $10L for project work they might need to do such as upload a texture. Amy got in my favorite line of the day, as I walked by and paid her: "Finally, a class that pays off!" I had to laugh. $20L is not quite as exciting as it may sound though, since the exchange rate is about $260L to $1 US dollar. But, $10L to upload sounds, animations, and images, and a lot of stuff can either be found for free or bought for $1L; the students received plenty of free stuff in class as well, along with landmarks to freebie places.

Next class: Rachelville, and we're very lucky to be able to hear from a guest speaker. Also, Mike Galloway from IPL came in today and did a training in collections for the Banned Books group (Collections team), which was recorded in Elluminate so everyone can replay it. (At the moment I am posting this, there is a marker for the place where the recording will appear, but not a working link yet.) The training has Hypatia and collections info; when it becomes available, see the Ellu-Archives link.

SL Update

By this point (6:30 pm EST, 3:30pm SLT, Saturday, Sept 15, 2007), I think I've now 'friended,' added to IPL SL group membership, and dropped 'Second Life Libraries' landmarks on 14 students from the LIS 5916 class (or else directly teleported them out of Orientation Island to the great wide world beyond.) Probably about half that number need to log back in to Second Life to accept their IPL memberships and SL Library landmarks, which can be used to teleport to Info Island.

I put up a Powerpoint on "SL Basics" in the class site that should be useful for students, also a discussion board thread on SL basics (read it all, it's good for you) and another thread on events in SL that may be of interest. I figured students might be active in SL today but as I'm on deadline for getting a research proposal written and submitted today, I'm jumping in and out of SL every couple or few hours. Right, and so back to this research proposal. Let's just hope they interpret deadlines the way I do, midnight on the day of. :)

VRE Week 3

Elluminate tanked on Wednesday night, right before class; I had set up the room and was in there during the faculty meeting, then logged out to race home through a thunderstorm and traffic. When I tried to log back in from home 30 minutes before class was to start, I got the dreaded "Elluminate Live! is not enabled for this class" message. Nothing like doing all the work to prepare a class in audio/visual, only to suddenly find out minutes before class starts that you'll now have to deliver it in text chat! The work involved is horrendous, essentially having to prepare TWO classes to deliver for every one class session. It's just not realistic to expect faculty have time for this, nor to expect them to chase around through phone calls and emails to Elluminate tech support and Blackboard tech support all at the same time while trying to quickly reformulate a class from audiovisual to text delivery in just minutes before it starts. When it hit 6pm classtime, I just hung up on the tech people, switched off phone ringer, shut down my email, and taught the class to my students. I don't have the luxury that the tech support people have of doing things whenever they feel like getting around to it - my class is scheduled for a specific time, and that's it. Stand and deliver.

I teach two regular classes this semester, Wednesday and Thursday, so those are the two worst days for anyone to try and reach me as I'm offline working on class prep (and probably sitting on the phone to tech support). This week we focused on Web 2.0 / Library 2.0, and next week we're starting Second Life and considering information services in virtual worlds. Naturally though there's an ominous post from Linden Labs about taking the grid offline during the daytime before our class next Wednesday; so I'll have to be prepared in case it doesn't come back online in time for class (again - double class prep). If any students are procrastinating about getting their SL accounts, be advised not to wait until Wednesday of next week because the grid will be offline most of the day. I've been advising students to get going on this for two weeks now, so there shouldn't be problems for anyone who's been paying attention to class at all.

Drexel's class will be coming online soon so if my students want 'first dibs' on any particular Internet Public Library projects, I need to know about it asap. In this week's class, I told everyone to post up in their blogs about what they are thinking they would like to do. Drexel's students will start 'taking projects away' from our list of possibilities in the next week, so I need to start seeing and hearing about what people are interested in doing. Remember that these need to be projects involving the Internet Public Library, not something you'd like to do that benefits only patrons at your own local library; it has to be accessible to people who don't have a library card or affiliation at your institution. I am also starting to log discussion board posts and blog posts, and lack of weekly activity on both dbs and blogs will be noted.

I'm working out speakers, tours and schedules for the Second Life class days; one of our meeting places may be in a treehouse, and we also are invited to use a beach space. I'm still finalizing all these aspects though. Second Life represents one more type of platform for delivering information services, in this case virtual worlds, of which there are quite a few others (there.com, Active Worlds, HiPiHi, Habbo Hotel, Penguin Club, etc.) Gartner Inc. predicted that by 2011, 80% of the people who use the Internet will be involved in virtual worlds. What does this mean for information services and information organizations in future? Time will tell...

VRE Recap in Week 2

Class in Week 2

Mike Galloway and Cathay Crosby of Internet Public Library visited the class; we used Elluminate with audio and visuals to talk, and to show Powerpoints and web pages, and did a collections exercise together in Hypatia. Mike and Cathay did a terrific job which went above and beyond, as I know they hadn't originally planned to spend the entire two hours with our class. Also prior to the class, they had met with me twice in Elluminate planning and testing sessions...so a big thanks and many kudos to them for all their hard work!

Slam the Boards, 9/10

Cathay's also been coordinating with the Reference Team Leader on "Slam the Boards" for IPL on Monday, Sept. 10. I know at least four students, if not more, are planning to participate; if you're one of those students, be sure to stay in touch with Cathay and your team leader for details - and rock on, 5916 Reference Team!

Second Life, 9/19

I posted up a Second Life discussion board in advance of our Week 4 Second Life class activity on 9/19/07, in which we'll visit the virtual island created by librarians at Florida's Clearwater Public Library. The librarians are very supportive of helping the next generation of library students, and they've even arranged for mentors to come in and help us learn more about Second Life. In advance of this session, students need to set up a Second Life account and go through the initial orientation; I've posted up a thread on this with suggestions, and students can also instant-message me when they get in-world (SL name: Lorri Momiji, use the Search button and the People tab). If I'm available, I'm happy to help, and in fact one student has already IM'd me in Second Life; we exchanged 'add friend' links and met up at Info Island.

Whew!

Overall, I taught four class sessions this week which is a record for me (three sessions that were online and 2 hours long, and one that was face-to-face for one hour). Two were the first time of using a new software, Elluminate, which (eventually) worked very well in the first session but had some problems in the second session. Lots of technical issues to figure out, and had to make many calls to technical support to pull it all off. Feedback from the students has all been positive thus far, and I do like that this makes the learning experience so much richer and more personal for students. It makes a lot more work for me though, adding on an extra technical layer of hassle to everything else that already goes into preparing a class. At some point while on yet another phone call, I uttered the primal cry of ordinary users everywhere: 'You know, this is not my job and not my problem...this is YOUR problem...why can't you tech guys just talk directly to each other and fix it, and leave me out of it?' Which is good to remember in any information service as we start babbling nonsense at the poor users about how things work and who's job it is to do what in our organization...it's not the user's job or problem to know all this, it's YOUR job. Less finger-pointing and buck-passing, and more attention to problem-solving would go far to create happier users.