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...