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.