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Co-Founder of Second Life Says Academics Are Biggest Trailblazers in Virtual Worlds | Comment [5]

Research on Connections Between Computer Use and School Violence | Comment [3]

Educause Survey: Top 10 IT Issues in Higher Education | Comment [1]

Orphan-Works Bill Sails Through House Panel | Comment [2]

In Wikipedia, Length Matters | Comment [7]

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May 8, 2008

Co-Founder of Second Life Says Academics Are Biggest Trailblazers in Virtual Worlds

Cory Ondrejka, the co-founder of the virtual world Second Life who is now a visiting professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, said in a speech today that virtual worlds are here to stay, and that professors are among the most active pioneers.

“In my view the academy has been blazing the trail of adoption of virtual worlds far more than gamers or industry,” said Mr. Ondrejka, who spoke at a conference at Case Western Reserve University called Collaboration Technology and Engaging the Campus 2008.

Naturally, the event was broadcast within Second Life, in Case Western’s campus in the virtual world. I attended the conference virtually, and was able to ask Mr. Ondrejka what the biggest challenge for Second Life was in being able to be more than just a passing fad in higher education.

“The challenges with Second Life is it has significant technical challenges for use,” he said, noting that it takes powerful computers and fast network connections for Second Life to function properly. “You can’t assume that your students are going to be able to run Second Life within the school’s network infrastructure.”

He argued that some form of 3-D virtual environment will catch on, though he admitted that it might not be Second Life that wins the race. The reason that the idea is powerful, he said, is that studies show that humans respond to a visual Internet, and that they express greater trust for the people they communicate with when they see a virtual representation of the person. “Learning in a place in 3-D affects us differently than text,” he said.

Mr. Ondrejka said that when professors first build a virtual campus, they usually try to exactly replicate a classroom in Second Life, with desks, chairs, and walls. But then they realize that the world allows different kinds of movement and communication than the real world. “You realize that in a world where you can fly, classrooms aren’t really that useful,” he said. So professors have built new kinds of classrooms online with no roofs. “Suddenly you see this explosion of classroom forms that matches what they’re trying to teach,” he added.

Organizers of the conference set up a booth for The Chronicle in Case Western’s Second Life campus during the event (shown below), and I manned our table between panel sessions and chatted with a couple of conference participants.

At one point my virtual avatar got stuck between a virtual chair and the wall of the booth, however, and I had to reboot my computer to get that sorted out. Luckily that’s never happened to me in real life. —Jeffrey R. Young

Research on Connections Between Computer Use and School Violence

A psychiatrist presented research on connections between excessive computer use and school shootings at the American Psychiatric Association’s annual summit on Tuesday.

Dr. Jerald J. Block, a psychiatrist and professor at Oregon Health & Science University, argued that the shooters in the Columbine High School massacre “spent a significant amount of time playing first-person-shooter computer games and creating game levels for others to use,” and that they became “unable to distinguish the boundaries between their virtual lives and their real lives, in effect mixing the two,” according to a news release. His research was published last year in an article for the American Journal of Forensic Psychiatry titled “Lessons From Columbine: Virtual and Real Rage.”

“[A]s they got into trouble with school authorities, limits were put on their use of the computer. This made them react with homicidal rage and suicidal depression,” Dr. Block told WebMD of the Columbine shooters.

Dr. Block has also studied student violence at Virginia Tech, Northern Illinois University, and other institutions.

Other scholars have criticized connections between violence and computer or video game use and theories relating to “Internet addiction.”—Catherine Rampell

Educause Survey: Top 10 IT Issues in Higher Education

Educause, the higher-education-technology consortium, released the results yesterday of its 2008 survey on the top IT issues in higher education.

The top-10 issues “most important for… institutions to resolve for strategic success” are:

1) Security
2) Administrative/ERP Information Systems
3) Funding IT
4) Infrastructure
5) Identity/Access Management
6) Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity
7) Governance, Organization, and Leadership
8) Change Management
9) E-Learning/Distributed Teaching and Learning
10) Staffing/HR Management/Training

Since 2003, the top three issues issues have been, in various rankings, security, administrative/ERP information systems, and funding IT. This year was the first time that “change management” appeared in the top-10 list, however.

Click here to find resources relating to each of these issues and an additional breakdown of the survey results.—Catherine Rampell

May 7, 2008

Orphan-Works Bill Sails Through House Panel

A House panel today unanimously approved a bill that would make it easier for scholars and others to make use of orphan works.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, said she would offer an amendment to remove the bill’s “dark archive” provision before the House Judiciary Committee votes on the issue. —Andrea L. Foster

In Wikipedia, Length Matters

A new study found that in Wikipedia, word count can be used to predict article quality.

Joshua E. Blumenstock at the University of California at Berkeley analyzed articles to see if he could predict whether an article was “featured” on Wikipedia’s homepage, which would indicate that it had received extra vetting from top editors to verify its exceptional quality. He looked at 100 variables that might correlate with whether an article ended up as a feature, including number of citations, readability metrics, one-syllable words, etc.

He found that using word count alone, he could predict with 97% accuracy whether an article was featured or not. Considering the full “kitchen sink” of all 100 variables only improved his accuracy slightly to 97.99%. The magic word-count cut-off seemed to be 1,830 words, above which articles were likely to be higher-quality, featured entries. Mr. Blumenstock speculated that the collaborative nature of Wikipedia may force longer articles to be higher quality.

Still, he wrote, “[f]eatured articles are meant to be ‘the best that Wikipedia has to offer’; these results indicate that they might merely be the longest Wikipedia has to offer,” he wrote. “The high degree to which word count can approximate Wikipedia’s elaborate peer-review process is somewhat unsettling.”—Catherine Rampell

Using Cellphones in the Classroom (Constructively)

While some scholars may question the value of introducing leisure-associated technologies into the classroom, education blogger Steve Dembo offers a short list of ways cellphones can be used to enhance the learning process:

1) Check the spelling/definition of a word
2) Research a topic
3) Look up reference images
4) Pull up maps (even with satellite imagery)
5) Document a science lab with built in digital camera/video
6) Fact check on the fly
7) Mail questions to the teacher that they might be embarrassed to ask
8) Classroom response system
9) Take quizzes
10) Record and/or listen to podcasts

UC-Berkeley Marching Band Does Nintendo-Themed Show

This is a few months old, but it’s still pretty cool. Back in November the University of California at Berkeley’s marching band did a Nintendo-inspired half-time show. Check it out:

There’s also, of course, a similar classic from Gordon College, where students performed a live-action version of Super Mario Brothers for a talent show.—Catherine Rampell

'Twittering' During a Campus Lockdown

Over on the blog bavatuesdays, a professor tells of a visit yesterday to the University of Richmond for a lecture that was interrupted by a lockdown following reports of a gunman on the campus. As the audience sat in a dark, locked room awaiting their fates, hoping and praying that tragedy wouldn’t befall another Virginia university, they began communicating and comforting each other via Twitter.

“I found the act to be really soothing,” Jim Groom, an instructional-technology specialist and adjunct professor at the University of Mary Washington, wrote on his blog. “People at UR were sharing information and giving advice to one another, while the larger network from around the world was sending regards, prayers, questions, and their well wishes.

“I had a very powerful sense that those ‘others’ were there with us from beyond that lab, or even the UR campus. I can’t fully explain why that felt so good, someone even offered a Safety dance from abroad, nothing like a laugh during a moment of untold strangeness. …

“For those thinking about a means to manage a crisis, I would put Twitter, or an application like it at the top of the list. It proved invaluable today for all sorts of reasons, and it made all the other means of connecting with others and collecting information dreadfully inadequate.”

Here’s a link to Mr. Groom’s tweets from the day. —Catherine Rampell

Social-Networking Site Starts Wikis for Language Education

Not willing to cough up a couple hundred bucks for Rosetta Stone software? Check out italki Knowledge, a free online language-learning, open-textbook site designed for the Web 2.0 crowd.

Founded in 2006, italki is a social network based around 90 different language-learning communities. Starting this month, it is starting wikis for each language intended to serve as open-source textbooks.

For other open-source resources on learning foreign languages, check out Wikiversity’s foreign language learning page or Web German’s Foreign Languages page.—Catherine Rampell

May 6, 2008

You Say It's Your Birthday

Robert Brauneis at George Washington University Law School has written a paper on the history of what may be the world’s most oft-infringed piece of music. No, it’s not a Britney Spears ditty or a LimeWire hit. It’s “Happy Birthday,” which was originally written with different lyrics as “Good Morning to All.”

Mr. Brauneis has also created a vast online repository of documents and sound recordings related to legal disputes over the song.—Catherine Rampell

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