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You have to learn to let go. The idea that books, magazines, databases or any form of information source can and should be kept for perpetuity is laughable. Items in a library need to be weeded and space is the major reason why. I know all of you want to keep your precious books, and I do to. But who’s going to pay for it, you?... — the other me
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May 27, 2009
Online Students at Bryant & Stratton College Will Graduate via Second Life
Some students at Bryant & Stratton College will have a short commute to their graduation ceremony: All they need to do is turn on their home computers.
On June 10, approximately 40 students in the institution’s online-degree program will sign on to Second Life, a three-dimensional virtual world, where they will watch computer simulations of the college’s vice president and a student speaker address them before their names, degrees, and honors are announced.
While several colleges have experimented with Second Life for college tours, debate tournaments, and more, Bryant & Stratton College claims it is the first to hold a commencement in the virtual world. It will also hold traditional graduations on its 15 campuses.
Scott Traylor, Bryant & Stratton’s director of admissions, says students are now stretching farther from the college’s physical campuses, and with work schedules and the high costs of travel, students asked for an alternative graduation. In addition to the June 10 event, online students are given the option to attend an in-person ceremony.
“They really wanted to have something that was more closely tied to their experience online, and they wanted to graduate with their classmates,” Mr. Traylor says of the students. “Just as they chose their mode of delivery for their education, they can choose their mode of delivery for their graduation.”
For Sheri Frost, the third attempt at a college degree was the charm. Having began her associate degree twice before, in 2001 and 2002, she will receive it this June, in paralegal studies. At first she was uncertain whether she could attend the traditional ceremony because she has four children and commutes using public transportation, but she later decided to go.
“I’m the first college graduate in the family, and I wanted my parents to see me walk across the stage,” Ms. Frost says.
Although she will receive her diploma in a cap and gown, Ms. Frost says she will still sign in online to attend the virtual ceremony.
“A lot of friends that I made through online schooling won’t be able to attend in person,” she says. “I wanted to be there for them and watch them graduate.”
For now, only the students and faculty members can watch the online graduation, but a video will be posted to the college’s Web site later. –Marc Beja
Posted on Wednesday May 27, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [10]May 7, 2009
Case Western Reserve U. Debuts Private Version of Second Life
Higher education has embraced Second Life. But the marriage of universities and virtual worlds has sometimes been marred by concerns over security, privacy, and intellectual property.
Case Western Reserve University today announced a new venture with the potential to allay some of those concerns. The Cleveland university will be the first to host a private, stand-alone version of Second Life behind its fire wall. Faculty and staff members and students will have access to the fantasy space.
“I think that it’s going to solve a lot of issues that many institutions have with using virtual worlds in general,” said Larry Johnson, chief executive of the New Media Consortium, a Texas-based higher-education-technology group that is working on the project. He added, “It’s the first step in allowing universities to begin to build their own grids.”
Case Western is the higher-education test site as Linden Lab, the company that runs Second Life, develops the so-called Nebraska version of the virtual world. The concept is to provide all the functions of Second Life, but to let institutions install the platform on their own servers, in their own data centers, and behind their own security systems. The new platform is “completely disconnected from the main Second Life environment,” according to a Second Life blog.
But why would a school like Case, which already has eight islands in Second Life, want to bother with a stand-alone system?
A medical school interested in performing research involving personal medical histories could use a private environment, Mr. Johnson said. Another function would be programs that focus on both adults and kids. Right now, adults need to undergo background checks to access the Second Life teen grid. One use Case envisions for the Nebraska environment would involve the campus Hispanic club providing mentors to Cleveland public-school students in the online virtual world, said Wendy Shapiro, the university’s senior academic-technology officer.
Oh, and another thing: When you host your own universe, you get “God” privileges.
“You can control everything,” said Ms. Shapiro, sounding excited at the prospect. “You can control who comes in, who gets kicked off. You can control whether people walk or fly.” —Marc Parry
Posted on Thursday May 7, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [7]April 24, 2009
UCLA Professors Use Virtual Reality to Explore Ancient Egypt
To Willeke Wenderish, an associate professor of Egyptian archaeology at the University of California at Los Angeles, exploring the ruins of an ancient temple within an air-conditioned computer classroom can be even more useful than visiting the site in person.
Ms. Wenderish recently co-produced a virtual-reality project called “Digital Karnak,” which allows students (and visitors to the project’s Web site) to learn how the Egyptian religious center has evolved over two millennia. Milling about the ruins or studying a two-dimensional map of the Karnak site can be disorienting, she said. Virtual modeling, on the other hand, allows scholars to observe what in the structure changed and when—using a more sophisticated tool than the mind’s eye.
“It helps them think through all the things that you wouldn’t have thought through if you were looking at a map,” she said—“which areas were roofed, not roofed, how high would the walls have been, how large would a doorway have been.” It also allows scholars to more vividly illustrate contrasting theories of how the site evolved over time, she said.
Ms. Wenderish said she plans to evangelize on the advantages of virtual modeling at this weekend’s annual conference of the American Research Center in Egypt, in Dallas. She thinks virtual technology, while increasingly popular, is still underused in archaeology. One reason is that “they’re costly endeavors,” she said, but illuminating ones.
And not just for understanding architectural sites, either: Ms. Wenderish said she is also working on virtual-reality projects on topographical sites, such as the Faiyum oasis, which contains some of the earliest evidence of Egyptian agriculture. “We model different levels of lake,” she said, “changes in landscape over time, where we find material and how it relates to the landscape—really to map out how the movement of the lake relates to human occupation in the area.” –Steve Kolowich
Posted on Friday April 24, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [1]April 13, 2009
American U. in Cairo Presents a Documentary About Second-Life Journalism
Those who attended the Virtual Journalism Conference at Washington State University this week may have glimpsed the future of global journalism in a brief documentary about an avatar-to-avatar news conference. The news conference, which took place in February in the virtual platform Second Life, gave eight Egyptian political bloggers a chance to directly question James K. Glassman, the public-diplomacy czar under form President George W. Bush.
“This is the ultimate situation of breaking down barriers of time and space,” said Lawrence Pintak, director of the Kamal Adham Center for Journalism Training and Research at the American University in Cairo—or, rather, his slightly-less-gray-haired avatar said that in the documentary. “We’re putting together people who are on opposite sides of the world for a real-time conversation.”
The Second-Life news conference was the final stage of a project, overseen by American University in Cairo and paid for by the U.S. Agency for International Development, that brought the Egyptian bloggers to the United States to cover last fall’s presidential election.
Technology that allows journalists anywhere in the world to connect with each other and with newsmakers could make reporting less costly at a time when many newspapers are cutting back on travel. And while some might dismiss a Second-Life meet-up as little more than a glorified conference call, Rita J. King, a former journalist, said the difference is tremendous. Ms. King is CEO and creative director of Dancing Ink Productions, which designed the virtual space where the news conference was held and also helped create the documentary.
First of all, “teleconferences put people to sleep,” she told The Chronicle. They’re also expensive. But most importantly, the experience of interacting in a three-dimensional space is much richer, sensationally and psychologically.
“Neurologically, people feel they are sharing an experience if the brain perceives that they are sharing space,” she said. “I have found that people are very likely to be candid in interviews that are conducted virtually, much more so than over the phone or even in person.… It is safe physically, first of all, but it also eliminates elements of discomfort that are part of the physical world, related to socioeconomic status, age, gender, race.… There are all sorts of limiting factors that prevent people from being candid with one another in person.” —Steve Kolowich
Posted on Monday April 13, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [1]March 17, 2009
New Research Center to Design 'Next Generation' of Virtual Worlds
Watch out, Second Life.
The University of California at San Diego announced today the creation of a new research center aimed at creating the “next generation” of virtual worlds, which designers hope will be more visually rich and have more features than Second Life and other popular online environments.
The center will use a new hybrid-computing platform developed by IBM. Sheldon Brown, a professor of visual arts at the university who is also the director of the new center, said artists working with simulations have been limited by the computing technologies available. The new IBM platform, Mr. Brown said, offers an increased level of flexibility and power that will give artists more freedom.
Among the center’s first projects will be the development of a virtual world based on Scalable City, a museum installation created by Mr. Brown. The center will also work on digital cinema experiments that use virtual worlds as a “set,” Mr. Brown said.
In the coming months the IBM platform, which is based on the company’s “System z” mainframes, will be shared with other institutions so they can develop applications in fields like medical imaging, said Elmer Corbin, IBM’s director of systems development and university alliances. —David Shieh
Posted on Tuesday March 17, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [13]January 23, 2009
College Debate Teams to Face Off in Second Life
College debate matches can be physically intense — with participants rattling off arguments at top speed and gesturing dramatically. So it will be interesting to see if a debate contest can work in Second Life, the virtual world.
This week Stephen Llano, the director of debate at St. John’s University, in New York, announced what is billed as the first tournament debate held in Second Life. It will take place on February 4 at 8 p.m. Eastern Time in the university’s virtual campus (shown below). A two-person team from St. Johns will go head-to-head with two students from the University of Vermont. The topic will be whether or not colleges should limit tenure for professors.
The event will not be an official competition, but if it goes well, it could lead to virtual matches in the future that would count toward tournament scoring, said Mr. Llano.
He said the technology could be particularly helpful in letting students compete against teams in other countries. “Not everyone gets a chance to travel internationally to debate against universities all over the world,” Mr. Llano said. “We could have some international debate online where people could stay at home and particpate in an international debate at very low costs.”
He said he was not sure how well the technology would work. The plan is to use a voice-chat feature of Second Life so that competitors can hear each other. Meanwhile, the participants can use their cartoon-like virtual characters, or avatars, to gesture to emphasize their points.
Mr. Llano said Second Life was chosen for the event over other types of online chat environments because so many colleges have built virtual campuses there. In the past, some debates have been held online using Web cams rather than virtual worlds like Second Life, he said. —Jeffrey R. Young
Posted on Friday January 23, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [6]December 4, 2008
Psychologists Doing Research in Virtual World Pay Subjects in Virtual Money
Richard L. Gilbert, a psychology professor at Loyola Marymount University, in Los Angeles, is about to begin a series of surveys of participants in Second Life, the virtual world where people interact as cartoonlike characters in a 3-D animated landscape. Usually the researcher would pay test subjects a small fee for their time, but for this study he’ll be paying participants in Linden dollars, the virtual currency used in Second Life.
He had no idea what the appropriate amount would be, so Mr. Gilbert walked around popular areas of Second Life asking strangers how much he would have to pay them to sit down for an hour and take a survey. “The average of all the responses that I got was $1,000,” he says. That’s 1,000 Linden dollars, worth about $4 in actual U.S. currency. “It’s much cheaper” than what he would have paid subjects in a traditional experiment, he says.
Mr. Gilbert says that two of the surveys — one about addiction to online worlds and another about sexuality in Second Life — just won approval from the university’s institutional review board, which must sign off on research involving human subjects. The project was a harder sell than usual, he says, because the board had not dealt with virtual worlds before. “I had to meet with them and sort of explain what we’re doing,” he says.
When the experiments begin in January, participants will have to visit the university’s new “island” in Second Life to take the surveys. Mr. Gilbert gave me a tour of the university’s island this afternoon, showing off the bank of virtual computers where participants will take the survey. When users click on the computers, they will be taken to a Web site with the survey questions.
Mr. Gilbert (whose virtual character is shown above, in black) says he wants subjects to come to Second Life to take the survey to demonstrate that they are experienced users of virtual worlds. —Jeffrey R. Young
Posted on Thursday December 4, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [4]July 9, 2008
Scholars Are Skeptical of Google's New Virtual World
Rumors that Google was working on a new virtual world have turned out to be true. The company unveiled this week its three-dimensional make-believe community called Lively, promoted in the video below.
Virtual-world scholars seem unimpressed by the project. The Terra Nova blog has assembled their comments. Aaron Delwiche, an assistant professor of communications at Trinity University, is disappointed that Lively does not allow people to create their own content, a feature of the virtual world Second Life. “Google has given us an impoverished space in which content can only be developed in-house or by ‘trusted developers,’” he writes.
Vili Lehdonvirta, a researcher at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, says this about Mr. Delwiche’s observation. “I don’t think it’s true that Second Life style dedicated tools for creating complex 3D content are a prerequisite for creativity and expression. People used to build pianos out of fish steaks and chessboards in Ultima Online,” he writes of the popular three-dimensional game. “Still, I agree that it would be really cool if Google came out with advanced content creation tools that are easy to use.” —Andrea L. Foster
Posted on Wednesday July 9, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [11]July 2, 2008
British Researcher Seeks Scholarly Input for Virtual-Worlds Think Tank
Ren Reynolds, a British-based technology researcher, has recently formed a think tank on virtual worlds, called the Virtual Policy Network, or tVPN. The goal of the group, he says, is to get scholars, industry officials, and policy makers talking about virtual worlds. The group is expected to have a presence in Europe, Asia, and North America.
One of the group’s projects will be an annual report that takes stock of public policies around the world relating to virtual worlds. The think tank is asking colleges, businesses, and governments to provide financial support for the project. —Andrea L. Foster
Posted on Wednesday July 2, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [3]May 30, 2008
Student Internet Posts Can Lead to Sanctions, Court Rules
A new court ruling limiting a student’s speech on the Internet—though the student in question is in high school—may prove worrisome to college students and freedom-of-speech advocates.
The U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled yesterday that a Connecticut high-school student could be barred from running for student government after posting a blog entry calling a school official a “douchebag” and encouraging other students to write or call the official to annoy her, the Hartford Courant reports.
The court, in a decision on a pretrial motion, ruled that the post, on the site livejournal.com, violated the school policy that student-government representatives show “good citizenship.” The court also said the post created disruption at the school, warranting the school to take action.
College students, posting public statements or images on sites such as Facebook, are increasingly getting scrutinized by administration officials. For instance, The Chronicle reported earlier this year about a software program that searches for offensive content on college athletes’ social-networking sites. Three experts in constitutional law said the program was probably legal because publically posted material is fair game for scrutiny.
The question, of course, is how institutions react if they don’t like that material. In the Connecticut high-school case, the student is pressing ahead for a full trial, to get a clear ruling on whether schools can limit the rights to free speech in the Internet age. —Josh Fischman
Posted on Friday May 30, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [17]