Giuliana Perco

One of the challenging tasks of Module 2 was to create an educational scene in SL and to “pack it” using either the spiffy Holodeck that we got from Loki Clifton, or the Builder’s Buddy scripts. I was all set to use the Holodeck, especially after the enlightening workshop that Paz gave us on the topic. After all, I knew how Builder’s Buddy worked….I had even given a hands-on workshop on it!  It was time to try something new.

This activity immediately posed a big problem, though: for a while it was hard  to think of a scene I wanted to build. I did not want to create the usual classroom scene, also because (as one of my students put it in her blog on her SL experience) if we are going to go to SL just to sit in a replica of a classroom, we might as well meet face to face and avoid all technical problems. I also did not want to rely too much on educational tools, like presenters, HUDs, and so on, I wanted the scene to be “mine”, so to speak.

In the end, I luckily came up with an idea that I really liked and for the past month I have been working hard trying to create a scene that would be related to the Second Life teaching typology in which I am interested, that is “immersive literature”.

In other words, I had the ambitious idea of creating a scene related to a work of literature, a 3D scene that could be “immersive” in the sense that people could walk into it and (perhaps) interact with it. Since the previous examples of “immersive literature” were quite impressive and elaborate and did not limit themselves to a single scene, but often included a whole sim, at the beginning the task was daunting. An additional issue was also to find a literary work that could be suited to SL, that was simple enough for me to follow while creating my scene with my scarce building skills and without a mouse (!), and that could be interesting.

My first and very ambitious idea was to build a virtual 3D version of the labyrinthic library of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (Il nome della rosa). However, aside from the fact that I would have needed a really huge space to re-create the library, I doubt that I could have done it in time and without using 5000 and more prims. So I eventually thought about Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (Le città invisibili) in which several impossible and imaginary cities are described in detail through individual, short chapters.  These stories are told by Marco Polo to Kublai Khan, who wants to know what Marco Polo saw during his long journey to China. Since the chapters of the book are not only narrative, but also very descriptive, I thought that I could perhaps find a city that would work for me. Easier said than done.

Building most of those cities would have required skills that I do not possess and an imagination/creativity that would surpass mine. Several cities required some movement, others were descriptions of ideas and not of physical places. It was hard.  In the end, I chose “Armilla”. What is Armilla?  This is how Calvino’s Marco Polo begins to describe it:

“Whether Armilla is like this because it is unfinished or because it has been demolished, whether the cause is some enchantment or only a whim, I do not know. The fact remains that it has no walls, no ceilings, no floors: it has nothing that makes it seem a city except the water pipes that rise vertically where the houses should be and spread out horizontally where the floors should be: a forest of pipes that end in taps, showers, spouts, overflows. Against the sky a lavabo’s white stands out, or a bathtub, or some other porcelain, like late fruit still hanging from the boughs. You would think that the plumbers had finished their job and gone away before the bricklayers arrived; or else their hydraulic systems, indestructible, had survived a catastrophe, an earthquake, or the corrosion of termites.” (trans. by William Weaver)

Armilla seemed almost perfect for my purpose, so I began working on it, enthusiastically beginning with lots of shiny and skinny cylinders that I would then convert into pipes.  Creating a three-dimensional network of pipes is not that easy in SL. For instance, I wanted all the pipes to look different, some rusty, some new and shiny, some moldy. That required a lot of time choosing and adapting textures. Also, the pipes had to be different in width, length, height. Some of them had to be curved.

I also needed faucets, taps, showers, a bathtub, etc.  I managed to make a realistic shower-head, a pretty good bathtub and sink, an acceptable boiler and a heating unit. But I must confess that the super detailed and almost perfect faucets and spouts in Armilla are not mine, but they are Alpha Lorgsval’s creations: he generously gave me one and I modified it a bit in colour and texture, but the structure is his and his only! Thanks a lot Alpha!!!!

Alas, I tried to use the “snap to the grid” trick that Paz taught us to align my pipes perfectly, but I could not do it, so actually some of my pipes are a bit skewed, I am afraid. In any case, since this was my first attempt, I must say that I am pretty proud of the result.  The free particles scripts for dripping water and water sprays that I got at the “Particle Lab” and modified to suit my purposes were particularly helpful and improved the whole structure a lot.

Once the structure was finished, the real problems arose when I had to put it all into the holodeck. First, I had to insert the holodeck script into all the many, many pieces of virtual plumbing, then I had to insert them into the holodeck.  In other words, quite a time-consuming task.  Second, and most problematic, initially the holodeck was not positioned correctly relatively to the pipe structure (my fault) and so when I created the new crate, only a portion of the construction was recorded. I managed to correct this. But when I tried to place the scene in the holodeck again….. pooof, my whole city disappeared!!!

Unfortunately, though I had saved each single piece in my inventory, I had not recorded their individual positions, so basically what I had was a bunch of scattered 3D puzzle pieces that had to be put together again.

I was very sad

I rebuilt Armilla with a lot of effort: initially I wanted to make it exactly the way it was before, but in the end it was easier to change it a little, so now it looks a bit different from the first version. When the time came  to put the scene into the holodeck again, I stopped though: could I risk it? I had recorded the position of each piece this time, true, but still… if the whole thing disappeared once more, it would have meant a lot of work for me again……

So….instead of the holodeck, I decided to rely on my dear Builder’s Buddy and….it worked

You can visit Armilla on my MUVEnation platform. Next to my SL version of Armilla there is  a very tall board with the initial paragraph of the story in both English and Italian: by clicking on it, one gets a notecard with the whole story, in both languages.

PS: The absolutely best example of immersive literature that I know is called Foul Whisperings Strange Matters (Macbeth 48, 50, 54): as the sim’s name indicates, it’s about William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and it’s  really a great experience to walk into it.

My very own hands-on SL workshop

I gave my first Second Life hands-on workshop today (Wednesday, 18 February). It was the first and I guess that it will probably be the last as well…. at least for some time.  Everything that could have possibly go wrong went wrong, alas. 

But let’s start from the beginning.

My workshop was on creating two sets of glittering prim earrings. The earrings were an excuse, I wanted to make people work with very tiny prims. I got the inspiration from a very good NCI workshop on using tiny prims to create jewelry. The NCI workshop was excellent, but also very intense and complex and I wanted mine to be much more simpler. Two sets of earrings seemed an easy enough accomplishment and I set for that.

I re-read and re-tested the NCI workshop instructions several times, I found other sources on tiny prims, I experimented a bit on my own, I then wrote the instructions for the HUD notecard and tested them on a friend while using the Speakeasy HUD. Everything went well on that first run, though I changed a couple of things in the instructions to make them easier to follow (shortening a couple of lines, for instance).

I then created a prim shaped like one of  the final earrings that participants would create in the workshop. I wanted it to be able to give a folder containing my class materials: I spent a long time looking for a script that, instead of giving all the items in its object one by one, would give everything inside a folder. After looking for a while, testing and trying to modify different scripts that did not do what I wanted, I realized that I had had the correct script in my inventory for ages (!)

Once I solved the script issue, I created individual spaces for the workshop participants, each with a dark colored “carpet” around, so that tiny prims could be easily spotted there. I set them up and linked them in a “Builder’s Buddy” base. I tested this several times and it worked perfectly. I was quite happy with myself.

I scheduled my workshop on Wednesday at 22 CET, so that my European fellow MUVEnation members could attend. I chose to give my workshop on my sky platform because the sandbox had been already booked and also because I thought that the sky platform would have been less distracting (lots of people come over all the time in the sandbox and I needed to be focused and not distracted by someone passing by and wanting to join half way through the workshop).

I was all set to go and my main initial worry was simply that for a while only one person had signed up in the wiki, but I realized later that that was not really something I should have been fretting about.

Anyway, earlier today after my last RL class of the day, I managed to get on the right bus that brought me  home on time, so that I could put the last touches to my workshop. These last touches consisted essentially in setting up the seats and checking one last time that the folder giver was working.

Alas, as I rezzed the Builder’s Buddy base and ordered it to build the classroom space, I immediately saw that something was not going the way it was supposed to. The seats appeared, but one at the top of the other and not in the positions recorded by the Builder’s Buddy base. I have no idea what had happened: the Builder’s Buddy base had worked perfectly till the day before. Of course, I panicked. I quickly tried to re-position the seats and their carpets, but, probably because I did this in a haste, when some classroom participants sat down, they were facing the back of the class and not the front. 

This would not have been that terrible, of course, had this been the only mishap. But, it was not destined to be that way. People began to arrive, I waited a bit to make sure that everybody who had signed up was there, and then started the HUD so that it started to read my notecard. Soon, I began to get IMs from other participants asking to be teleported. I was happy because more people than I expected seemed to be coming, but I am also not very good at multitasking, especially in stressful situations. I am not really sure whether it was my fault or a SL glitch, but as I was teleporting Paz, my SL first froze and then crashed. Of course, it took ages before I could restart it and get back to my platform. Luckily, “my students” were still there, waiting for me: I felt a sudden rush of affection for them all! They had not abandoned me!

The  HUD, however, had reset itself to the beginning, of course, and so I had to restart it, this time going more quickly through the first part. After a couple of additional glitches (mostly prims that disappeared and that are still hidden somewhere in the creases of my platform), we managed to create the first earring. I glowed as some participants’ comments showed that they were quite happy with it. This was very promising for the second kind of earring, which was more complex and required to hollow a torus.

Well, I was giving instructions on how to hollow it to a value of 95, when I abruptly found myself quickly falling down into nothingness (my platform is at 700 m). I literally could not believe my eyes: my platform was gone and while the workshop participants were still sitting on their seats suspended in the void, Paz and I, who had been standing, were falling down. I was so surprised that I could barely stop my fall, and I would have not been able to go back to my by-then inexistent platform if Narci  hadn’t rescued me first by teleporting me back and then quickly creating a platform for me. I was so mortified that I almost wanted to cry (thinking back at the scene, it must have been quite a hilarious moment, I guess).

A split second before the catastrophic fall into nothingness…the platform is already gone!
(courtesy of Narci Shan)

See what I meant when I said that everything that could possibly go wrong did really go wrong?

I am not sure how I managed to get back into teaching mood. The whole thing seemed a bit surreal at that point. Some more confusion ensued because different strands of conversations intertwined in the chat, some participants were puzzled. I got confused too. I’m not sure how, but I eventually managed to fudge my way to the end of the workshop (at that point it seemed way too long already!). All in all, I must thank all the participants for their patience through this long series of debacles and for their help and moral support. I still felt mortified, but it really helped that everybody was so understanding, nice, and helpful.

One thing though really bothered me for a while: What had happened to the platform? Who had taken it? How could it have disappeared? Dear Paz, if you read this: I apologize from the bottom of my heart for initially even suspecting of you, since I thought that you were the only one (beside me) who could move my platform and I was not clicking on anything at all at that point, not even my HUD. It was only later, talking with Alpha, that I noticed that the platform had not vanished, it had been hollowed! I also realized that I had not changed the permissions on the platform, nor had I locked it before the workshop. So what probably happened was that someone, while trying to click on the tiny torus to hollow it, must have instead selected the platform and hollowed it. Well, and hollow it certainly was!

Lessons learned:

1. Never share a flying platform with a whole group, especially when minuscule prims are involved.
2. Always lock a flying platform before inviting people over.

This sounds like a trivia, but “prepare for the unexpected” has a different and more concrete meaning for me after this experience. I had worried about a low turn-out (instead I had a “full house”!) , about getting questions I wasn’t sure how to answer, about people thinking that my earrings were kind of silly, but what happened instead was absolutely unexpected.

If I could do this all over again, I would test my workshop on my actual platform, instead than somewhere else, so that I could notice how the carefully chosen texture for my platform (amber crystals to recall the workshop theme) was not good for this kind of workshop at all (prim gems against a gem background: what was I thinking?) With a pitch black floor, less prims would have been lost, perhaps.

I would then schedule my workshop on a day when I had more time to come to SL beforehand to check everything, so that, in case of unexpected glitches, I would have fixed them properly. Had I done so, I could have better corrected the issue with the Builder’s Buddy and the positioning of the seats. In my haste to re-positioning them, I must have put them a bit too high on the ground: indeed, some participants’ feet disappeared into the carpets when they sat down (sigh)

Moreover, since fixing the seats glitch would have made me feel less nervous whenever someone sat down, I might have not forgotten that part of my original teaching plan was to follow along the creation of prim gems by building a much bigger one myself, so that everybody could see the steps. In my nervousness, I totally forgot this and when I began to do it later with the torus, the vanishing platform made me forget it again.

I could not have prevented SL from crashing and I am sure that, even with more time, it would have never occurred to me to change permissions on the platform and to lock it. But, having had the time to fix the Builder’s Buddy debacle correctly would have made me less nervous at the beginning of the workshop.

This whole experience has made me appreciate more the hands-on workshops I attended in the past weeks. I was very bitter towards one workshop whose instructor kept dancing all the time, while he completely ignored when, due to a glitch in a script, several participants fell through the ground into the water below. This behaviour upset me very much at the time, but I am now wondering whether the poor guy first got into one of those animation loops that are difficult to stop even with the “stop all animations” device and later had simply panicked seeing his students disappear into the grass and had decided to ignore the issue because he had no idea of what was going on. Still not forgivable, but it makes me reconsider the whole experience and be less harsh towards him.

In all this confusion, I regrettably also completely forgot to take snapshots, so, if some of the friendly and patient people who joined my workshop managed to take some and is reading this, could they please pass them to me? I’d like to have a couple of images to illustrate the whole story.

Module 2 – Activity 1:  Analysing hands-on workshops

To complete  this task, I attended several in-world workshops. One was a self-paced one on basic scripting and thus does not really count for this activity, the others, however, were taught synchronously by “live” instructors. Of these, I really disliked one, while I learned a lot from the other two (both held at NCI island).

After having analysed the “flawed” workshop, I will here examine one of the NCI ones, since I believe that the ways in which they were structured and held summarize a lot of the teaching practices to which SL instructors should pay attention.  Actually, one can learn a lot also from negative experiences. I am not giving details about the “bad” workshop, because my aim is not to criticize a particular instructor, but simply to observe teaching techniques used in SL.

For the analysis of both workshops I will be using the analysis grid for “Second Life practices in learning and teaching activities” developed by Margarita Perez-Garcia (MENON Network, Belgium) and Dr. Steven Warburton (King’s College London, UK) and made available to MUVEnation participants.

Workshop # 2
1 h and 30 minute hands-on workshop – Aim: Learn how to create prim shoes
Offered at the NCI island – Instructor: Afon Shepherd *

Workshop Design: planning and preparation

Spatial design and layout: Emulation of RL  (each participant sat on a personal space on which it was possible to work without disturbing other participants).

Instructional design: Learning objectives, outcomes and goals were clearly structured (the goal was learning to create a pair of prim shoes)

Organization of instructions and discourse: The instructions were prepared in advance and delivered by a notecard reader. The instructor, however, often paused the reader and left room for questions and comments from participants

Physical organization of learning material: Structured (class instructions were delivered to a participant’s inventory as soon as the avatar sat on his/her stool)

Business model: By donation (the class was free, but at the end donations were suggested by a “tip-jar”)

Maturity level/Developmental version: Fully tested. This particular workshop had been offered for over a year.

Comments: The workshop was carefully planned and structured. It took into account possible difficulties that participants might encounter in the process of creating prim shoes. It offered a visual representation of the different parts to be later assembled to help learners to create their own prim shoes

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Workshop Implementation: Delivery of instruction

Assessment of prior/required knowledge: Informal assessment. The workshop specified that previous building skills/ experience were strongly recommended “since this class needs to move quickly to stay on track”.

Pre-prepared activities to meet the knowledge requirements: None

Prior knowledge: On demand

Preparation of user interface and viewing controls: On demand

Technical preparation of participants: None

Conversational flow: Ordered and controlled by  a notecard reader to deliver instructions to participants, however, the instructor often pause the reader and commented on someone’s work and offered answers to participants’ questions

Communication dynamics: Tutor <-> Learner and Learner <-> Learner

Movement of learners and teacher: Constrained sit position for both learners and teacher. Each learner had a personal space on which to build and the set-up of participants’ spaces was shaped as a grid. It was very practical for the purpose at hand, though.

Presentation of outputs and results: A series of three big and colorful posters at the front of the class showed three images detailing the individual elements needed to create the shoe and the process towards the assembled final product.

Delivery of learning material: At the beginning using an automated tool placed in the seat on each participant’s space. Participants did not need to click on any object, but the class material was delivered to them automatically, as they sat down

Use of tools to deliver both content instruction: Presentation tool (notecard reader)

Use of media to enhance teaching: Use of text and visual images at the front of the class (posters)

Concurrent learner activity: Activity exclusively centered in the 3D world

Personalisation of learning: Adaptive pathways (the instructor was extremely attentive towards participants’ questions and progress-or lack thereof. The instructor helped and advised individual participants)

Pedagogical approach: Directive; Focused on both concepts and procedures; Process oriented

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Implementation of the workshop: follow up and evaluation

Provision of guidance, support and feedback: On demand via main communication channel, also spontaneous offers of help from teacher who noticed if some of the learners were having problems

Monitoring of student progress: Both gathering of informal feedback and structured monitoring

Quality of feedback: Both informative and formative

Assessment model: Informal assessment

Comments: The instructor was very keen in monitoring participants’ progress, not only answering questions in the local chat, but also offering help whenever she noticed that a participant has problems completing a part of the task assigned. This was extremely satisfying since issues were quickly resolved and everybody in the end walked away with their newly made prim shoes.

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Implementation of the workshop: recall and transfer of learning

Recapitulation: Systematic

After session resources: Combination of  artifacts and networks: the instructor kindly underlined her availability advising participants to send her an IM if they had further questions or they needed more clarifications.

After session activities: Individual activity: the instructor underlined more than once that the end product of the workshop was only a sample of a pair of prim shoes, but urged participants to experiment more, stating her availability to help through IM.

Comments: A great, professional and very informative workshop

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* The instructor kindly agreed to be mentioned in this blog.