Joe Sanchez - Educators Coop

The last few weeks I’ve been working with Girlstart
on a summer camp in Teen Second Life. My Teen avatar is pictured above, Stem Skytower is the name. The camp attendees included 19 high school juniors the first week and 23 the second week. The girls came into TSL without any experience. Following a 4 day curriculum based on my undergraduate class, the girls were able to create extraordinary exhibits about women in technology, girls in gaming, and other STEM (science technology, engineering, math) topics.

I’ll be posting more about the projects and the data we collected in the process. My initial reading of the surveys show that this curriculum once again breaks the Second Life learning curve.

We submitted a panel to SXSW (South by Southwest SXSW) so if you have time I’d appreciate a vote : )

Gaming as a Gateway Drug: Getting Girls Interested in Technology

Wanted: Girl Gamers! It’s not just about playing, but using play to ignite a crucial spark. This session will explore how educators, parents and the community can use video games to attract girls to pursue STEM (science, technology, engineering, math).
vote here

This morning (7/10/08) at 10am CST I brought my students at the University of Texas at Austin into Lively for a class session. We met in Lively for a little over an hour. During that time we built a room for the Educators Coop and taught each other how to use various tools such as embed URLS into objects, embed youtube movies into objects, and change the music stream in the room. We had a pretty good time playing with the default animations such as body slam and punch. Overall as a class we found it easy to use though very limiting since we couldn’t create our content. After a few minutes we had added just about every type of object into the room and there was little to do after that. We had a lot of fun discovering and i think my students enjoyed seeing me in a position where i was asking them for advice about building and navigating in a virtual world

We did visit the Linden lab room built by Pathfinder but there were way too many people there and we experienced a lot of lag. I choose a pig avatar and as you can see my students picked a variety of other types of avatars. It will be interesting to see what Lively becomes. I’m most excited by the browser-based client and the ability to embed rooms into web pages..especially facebook.

The room we made is here http://www.lively.com/dr?rid=6257502609839847777 ….

Tonight the students in my Working in Virtual class will present a panel in SL about their experiences learning in Second Life. The panel will begin with a short introduction and description of their projects. We will then break into groups for student led tours of their builds. Following the tours the students will participate in a Q/A session with the audience to discuss their experience in SL as learners. My students created three areas, a Quidditch arena, a Wellness Center, and a replica of an Austin bar and grill called Cain Ables. The students used half an island to build their projects and while they didn’t need the space they did need the prims… Below are pictures of their builds and an invitation to attend their event.

You are invited to attend a special Panel session “SL The Student
Experience” to be held on Wednesday July 9 at 5:30PM at the Educators
Coop 1. In this session students enrolled in the undergraduate summer
course Working in Virtual Worlds taught by Joe Sanchez aka North Lamar
at the University of Texas at Austin will discuss the student
experience of learning in Second Life. The Event will feature samples
of student work and a Q/A session with the students and instructor.
This will be an opportunity to hear from the students’ point of view
of the highs and lows, challenges and opportunities of using Second
Life in a university course. Projects include a playable Quidditch
game, a reproduction of Cane and Abels (real life bar and grill), and
a wellness center.
When: Wednesday, July 9, 5:30PM (SLT)
Where: The Educators Coop 1 http://slurl.com/secondlife/Educators%20Coop%201/51/55/22
Overflow Location: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Educators%20Coop%202/247/24/30
** This event is free and open to the public; - Sponsored by students
of INF315e **

Henry Stokes (my conference roommate) hosted a Wellness fair as part of Loriene Roy’s presidential initiative for workplace wellness. He did a fantastic job creating a day long program that included sessions on healthy eating, chair pilates, office yoga, hula dancing, and Dance dance revolution among others…

I have never done pilates before but i must admit that i found the stretching to be very relaxing and I may look into taking a class when i return to Austin. My back had been tightening up the last few days since i have been walking around the conference area with a loaded backpack and sitting for hours at a time. The simple movements felt great and i could feel my spine straighten out towards the end of the mini-workout…

The Hula dance was really fun. My Hawaiian brother Annalou sang and taught us a short dance. It was great to see him interact with audience, he explained the history of the particular song he was singing and explained each movement of the dance making it easy to follow. The steps were..push the sun, search the ocean, pick the berries, welcome the Earth, and get nasty LOL… He was great

Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association (APALA) reception has been the highlight of my week. I was able to reconnect with Annalou whose wife sang songs for us on her ukulele. APALA knows how to let loose with beautiful song and dance. See the pictures below to get a feel of the reception….

Look, another SL librarian!

Saturday i was part of a panel that presented a talk about virtual worlds and communities hosted by Tom Peters. We had a great turnout both in Second life and at the face to face conference. My part of talk focused on the why the Metaverse is important to the American Library Association and why the study of it falls into our domain. The audience seemed receptive to the ideas i think Tom wlll be posting the the session as a podcast on his website. I will post the link when it is available.

At the end of Tom’s talk he asked for a show of hands to see how many people were in virtual worlds other than Second Life…the picture is below

After the talk i had a chance to meet and give long over due hugs to fellow Educators Coop members Lori Momiji. I love meeting SL friends in RL and on my back to the hotel i was able to take a snapshot of three wonderful Information ISland reference desk volunteers. What a great day!

The evening was capped off with the School of Information Alumni recpetion hosted in the Sweet Suite. Below is a pic of the firework show from Disney land that is viewable from our balcony…mmm dessert, these things were yummy

Gaming night was quite a bit of fun with a few unexpected surprises. ALA President Loriene Roy, an avid gamer, gave out the first Presidential Citations for Gaming in the Libraries. 3 citations were awarded, one for Innovation in Education, Innovation in Library Programs, and Innovation in Technology. What i liked about Gaming Night was the mix of table games and video console games. Many people were playing turn-based board games and i learned about quite a few new board games such as 10 days in the USA

The hall was setup with four projection screens with Dance Dance Revolution, Mario cart, Wii Sports, and Rock Band. It was fun watching people discover the Wii, for many people last night was the first time they had ever seen or played a Wii. I have a feeling that many will be purchasing a Wii when they get back home.

I had an embarrassing moment while playing Rock band. I was asked to play with a group of four Rock band Ringers on Expert level so we could show the crowd the complexities of the game. The other three guys were really good…I was handed the microphone and asked to sing Welcome Home from Coheed and Cambria….I failed out within the first few bars…BUt i later made up for it with a decent rendition on Enter Sandman from Metallica.

All in all Gaming Night was a lot of fun and it served in connecting the traditional board gamers with the newer video-gamers and I think both groups gained respect for each other and saw more similarities than differences.

This last year I have been mentoring a group from the Emerging Leaders Program within ALA. The Emerging Leaders are a group of librarians that have less than 5 years experience in the field or are 35 or younger. I was asked to serve as a mentor for a group of five Emerging Leaders as they worked on one of Loriene Roy’s Presidential Initiatives. My group was originally tasked to construct a database of capstone projects and field-based learning activities being used in MLIS programs (Masters of Library and Information Science). As luck would have it…none of the emerging leaders in my group had the technical background to program a database so we altered the project based on their skill set.

My group ended up conducting a needs assessment and feature analysis based on survey results from 92 users. They were able to confirm that a database of projects is a good idea and needed but they also identified a need to create a process that would allow distance education students to find service learning projects in their local areas. For example, if a student was enrolled in a distance education program at North Texas University but they lived in New York, what types of resources are available that can help that student find an internship or field-based work in another state. Their project was well received and we plan on submitting an IRB application so that we can publish the results or reuse the survey data in order to publish the results.

Now I’m off to the Library Champions fundraiser and then open Gaming night

The 5th ALA Forum on Education was a huge success. We were successful in creating an interactive event for a large group of people. Rae-Anne Montague and Clara Chu provided a great foundation for the attendees about Service Learning and the role/s of those performing the service/learning and the critical their of reflection as part of the learning and service process.

The Researchpalooza was timed perfectly and the presentors provided a wide variety of service learning projects ranging from services to the elderly through service learning in prisons. It was a fascinating range of projects and ideas.

The group discussions were very powerful and participants were engaged. What i love about the event is the mix of students, professionals, and faculty all participating on a level playing field. I’ll post more later : )

I went down to scout the room location and setup for the Forum on Education that I’m hosting at 1:30PDT. The room is very crowded even without people in it. I don’t think there is room for people to walk around and view the poster session. My first instinct was to start right clicking tables and deleting them but then i realized Real Life isn’t that easy… I started to rearrange the room but chairs and tables are heavy LOL. The good news is that we have 20 flip charts in the room and we’ll be able to put those to use during the small group discussions. here is the setup (hope there isn’t a fire)

So Anaheim is really clean and touristy to the extreme and the convention center area is full of boring and surprisingly expensive chain and hotel restaurants. Luckily last night as I went for a long evening stroll I found a great local bar called Captain Bombays. I must have been walking for about 25 minutes before i spotted it so i imagine its about a mile and a half from the convention center area at Katell and Euclid. Great local bar, fantastic jukebox , quite a few beers on tap for a bar this size and .50 pool. The cab ride back to the Hilton was $8…

Cho Nho is a Vietnamese restaurant located in the same burnt up shopping strip (watch your step) where i ate the best shrimp fried rice in my life. Seriously, what was in that red sauce? Cho Nho was awesome, the food was great and as were the karaoke singers. Dinners were passing a microphone from table to table and taking turns singing. I think they were singing in vietnamese but i’m not sure. Good times and my first glimpse of “the real” anaheim. Well I’m off to attend the morning Oral History program.