 Hello everyone and welcome to the 4.30 p.m. to 5 p.m. session of the 2019 Open Simulator Community Conference. In this session we are happy to introduce a presentation called OpenSim Education is Dead. Let's bury it. Our speaker today is Smith Whitfield, otherwise known as Andrew Wheelock. Please check out our website found at conference.opensimulator.org for speaker bios, details of our sessions, as well as the full schedule events. Now Andrew Wheelock is the Winrich Technology Coordinator. He's an educator, a husband, and a father of three, and he's gravitated towards teaching and learning with mobile devices, virtual environments, and gaming. He sees the true value in harnessing technologies to make powerful learning experiences, as well as helping students navigate technology dangers. Andrew has learned that teachers can grow a much deeper understanding when they talk to their when they talk to other innovative educators who can inspire each of us to go beyond and push the boundaries. Smith Whitfield, as he is known in Second Life, is also co-leader of the International Society for Technology and Education's Virtual Environment Network, otherwise known as IST. And also heads up the Virtual Pioneers Group, which helps educators in SL learn from one another and to share their observations on how technologies work best for education. To learn more about his work, I'm going to give you a few websites here. I'll paste them into our local chat as well, but it's venetwork.weebly.com is one. Another one is islandsoe.weebly.com, and then there's another one. It's a little long to read off, but it's basically about him being a thinker award recipient. So we'll let you take a look at that as well. This session is being live-streamed and recorded, so if you have any questions or comments during this session, you may send your tweets to open, excuse me, at OpenSimCC with the hashtag of PoundOSCC19. Welcome to everyone, and let's begin our session. Hi everyone, great to see you virtually again as always. Thank you for that introduction. Always nice to hear yourself from a different lens. I was hoping to do this presentation maybe in the beginning of this conference and then just let everybody connect with me and collaborate and then see other fantastic things, but it turns out here I am towards the tail end of the conference, so we'll have to I still am hoping for wonderful connections and great conversation and the title certainly for those of you who know me, I've never considered myself a pessimist, so I hope this doesn't come off as pessimistic, but I want to kind of just bring my experiences together and then hopefully this will help all of us, myself included, kind of reflect where we are with OpenSim and see if we can pull some new ideas and collaborations together. So with that, let me just kind of tell you the projects that I've been, I know many of you have seen some of my work before, you'll see what I've done, and forgive me, I'm new to the speakeasy, so I'm going to give this a try starting now. I'm not good at going through a script, but we're going to give this a whirl here, so I had this mad idea. In 2007, I entered Second Life for the first time thinking, you know, it was just a flash in the pan, yet, to my surprise, I found it so fascinating and I thought it could offer a huge educational purpose and promise. For example, I want to teach about Roman history and architecture, ta-da! Let students explore the Coliseum as an avatar in a virtual world. Civil war battlefield, perhaps? Better yet, let students build a Coliseum or design a civil war battlefield. Think of those possibilities, and so I did. With the permission from my work and supervisors, I looked into creating a virtual world experience for students. After Second Life's team grid crashed and failed, we went to reaction grid, which also went bust, despite a great team, I might say. There were a lot of good people behind reaction grid. Undaunted, I applied and received a grant through the New York State Department of Education. Yes, jive as well, thank you. And with help from my awesome tech support group, we downloaded OpenSim on our server and the fantastic results, we got it to work. So my first project was recreating the secret annex from the diary of a young girl, Anne Frank, and I had a group of teachers bring their students in and on the slide behind me, you can see some of the pictures from this project. And this was an amazing experience and these teachers were all part of a grant, so we had about five teachers in our starter. So however, we did have some crashes and bumps, and we slowly figured out how to set up the grid. So as students started coming in, it became smooth and seamless. But I won't lie, those early days were challenging with setting up the grid. And we did research and yes, the students learned. Their learning showed significant gains over traditional means, and this was all part of the write up for our grant. So we took students who had done testing from earlier year and then year two, so had some basis. We wrote the progress in our grant report and I published articles through ISTI's leading and learning magazine and I'll be happy to share links to that as well. So year two saw an amazing collaborative adventure endeavor through a new region called the air of the king. And you can see some of the pictures behind me of that air of the king project. And the beauty of this was it was a gamified project that involved one of the grant teachers, Mary Howard. If you want a good website to follow, feel free to go to your smarticles at blogs.blogspot.com. So Mary became part of the project and Mary, I call her the curriculum whisperer. I think she's done a presentation with me last year about this project. And Mary does a really good job. She's really a creative thinker and she put together this year two or helped me put together this year two. We came up with a castle and we came up with ideas to gamify this, but the beauty of it and what I wanted to see from the teachers in the grant is for them to take it on. And so Mary charged ahead and as we worked together through this project, it was really a wonderful experience. Let's just back up. The students loved this project from going from surf to lord and lady learning sixth grade medieval history as well as Arthurian literature along the way. Yes, Mary is great indeed. And we also published articles on this project as well. And then came year three. So we had built the starter program, which was the Diary of a Young Girl, which was really pretty much most of the work there was pretty teacher guided. And then the second year with the heir of the king, it was really kind of student guided. They were working through challenges and quests. So the natural extension from that was year three, which was really what I call the digital design. Just make sure my speak is going. And again with Mary Howard, as well as the other teachers, I don't want to diminish their impact as well. But Mary was one of the key drivers of this one with her students. And we also had the Darwin Martin House, which is you can see the picture behind me. That is one of Frank Lloyd Wright's creations. One of his early houses still in Buffalo. If you're ever in Buffalo, feel free to check that house out. It's right by the Buffalo Zoo. And the really the beauty of this project was the students got a field trip opportunity to the Darwin Martin House. And they got to see Frank Lloyd Wright's style of architecture known as Prairie style architecture. And then the students had a chance to go into the virtual world and create a Frank Lloyd Wright inspired architecture piece of their own, which was amazing. And as you can imagine, the students just jumped into it full force and did some amazing work. And Mary documented a lot of this on the website that was shared earlier. And if you need that website, it's islandoe.weeble.com. And you'll see the links to the different, all the different projects we did. And then we also had a local school here do an art museum project, which to me was one of the, again, a natural extension. I reached out to one of the art teachers here locally at Frodo and your middle school and Sheila Cannon. And Sheila said she was, I hope she doesn't mind me saying this. And again, forgive me for going a little off script here. But she was pretty scared about doing it, but she let me be a part of it and help the kids and it was really fun letting them come in and build their own kind of virtual art museum. And again, we wrote an article for New York State Department of Education and got that published on their innovative projects website. I can get that article link for you. So Mary, of course, being the charge ahead teacher, she also went on to create some more digital projects within our virtual world. She created an invention convention for her students where they did a business prototype and then they had to build their business within the virtual world and create almost everything. It was amazing the projects they did. And Mary also created the book study adventure based on the book, the Westing game. So she had created a Westing mansion and had a scavenger hunt within the game and embedded all kinds of really amazing things in there. So great book and great project. And again, it was, you know, what I wanted to see. I wanted to see teachers take off and create their own content. So we continue to work to enhance and to add. And I was also recognized with awards and accolades, which recognized the work that all of the great people did. You know, I hate to have my name attached to it because so many people, the work they did, you know, was amazing. I feel like in many cases, I was just the front man to all this magic. And I do have a slide. Oh, there's Mary's, there's the digital art museum pictures behind me. And the next one. Here's again, there's the middle school art projects. So again, some of the words I was, you know, blessed truly to get the nice gate, which is our local SD affiliate teacher of the year, based mostly on the Anne Frank build, the thinker award, which I think you all know and love selvi. And it's such an honor that that award is truly, you know, a fantastic honor, as well as a PBS innovator award for the Anne Frank project. And again, I mentioned these because I just really am so grateful to the team of people that all came together to be a part of those. And so really, as all of those awards, I consider kind of team awards. So jump back to my speak easy. So and then slowly, teachers started to gravitate away from the projects. Some of the grant teachers retired naturally. In the case of Sheila Cannon, the art teacher, she retired. So she went out with with the bang, we had lots of, you know, again, I had several teachers retire, we had some teachers that's, for a variety of reasons, moved a different subject area grade level. So we had, we had some turnover in teachers and they we didn't was hard for me to hang on to the teachers that we had. And then really in our area, and I know it really is represented more by the slides, Chromebooks became all the rage in almost all the students. And, you know, for obvious reasons, where I live is mostly rural. But even, you know, even the city schools with big budgets also went Chromebooks, they were easy, cheap, quick to start up quick to get students going. And of course, Google had built an infrastructure around it with Google Classroom and all the great Google tools. But with that with Chromebooks dominating the landscape, especially one to one, school districts were slowly getting rid of their computer labs, and they were getting rid of their high powered computers. And we really needed to, for OpenSim, there really isn't a good opportunity to, you know, you just can't do OpenSim on on Chromebooks. There is the Lumia app, which is not bad, but you really can't do a lot of creating and building. So it's really becomes more of a viewer. And it's also a cost for the Lumia app. So it really wasn't a good option. We also had to go through, you know, testing APPR. I don't know if anyone's familiar with that, but it's basically, you know, teachers are evaluated based on their test scores. Curriculum demands. Let me just make sure I'm following my speak easy here and forgive me for that. So there we go. So due to their low cost and internet-based platform, we're talking about Chromebooks. So testing APPR, race to the top, the Common Core all dominated the educational lexicon and pushed districts and schools into one size fits all programs and technology. So it was harder and harder to get the new teachers to replace the experienced teachers in the grants. And so here I stand. I stand here before you today. A well-oiled OpenSim grid with unlimited possibilities. And at this point, I only have one school that's interested. Mary, by the way, changed grade level. She's now in science teaching. Again, her school is Chromebooks now. So the challenge is there. You know, my time is coming to a close here. And so am I. So again, so Mary's science. So I feel deflated, to be honest, with you and frankly, a little defeated. I still believe in the potential of OpenSim learning, but I don't believe at this point, the culture and conditions that are necessary to reward innovative ideas has the fertile ground it needs to survive. So tell me I'm wrong. Boost me up, please. Pick me up. But more importantly, show me where OpenSim is alive and well and thriving. And I'd love to collaborate. So reach out to me. Let's collaborate. Let's misery. And I'm proud of what was created. And it's such a rewarding experience. And I hope that comes across. But I'm worried it's now time to put it to bed and kiss the experience on the forehead and let it go to sleep and look on to other things. So could it be the sleeping, the sleep of sleeping beauty with the hope that like the fairy tale, fairy tale one day it will wake up? So that's my fairy tale, everyone. So I need your help to collaborate, connect, give me new ideas to breathe this back into life. Thanks, everybody. Thank you, Spiff. I hope that this isn't your great hurrah. I hope that there's much more in store for you and others in the future. Educators, especially if you can reach out to Spiff, if you've got ideas about how we can make things better for education or use, please, you know, share those thoughts with us. Well, thank you, Spiff, for a terrific presentation as a reminder to our audience. You can see what's coming up on the conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org. And following this session, the next session will begin at 5 p.m. in the same keynote region. And it's entitled Virtual World Educational Projects Overview at CVL. Also, we encourage you to visit the OSCC 19 poster expo in the OSCC expo 3 region to find accompanying information on presentations like this and to explore the hypergrid tour resources in OSCC expo 2 region, along with the sponsor and crowdfunded booths located throughout all of the OSCC expo regions. Thank you again to our speakers, Spiff, and to the audience.