 Welcome to the 3.30 to 4 o'clock session of the 2020 Open Simulator Community Conference. In this session, we are happy to introduce a session called dystopia rising, how emergency remote education opens the portal to the metaverse. Our speakers are Chris Lukes and Kay Novak. Chris Lukes is a PhD student at Old Dominion University. He has 15 years of experience teaching online and face to face. He also has passion for investigating new technologies and collaborating with other educators on exploring virtual worlds and games. Kay Novak is an instructional designer and a PhD student at the University of Colorado, Denver. She also leads and facilitates the metagame book club, which combines the reading of fiction, gameplay, and education research. Please check out the website found at conference.opensimulator.org for speaker bios, details of the sessions, and the full schedule of events. The session is being live streamed and recorded, so if you have questions or comments during the session, you may send tweets to at OpenSimCC and the hashtag OSCC20. Welcome everyone. Let's begin the session. All right. Well, thank you very much, Lear. This is Chris and I will be talking for a first couple slides and Kay and I will just bounce it back and forth. We'll also be typing in the script in the chat as well for those that prefer that method as opposed to reading a Google doc, which we put in earlier. And so today we're going to talk to you about how the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and remote learning and education has opened a pathway for more educators to visit the metaverse and its many worlds and environments. So here is just basically one definition and the key takeaway here is dystopian fiction offers basically offers a way for us to look at a vision of a future and in some instances even inspire action. So one of the things that we are looking at for this presentation is we're like going like, oh, 2020 is does seem a little bit dystopian, I don't know if everyone agrees with that or not, but we'll talk a little bit about that shortly. So what is dystopian literature or dystopian genre? It's characterized by five things. It's characterized by government control, technology control, environmental disaster, a focus on survival, and the loss of individualism. Some examples of dystopian literature that we've covered before in our book club and other places is Ready Player One, Ender's Game, Altered Carbon, Snow Crash. Is any one of these your favorite? Feel free to type in. I will just jump in here while we're saying. OK, the first of these, I was going to say, I was going to jump in. Yeah, only one. You can put more than one. I was going to say the first thing I've ever read, Snow Crash, OK, then Ender's Game, then Ready Player One, then Altered Carbon. And so, yeah, and everybody's going all of them. So I'm going to say just the ones people are unlikely to have read. I'm going to first ask everybody. I mean, we've got enough gamers here. So in chat, just type Y for yes or N for no. You don't have to go into more detail than that. That's everybody here, Red Snow Crash. OK, do we have anybody here who hasn't read Snow Crash? If you have not read Snow Crash, oh my gosh, read it now. OK, read Snow Crash. OK, there are things. And I mean, I read it like 10, maybe I'm trying to think how old is it? Is it 15 years old? Maybe maybe 20 years old. OK, read Snow Crash. There is so much that you will get that that deals with dystopia and the pandemic and everything like that. Go ahead and read that. And in fact, you guys are making me think we have to bring up Snow Crash for a quick read from the book club. There are things about it that you will go, oh my god, they're predicting exactly what is happening now. This is almost William Gibson's 15 minute into the future. OK, and maybe we will, because this is so wonderful and beautiful. And we'll keep referring to that. The next thing, altered carbon. Altered carbon actually did not come onto my radar until. It did not come onto my radar until I actually saw it up on Netflix. But there's parts of it that we're we're dealing with with everything going virtual now that there is just this overall framework that works really, really well. Yeah, yeah. So altered altered carbon. OK, it is adult. OK, so it is not. Well, Ready Player One and Ender's Game could be considered YA and we could have our resident librarian Beth even jump in on her consideration of it, but Ready Player One and Ender's Game, I believe both of them were not written as as young adult novels, but they but the young adults took them over. OK, so so now they're called like now they're considered YA. Yeah, Snow Crash. I wouldn't think you would have have Snow Crash in there. Their parents might object to like little pieces in it. Altered carbon, definitely adult. Yeah, wound up living Ready Player One. Yeah, so so the whole the whole thing here and this is we're jumping into our discussion already, but but the whole thing that I wanted to say is all of these give us examples of societies that are living. Partially virtual and we're doing that now and I'm an educator and I know we have a lot of fellow educators here. Remote emergency learning is hard and it sucks. And and I know I know that it sucks is a technical term. OK, we'll use it later. Oh, Val, thank you for that. Thank you for reminding me Metaverse, Kate. Yeah, Metaverse came from snow from the book Snow Crash. So Val, maybe we should talk and and maybe our groups can get together and read read Snow Crash together again. Not that we've done it before, but together. Yes, an emergency responders and I will tell you right now I've been assigned as an instructional designer to work with the nursing the nursing program and the nursing students, and it is dystopic. I will tell you that we came we ended up we ended two weeks ago. We spent a week doing nothing but like role playing difficult conversations with the students because the students are not getting the time and this is the US and the US is having real problems right now. They're not getting the time on the floors with nursing supervisors. Normally when they're doing their bachelor's degree in nursing, they would be spending a lot of time shadowing people who have the role of a nursing supervisor. They cannot do that because they can't get on the floors. Yes, serendipity. That's exactly how I feel. Oh, if we only had, yes. Oh, Mike, I did not know Snow Crash was written to be a graphic novel series. I can actually see that and I can really see the person the places where the graphic novels were put. Yes. So Val, maybe we should talk about revisiting Snow Crash like really soon. OK, what I'll tell you is this is a discussion we had with the ISTI virtual environments network people. And we also did a presentation at ACT. You're not getting the same presentation because the people there were really novices. But you guys are you guys are experts and learners. But ACT, that's the group where all the professors who do instructional design belong to. Yeah, and the thing about it is we had that discussion trying to open the eyes of some instructional design professors. Now, there are instructional design and educational technology professors who came into virtual worlds, you know, anywhere from 15 to 10 years ago. And then they kind of left. I want to I want to bring them back. They did a whole bunch of research. So if you ever go looking for something for research, there's a whole lot of stuff. There is a whole lot of stuff there. And advocates just reminded me, we got to get back on topic. OK, we'll get back on topic. I should take on our slides. Get back on our slides. Let's take it over again. I'm bad. I already started talking. OK, go. OK, slide five. So let's go ahead and see. So this is a quick slide that looks at the comparison. So we have the dystopic characteristics on the one side. And we have the 2020 characteristics. What's going on now in 2020? Do you see some similarities that are showing up there? And if folks are not from the US and are wondering what the color of county colors mean, I'll go ahead and type in a quick website. You can click on to sort of see what the US is doing as far as how the rating covid the pandemic and how the pandemic is going in each different county in the state and different color coding everything. And so you're seeing a lot of similarities between the two. Yes, the color wheel of severity. And so we're seeing a lot of that and a lot of this rose up. And you're seeing a lot of technology mediated interaction like Zoom. So a quick question. Is this the oasis that Klein described in Ready Player One? I'm seeing a lot of no's. Yes. I know. I know. And not even the oasis. I mean, OK, in Ready Player One, there's just that small portion that talks about the school. But if you think about, I mean, him talking about what his professor, he goes like, I don't know if my teacher looks like this in real life, but it works. And they they did a solar system thing and they went walking in the solar system. I mean, oh, my God. And then also the other thing about it was Zoom started out being everyone's like Zoom is going to save education during the pandemic. That became everyone's pandemic response was to put people on Zoom or other web conferencing systems. And then about the summer, after about a semester, we started hearing the word Zoom fatigue and talking about, well, what is Zoom fatigue and how are people dealing with Zoom fatigue? And if that's a new term to you, here's a quick link that's there. And it's yes, I agree. I agree. It's more of a black mirror episode. Yes. Oh, it is. It is. Thank you for that insight. That's a great way to describe it. OK, so I'm going to take over and we'll go quick and Chris will be pasting things in because, of course, we got more, you know, obviously there's more we'd love to discuss than we're actually, you know, we actually ever have time for. OK. So, I mean, the thing of it is when I know I'm an awful person, but when I when people go that they have Zoom fatigue, I'm like amateurs. Oh, you're amateurs. OK, the reason why I say the reason why I say amateurs is because like you haven't been online long enough. And, you know, the next point is, you know what? People who live stream for a living, they I mean, I've watched. I will tell you, I did a little research and this will eventually come out an article about what are the characteristics from the people who make videos on YouTube who talk about live streaming? OK, who talk about how to live stream. And when you look at those, the comments that people make are you have 10 seconds to catch people's attention before they jump to the next before they jump to the next channel. How many of our instructors or people who are are leading Zoom meetings have that kind of skill? OK. There are not that many people who have that kind of skill. OK, so so I just want to say that, OK, we think it's time. Bring in, bring in the novices, bring back the veterans. Get everybody, you know, who used to be in Second Life in OpenSim and may have them make a I don't care a short video or show a really short thing. OK, so we're going to go really fast now. OK, so so and this is just a quick question for everybody. How many virtual worlds do you normally go into? And I'm tossing in World of Warcraft because I feel that the World of Warcraft is a, you know, I feel that that be that anything's an M and O is a feature and not a bug. OK, but I will tell you on a lot of us at a weekly basis, what we go into three, maybe four things that could be considered virtual worlds, I would say start showing them. I mean, if people are too scared, if people are too scared, take a screenshot. You know, if they're too scared to come in, take a screenshot, take a screenshot of something big and beautiful and epic. I mean, this here is an epic fail during one of our raids, but that's OK. Yes, No Man's Sky counts. Oh, my God, No Man's Sky absolutely counts. And it's beautiful. Go there. Yeah, take things there. Twitch channels, I think so, because I will tell you, I've been describing to people, Twitch channels. OK, real quickly, because we have no time, of course, the immersive learning network. Did anybody go to that that that conference this year? It was really quick. It was in June. Chris, you could keep going back. You can you can keep going forward. I mean, it wasn't the best. This was my avatar. You can see it rising. They didn't have different shapes and sizes other than that. You know, other than that, I am not a size five. And it doesn't allow you to put put age in the face. That's pretty much me. Oh, my God. Serendipity saying I wish we could merge OpenSim to endless worlds. Like, yeah, but even in a world that was very not not robust, like here, you know, they were able to be whimsical. And if anybody clicked into the void, oh, my God, it was fun and and silly and stupid and everything that that you really need there. And and Lyra Lyra did it. I asked Lyra and Lyra did this, too. But here's the thing. I know I'm preaching to the choir here with you guys because you know what it is. Keep what I'm basically saying is, yes, I think the pandemic is a portal. I think the emergency remote learning is a portal. I know Lyra already brings her students in here and I know a lot of other people already bring the students. What I'm saying is keep going, you know, go ahead and keep going. I'm bringing my students into Mozilla Hubs. I teach a class, the class that I'm teaching. This is about where I can bring them. I can bring them into this and all VR. I'm at a community college. I do not have I can't. I don't have the funding to send things out to students for them to be able to go into. So I'm going to go real quick, Chris. So Eve online serendipity. Oh, my God, Eve online is is wonderful. Of course, second life. And the next slide, Chris, you can just go to it because we're going fast. You know, this was the my version of some stacks in the oasis that I've built about two years ago and power power of green. Absolutely. Mozilla Hubs. I'm bringing it up. It's a gateway. You use the formula of a gateway drug. This is one of our friends. Day Miami in Second Life. This is his slide when we were at a presentation. This was what he shared with us 3D web worlds. It works if the student computers are just Chromebooks and you can't get past that. Next one, Chris. Next slide. This is also from one of our friends and some people will know him, Scott Merrick. You know, he's set this up. He's set this up for people to come and look at and use. He unfortunately related to us that he can't necessarily brings his students in there. And unfortunately, I have one minute left. So in my one minute left, I'm going to say that take a look at Epic Games and Unreal Engine. They are now focusing lots of things that we can use as designers and educators, including tutorials, field guides and basically to to wrap this up, want to say, bring people into the metaverse. Talk about it. Talk about it until people go ahead and talk about it until people get it. So just wanted to say you can take a look at the additional slides that we have up here. Thank you. And basically, we just wanted to come up and talk about our times now, how they're dystopic. And whenever there's dystopia, there is room for opportunity and for and for those of us who are in games. It's the time for anybody who is chaotic, neutral to be able to go and find those opportunities and use those opportunities. So thank you. And Jaya, thank you for. Thank you for a fantastic presentation. I don't know if you guys I don't know if you saw the text chat. Yeah, there are quite a few comments for you, including Power of Green works for Epic Games. So you might want to get with him later. Oh, my God. And power if you're a lady, my apologies. Thank you for a terrific presentation as a reminder to our audience. So you want to say bye, Chris? Go ahead. Sure. Bye, thanks for coming. And thank you. As a reminder to our audience, you can see what's coming up on the conference schedule at conference.opensimilar.org. Following this session, the next session will begin at 4 p.m. in this keynote region. And it's entitled Connecting During COVID, Unlocking a High School Prom in OpenSim. Also, we encourage you to visit the OSCC 20 poster expo in the OSCC Expo 3 region to find accompanying information on the presentations and to explore the HyperGrid tour resources in OSCC Expo 2 region, along with the sponsor and the crowd funder booths located throughout all five of the OSCC Expo regions. Thank you again to our speakers and to the audience.