 and welcome to the 5.30 p.m. to 6 p.m. session of the 2019 Open Simulator Community Conference. In this session, we're happy to introduce a presentation called Art Gallery, a plug-and-play OER immersive activity. Our speaker is Bethany Winslow. Bethany Winslow is a volunteer with Community Virtual Library and an instructional designer at San Jose State University. In her years in virtual world, she has found that much more is needed to help educators understand how vibrant is the history of virtual worlds in education. Today, she'll talk to us about creating an immersive virtual event. And please check out the website found at conference.opensimulator.org for speaker bios, details of sessions, and the full schedule of events. This session is being live-streamed and recorded, so if you have any questions or comments during the session, you may send tweets to appopensimcc with the hashtag OSCC19. Welcome, everyone, and let's begin the session. Well, thank you very much, Scott, for a very nice introduction, and thank you, everybody, for attending this presentation. I appreciate it. I want to tell you a little bit about some of the content I've created in the hopes that it'll help other people to be able to host other fun, immersive events. Creating an in-world event, no matter how large or small, is a really challenging endeavor, I think, for most of us. But for busy educators in particular, the prospect of having something else that needs to, you know, something else that needs to be created, yet another explanation or tutorial that needs to be developed, these are just one more little hurdle that gets in the way of wider adoption of virtual worlds in teaching. And so, as an instructional designer working in higher education, I know firsthand how easily instructors can feel discouraged by those little hurdles. But I also know from experience how helping facilitate a little bit of success can really help encourage and help people to persevere. And I think we know the same thing for our students, too. Indeed, the same can be said, I think, for anybody. The Community Virtual Libraries Hypergrid Resources Project is something that I took on because I wanted to support educators to navigate and explore the wider metaverse of OpenSim. We want to help educators find their tribe in OpenSim, and we have hypergrid portals that connect with persistent virtual worlds, and information about those worlds and the people behind them. And our Director Valerie Hill often remarks that we've really got to stop reinventing the wheel and working alone in our little silos. That's the default mode I see in the physical universities. And I think that solitary habit kind of dies hard in in world, too. An educator who's new to a virtual world and new to the concept of hypergridding. This whole metaverse concept and open world can be very intimidating, and people can be not knowing where to start. Not everybody has the ability or the inclination right away to build in their own world. And one of the first questions that faculty have for me when I talk about any new concept or show them a new technology is to ask me for an example. So one of the things that I wanted to start providing at the Hypergrid Resources Library are a few things that sort of scaffold the use of the virtual environment with some pre-built areas and, you know, instructional content and immersive lesson examples. My latest project is, you know, an immersive art activity, but that's really just one piece of a larger picture that I want to kind of sketch out for you before I tell you about the immersive art activity and the content that I have for you guys. So, you know, I got the idea for this activity after I attended an enrolled event where students had presented their work with slides, just like we're doing here, which is awesome. But it occurred to me with some tutorials. It might not be that hard to go once that further and have students do something beyond maybe exploring a region. And I know that doing something creative is highly engaging and that embarking on that first step of making and tinkering really supports the community of practice that we've been talking about. And I really think this activity can help your participants to get invested in what they're doing on your region. But again, faculty shouldn't have to reinvent the wheel. I wanted to create content that anyone could use because this is the sort of support that faculty need. And this isn't just my own observation. You know, research has identified that the lack of institutional support and training is one of the reasons virtual worlds didn't stick with educators despite a lot of early adoption. And I've also heard this directly from educators I've met in world and in world events. In fact, Greg Perrier from Northern Virginia Community College has shared extensive thoughts and ideas on how to address this challenge with his presentation materials that are available at the Science Circles website. And in fact, I really want to continue to develop resources at the library that will help bring Greg's vision for educators orientation to teach in virtual worlds kind of come to life at the Hypergrid Resources Center. So that's a bigger sort of long-term plan that I've got. And it really kind of ties in nicely with what open educational resources that we're kind of talking about here. And ultimately, we want to have that Hypergrid Resources Library be that hub that helps coordinate an educator-specific orientation of virtual worlds and the lessons that we learn here. And so I'd like to support educators who want to have a safe space to do their work and be able to practice presenting in worlds before trying it out with their students. And so that's a sort of big picture of the direction I see for the Hypergrid Resources Libraries. And so creating content that's an open educational resource and using OpenSend to do it, for me it's really about two things here. It's leverage and sustainability. And at CVL, we really promote collaboration, sharing, because crowdsourcing, the development of virtual environments for teaching and learning, it just seems to make good sense. I think it's a worthy long-term sustainable activity. And the alternative is that we might be just at the mercy of others who are selling us solutions. And for educators just getting started who might not be ready to have a region of their own, where else would they go first? That has been a library. So we do have portals that connect to other people's worlds. And we have public spaces where educators can meet with a colleague to try out their hand at presenting in worlds. At our kindly location, we have some additional beautiful meeting or discussion areas and settings that I think really are conducive to learning. And we really want to go beyond providing attractive areas where they can meet with students or colleagues or practice delivering a presentation. So I want to offer additional resources that show an educator what an immersive activity might look like in a world and actually give them content they can copy and put into their learning management system too. So what I've been working on are several different examples. And all of these are marked clearly as shared via Creative Commons Licensing. So anybody can copy and use what they find at our location here. And perhaps they'll just give somebody an idea or two. But visitors to the HyperGrid Resources Library on Kitely Oradicon will find an example lesson that integrates hypergrid exploration. So I have on the screenshot here some example lessons, a lesson of a hypergrid with instructions. There's directions on how to hypergrid do a local teleport hot for the students with some screenshots. And I have inquiry questions that are pre-written. So an instructor could actually look at this and see how this could be useful. And they could modify this for a real lesson. The note card giver provides links to Google Docs that an instructor can use as is or modify. And finally, one of the long-term goals of CBL I kind of think should become maybe a GitHub type of repository of various open educational resources as well as maybe OAR files. Now I don't know the technical side of how to do that, but it seems to me to make a whole lot of sense that this is very much a library and archival kind of project. But I want to tell you about the immersive art activity. So this immersive art activity, I call it the art gallery contribution. After completing a survey about an educational event, when it asked for a recommendation to make it the next one even better, I wondered if I might be able to help walk new participants through a process of taking a photo or a selfie somewhere in the region and then meeting at the sandbox and showing them how to add their photo to a simple prim. And I actually volunteered to help do this. And then you know it dawned on me I should just write up instructions, create some generic signage, make a couple of tutorial videos, and then just share this with anybody who wants it. I think the activity could be adapted to a number of different kind of different ways. So the event where we're going to test this out for us is our own event where is going to be a friends of the community virtual library wall. So at the event we'll be asking people to take a selfie anywhere on our region 52. And someone could you know adapt this to some artistic or landscape photography art gallery at their own event or whatnot. I think there's a few things though you need to do to make this work. First of all, you've got to provide orientation to your specific location and you know how to access the tutorials. But my generic content, tutorial content should really help. But I'd still recommend meeting your participants in world. I would recommend to instructors to encourage collaborative exploration, maybe in teams or small groups. And I'd even provide, you know, recommended teleport locations on Google Doc or something. And you could put that sort of thing in world on a note card, or it could be something you post in your learning management system. But my instructions are generic, but there's a tutorial video on how to use the search and your mini map and the world map and how to just click to teleport and explore. Ideally, I think the event would take place over a long enough period of time to allow people to you know, to log in and out multiple times over several days. Because you'll want to meet at the stand box to help students with the resin of a prim and helping out there. But I really tried to make the tutorials be enough to help your students on their own. And finally, you'll want to have some kind of little concluding activity like a mixer where you add their artwork to a gallery wall. And I'd also recommend a prize for participation. That's a fun incentive. And it's not essential, but giving away some goody is another engagement device that helps participants feel invested in the activity. So if I were an instructor, I'd probably also give extra credit for this kind of thing too. So I'll show you a couple other photos of what you'll find at the Hypergrid Resources Library. So first of all, I have to tell you guys, I've learned everything I've learned here, I've learned by doing and it has not always been easy. This kind of thing has been part of my own journey as a learner and building in worlds. For example, I had a terrible moment of panic this week when I went to Kitely with my OSCC avatar and found my horror that I could not build in the 52 sandbox. I know you guys can appreciate that. But that kind of panic, it worked with another avatar from Avocons. I couldn't figure it out right away why it wasn't working. And I went to the welcome zone and then noticed the sign welcoming me to join Communication Arts Group, and then I had an epiphany. And indeed joining the group is what enabled me to use the sandbox and have a building permission. So of course, I completely amended my instructions. But seriously, this is a kind of hurdle that can derail educators. So I don't mind going through this frustration and trying to document everything I'm learning because it can become a resource for anyone else in the future. So I've created some signs with embedded note cards for students. And these are at the exhibition booth 10. And these are full permissions. So you should be able to, and I tested it, you should be able to take copies. Let's see here, I'll show you. In terms of the tutorial, I am using Google Drive and Google Doc so that anybody can take a copy and sort of edit themselves. But the idea here is making something that's generically useful enough for many people so that anyone can participate, even asynchronously, if they can't come to your live event, that they can still participate. I've created some generic signage with directions on how to find and get for sandbox. And the signs have some note cards that have links to the tutorials and screenshots. They're on the Google Docs and video tutorials that we have on our YouTube was YouTube. So I don't think I really have time to show you a video, but you can get copies of these resources and check out the videos and tutorials at expo booth 10. And I would love your feedback. For example, if you see any problems or have any suggestions, I can integrate your suggestions right onto the Google Docs. It's really nice to be able to make this kind of edit and it automatically means that everyone using this resource has the latest and best instruction. So, hooray for crowdsourcing and for leverage, right? I did intend to group all this content together and into a single folder, but I haven't done that yet because, honestly, I figure out stuff as I go and I haven't figured that out yet. So we do encourage you to please join us to help us test the useful moves of these tutorials and become a friend of the Community Virtual Library. We have a holiday mixer on Friday the 20th from 3 to 4.30. And if you can't make it at that time, we hope you'll still come another time. And because you can follow the instructions there, share your photos with me and I'll add it to the Friends of the Library wall. What we're going to do is meet at the Hypergroup Resources Library at Cookie 2 on the Kite and Grid. And to kick it off, we're going to, I'll recommend some places to visit on our region. And you can use this or the teleporters on your own and kind of look around. We'll take some selfies or photos and gather at the Cookie 2 sandbox and make our objects and then go back to the gallery, which is right next door to the main library building. And we'll be adding people's portraits to the Friends of the Library wall. So, you know, I think that's about it. Thank you very much to everyone who's come to this presentation. I really do hope that you find some of this content helpful or that you can see the value for an educator who doesn't have the expertise that I think most of this audience actually has. And I think we might have a minute or two for any questions or comments. But if your educational location is not connected to our portals, please contact me. I really do want to connect to your location. And like Eileen, I have a Google Doc. I think this was a great idea, the Google Doc. I totally did this. Let me copy this in here. So if you guys have any suggestions, just post it on that Google Doc because I can't keep up with all the virtual worlds that there are. And of course, if I've ever linked to your hyperverted location and you don't want it, please let me know that. I'll take the portal down. But oh, thank you, Eileen. I wish I had more faculty at San Jose State who are doing stuff in world. And that's why I'm delighted to help you or your students or your faculty. It's great. So if there's any questions, let me know. Thank you very much, Bethany. Yes, if anyone has any questions, please put them into the chat stream and I will read them out to Bethany and we'll take a few more. Is there any attempt to do more than put a picture on a prim, like build something? Well, that's a great question. Like I said, I learned by doing, I'm not a great builder. It was a revelation for me to be, and now I think it's easy to put a picture on a prim. But I have very little other skill. I wouldn't know how to make a script. So I am definitely looking to do more in terms of creating tutorials or help for other faculty who want to teach in world. And like I said, I want to build on Greg Perrier's vision for an educator-specific orientation. So I have some definite ideas with that. And the biggest challenge you see for new users, well, that's a great question. Eileen can speak to this at length as well. There's a learning curve. It's hard. And I really believe that it should be. And my pitch right now is I go to a lot of physical world conferences. And I, there's lots and lots of interest in VR. It's everywhere. But a lot of people I know, I meet all over the country. They've never been in a virtual environment. And I encourage them to make the virtual worlds their professional hobby, as a form of preparation. Yeah, you guys have videos going over the basics. Yeah, I should add that to the library forums. I'm going to go ahead and copy that right now. Thank you. We do need to kind of like, yeah, have things not be scattered all over the metaverse and be recreating the wheel. You know, we're reinventing the wheel all the time. Alan asks, have you asked folks if they spend a few hours a week helping teach building to teachers? No. I think there's different kind of groups kind of doing things. Everybody's kind of doing stuff on their own. And it looks like you want to ask another question, like, would I be willing to do that? I would. In fact, I've thought that I could maybe start hosting like weekly Zoom sessions. Maybe I can't do this weekly, maybe monthly Zoom sessions to get started. But I need faculty who are interested. I only know a few people at San Jose State even doing anything in the world. And they're all at Bacara and CDL. They're all my peeps in the world right now. Well, again, I appreciate you guys maybe taking a look at what I have created and what I've shared out. And then again, give me feedback. If you say, you know what, this video is too complex or it's too simple or can you make one like such and such? I'm all ears. See, I'd like to, I need to know where that curriculum is. If you, Rhiannon, if you could put that link on that Google doc, I want to kind of start being able to connect to all of that content instead of like make a curriculum you've got one. But then start kind of providing a, hey, start here first, go to this curriculum, do this for two weeks, and then come over to here. Nice. So anything you guys want to put on that Google doc? Like, you know, Eileen has a Google doc. I think we got to kind of try and work more collaboratively together. I cannot agree more. I'm definitely, I bookmarked your doc myself and I'm going to go do a deep dive. All right. Thanks, everyone. Thank you, Bethany. That was a terrific presentation and there's a total need for everything that you're doing. Now, as a reminder to our audience, you can see what's coming up at the conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org, following this session. The next session will begin at 6pm and it's entitled Music at OSCC 2019.