 This session, I'm happy to introduce the group that attended and were featured speakers at the mainstreaming virtual world learning colloquium, which was held last weekend. Our featured speakers included Joyce Bettenport, Cynthia Cologne, Valerie Hill, Krista Lopez, Eileen O'Connor, Andrew Stricker, Barbara Truman, and Rachel Uman. I'm K. MacLennan, professor of practice and director of online learning at Tulane School of Professional Advancement. The colloquium was something that I originated and applied for funding from the Carroll Lab and Bernanke Faculty Fund and received funding from this fund and my school of professional advancement. So it was held in the Avocon grid as a community event add-on to this OSCC 18 event. And the impetus for this colloquium has to do with the fact that OpenSim has been excellent fit for educators to use to stage immersive learning environments. And the key features that make OpenSim a perfect fit for educators include low hosting costs, in-world building tools, the ability to safeguard student identities, the ability to save and reuse simulators, and more. Yet the use of virtual learning simulators in OpenSim are not mainstream in higher education. They're not even mainstream in institutions that offer them. I can, I say this myself, it's offered in my courses but only about a third of the students volunteer to be part of the virtual learning activities. So in an effort to see if there is any way to refocus attention onto this terrific simulator platform, the colloquium was born. So each of the speakers were asked to ponder how and to discuss how they're currently using virtual world learning simulations, how their use differs from past use, what they think is needed to expand the use of 3D learning simulations, and what they predict in the way of simulations. For my contributions, both current and future, my suggestions include to educators and others in 3D virtual world platforms to use simulations both in world and out of world. I've had a lot of success videotaping case studies and then using them in our learning management system. Also, the only feature presenter that wasn't able to make it here today is Valerie Hill, and she is sponsoring and working on a virtual world database. So with Valerie's work in mind, consider sharing your content and tutorial creations with the educator community. Also, I'm presenting with two colleagues from Tulane first thing tomorrow morning about virtual machine software where my colleagues have enabled me to offer students the use of virtualized viewers where they can enter the virtual world and participate in simulations from any mobile device, including their mobile phone. And finally, what I'd like to leave the group with is for the group to consider addressing the need for a single sign on it to open SEM from learning management systems. We've heard a lot of discussion about new viewers, and I just would like the new viewer to be API or LTI and be able to be integrated into our learning management systems. I have this vision of myself and students just stepping off the page with our avatars. So with that as the backdrop, I'm going to turn it over to our first speaker, Rachel Uman is an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington in Seattle. Thank you so much, Kay, and thank you all for being here. I'm so delighted to give a big summary of our conversations at the colloquium, which are very productive. So as Kay mentioned, I work at the University of Washington, Seattle. I'm a pediatrician who also takes care of babies who are newborns. And so one of the key focuses of our group there is to improve newborn outcomes. And after I got there, I made sure that their mission included technology. And so we have a focus not just on simulation based training that uses mannequins, but we are also using virtual simulations. And in the simulation world, I think it's not new. And we all know that simulations have been used for years in aviation and military, I think, you know, in space. Those are actually reasonably mainstream. Um, what has been lagging behind, I think in medical training has just been, you know, being able to translate what we are using in the mannequins and in the labs to the virtual environment. So that is an area that we have set out to try to improve on. And in addition, I know we were thinking about how we use simulations for training healthcare providers, not just in high resource settings, but also in the resource settings. And I think that is where open simulator and open simulator technology could be really powerful. So I just want to say that, you know, where we use simulations, we can use virtual environments. There's very little that's discrepan or different from the educational standpoint between writing a simulation for the mannequin and writing a simulation for the virtual world. So that's the message that we have been trying to communicate to our group with some success. And so we have a VR AR lab now at the University of Washington. It's embedded within the neonatal section. And we're experimenting with lots of different types of sims and different types of programs. So Kay mentioned then and now. So virtual worlds then, if you might recall, before I moved to Seattle, I was working in Indiana. And there we were doing the Africa Traveler series with the Global Health Sim that I think many of you heard of it. And then we also had a public health simulation that we were using to explore just the differences in outcomes between urban and urban setting for public health students that were doing an MD and MPH program. So those kind of set the stage for me because from there we did some teamwork training and we were able to develop a prototype for health care providers doing teamwork training and use that prototype to collect some preliminary data that we were later able to translate into a grant application. So being able to use open simulator as a prototyping tool I think is something that we have all or many of us have done and use that as kind of a stepping stone to translating various simulations to larger audiences. I mean, I think while we don't know the benefits, I think we've all experienced the positives of using open simulator. Some of the challenges have not completely gone away. One of which Kay mentioned, being able to connect or interface with the learning management system in order to collect that kind of check off data for what the learner has been able to do in open simulator. The other aspect is just access. Being able to access a simulation easily either on a phone or on a iPad or on, you know, simply on the laptop without multiple steps is really important. So at least for our user audience. So the other message I think I wanted to share is, you know, knowing your audience is really important. And I think we recognize pretty early that while medical providers are smart, they have very low patience for any tech issues. And so your audience matters quite a bit. I'll say one or two more things because I know that I don't have a lot of time and I'm on call also. So the phone that's ringing in the background is probably for me. But I'd like to say that our success has really been in finding applicable areas to collaborate on with other faculty. So going it alone is neither fun nor productive in academics. And so I've collaborated with faculty that are interested in disaster simulations. I've collaborated with faculty that interested in creating a tool for transport teams to use for practice. We've done a creation that involved prenatal counseling. And just, you know, different people are interested in different things. So as an educator or researcher, you may have an opportunity to kind of get a little bit out of your comfort zone, try something new, reach a different audience and thereby expand your influence or expand your reach. So we've been looking for areas where a virtual world can be inserted as a component of a larger project. So for training or testing. And with advances in graphics cards, I, you know, again, having had to buy computers, you know, to run other types of VR, if you put up OpenSim on a high-end computer, it looks great. So, you know, the concerns about graphics and fidelity of graphics are really going away, I think, you know, as people have better improved systems. So I will leave you with just one final thought and just encourage you to write about your projects. So the Journal of Virtual Studies is one that has a practical application section, but there are also other journals that, you know, like a, you know, mainstream journal, well, I won't say a journal of virtual studies. Of course, it's a mainstream journal, but other journals that are more subject focused that would still welcome a virtual project. So simulation journals, journals that, you know, deal with education and educational teaching methods. I think the more we get the message out, regardless of the tools that we're using, the more people will welcome this as just another way to learn. Thank you, Rachel. And I just want to call everyone's attention to Rachel's presentation tomorrow afternoon at 2.30, I believe, Pacific time. Yeah. Our next featured speaker is Barbara Truman. Barbara is a faculty member teaching graduate students as well as a researcher at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. Welcome, Barbara. Thank you, Kay. Yeah, it was such a pleasure last week to get together and share some insights that all of us have been working on, you know, and part of what I shared was my involvement at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. Previously, I had been a faculty administrator where I had responsibility for all kinds of decision making regarding the choosing and the implementation of learning technologies. And then to some degree, the information systems that enabled those learning technologies. And if any of you know anything about the University of Central Florida is that it has been a focal point of extreme growth in the Orlando area. So we were right in the middle of the hot seat where we had to we had to reduce seat time on our campus because there was no way we could we could build brick and mortar fast enough. But I always wanted to get involved in 3d immersive environments, you know, and I had, I had seen I had participated in all kinds of professional associations to try to learn from what others were doing at other campuses so that we could kind of bring the best back and make some good choices. The new media consortium is where I first saw Cynthia Colloine doing these presentations. And it planted a seed in me to want to follow up and learn from her. So I was very fortunate to get my doctorate degree through Colorado Tech and and met Andy Stricker as well through that process. So I really feel like I've learned from the best. As as I have gone through my progress from being on the teaching and learning side, I've met other people and tried to learn how to do the grant research. This is where I met Rachel. And we met in a virtual world first, but then we worked on a project we wrote a grant together. Unfortunately, it wasn't funded. And to the degree that we were hoping. But it was extraordinarily valuable to me as professional development. So there is no way I can go back to the traditional associations where they have their phone calls in their webinars in their once a year, face to face conferences, sometimes twice a year. There's no way I can go back and participate like that. I find that these environments are an incubator, they are an accelerator, they save lots of money. And one of the big things I came away with last week was where I saw an intersection of three themes based on our speakers. And this is very exciting to me moving forward. We heard from Valerie Hill. She talked all about digital citizenship and meta literacies and and in empowering all these learners and really trying to catalog all these resources that are available to help faculty, teachers, campuses with some of the decision making of what's going on. There's a huge role for the libraries to play in this emerging space. I also heard Krista talking about the need to support the climate. So climate stewardship was an incredible theme that I came away with. And then from some of my previous research and also with working with Andy Stricker with the Air Force, looking at how to integrate the information systems, moving towards smart city, smart community, smart campus, eventually artificial intelligence. So how the core developers come up with the protocols and the standards that will enable us to have a platform, I can see where we can combine our efforts across these three areas. And it could be the most transformational impact that we could have on higher education, at least, and then hopefully back to secondary education as well. But it's also the opportunity to work across the domains. That's been one of the activities that I have really tried to figure out how to do is how to work with the military, how to translate some of the research that they have done, lots of times on effectiveness, and then bring that back for academia. And then try to figure out how to get industry working where it will be able to find the collaborative interest so that they'll share. But then we're kind of forming this consortia where together we can solve a lot of these challenges that individually at our campuses, there's no way we can. So that's what I would just like to leave you with. That's what I came away with last week and I'm really excited moving forward to trying to connect some of the research with the National Science Foundation and some of the other associations that I've been involved in to try to move that agenda forward. Thank you. Barbara, thank you. That was a terrific summary. Our next featured speaker is Andrew Stricker. Andrew is an instructional architect at Air University at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. Welcome, Andrew. Hi. Yes, I've been very honored to spend several years working with many of you and exploring what are the possible is with these kinds of environments. The Air Force is fascinated with the means to improve on the levels of engagement and interactivity and meaningfulness. Those three parts is our secret sauce for how we're developing our airmen for the future. As I mentioned earlier today, the future that we're dealing with is very complex. The challenges are spanning multiple dimensions of issues and we're wanting our airmen to be really capable of adapting as best as they can to changing circumstances. A lot of the research around human intelligence and development and how you develop people over a lifespan to be facile with change and capable of dealing with high levels of uncertainty has been right at the heart of my work. Cynthia and Barbara have been associated with our efforts with the Air Force for over a decade at least. We've been bringing great insights from people because they're kindred spirits with each of you with their belief in collaborative efforts. I think each of you have already spoken about the power collaboration. Well, everything that we're doing benefits from design thinking that we use as our core methodology. We bring people from across industry, military communities, and higher education institutions into these very high intense rapid prototyping efforts. The Department of Defense has put together several innovation hubs at Silicon Valley up at Boston and Las Vegas and Austin and we've got one in my location, Air University. What we've done is we've invested in this kind of a model to figure out ways to really enhance the applications of virtual reality environments. I'm a cognitive scientist by education and background and so the things I'm trying to do is how to create these kind of intense scenario based simulations that really capture people's imagination and when they get into these environments they're compelling and they understand the power of learning together, problem-solving together and forming a connected network of people that go outside of their particular areas of where they work. For example, we're encouraging our military faculty to get into these environments and be connected with other faculty across several institutions and organizations. So far what we've done with our open simulator work with the Air Force, we process well hundreds of students through some of our prototypes and so they do test the robustness of OpenSIM and I absolutely agree about the power of a single sign-on. We had a single sign-on at one of our schools for captains but when it came to OpenSimulator we had to feed in that information and so it would be wonderful to have like learning interoperability standards applied for how we could connect in various learning management systems into these kinds of platforms. I'm not too worried about that, I think that will come. I'm just very excited to have the means to have the environment like OpenSimulator where faculty directly can contribute to the design build process. I've been associated with various National Science Foundation, National Academy of Sciences programs where they've emphasized that the real engine behind innovation in our universities is getting faculty directly involved in the creation of these kinds of learning scenarios and simulations and so I don't think Barbara or Cynthia you would disagree at all right everything we've done it's been involved faculty and in many cases students have been right there with us contributing you know what a wonderful way to learn right we are actually creating and building and showing how well you stand something by the models you construct right and then being able to bring others in to actually give you informed insight about your model and I know Cynthia you've used those techniques in your classes many many times and so but so much of what I see about everything I've seen at your conference and and what Tulane has put together is it's just right in line with some of the best research we have about how people learn and and what we want to try to do for the next generation of learners coming in our institution so thanks for the opportunity to share today. Andrew thank you our next speaker is Eileen O'Connor Eileen is an associate professor at the SUNY Empire State College and she's got a big presentation after this later in the day today so thank you for stopping by today give us a little bit of an overview of your presentation from last weekend okay well and thank you Kay can you hear me well enough I just want to be sure yes yes thank you well you know I'm very much enjoying hearing everyone speak and feeling a little left out myself because I tend to work in a rather isolated fashion so I'll give you my story and hope to get much more involved with others I came out of IBM back in the 1980s but I was actually in IBM open to science division in 1980 I was a chemist so I came in that way I got into big blue and that was as computers were really just starting up and so on a personal computing level became very involved took a buyout though at the end of the 80s and moved to upstate New York and went back for doctorate combining my interest in science and my interest in technology and at the same time I had a son-in-law who spent days in virtual spaces war games world of war crap that type of thing and I started to say why aren't educators using these spaces so that became my initial desire to see what was so involving and seductive about these environments and what I then went through my own journey getting out of school working for RPI for a while in engineering school where I was able to see programmers sitting there working on developing games wanting to get them myself so I remember naively saying well I'm going to make some kind of a deal with Nintendo you know they have all of these game engines and areas like that but then I never had time to pursue it and I started working for SUNY Empire State College about 15 years ago so I always had that in the back of my head now I was in the graduate program in science education initially and what happened was along the way the school itself SUNY got a grant to bring in second life and so what they actually did was had money to make a beautiful island and if you come late at the end of the day you'll see more pictures on that but they began with some help from artists to create some very lovely spaces and they went to faculty now I'm in an online program I teach 100% online we did have some scenarios early on where we actually worked with some K-12 schools but I was mostly teaching people who would become K-12 teachers and then the program brought in later to bring in more corporate developers etc but it was seeing second life that got me interested now we had help initially and there were wonderful tech support people who come in and help us and artists who would make things and if any of you know if you're a science person and my master's is in engineering I have no artistic skill so I created spaces but I was willing to work in the virtual spaces I seem to have that scientific tolerance to failure you know I was quite willing to keep on failing and I knew from being involved with computers since the 1970s that they would always make create problems but they created great possibilities so I stayed with second life making things and bringing my classes into them now I had online classes so I followed through the usual ups and downs of having some support for a while then the number of faculty that got involved although they offered this to a number of faculty they're really just two or three of us we stayed involved with virtual reality and I loved it I was able to bring my students together we had I used it mostly as a community space and we would have meetings we would have the regular online courses and assignments but we would meet together and have discussions it was an amazing way to build community and I started looking that at that as my research area then what happened as you all know it became too expensive for second life the school stopped supporting it which actually opened a lot of venues for me when I discovered open source and so I will always thank the folks here for giving me that opportunity and what open source gave me was not only the ability and I'm a big Kitely person I'm not smart enough to run all of these things myself I basically am an independent I don't work with support from the school I you know rent my own server space and I get nods that that's Eileen's research area so you know it's they don't poo poo it but they don't support me so Kitely really had a wonderful stable platform I was able to get a lot of creative commons materials and I put together my own islands and also I'd like to share with the group I made many many tutorials one of my jobs way back at IBM was technical writer so you know I needed to teach how to use these spaces eventually way went into a master's program in emerging technology and all of my tutorials are what my students use and if you learn you know if I don't want to take too long the we've had over 30 students create their own islands but the challenges are still there I'm glad to work with students but we they tend to be sort of solo islands we really need to within the school move to a higher level I see myself rather scattered you know so you know we have to teach a lot of different courses and I think as Kay was saying I wish I taught only in virtual reality but I don't I have to deal with many many other types of technologies so there's the learning there's bringing the students in and there's still a lot of resistance among faculty I've stayed below the radar literally I stay below the radar to not make waves if people sense you're doing something outside the box that they may eventually have to do it can be kind of disastrous in terms of moving through the system now I am tenured now so I'm not as worried but there's resistance there the other thing too is because I'm online I can so to speak make my students come to these assignments to these meetings but what they run into the challenge nowadays if you try to download something like firestorm there are a lot of blocks put in by institutions and I have found that instructional designers have not been as helpful as I wish they would be you know I basically tell them I own tech support but they haven't always helped so my students who work from home at their own computers are able to get into firestorm use firestorm and get into my islands but there are institutional problems if they're trying to come in from a school or something and even my fellow faculty members when they're in their physical offices often can't get into these spaces so there's there's a lot of challenges just in terms of using the technology but I think that's terrific what a wonderful overview and again we're going to come back to Eileen this afternoon so I encourage everyone to stop by her second presentation today our next speaker is Krista Lopez a professor at the University of California Irvine as well as an open simulator core developer and the originator and developer of the hyper grid thank you Krista for joining us thank you so let me just tell you what I talked about in the immersive learning symposium last week it's not so much about the the using these environments for educational purposes for a related topic that in universities we are very well aware which is for for these kinds of things meetings and conferences and that is an inherent part of of getting people together somehow and there's a lot of of meetings and conferences in in you know in higher related to higher education so much so that we fly a lot we tend to go to conferences all over the world several times a year and there seems to be this sort of association between you know if you are successful you are supposed to travel a lot which is a really bad incentive but you know that's how that's how things have been going so a few of us in a group that I'm associated with the ACM and in particular the special interest groups in programming languages we have been kind of thinking about about this issue of flying so much and contributing to climate to the planet warm warming up basically maybe we it turns out that a long distance flight is one of the major components for it's not a major but it's a it's a big chunk of of a contributor for global warming airplanes are really wasteful and so we have been kind of brainstorming about other ways that we could conduct our business as usual that that that is going to conferences and attending conferences so many times a year and we've been going through a bunch of options you know many of them some of them are sort of low-hanging fruit like carbon offsets others will be a little bit more radical it would need to change in our culture somehow and of course the most radical of all would be to to have to move the physical conferences into something like this that we're having here right now so I don't need to talk to you about virtual conferences I think you all are sold on that idea we have all experienced these events online I think you are repeating many of you are repeating the experience it's really an engaging it can be an engaging experience so the the what I was kind of trying to make an argument is that there is a strong argument for investing in these environments and in this technology with with the idea that we need to decrease long distance travel because of global warming because of carbon emissions and so I was trying to give everybody else an extra boost an extra argument for when you are competing for funding for education on these environments or meetings virtual meetings that hooking up to the idea that we need to reduce travel is perhaps a good a good way to go at it so I was trying to steer some enthusiasm among the participants there to see if we could somehow get get together and get some funding to develop the next generation of viewers which I think as you I've been telling you all all day long is the the weakest link in all this all this ecosystem so that that that's it in a nutshell first thank you yep and I hopefully we'll have a few minutes left over for questions um uh moving us along Cynthia Cologne is our next speaker a featured speaker she's a professor at Colorado Technical University thank you Sen for joining us thank you Kay let's see I had written out some notes but we won't worry about those I've I've taught 52 university classes in virtual worlds and to me that's the way to go but here's why it's not just about university classes it's not just about formal education it's about the fact that all of us need to learn and that we have this burden the world is constantly changing it's constantly complex and everything we do requires us to keep moving forward so when students come into this world all of a sudden there's an intimacy that occurs because I've worked with them synchronously as well as asynchronously right so we meet we simulate that face-to-face meeting that Christa just talked about that's so valuable right and yet we don't see our faces we see our avatars our emotions we drag content to our bodies to each other's bodies all of my students create content even though they have zero virtual world building skills okay and it's because I believe in the power of creation the reason I love these spaces and opens them in particular is because my students can come in and create and without that power of creation they don't form a connection to the content it isn't personal right and I don't mean that they're creating things that they're studying sometimes what they create models their ideas in strange and wonderful ways right and so it takes them to new levels I know our time is short so I'll wrap up I'll be speaking again at 3.30 on the deep immersion panel and I'll talk about it then but students like Barbara are so inspiring to me because they they don't leave they don't stop learning as soon as class is done or they graduate they don't disappear we still we form connections that matter and we continue the work and that to me is the future of learning in virtual worlds Cynthia thank you that was well said Joyce Betancourt is our final speaker today featured speaker Joyce is founder creative director of avocon and of course the nonprofit commons in second life and avocon enabled our colloquium last weekend I don't know how we would have done it without them Joyce thank you for taking a few minutes out today to talk to us you're welcome um yes uh so uh I actually did load a couple slides for my presentation but I will I'll go pretty quick because I know we only have a few minutes um and hopefully I can get them to go actually I'll talk until Franza picks up us slides maybe um but either way so um to to sort of um to sort of start where my where I was where I was uh uh focusing it on during the colloquium last week you know I kind of started off with um uh with my background and initially it was with um um it started actually off in the teen grid of second life um if many of you can kind of go back to that um with the with the educational nonprofit um global kids and um the work we were doing with um uh it was it was it was great work we you know we're funded from macArthur foundation's digital media and learning so a lot of the the touch points that like barber said with like um digital media literacy is really being a huge topic and and using spaces like virtual worlds and game spaces and um uh from from there and and um though the virtual world environments as we all know are very powerful for education you know we'd we'd uh you'd be teaching the teaching uh these were often high school aged students you'd be teaching them you'd go away and come back and suddenly there'd be a whole city build that they would have made over the weekend um so the the ability and the excitement to actually work in the space was great but they weren't practical in the fact that it was it was very limited even more limited as than what we think of second life the teen grid was much worse um and uh and then it kind of evolved you know from there but certainly we we worked on a lot of uh complex builds and even had the teens uh uh designing uh the experiences and building as well um and that uh that kind of led to doing um to doing sort of oh here we go that's for that um that kind of led to doing events sort of like what's here on the slide where um we were combining lots of multiple virtual worlds at once uh here is yville there.com a second life teen second life was also this and this was a particular event from the United Nations uh where Kofi Annan was receiving an award um so we would do these complex sort of bringing everybody together but still wasn't it was great but it was really hard for each of those worlds worlds to connect uh to connect or talk to each other um and also um from the from the from the doing this point of view uh you you know there wasn't uh important export the same way that we have here so it kind of was limited in regards to what each of these particular events uh meant for connecting both content and people um and then um I you know I went further on to some of the the um kind of instructional uh design um uh and educational technology stuff when this particular one was working with the the American Museum of Natural History and the challenges of uh bringing bringing students in a very tight um time frame and uh and working within the frameworks of uh what the UI uh back to the whole viewer thing what the UI was so that way you could quickly teach people how to interact and build uh in this case this was a um a a uh archeologic an archeological um uh project on um prehistoric aquatic life um and uh getting students we had you know we actually had to kind of um hack the build tools in what we had to be able to create this um and which could be much easily done if you know in some of the ways that we've talked about modular viewers um here and and uh but certainly you know was that um and this kind of comes into the now uh so primland is actually in the avacon grid um and another thing that stems back to the teen second life and global kids days is we actually had put together a an open source uh creative commons curriculum and um with that we we allowed people to remix it and folks were uh uh um sort of redistributing it mixing it up with with um uh learning management system software stuff um and primland is the open simulator reincarnation we took that up again and uh remixed it so now it's a whole um uh or that you can actually walk through learn how to build um and uh an avacon's really been sort of focusing on how trying to get these resources um out to um out to the um the community so we'll be we offer things like this too and i'll just kind of wrap up with um k brought up nonprofit commons um so nonprofit commons obviously is a big piece of it and that really brings me to kind of like moving from the educational space to like this sort of larger community and how do you how do you support those uh in in virtual environments um and um uh avacon did that initially by organizing the second life community comm conventions uh and then um moved that over to that same paradigm to supporting specific communities like nonprofit commons um this is a particular one from s l c c uh a physical conference to to christis point much more complicated takes up a lot of resources costs a lot more money um and then what we have here um and um that ultimately leaves us to things like open simulator where we have um you know where we have the event we have today and being able to support a community in a broader in a broader way um and one that we have much more um control and portability of our um our educational and other assets and uh learning so that's it joice thank you what a perfect place to to stop right where we're back at the today's conference um thank you panelists for a terrific presentation i i've been getting the high sign about running out of time uh so i'm guessing we don't have time for questions but we can probably take a couple just because we're after this we have a break so we probably can go right to the hour okay let's see um please type your questions into the chat and while you're doing that um i'm going to go ahead and give the a little bit of the announcement for the next session we have a break and our next session will begin at 3 30 p.m. Pacific time here in this auditorium it's the state of immersion tales of front line the tales of front line of learning research and engagement um we also encourage you to visit the oscc 18 poster expo in oscc expo region three and uh again uh let's take a look and see what we've got here in the way of questions sin uh all uh you are so adept at uh monitoring the chat do you see anything in the questions you know i haven't i did have a few questions that came in through whispers and i was answering them as they went on but um and and you have to realize our ability to have privacy and to be vocal publicly it is a very great gift and that's the back channel is really important and i love the fact that it's built into the tool right we don't have to go to twitter or facebook or anywhere else me we uh to have this back channel and to and to do this sharing so i love that but i want to thank you for bringing us together because i think that's very powerful and and i i look forward to our next collaboration i agree and i hope that that this becomes an annual event uh you know piggybacking uh on to the oscc events i do see one question from buffy um she asks where do we see a virtual worlds heading for the future will there still be an open sim or a second life well i can't speak for second life but i know open sim is alive and well and uh going to be around for some time to come and anybody any of our panelists please jump in to answer buffy's question well for the air force uh we are definitely excited for the future of open sim and and what it represents with open source and the community of engagement uh and developers and and end users so from the air force perspective we see a long future well thank you everyone and now a short break and we'll all be back again and you're going to see rachel and sin and barbara and uh so many of our speakers uh back again uh for more sessions at this conference thank you for attending