 Welcome to the 1030 a.m. to 11 a.m. session of the 2021 Open Simulator Community Conference. In this session, we are pleased to introduce the presentation Excalibur and the story continues. Our speaker is Haike Philp. Haike is CEO of Let's Talk Online, an immersive education specialist for language teaching and learning. She's co-initiator for the virtual classroom and EU-funded Lancelot and Avalon. She's the founder of the virtual roundtable conference and co-owns a donation in Second Life and in OpenSim. Please check out the website, foundatconference.opensimulator.org for speaker bios, details of sessions and the full schedule of events. The session is being live-streamed and recorded. So if you have questions or questions, please contact us. We'll be happy to answer any questions you may have. Thank you for joining us. We're live-streamed and recorded. So if you have questions or comments during the session, you may send tweets to at opensimcc with the hashtag O-S-C-C-21. And again, please put the word question before your actual question in the chat if you need to ask a question in the local chat. So welcome again, everyone, and let's begin the session. Over to you, Haike. Hello, and good evening to some. Good afternoon, good morning. Thank you very much for being here. And I'm happy to have been following in the footsteps of Helena, although this is really difficult. Hasn't she done a wonderful presentation? And to be honest, I am truly admirable at what she's been doing in opensim. Thank you so much, Helena, for your hard work with your students. And you are giving us often the solid, pedagogical principles of teaching in world. Thank you so much. And I'm here to talk about Excalibur. So Excalibur is now it's finally been funded. Yes, yes, yes, after, it's the fifth one after Lancelot, Avalon, Guinevere, Camelot, now Excalibur. And it is wonderful to hear that the European Commission in the Erasmus Plus Program has got some funds left over for that one. And Excalibur, I've talked about it last year already when we did some special sort of proposal. And then at that time, we got turned down because the project coordinator was British. You know, it was a university in UK and because of Brexit, they didn't grant us the funds. So we resubmitted with a new project coordinator then in spring this year. And that's the, yeah, yeah, that's the Finnish university project coordinator. So let me talk about what Excalibur stands for. And I know it's a little bit long. It's even as long as that almost the speak easy heart can't handle it, expanding content and language integrated learning through building a sustainable future in real time and immersive environments. And there's something great about this acronym and the acronym, oh, sorry, just to mention the University of Finland. It was project coordinator. And there's something great about this acronym because it contains another acronym which in the language learning world has a lot of meaning and a lot of famous connotation to it, which is CLIL. Does anybody of you know what CLIL stands for? Have you heard about this language learning policy which in Europe, thank you, Buffy, which in Europe has been kind of the major language learning policy. I mean, there is no, in Europe, there's no language ministry as such, but all of the countries just follow recommendations by ECML, which is kind of apart from Council of Europe, you know, an extended arm of Council of Europe, but they're following recommendations and the recommendations are based on research and research has found that if students and pupils in schools learn STEM subjects in the schools in their respective language, and this is what the acronym stands for, kind of language, is an approach for learning content through an additional language, thus teaching both the subject and the language. So the subject is usually is STEM, STEM subjects like science, technology, engineering, arts and maths, and they are taught in English rather than in the language of the respective country. And it's not taught in English, not in Italian, in German, it's taught in English in the schools in Europe. And this policy has been widely implemented and it's rather difficult for some of these science teachers. On the other hand, the students are very excited about it. So it's very popular amongst the pupils for some, you know, and so they've been working hard and implementing CLIL in Europe. So in Excalibur, which will be focusing on immersive building, the project coordinators and some of the universities, and I'll be talking about the project partners now, University in Nordisk, Artiske in Norway, and they are at the very, very most northern tip of Norway, so they're near the Arctic Circle. So they're very interested in teaching at a distance and in that case, it is the German CLIL form, CLIL Lotte, it's called, and the University of Norway is providing some expertise when it comes to steam subjects in the schools been taught in German, interestingly. Then Germany is present, Landesmedia Zentrum, teacher gaming. Teacher gaming is an amazing partner because they developed Minecraft Edo before it was acquired by Mojang and it's not the Microsoft Minecraft Edo. They are not those ones, but they've built up a community of 20, some 70,000 teachers who are playing Minecraft. So, and its focus is a lot on Minecraft. So the schools involved Minecraft is the core sort of technology and OpenSim will also be deployed. I mean, initially in the project, there was a clear direction of doing OpenSim as well, but budget funds, cuts, which is normal when you apply for funds, yeah, they're not drastic, but we might still work on even like not doing things in OpenSim. I don't know yet. The project will start in March and the project partners will meet in January, February to discuss the technologies involved. It will be Minecraft and Mine Test, which is the open source version of Minecraft and hopefully also OpenSim. It would be to my liking. Why OpenSim? Oh, I'll just quickly mention our expo, four reading building. So why OpenSim? Well, if you remember two years ago, we did a comparison of a lot of 3D environments and came to our favorite one, OpenSim. And then last year we set out with basically a bare piece of land. Oops, I have to catch up with my speaking yard. Yeah, oh, sorry about this one. So, okay. And now they're coming up the workshop, yes. And two years ago we, in Evo, Evo is our sort of annual workshop, language teachers buy the hundreds and thousands get together. Thanks, Lea. And for five weeks we immerse ourselves in various activities. This year in January, we focused on storytelling and I have some beautiful products that are brought with me, I'll come to that in a minute. But two years ago we decided it was OpenSim and now what we did is this bare piece of land. It looks much, much more beautiful. That was last year. And this is what Egya Nation in Kiteley is this year. A gorgeous FourSim region, almost full of various spots for what we love the storytelling part of it. And it's so beautiful. It's got lakes, it's got parks, it's got several castles, it's got sandboxes. And here this Evo session to which I would like to very much invite you. The Evo session will take place here. And this is where we will also learn building in OpenSim, but not only in virtual worlds. And some of our builders are also teaching us how to create a hut in Second Life, for example. Thanks, Shaken. And some of our activities coming up will also be about building in virtual reality. So Egya Nation in Second Life is still active. And Egya Nation in OpenSim is beautiful. And we're so proud of what the teachers have put together for our Evo session. I was amazed, absolutely amazed. Amazed at the beauty, amazed at the products. So and the story books, which I'd like to present from this year's Evo session are the fantastic work we did. Now, coming up, as I said, it's about building, but this time we did focused on storytelling. And here in, I'm going to present some of the examples. So if you could perhaps take those links in the speakeasy hut and check it out for afterwards. I pasted a couple of them. There are done in Book Creator. Book Creator is an online platform which allows us to put screenshots together in form of comic books or in form of reading books. They've got several templates for that. And we use the Book Creator to develop the story and then we took the screenshots from Second Life. Here are the examples. We're so proud of them. And especially the one from Singapore 1825 by Chris Morningsing, so well done. And some of you may know Chris Morningsing. Yeah, he joined our Evo session and he took us to his Singapore 1825 Island which is absolutely adorable. And he built that together with Kaylee West, if some of you know him from Second Life. Dr. Scott Grant, Monash University. Does anybody know him? No? Oh, she's volunteering. Oh, wonderful, wonderful. It's so great to be among friends. So I come to the almost the end of my session and I hope to get another five minutes to actually ask you the audience a couple of questions. Here's the amazing journey that I started 2003 and the year funding project and here's Excalibur number five. So made more than 2 million euro. No, funding, 2 million euro. Oh, Kaylee, we love her. Absolutely love her. And Chris Morningsing was a student of Kaylee's. This is where the connection goes. So the one thing which was the purpose of my talk today was to invite you to the Evo 2022 session. Check out one more time the link to sign up. It's an unofficial link because sign up apparently only starts in January, but I'd like to give you that one again. And this Evo immersive session will focus on building in virtual worlds and virtual reality. So we have some of our language teachers, experts or building in framevr.io. Engage in old space VR and Mozilla Hub and we want to learn this kind of building too in virtual reality as well as in virtual worlds which is then open sim and second life. And I'm also part of the Evo session Minecraft MOOC. So in order to prepare for Excalibur, yeah. This is where I stopped about what's happening in the metaverse for us language educators. And can I ask you a couple of questions? The audience, if I may, you can also be free to ask me a couple of questions. And well, the biggest question I have is, have you met people in world who the unofficial link? Did I paste it or not? Did I not paste it? Oh, it's the tiny URL link that I've pasted. Let me grab that unofficial one. Yeah, let me grab that unofficial one again. One more time. Okay, Heike, there's a question already. I got lost in the chat. What is the unofficial link again? Yeah, that's the one. I just pasted it, it's in Canvas. And as I said, don't expect any activities when you sign up there. It's Canvas link, but from January onwards, we will be able to officially announce that one. So you can sign up a little bit beforehand. And Friends Charming worked on Aframe VR, a web project we got spaces like that. That sounds wonderful. Rhine and perhaps we could ask friends to, if you wants to present how to build, if he knows how to build Aframe VR, do you? Oh, is he here? Probably is. And you know of people who stayed in world because they wanted to learn a language or who came in world because they wanted to learn a language? And do you know of people who stayed in world because they learned to build? Friends, good you're here. Rhine and says, absolutely. Can I ask the audience? I mean, you can also ask me questions, but I would love to know from you because last year and the year before, I keep calling for a big building project. I'd like to do with all of you guys. The Tower of Babel. The Tower of Babel with all of those different. Well, the thing is that I asked you, what do you think will bring people in the world or what keeps them in world? And a lot of you have said, well, easier entry, more orientation, more this than the other. And we've been doing this for 15 years and people are not staying. They come in world, yes, but they're not staying. So I would love to perhaps get everyone together for a big, big, big, big, big, big building project. The Tower of Babel. And I will keep asking you every year again until we do it. So with this, I'm closing. Thank you so much, everyone. Thank you. Thank you very much, Heike. And by the way, I know some people who come for languages and at least to practice some languages in Opensim. So thank you very much for this informative and interesting presentation. And as a reminder to our audience, you will want to check out conference.opensimulator.org to see what is coming up on the conference schedule. We now are moving, I'm sorry, also we encourage you to visit the OSCC 21 Poster Expo in the OSCC Expo 3 region to find accompanying information on presentations and explore the hypergrade two resources in OSCC Expo 2 region, along with sponsor and crowd funder booths located throughout all of the OSCC Expo regions. The next session will be at 11 a.m. and in this keynote region, and it is entitled Grand Opening of Opensimulator Art. Thank you again to our speaker and the audience.