 Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 130 breakout session of the Open Simulator Community Conference 2013. As a reminder to our in-world and web audiences, you can view the full conference schedule on our website at conference.opensimulator.org, and you can post your questions in local chat, on the U-Stream chat, or tweet your comments using the hashtag OSCC13. This hour, we are happy to introduce Gil Hilde, Mycel Eghart, who will be presenting Language Quest and Data Analytics in Secondary School. Your Hilde, Mycel Eghart is a freelancer in the field of educational technology and co-founder of talkademy.org, a not-for-profit organization that engages in using and creating virtual environments and learning for learning purposes. Talkademy.org serves universities, companies, and individuals with learning events using Second Life and Open Sim as a frequent partner in European projects. Avalon, Talk With Me, Nexthel, Euroversity, EEA Inspiration. Before starting, Talkademy.org, Gil Hilde received a degree in computer science from the Technical University of Vienna and gathered about 10 years of professional experience in software engineering, project management, quality management, and training. Welcome, Gil Hilde. Gil Hilde. Well, thank you very much, Joe, for this long introduction. I hope everybody can hear me well. Well, welcome to my talk. Hello, everybody. I hope that everybody found me because this is rather something belonging to the educational track, and not that much here. But yes, as I said, hopefully you'll find me. This conference is so well organized, so it should be possible. What I basically want to do tonight is to give you a short report about some interesting aspects of school projects that we had run as a part of the Nexthel project during the last couple of years. And as far as I know, there's very little going on, at least in Europe, in secondary schools. And this is really a pity because everybody who tries to bring this kind of technology to schools sees how much students love it, how they get engaged, how much they can learn with this kind of technology. But as well, everybody who has already worked with schools, and I know some of you had, knows why there is so little going on in schools, because schools are really a different partner to work with. They are running on their own tracks somehow. So one interesting question is how can we approach them? What kind of activities can we offer them to get their attention and to make it fit into their normal schedule? And I think one very nice activity that is actually interesting for schools are language quests. And this will be pretty much the longer part of my talk. What I want to share with you is some experience about language quests that we developed and give you some examples, two examples. And of course, you are more than welcome to reuse this kind of quest in your own classrooms or for your own research and help us develop it with us. There are some European projects going on that try to engage teachers. Nick Svart has already introduced the Teela project to you, I guess. And there was this Avatar project before, which also tried to engage teachers. And we from Tokademi as part of the next step project, we did quite a lot of workshops for teachers in Austria. But the response, well, the interest is there, but actually making this step into the classroom is a much tougher way. So hopefully what I tell you today will help a little bit to get this technology one step further into the classroom. Basically, there are three aspects in my talk, as I said before. There is this quest design topic, including two examples. There is the aspect of data analytics, which is pretty much the field of research of the next step project. We know that in virtual worlds, we can actually collect a lot of data. We can track everything our students are doing. We know what they do, where they click, where they go, who they chat with, what they chat. So there's a lot of data to collect. And the interesting question, of course, is what to do with this data? And what does this data tell us? How can we use this data to come to conclusions about students' skills and learning progress? And finally, the third aspect of my talk is working with schools. As I said before, there are quite some challenges in working with schools. But the good news is that there are also some ways how we can handle it. Our special thanks goes to 3DLES and Nikits Ward, who allowed us to use his beautiful village of Cheperdale for the school trials. And of course, to the European Commission for the support, for the funding, this kind of research, via the next step project and the university network. I want to give you a quick overview of the next step project, just the basic ideas, because this explains why we were invited into this project. The next step project basically is about tracking what students are doing online, which kind of learning activities, analyzing what they're doing, visualizing what they're doing and feeding it back to the teacher to give the teacher a tool for planning further activities. And the next step project has quite a broad approach in terms of technology. So they are not only focused on virtual worlds, but all kinds of learning applications, like Moodle or of course mobile applications and Web 2.0 and whatever. But the important part always is to be able to collect this data. And there, of course, virtual worlds fit in perfectly. And this is our part in here. As I told before, Quest Design is something I want to focus here, because this is really something that makes a difference to the students and of course to the teachers when you try to convince the teacher that this kind of activity is beneficial for the students. The first question when designing a Quest, of course, is the topic, the kind of stories that are appealing to the target group. And when we started this, the target group were 13-year-old kids. So the first ideas was something to do with some mysteries, some vampire stories, adventure stories, something with crime, whatever. But then finally, one idea came from the students themselves because when they first entered Chatterday, they asked, where are all the people? Because when being in a city, normally you expect that there are other people there. And as we all know, unless we invite people into our virtual spaces, normally they are quite empty. And this gave a nice starting point for this Quest to let them explore what happened to the population of Chatterday. Some more details about this later. Then of course the second question is how can we achieve a maximum of activity? How can we really make the kids work? How can we ensure that there's enough interaction with each other and with the environment? Something I forgot to tell the beginning was that this school trial was a cooperative project between a school in Austria and in Norway. And of course this is a very interesting setup for the kids because they have to use English as their common language. So one point is to ensure that there's interaction going on between the Austrian and Norwegian kids and of course between them and the environment. And there are several ideas how this maximum of activity can be achieved. One is certainly to foster asymmetric roles within a team. So, for example, kids would have different parts of information and need to combine it. Or not all of the kids have the same task to do. So they have slightly different assignments. Then of course there's the possibility to interact with the environment, to read hints, etc. But as well to interact with actors which we have to organize somehow. Preferably native speakers of the language they should learn. And then of course there's the possibility for interaction with the greater community that they look for information where the internet and textbooks. So a combination with web quests would be possible. I'll show you later when I talk about the examples which strategy we used for our examples. The third point is the question of immersion. And we think that immersion is really a very important topic because this makes the difference whether students just feel themselves being spectators or being right in there. And here we took some inspiration from a live role plays which we, well I have already tried out at the birthday parties of my own kids and they always worked very well. For example once we had a party with the topic become a private investigator. And while the kids were doing some training sessions like analyzing fingerprints for example, a neighbor rang the door and told it some well-earned truth in the stone. And now suddenly the theory met practice and the kids were right there on the first job. And this is how we tried to drag the kids into this story and we used this as inspiration for this virtual quest as well. So there as well we tried to drag the kids in. And I'll explain later how we did this. Of course one important issue is the potential chaos how to minimize that because having 20 kids in the same room with headsets and voice going on and everything has a huge potential of chaos and one possibility how to address this is certainly to build teams somehow to make sure that each student know exactly where his team is that we use names or groups so they know where their own team is and of course they know very well what their exactly task is. And this is something the teacher has to ensure before. There are, well this is one slide where I talk a lot but no more. You should see the slide quest design. Can you see it? The slide one quest design. I think you might need to reset the display, okay? How do I reset the display? How do I do that? Maybe click the home button. There should be I think a red X at the bottom of it. Okay. So you don't, you still see my very first slide? Now wait a minute, hit the home button first, try that. Okay. The home button now. Okay, go to the beginning. I believe that got it now. Okay, so now you see my first slide? That's the first. Thanks, Nick. Yeah, I think you'll need to do that then try to find the catch up with the slides and you should be okay, maybe. Okay, so you can see this one. Okay, doesn't matter. Not that important to see this one. So this is the one I was just talking about. Okay. So the potential chaos, this is a big issue, something we could talk hours and hours and hours. And finally, of course, the organizational context is a very important part of each quest design. We need to know before how this whole quest fits into the lesson, into the session, into the curriculum. If it's something that runs over several days, weeks, or the whole school year, we once had the idea to support a whole year of A1 English learning with activities in Chatterdale, which would make one long story in many chapters. But this is still just an idea. So maybe somebody wants to help us with this. And this brings me already to the first example. The first example, and I have a quick, a short video here, and I was told that I should just paste the link to local chat so you can watch it in your private browsers and wouldn't have to watch it here. So I hope that you can all open this link and watch the video and then I'll go on talking in two minutes. Does this work? Really? We apologize for the delay here. We're trying to see if we can get the slide system working again for our viewing audience. Just hang in there for a few minutes or a few seconds, I hope. Gerhilda, is somebody there helping you? Here comes Nebonon to the rescue. So I hope you've all seen this wonderful video which Nick compiled. Try to keep it slow. So shall I try to... Okay, then I guess I'll sit down again and put my slides there again. Should I delete them before? Yes, I think this video is really great. We have shown it so many times and people always love it. So now I have dragged my slides again over there. Can you see them now? Does it work now? Stand up again. Can I try one more? Alright, Gerhilda, I think we've got a problem with our slides. So maybe we should continue the session. Can you do it without it? Okay, without slides. Well, they are not that great anyway. But maybe the next one would be interesting. Can you send me them, please? Well, if the primes are wrong, send me the text. Okay. How can I send them to you? How can I send the slides to you? Can I just drag them into chat? Now I can. I think the properties are fine. Drag them on me. Okay, where are you? Then I stand up first. Oh, here you are. Now they are completely gone. No. I think there is some some permission issue because I cannot give them to you. No, I can't give them to you. Did you receive it now? Okay. Can I give you all of them at the same time? Why not them all at once? We've got one. I think I can only give you one at a time. Well, I'll just go on. I just go on and you tell me if you think you can. I think it's not fixed. Okay. Should I turn the page? Wait a second. Thanks, Alfonso, for the feedback. But the permissions was the permission problem. Next one. This is where it almost stops. First one. Yeah, it stopped again. Yeah. Okay, I'll just go on if there were no color. So, which is the right one? You can zoom in on that. Okay. So, now you have seen this wonderful video about the Chateau Del Mystery. And I'll tell you just quickly what this story is about and then you can you can judge on your own if you think this would be interesting for a 30-year-old kid or not. The story basically is that some thousand years ago aliens have distributed energy dispensers all over the universe and one of those is the place that's today known as Chateau Del. And they chose the place because of the near cave because their skin is very sensitive to ultraviolet radiation. And when they ran out of energy they came to Chateau Del and were quite surprised to see how the area had changed and that those strange people were playing football with this energy dispenser. And however, the aliens were fascinated by this huge variety of things that those people have had there and they started collecting them during the night and collected those things to the cave. And then the aliens' council decided that the strange creatures had this on the holy site and therefore should be teleported away. And first they they isolated Chateau Del from the rest of the world they cut internet connections close the rail with candles, etc. And then they used the teleporter but there was a programmer mistake with the set coordinate. So only those humans who were on the surface of Chateau Del were teleported away, not the priest who was in the catacombs and not the barkeeper who was looking for more beer in the cellar and Professor Jones who had already been close on the aliens' heels for years had been in the cellar together with the barkeeper. And this Professor Jones had found out most of the story and had written letters to his aunt but they never left Chateau Del those letters so the students can find them. And finally Professor Jones managed to find the cave that was trapped there and so he had to wait for his rescue. And this whole story is manifested in Chateau Del by various hints. For example police records that the students can find in the police station about thefts because as I said before the aliens had started to collect some objects that they found there and of course people said this is well, they were stolen. Then they have the statements of the survivors of the barkeeper and the priest they have letters to Professor Jones' aunt which never left Chateau Del which they found in the post office and of course they have as a starting point some statements for example statements from Amazon.com who realized that the Chateau Del people do not pay the bills anymore. And well this is quite a challenging mystery and some interference skills are needed by the students so it's not that easy but as they are in teams we thought they should be able to solve it. What we need as a preparation of course is we need to set up these hints in Chateau Del I hope that you can see this slide here at the right side for example you see a customer complained record at the local computer store where several people complained that the internet doesn't work anymore and the other thing is a letter which Professor Jones wanted to write to his aunt and there he tells that he caught a radiogram and he observed some strangers in the night things like this and how do we run this story with the students? The basic idea is that there is a teacher in the class who reads a story to the students and shows those slides where several people wonder what's going on in Chateau Del for example as I said before the Chateau Del students do not pay the bills anymore or the train from Chateau Del doesn't arrive anymore or Professor Jones' aunt who promised to send the letter every week but no letter came and then finally of course people from the newspaper they just think what's going on in Chateau Del we have to send some people there and find it out so first we read this story then we distribute fictitious emails to each team for example this is an email from a private investigation company who was contacted by this aunt of Professor Jones and he writes to his team of private investigators that they have received disorder from the aunt that they should go to Chateau Del, look for Professor Jones go to immediately meet your team members at the police station and check what the police knows about Professor Jones and then they should send a report and an invoice and by the end of the day so each of the team each team we have five different teams and each team gets this fictitious email and this is the point where they log into Chateau Del, go there meet their colleagues from Norway, if they're Ausprens or from Austria if they're Norwegian and go explore Chateau Del hopefully find the letters hopefully find the other hints hopefully find the surviving a bit drunk bartender yes and hopefully find Professor Jones in the cave at the end in order to get into the cave they have to find out the secret key that opens the cave and then they they they find Professor Jones there and they get some reward which is an incentive for them because the aliens didn't take all the things they collected with them they left some things in the cave and those are then gifts for the students so they can get some gadgets for the avatars so we did this several times and the students always loved it. I did it once with a class of 24 students, 22 where boys and only two were girls and I've never seen this class so focused, so concentrated so engaged they didn't use the break they had a double session with me and they didn't use the break these 10 minutes they would have between the two sessions they just wanted to solve this mystery but nevertheless some of the students were a bit overwhelmed by handling technology and interfierencing at the same time and some others didn't realize that the other avatars were real people and misbehaved a little bit and the chaos reduction strategy didn't completely work out but what we learned in this first trial was that we need a second quest to do it before in order to introduce students to this kind of activity in a virtual environment this is where we developed the second quest which is the granny quest and the granny quest is the simplest possible quest that can be done in a virtual or real environment it's just a scavenger hunt where students are basically sent from one station to the next one where they collect hints and their interfierencing skills are not really challenged, only a very tiny little bit and the granny quest is also a lot easier because there's the same assignment for all students although they have different starting points so by sending them to different starting points we'll make sure that they do not just follow one other and the idea of this story is really to make them getting familiar with the environment and this kind of activity the story is that they have to find out where granny lived and organizationally it's quite similar to the mystery story it starts with the teacher reading a letter from granny where it says basically that well granny had died a year ago and she wants she wants to inherit her house to the one who first finds out where she had lived and granny seems to be a little bit a strange personality and students have to have again go to chat meet the team and then find hints and those hints are distributed at various locations if we have actors then actors would give this information that you see in the speech bubble if we don't have actors here they find the hint as a texture on a queue and each of those hints has a little bit more about poor miss pedigree about this granny for example here at Harold's fashion store the storekeeper says that each fall she came and bought some of the warmest clothes she had her house must have been terribly cold and windy but maybe you want to go to the fish and chips shop she was a good customer there so go there and ask and the fish and chips shop that she often brought very fresh fish and asked them to fry it for her etc and finally to find out that granny had lived in the lighthouse and there is the lighthouse guardian which is the only act that we really need for this quest and the lighthouse guardian then gives them some more background information and hands them over this declaration from the municipality of Chatterdale that they are the official owners of the lighthouse now so these are the two quests that we did with the students they are fully worked out ready to use in Chatterdale just ask Nick if you are interested in our experience is that really students engage very very nicely with this kind of activity and especially in a cooperation setting of different schools is a brilliant way just to get them use their language and have some fun as well this brings me to the second aspect of my talk if you remember my first slide the second aspect is this data collection aspect and this is an aspect that we came to by our engagement in the next project Big Brother is collecting data from you as I said before obviously we have very various possibilities to collect data from our students the important question obviously is which data to collect what to do with it and then how to interpret it and what we did in this trial was that we started with the curriculum aims of our students of course you can we use the European framework of reference for language learning and in this curriculum you have statements like for example students should understand written texts in B1 level so what we can do is we write this fictitious email which they get in B1 level then the second question is of course what can we observe and how can we can we conclude that the student had understood the text and then the student straightly moves to the right place after having read the text we well we think that obviously he has understood it of course we can't be sure but we try to do it well if we do it more often then hopefully it would statistically be out-weighted and then the third step is how can we read the text and for this we used location tracking scripts and automatic reader script that writes into local chat when an avatar enters a place so this is really a very simple mechanism to track it it costs a couple of lines of code in this object but it's quite quite powerful because it can be derived just by tracking where students move and how they move and how the whole group moves the second thing we have of course our actors so we do not have to generate all this evidence automatically but we can also ask our non-playing characters to assess the quality of conversation they had with the student and so there's a little pop-up when the student leaves the bar for example and the actor would just press the button and assess how well the student spoke to him and all this evidence then goes into a big log file and what we do with this log file is we hand it over to a component called prunefer which is contributed by Technical University of Graz and they work with knowledge, with competence-based knowledge-based theory approach which is quite theoretical approach but the basic idea is to decompose a domain of knowledge into chunks and somehow update this competency state and they have written a very nice little tool which they call the chat log analyzer module and in this chat log analyzer module we can we can quite nicely get some deep information about how students behaved and what they did during the session for example the first on top right you see the chat intensity over time so we see how much did the students chat so how active had they been of course analyzing the chat gives a lot of other opportunities as well for example we can check if they chatted in English, in German or in Norwegian we can parse for keywords to find out if they behaved well or if they used keywords then we have what else do we have well there are many more reports but this chat intensity is one of the nice the other one of course is the movement pattern and from this movement pattern we can derive some information how well the team work together did they stick together or not who found a certain hint first did they just follow each other or did they use the information they had on things like this so we see quite a big potential in this approach and we would be very happy to get some support from the research community to go on a little bit with this kind of research and frankly speaking the hard point of course is to derive these rules to find out some good heuristics to derive information assessment about competencies based on this chat log and we were quite surprised how far we got by those simple things that we are tracking so four minutes left finally the third aspect of my talk working with schools as I said at the very beginning schools are quite different organizations to work with because they are very busy they follow their own rules and they have very little time in general and but the good news is that there are certain times that work very well and these are times we have to find out when we approach a school for example the last two weeks before the summer break is for many schools a time slot where they are very happy to get some news interesting innovative projects in because then the grading is already done and students do not know why they really go to school anymore so to have something really engaging to offer them is normally very welcome same is true for often for hours in the afternoon when some schools do not have classes but some students have to be there so the question obviously is what to do with them then of course the second thing is the curriculum so we know that what we do has to fix has to fit into the curriculum but the curriculums are quite flexible in general finally we know that schools usually have very limited resources but they are quite happy if you help them and if they see that they have the chance to get somebody in who is IT savvy who can help them with general IT problems they might embrace you yes of course schools need to be flexible and often timetables shifts and things are different in the morning than you thought the evening before this is something we just have to live with of course very important we need a safe environment so OpenSim 3D LES is a lot more useful than second life and of course when we have a cooperation with the school you must be aware that there is a huge coordination effort and one very important thing is to make sure that the students get enough time to build up their relations the virtual environment question shouldn't be the first time when they meet but they should have written or exchanged emails before or did some Skype conferencing so I think I am perfect in time although there is technical hiccups so you can need to stop the audio you can continue the text ok so I was just told that they stopped the audio now but I may answer your questions in text let me say one thing here before we quit I thank you for a terrific presentation I apologize to you and the audience for the technical difficulties but I must remind everybody that OpenSimulator is still alpha software this completes the educational portion of the OpenSimulator Community Conference 2013 there are still a few social events you may want to attend you can see the conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org thank you again to our speaker and the audience and then we will continue on chatting here if you wish thank you we can use voice ok Beth says we can use voice for another 10 minutes so Beth can they hear me now I am going to Beth so so let's just continue until she shuts this off yeah let's just continue until she shuts this off ok so let's see there was one one comment ok there was just this one comment from the question are the students in the same classroom in real life where they locked in from the houses well in our trials they had been in the same classroom which which was one reason I mentioned this chaos minimization strategy and to be honest I think it helps a lot in minimizing the case if they are not in the same classroom so the question is really what kind of organizational context you have and I think if it's possible that they do it from the houses in the afternoon it would work even better if they are already able to handle the environment of course if they have to be in the same classroom or at least it's cool it helps to distribute them at least to different labs if possible and of course if it starts becoming too loud then really go back to text chat so the way we handled it then was that we restricted voice chat to the conversations with the actors and communication with the team was only done via text chat okay I think there was one comment about mixing up problem solving skills and language skills yes this is of course a problem I mean what we derive about language skills has a certain amount of uncertainty in it and if we do it only once then maybe we can say anything at the other hand if this is an integral part of a class and you do it more often then I think it's possible to derive language skills and one thing that's important is really to start with the granny quest not to do the hardest thing at the beginning because of course in the first sessions they struggle with all kinds of things but once they have the mindsets and they are and they know the way we work and the way these quests work and they know what they are expected to do then I think it works quite well any other questions kids the kids can help because of course I have a class that will go online every four weeks every four weeks for one class or one week yes of course this is a question of quest design as well as soon as you really try to assess language skills then this has to to deeply go into the quest design you really have to think what kind of activities what kind of tasks they need to perform and what can be derived in our example they had teams that were mixed with two Austrians and two Norwegians this was the fun about it oh ok this was a question to Nick talking about I'm not sure are you talking about are there any more questions for me if yes then please type them now Gerhilda I think that brings us to our second ending of the session maybe any file question I apologize for our timing issues and the technical issues but thank you very much thank you to the audience and thank you Gerhilda well thank you