 Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 9.30 a.m. to 10 o'clock a.m. session of the 2021 Open Simulator Community Conference. In this session, we are pleased to introduce a panel called Virtual World's Education Consortium Across the Metaverse. Our host is Dr. Valerie Hill, a.k.a. Valibrarian Greg, and she is joined by fellow panelists and members of the VWEC Founding Board, Dr. Becky Adams, a.k.a. Elly Pinyon, and Kevin Fienen, a.k.a. Feiland Corma. Renee, a.k.a. Zinnia Zauber, is not able to join us this morning. Valerie is a library and information science educator, a VWEC Founding Board member, and the director of the Community Virtual Library. Becky has taught online for 15 years and developed and currently teaches teaching and training in virtual worlds for the University of New Mexico. Kevin is the founder and president of NoMaze Corporation, an IT management consulting company and Rockliffe University Consortium. Please check out the website found at conference.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 comments during the session, you may send tweets to at opensimcc with the hashtag oscc21. Welcome, everyone. Let's begin the session. Thank you. Welcome, everyone, to virtual worlds education consortium across the metaverse or VWEC for short. The VWEC started at the beginning of this year, believe it or not, even though many of us have been around for 15 years, this is new. It started on January 6th, 2021, after several educators discussed the various obstacles that we all face teaching in virtual worlds. For example, many of us believe that virtual worlds provide great potential for education, but one of our biggest challenges is too many options. Second life, OpenSim, Kitely, Avocon, DigiWorlds, and many more virtual worlds are available. Plus, now educators are exploring VR worlds on VR headsets, ScienceSpace, AltSpace VR, and many more. This can be overwhelming to many educators. We believe that virtual worlds are virtual reality, just without a headset. Also, it is difficult to advocate virtual worlds, especially virtual worlds for education, to people who have never been in a virtual world. Watching a machinima video just does not do it justice. You really have to be there yourself, embodied as an avatar. The virtual worlds education consortium will strive to advocate for virtual worlds through sharing examples to those who are unaware of the potential for learning. We can show the variety of teaching styles and learning environments from the traditional simulations that may look like a traditional library or a traditional classroom to the totally inventive and creative spaces that people can create. And you can see on this slide our mission. The goal of the Virtual World Education Consortium is to bring educators together, both to share what has been successful and to tackle obstacles across virtual platforms and communities. We meet in second life quarterly, as I mentioned. Four times a year, anyone welcome. And you don't have to be a formal educator to attend. You can be a person who is just interested in helping other educators or a lifelong learner. We meet in second life, but we're very excited to announce our new pavilion in Kitely. Because we realize that second life is but one proprietary company and not the only virtual world in the metaverse. So as the metaverse evolves, and you know there's a lot of hype about that word right now, we've understood the metaverse for years, but that definition is now evolving. And as the metaverse evolves, the Virtual World Education Consortium will strive to be inclusive to all educators and willing to try new environments, realizing that some people only want to use one particular virtual world. I'm going to hand the program over to Ellie, one of the Virtual World Education Consortium founders. Ellie. Thank you, Val. BWEC is currently holding quarterly meetings, as Val mentioned, open to all who are using virtual worlds for education and training. Our meetings are primarily for supporting educators and groups by gathering educators' opinions, advice, and ideas. And to share updates on our progress with areas that have been identified in previous meetings. We also sponsor cross-community campfire chats to give one-on-one support to educators and facilitate support for the educational community. Midori Linden has been leading a monthly campfire chat hosted at the BWEC pavilion that has been very productive. We love those who do this. We would love to do this in other worlds as well. Our meetings are hosted by a different educator each time. Our initial meeting was at an introduction to the BWEC, led by Val Librarian of the Community Virtual Library. The participants used the Google Doc to brainstorm ideas for overcoming obstacles in virtual worlds and better networking to avoid reinventing the wheel. I led our second meeting in April, which focused on mentorship with participants breaking into groups to discuss their approaches to it and identify needs. We then asked how BWEC can help them. In July, Zinnia from Peninsula College hosted our third meeting. In this session, we asked participants to brainstorm what they needed from virtual worlds. In breakout groups, participants discussed what helps them and what are barriers. We then shared a more formal survey to gather data to guide our efforts to address their needs. Our October meeting was led by Sheila Yoshikawa, leader of the Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable and coordinator of activities on Infolite High School. She used the theory of change framework to draw on goals and desirable developments identified in previous quarterly meetings and work towards more specific plans of how do we get where we want to be. Our next meeting in January will be led by Marley Millenia, who will be hosting our discussion on lifelong learning in virtual worlds. Already, we feel our efforts are paying off. We have heard directly from groups and individuals who are teaching and training in virtual worlds to identify successful practice issues and barriers and identify resources needed. We have set up communication tools, portals for support, and collaborated with existing databases that list educators and educational entities to bring groups and individuals together. We are working with Linden Labs to address barriers there and we have set up cross-community campfire chats for us to get to know and help each other. Kevin, would you like to share how we are working with Linden Labs and beyond? Thanks Becky. In March at the Virtual Worlds Best Practices and Education Conference, we hosted three workshops with the development and design team from the mid-labs. The idea was to help bridge the gap between what we as educators need to effectively design and deliver curriculum and the challenges of what a platform like Second Life can provide. In April, Rockcliffe started to work with Linden Labs to start weekly discussions on improvements to the platform. Shortly thereafter, those conversations were expanded to include the VWEC and eventually led to a Second Life Usability Survey that was distributed in July of this year. At the same time, Nory Linden brought forward several challenges when the labs was experiencing and managing educational expectations. Some of these challenges were inconsequential to open sim due to the segmentation naturally exist between grids that provide greater security and control. However, several are common to all open environments regardless of which grid we use for educational instruction, most especially when it comes to the safety and protection of K312 students. These issues are pervasive regardless of whether we are in a specialized grid running open simulator in Kiley or other forms of virtual environments. What we learn here benefits everybody. Beyond this was also a recognition of a shared need for an educational non-profit reserved space. This would allow for education-related activities to be distanced from more adult-oriented marketed activities and services. Further, this would also allow for education-focused stakeholders to be able to leverage and share services in close proximity to each other, allowing for a greater sense of community. We're going to do a pilot of the Move Procedures with Linden Labs in the next few weeks with the expectation that we will fully roll out communications hopefully and I apologize in here we say it by the end of the month but it's you know hopefully by the end of July uh uh January sorry my apologies uh as a result the Second Life Usability Survey and the ongoing discussions at both the VWEC campfires and the Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable, ROCLAF has been helping to bridge the technical divide between new ideas for Second Life and Second Life's product development life cycle. We're currently in the process of putting the finishing touches on a forum for all educators to contribute to those discussions and to comment on change requests before they go to Linden Lab. You'll see more information about this in January. As a lead up to this we will be starting to conduct quarterly architectural review meetings with Linden Labs senior design team to review new feature requests and ensure a higher probability of those requests being accepted. As Becky indicated earlier it all starts with understanding not just who we are and how we can help each other but also how we are using these platforms and be forward thinking in what we want out of these platforms in the future and I believe uh Val is going to be talking about uh how we're going to be connecting collaborative. It's actually me. Oh thank you Kevin. Yes no problem. Thank you Kevin we we are united together as one. Respect, responsibility, reliance and resilience are the cornerstones of our foundation and future. We want to connect the dots and with each other and want you to know that you are not alone if you're an educator out there by yourself or if you're a group you can join us. We are equals and all of us have unique experience and expertise to utilize. The challenges of COVID highlighted what we have been doing for years. Virtual worlds helped us as educators to have professional communities of supported friends to engage with while in this lockdown. These fellow educators and advocates have been here for many years. It has been lovely to feel secure because we could express our fear, our frustrations and our future hopes even when there was uncertainty around us. Having dependable people to connect with who are innovators and problem solvers makes difficult times turn into defining times. This extra time together supporting each other helped facilitate the formation of the virtual world's education consortium. A consortium is a cooperative partnership that shares objectives on a joint adventure. We are a fellowship and no matter your size or origin we are equals on this quest. Our future goals encourage you to join this journey. Resources, solutions, showcase and advance. Remember our differences are our strengths. We prosper as a whole as we showcase our exceptional solutions and develop new tools collectively. Identify learning resources already created with links and apps to find them. This includes people. We are a very optimistic and inclusive group focused on supporting each other's work. Remove barriers to learning by brainstorming missing components to devise successful shared building blocks to create bridges. Capture and showcase the treasures and serious research of our fellow educators and promote outside of our typical areas of adventure or I mean service. As you can recognize that is Cinnia's Burbage and we love it. So show off and hit that share button. Variety empowers evolution. A consortium is a continuum. This is a continuous progression forward connected and distinct. One and all have a voice. Everyone brings courageous questions, imaginative answers on spine challenges and innovative solutions. Join us around the fire or host a community campfire chat to foresee into the future. Together we love to discover and solve problems. We welcome diversity, curiosity and you. Thank you back to you now. Thank you and we're so sorry that Renee Zinnia could not be here to share this herself. You can see in her slide various people sitting around a campfire and note cross community campfire chats. So your community can also hold one of these and better collect collaborate across communities and we'll share more about where you can find information about the cross community campfire chats. So we hope that all of you are feeling the excitement in our voices as we think about the future of education across the Metaverse. The VWEC is inclusive to all and we believe that it's going to take all of us to advocate for virtual worlds to help newcomers adapt and use them to document the progress of the great educational things that are being done to share research and to keep up with all the changes and the challenges ahead. I'm going to pass out a note card for those of you that are in world that has links to our database that we are forming at the virtual world education consortium and in the text chat you can find the form that you can fill out to become part of the directory and the database. The VWEC database is also here in the local chat. The chat logs of all of our quarterly meetings will be archived on the community virtual library website which is communityvirtuallibrary.org and on our final slide you'll find our contact information. We are but four of the founding members and there are many other educators across the Metaverse that can join and collaborate and help each other. As I said face the challenges of advocating for virtual world education and also archiving the progress that's been made. So we want to thank you and we hope that we see you across the Metaverse as it evolves and I think we have time for a few questions. Feel free to put them in the local chat as I drop you the note card. All right it looks like we do have a couple of minutes. I have a question. I think I might have missed this while you were talking. There will be educator meetings in your new area in Kitely is that correct? We don't have a date yet for our Kitely expansion. As we said we started in January of this year 2021 and our next meeting will be January 5th 2022 and that will be in second life. At that meeting we'll discuss branching out across the Metaverse and maybe having our session in Kitely. Okay thank you. Lisa Laxton asks if there's anything you need in terms of online resource help? I'm going to say absolutely we want to reach out and help each other with all the technology that is at our fingertips. Kevin or Ellie have anything to say about what kind of help we need? Well I think we need help always. So Lisa will be in touch for sure. We have quite a few people giving us access to their toys and tools but we are always interested and we sometimes don't even know what they are until you offer them to us. So thank you. We also would like more help with our Hypergrid Resource Center. We have a Hypergrid Resource Center and library in Kitely and being able to connect and collaborate across grids is a goal that we all share at the consortium. Okay and there's one more question very very quickly because we're almost out of time. Is there a location for the Kitely arm? Yes we put that location on the note card and also go to the community virtual library.org website and as the Kitely VWEC expands all that information will be there. Okay great well thank you to our panelists for an informative and interesting panel. 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. You won't want to miss our next session which will begin at 10 o'clock a.m. in this keynote region and is entitled system design design of the Outworlds Dreamgrid. 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 hypergrid resources in OSCC expo 2 region along with sponsor and crowd funder booths located throughout all of the OSCC expo regions. Thank you again to our speakers and the audience.