 Hello everyone and welcome to the 5 p.m. to 5 30 session of the open simulator community conference in this session. We are happy to introduce our presentation called virtual world environment educational projects overview at CVL and our speakers for this are Valerie Hill, Bethany Winslow and Mary Vance. Please check out the website found at conference.opensimulator.org for speaker bios details of the sessions as well as the full scheduled events. A little background on our our presenters today Bethany Winslow reports faculty integrated technology into teaching and curriculum at San Jose State University School of Information. She is a volunteer with CVL and the project lead for the CVL hyper grid resource library. Let me just paste that into local chat for you and Dr. Marie Vance and Vance Lapis holds a PhD in computer science and works as a research scientist at Hewlett-Packard Labs. Marie is the author of over 50 technical papers and holder of 20 US patents and is currently researching virtual reality for use in education. Dr. Valerie Hill, Val Librarian Greg received her MLS from Texas Woman's University in 2007 and a PhD in library and information science in 2012. Valerie is a library and information science educator with a research focus on the intersection of information literacy and global digital participatory culture and she serves as director of the community virtual library. I'll paste that one in for you too. This presentation was shared in overview of OpenSim projects that were developed by the community virtual library accessible via the hyper grid in Avocon and Kitely as well as discussion about several other projects and for more information I'm going to give you a website here so that you can access it as well and that is ValLibrarian.net. Now this schedule this session rather is being live streamed and recorded so if you have any questions or comments during this session you may send your tweets to at opensimcc with the hashtag pound oscc19. Welcome everyone and let's begin the session. Thank you for that wonderful introduction and we will get started now with virtual world educational projects overview at CVL and most of you know that CVL stands for the community virtual library. And we're here to give you a brief overview of how the community virtual library has expanded beyond second life to explore virtual world librarianship and education. Many of you know that the community virtual library has been alive and well in virtual worlds since 2006 and you can find an article that gives the history of the community virtual library I'll put a link in the text chat if you're interested in knowing how it began and how it has evolved over all of these years. I'm currently the director of the community virtual library and let's see if I get my slides on the right slide here. Looks like they may not be in the exact right order in the HUD. Okay here we go. You should be seeing the CVL staff on this slide. Part of our staff is here today and that will be Marie Vance and Bethany Winslow as you heard in the introduction. Marie Vance is our digital citizenship museum director in Kytley and Bethany Winslow is our hyper grid resource library director also in Kytley as well as in Avocon. If you want to know a little bit more about the community virtual library in the text chat here I'm dropping a link to our mission statement community virtual library a real library in a virtual world. We are exploring ways that a library can use virtual reality and virtual worlds to share resources in digital culture. So many of you are familiar with the community virtual library in Second Life. Hopefully you're seeing the slide that shows the front of our main branch there in Second Life but we are moving to other spaces. Second Life is not the only virtual world out there and there are many benefits that we're exploring at this conference in open source worlds. Today our goal is to share about some of the projects that we have in other worlds beyond Second Life. We've been exploring spaces such as Kytley as I mentioned we have a branch there and Avocon. We're also exploring some of the web-based worlds you heard today from the leaders in Cyber Lounge. We have a branch in 3D web worlds as examples and in a and in addition several of us Bethany and Marie and and among others on the CVL board are exploring the VR head mounted displays so that we can research and evaluate the differences between VR in that mode and on a desktop. So we have a branch in Sansar. We are exploring alt space and numerous other virtual reality spaces. Some of you might have attended our SmackDown event yesterday where Bethany and Marie had a lively debate about the differences between desktop virtual reality that's virtual worlds. This is virtual reality and HMD virtual reality. We firmly believe that virtual worlds are a part of virtual reality. They're just without the headset. The community virtual library is firmly committed to a presence across the metaverse and my colleagues here are going to explain a little bit more. So I'm going to turn it over to Marie Vans who as I said is the curator of the CVL digital citizenship museum in Kytley. Thank you Val. So according to Karen Mossberger who is the author of digital citizenship the internet society and participation digital citizenship is the ability to participate in society online and I put a link in there for you a direct link to the book if you're interested in in her the book that she wrote. So for the past couple of years we've actually been working on the digital citizenship ship museum as part of the Cookie 2 in Kytley and part of our mission is to bring awareness of what it means to be a good digital citizen as well as how to be digitally literate. So currently we have 18 exhibits a resource center and the newly opened archives room these exhibits not only provide information on how we can be good digital citizens and digitally literate but also on how we can create a community of practice around bringing that information to others in virtual worlds. So up here the image on the left gives you an idea what our sim looks like and the image on the right is actually Val's digital citizenship exhibit in on the sim. Last August we had an event at the digital citizenship museum that introduced the archives room. So I need the next slide. Great. So here I have several images from the new archives room which is situated under the water in the center of the sim. In this room we highlight efforts to preserve virtual world artifacts and events focused on educational activities. At this point the room is about half full and there is a space for many more presentations. I started with the wonderful collection of Ale, Ale, Arcadia, Asylum, and Laura Lemon who are all actually the same person in real life. If you are unfamiliar with her story the presentation in the archives room describes her journey along with many of her famous pieces for example her slum city and a hobo builds. Her collection is probably the most extensive and well known throughout the open sim metaverse and fortunately for all of us Aida Radius has put most of that collection on a new media arts sponsored Kitely Hub or Kitely Grid. The presentation in the archival room at the digital citizenship museum demonstrates the effort that new media arts is putting into preserving this wonderful collection. There are also two presentations that were given at the ISNT archiving conferences in 2015 and 2018. These focus on how the San Jose State University's VCARA community or the Virtual Center for Archives and Records Administration is preserving the educational content and activities that have taken place over the last 10 years in Second Life. There are several more presentations on other efforts and I encourage all of you to come and see it. Just visit the Digital Citizenship Museum in Kitely and I've put the the URL the slurl there for you and look for stairs down into the water surrounding the middle platform or just jump into the water there. Also we can still we still have two buildings left in which we can add exhibits and after that we plan to start expanding by adding floors to the current set of buildings. So if you're interested in placing content relevant content or know of someone who has plenty who wants to do that please contact me. We have plenty of room to expand. Thanks. And Bethany will go ahead and continue with Bethany Winslow. Great. Thank you very much. So this is the slide here. Yeah the hyper grid resources centers are intended to help educators who are new to OpenSim learn more about what hyper gridding is and how this metaverse is different than Second Life. We've kind of started with the assumption that people will be coming to us with a Second Life background. So the idea was to have space stations with portals to other worlds which is a useful metaphor for understanding OpenSim compared with teleporting anywhere in the closed world of Second Life. And of course we want to help educators find their tribe but we have to go beyond just having hyper grid portals to connect them with other locations and information about those worlds. So the hyper grid resource centers have evolved since I presented on this last year and the work will certainly continue to evolve. As I've mentioned before everything I've learned about designing virtual environments I've learned by actually doing with what I'm doing with CVL. And my talk yesterday was about some content I created that people can use to replicate an immersive art activity in their own virtual world. So the vision I have for these centers is really that they're one of the first stops for an educator to get some ideas about how to use virtual worlds and teaching. And I also mentioned that I would love for us to maybe bring Greg Perrier's vision for an educator specific orientation to life at our resource centers. We've got a lot of great resources that are all over the metaverse so it's a matter for us at the library to curate these materials and locations and make sure they're easily usable or accessible to the new visitor. But it also occurs to me that with the increased interest in virtual reality especially when there's some of its challenges are becoming more apparent educators might end up taking a second look at virtual worlds as a good option to get started. So perhaps our future visitors will not have gotten their started in second life. So perhaps we shouldn't assume that they come with any knowledge at all. So an educator specific training center is something that I do envision going forward. And I asked the community for feedback after my talk yesterday and indeed several comments confirmed that it would be a good idea to have educators volunteering to train other educators you know to get started. And the HyperGrid Resource Center is a logical place to host those kind of events. I've been thinking about converting my office hours at the Second Life Library to a new educator training hour and integrating the use of Zoom so that any educator could watch as I show them how to log in and navigate Firestorm. This could help scaffold the getting started process for educators since much of it is in how to use the viewer. So that's a forward thinking kind of goal. But I do have a couple of things that I'm still working on that I want to tell you about so Val you can go on to the next slide there. I've started creating some examples like how to use HyperGrid locations in a lesson. And there's you can see these here at the in the location. But one of the first things that my faculty asked whenever I meet with them to talk about an instructional design or new technology is they'll ask for an example of how it's in practice. So it's just like how we provide students an example of an outstanding paper. It lets them see how high the bar is and helps them to gauge themselves against that standard. So examples are particularly helpful for new you know faculty for whom teaching in a virtual world is entirely new. Otherwise the default in my opinion will be just to lecture in world. And that might be a great place to start as a baby step. So we do have areas where if an instructor wants to start integrating virtual worlds with their teaching they can use the HyperGrid resources centers as a meeting place. This slide here shows some pictures of some of those spaces. And it's a place where they can get ideas and they can practice presenting and and hopefully it's a place where they can find and use other open educational resources as these are developed or given to the library. We have exhibit areas on Kitely with some other examples and Greg Perrier just provided us his teaching in virtual worlds manual which is a great resource. And if that manual is just located on the Science Circle website an educator might not ever find it. So I'd love for any educators who do freely share their work to consider contacting us so that we can connect to your portal to your world. But also if you have developed lessons that someone else might benefit from please consider sharing those with a Creative Commons license and maybe letting us help you get the word out if they're you know that they're available. So going forward I think our priority is going to be in trying to curate the locations of existing teaching and building tutorials. We need to see what is already out there and evaluate what might be missing. So it may be that we develop getting started curriculum that recommends people go to visit different locations. For example Avocon has Primland and other learning materials but it was also suggested to us that we create or curate a repository of content with things like video, manuals, textures, learning simulations, little reserves with tutorials, etc. So finding a way to curate these resources whether we create and house them or they exist elsewhere is a longer term vision for us. And that's it for me. Great thank you Bethany. And I think in our last session Spiff pointed out a bit of the obstacles educators face but I think Bethany and Marie are really illustrating that only together through collaboration and curation of virtual world content can virtual worlds really succeed for education. The Community Virtual Library is a project of new media arts. There's the link to it in the text chat. And another project of new media arts, a sister project of the Community Virtual Library is the antique pattern library which has a head librarian in Amsterdam. We work closely with the antique pattern library and we actually have a virtual world simulation in Kitely. The antique pattern library digitizes antique manuscripts and patterns and has recently contributed resources for our Dickens project resource center in Second Life during the month of December. Our goal for the antique pattern library is to advocate authenticity of historical simulations in virtual spaces both VR and virtual worlds such as architecture, furniture, historical attire. All of these things should be authentic for immersive learning. So to that end if that sounds kind of interesting to you if you're into antiques, manuscripts, and authenticity or you know someone that might be interested, contact us because we have opportunities to bring authentic antique textures, patterns, and resources into our Kitely antique pattern library. So as mentioned the Community Virtual Library has several colleagues who are exploring VR headsets to compare the head-mounted display experience with the desktop display experience. My slides are not quite syncing up here so I'll get back to that one. And as we compare these experiences we can find the best uses for both a VR head-mounted display and a virtual world on a desktop. They have unique advantages and disadvantages and so far we believe that virtual worlds are here to stay. They have some advantages that are specific that cannot be done on a head-mounted display. So if you're interested in helping us with that exploration you can contact us later as well or if you're interested in helping with our Community Virtual Library virtual world database where we believe that communities in virtual worlds are actual resources that can be of help to everyone. So I'll put our contact information on this last slide. We invite you and your community to partner with us because as I mentioned it's only through working together and collaborating that virtual worlds for education can survive. We can help promote the great work that you do in virtual environments. So it's really great to see everyone here at OSCC and having this great audience validates the time we have spent in virtual worlds. And so I think we may have just a moment or two for questions. Actually we're right at our time limit now. What we could do is they do have your contact information there. If you'd like them to reach out to you that way or do you have another preferred method? You can use that contact information. You can also find us in all of the virtual worlds. I have the same username and Kitely, Avocon, any of the OpenSim worlds. So either way is just fine. Okay. Well thank you so much Valerie, Bethany, and Marie for a terrific presentation today. As a reminder to our audience you can see what's coming up on the conference schedule as we're just nearing the end of the conference today at conference.opensimulator.org. And following this session our last session for the day will begin at 5 30 p.m. in the keynote regions that we're in right now and it's entitled Real World Applications of Virtual Reality, Saving Newborn Lives. That sounds interesting. Also we encourage you to visit the OSCC 19 poster expo which is located in the OSCC expo 3 region to find accompanying information on presentations and to explore the hypergrid tour resources in OSCC expo 2 region along with the sponsor and crowdfunded booths located throughout all the OSCC expo regions. Thank you again to our speakers and to the audience.