 and welcome to the 5 p.m. to 5.30 session of the 2019 Open Simulator Community Conference. In this session, I am very honored to introduce Dr. Eileen O'Connor and her presentation, Design Challenges in a Youth Safe VR Environment. Dr. O'Connor is a professor at SUNY Empire State College teaching the creation of education level open source environments. She's been involved in VR for graduate education for 13 years. Today she'll talk to us about challenges in these environments. And don't forget to please check out the website found at conference.opensimulator.org for speaker bios, details of sessions and the full schedule of events. This session is being live streamed and recorded. So if you have any questions or comments during the session, you may send tweets to atopensimcc with the hashtag OSCC19. And welcome everyone and let's begin the session. Eileen, it's all you. And thank you very much for, first of all, hosting this conference, all the work that goes into it and for the attendees and all that make Open Simpossible. I'm going to be answering questions and I hoping we won't have the naked avatars coming into these school safe environments. But what I'm going to run through is a little bit and trying to keep my eye on the time just about what got me here. And I wish I could say Scott who went before me was my creation, but Scott certainly and the wonderful students we have bring art to this. I have a technical background and I will say that when I started in Second Life back in the early, kind of the round 2007, the school had the environment and they were doing a nice job because they had a lot of artists who set things up and they allowed me to come in as the technical STEM person. And I embraced it, but my work was so ugly that they put me up on a skybox. And so we did, they did find, the combination of bringing arts in was very important, but cost eventually became prohibitive. Some of the bloom on the Second Life had gone away and I still continue to use it. I was in the science education area, eventually we developed a whole program for emerging technologies and thank goodness with OpenSim we've been able to continue to bring in our wonderful students and have them going further. But now I'm in a position where I've been working with people in the K-12 world. And I've not, certainly, when you wanna go to a high school principal and with all of the issues that are coming up with sexual abuse, et cetera, in schools, you want to be sure that when they see this virtual environment that you're promoting that there's nothing that could offend a parent, a student, a child. And so I've been very thankful for the world that right now Kitely's put together with the virtual private networks. And I'm now moving beyond my job. My job is to work with graduate students who are an adult. And so I don't have to be so concerned about them, but I'm going to be asking those of you here because mostly this is the choir. You are the people who develop and to bring people in. I was very impressed to hear about Eureka out of Israel. That would be the model I would love to someday be. I have to bootstrap this myself though. And I'm using the virtual private networks as a way to get to this. And I have a very lovely person who's been out spreading the word of what can be done in K-12 environments and in home schools and Sunday schools. But what I need is to be able to leverage this. Now, Bethany Winslow, who'll be coming on shortly, talks wonderfully about the emerging culture that's happened within virtual reality coming through Second Life over the past 15 years or so. What I wanna do is somehow emulate that. Now my challenge, and I'll be asking you, please type in the chat, get in touch with me later. I also have a link that I'll put out to the end to a Google doc for anyone who wants to share ideas with me. I'm hoping to start with that little seedling. Do what I can do, which is tech support, motivation, courses to get it starting to grow. But then I wanted to ultimately get its own legs where I would like the teachers and organizations and the different students themselves to be part of developing this. So I think that's where we'd all like to get. So I'm looking for going into some of the constraints, some of the problems that I know will happen and asking here as I know in advance the design issues I'm up against for ideas from those of you who either challenges yourself or have new ideas to please share them with me either in the chat now and I'll copy and paste it out or in the Google doc I'll put out at the end. Definitely, and I've been hearing a lot of this during the conference, we need to be sure that everything is secure. And I'm counting very much on the virtual private networks to help me here. I know Kitely's been doing a good job. I've just gotten access, my semester's ending, I'm getting the grades in, I'm gonna be jumping into this to learn as much as I can. With the idea of eventually with the environments I go to getting their IT departments to become a lot more involved but I need to get that seedling going. I need to be able to get others involved. And as we all want, we need to get to that engagement factor. And engagement is not simply showing a virtual world. You have to have storyline, you have to have motivation. Today we get cyber invitations from everybody and who gets the time and space? And we're dealing with K-12, we're competing with entertainment, which is really knows how to create motivating stories, how to get people engaged. So I'm trying to get educators to be thinking that way. But part of what I have to do is really get the educators to let the kids themselves become part of this. And so I'm trying to read my own slides here. What I need to get is the youth involvement. That's going to be key to getting anything to work here. And I think you all know that. What you compete with today in trying to balance the creativity that kids can bring in with the structure that you're going to need to have to get to some learning objectives is the first thing, when you get older teenagers, they're going to say, well, I can do better with Fortnite. The graphics aren't as good. Okay, and then you remind them, there are SIM cities and things. So it's not in the graphics. It's not in that, you have to deal with attitude coming in from older students. You also have to, yeah, and people are talking, we've got FERPA, we have identity things. We have to be encouraging them to explore, but we have to limit exploration. And one of the things I'm thankful for with Kitely, in their virtual private network, you can set up six avatars. You can have an avatar that cannot become totally naked. And I was surprised they actually have, they call them non-naked avatars because the first thing kids know is how to do a lot more than their adult monitors. So what we have to do is be able to bring kids in, encourage them, but at the same time, realize you can get attitude that this isn't a great game. I see that all the time with Kitely. So, yeah, no, this isn't a Kitely sponsored event, but I'm very thankful for Kitely because they really have made a lot of things available to me. Now, I've been blessed recently to have an advocate who's bringing me into K-12 schools that I couldn't have gotten into before. My life is very fractured. I'm spending a lot of it developing VR spaces. I have 50 graduate students, I have to publish. So to get into the K-12 area, which is very important to me, is almost impossible, but I have this advocate. But now I have to look at the fact, if you remember from Prenski, I meant to find his thing from way back in 2001, he divided us into digital natives and digital immigrants. Immigrants will always have quote accents, but myself, he's certainly got debunked because he's never researched background, but I've certainly seen that in so many cases, there is this division. And I've been in technology before most digital natives were born, but they still, I will tell you, my grandchildren are faster at the computer than I am. So what we need to do is get, most of my teachers that are coming in will be what you might call the immigrants. So I need to get them on board, which was why I was very interested in Eureka, how they worked about getting people involved. So, and again, please in the chat, as much as you can tell me, as many ideas, tips, places, the more that you can tell me to get into this group, it will be important. So I'm going to be the initial owner. And the scary thing is I am not an IT person. So I will be depending on Kitely and leaning on them a lot to help me get everybody on board. I'm going to need the quote teachers who are people who are already passionate about their subject area, but need to begin to understand a virtual environment. I'm going to need the participants, I'm going to need the students that will be now in this environment that hopefully we can monitor their behaviors, we can make sure they're dressed appropriately. And I'm going to need the on-borders. As Scott just said in his presentation, on-boarding people into this area was really important. And for bringing kids in, they're not too difficult. They're gonna have to learn to bring the viewer in. So I'm looking at creative ways of getting on-borders from among the kids themselves. So if I can get them to get the viewer onto their computer, because I hope to work somewhat systematically with the schools, then I want to start getting the students themselves to be part of the on-boarding. So what my initial model, which does reflect on what I saw from the Israel model too, is I want to have what I was calling here VR sets, where there are some backgrounds to stimulate thinking. And as Scott pointed out, we have, thanks to wonderful artists who've made the available, we have walled cities, we have swimming pools, we have things that could become backgrounds. And in their modeling simple pedagogical techniques, we want to get them, sometimes lecture will be appropriate, but with a group of K-12 kids, we want to get beyond the lecture. So I want to have models that can help the teachers themselves start thinking, basic, simple models, that then can embed that pedagogical content. Yeah, no, and the pedagogy can be anything from problem-based learning, we can have role-playing. And I have a number of publications on that area that I'll be using with these teachers to really get them thinking. But the more experience is ideas that you can put in the chat for me, I would really appreciate it. And so my background is the education piece with the technology. So I can pull up these models and try to make them available. But again, if you've got experience in this area, things that you think would work or know would work, I would appreciate that greatly. Now, what I have to keep in mind too, is as I'm making these models, there to get the teachers themselves excited about the work. I need to do that scaffolding from RUNER. I need to get the scaffolding in to move them over to the other side of the scale where they now become creative, where they can move out themselves, where they can also realize that virtual doesn't exist without all of the work that this group is doing, where you need tweets and Twitters and you need Facebook. The virtual in and of itself is not everything. So I have to get all of these folks kind of onboarded in this area. So I think this, excuse me, is kind of my last slide in this. What I'm trying to do is mindful of the complexity which I know is there. And I think all of you know is there and I've been appreciative of the supportive statements coming in. But we're all here because we have a passion for seeing where we can go with this. So I'm interested in any ideas about how you have thought about can suggest and I'm gonna put out a link to a Google doc at the end where if either now or later you come up with ideas, websites, links, please put them in just so that becomes part of my brainstorming with some of these people who I'll be working with. And what I wanna do is craft some small scenarios to begin with. So when I get this pilot group in, that they get enough legs that they can see some of the potential. And again, that's where that group from Israel was very informative. And then from there, I would hope to see this self-generative model come out of it, which I think is what everybody hopes for. And, you know, easier said than done. Yeah. Well, and I'm seeing with, and Beth, thank you with Kids Exploring Minecraft, make up their own stories. And I just pushed out the link if anyone wants to keep telling me things too. And I did tell Joyce, if you folks come in, if I did this link right, you should be able to just start throwing in ideas to the extent I can then sort them later. I will be glad to feed them back to anybody else who's in this delightful conundrum. I have now in front of me the potential to develop a model that if I could get it working well, could be scalable to many thousands of students. This potential organization is quite big. But, you know, I have to get, that's why I have to get it moving so that it gets its own legs. And I think you can appreciate that yourself. And so I'm thinking at this point, Scott, do people want to give me more comments or feedback or have any particular questions? Yes, if anyone has any questions, feel free to put them in the chat window and I will relay them to Eileen. And please do take my email. And if you have other ideas later, send them to me or you please jump into that Google doc at any point. I think if you have a Gmail account, you should be able to just type in ideas. And there's a couple of people here in the chat, Eileen, who would like to speak with you later. Lily may come. Okay, okay, good. Scott, where would you suggest I go for that? How do I do that? Or, well, they have my email too, so. Yeah, and they can friend you right now. Oh, okay. All right. Yes, that's actually a very good thing. If anyone has any questions or further side discussion they want to have with Eileen, friend her now. Okay, and thank you, everybody. Yes, thank you, Eileen. She's been a wonderful mentor. All right, everyone. Well, thank you very much, Eileen, for such a terrific presentation. Oh, thank you, Scott. As a reminder to our audience, you can see what's coming up on the conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org. Following this session, the next session will be up at 530 or 5.30 p.m. Pacific time, I have to remember that. And it is entitled Art Gallery, a plug and play OER immersive activity. I can't wait to see that. And also we encourage you to visit the OSCC 19 poster expo and the OSCC expo three region to find any accompanying information on presentations and to explore the hypergrid tour resources in OSCC expo region two. There's some great stuff there. I've already gone shopping. And along with our sponsor and crowd funder booths located throughout all of the OSCC expo regions. So thank you again, Eileen, and thank you to the audience.