 And welcome to the 1.30 p.m. to 2 o'clock p.m. session of the 2020 Open Simulator Community Conference. In this session, we are happy to introduce a session called Networking Across the Metaverse All in This Together. And our speakers are Valerie Hill and Becky Adams. Dr. Valerie Hill, aka Valibrarian Greg, received her MLS from Texas Women'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. Her research in virtual environments explores meta-literacy in meta-modern culture. Dr. Becky Adams, aka Ellie Pinyin, recently retired from the University of New Mexico after 13 years as the Director of Online Course Development and Faculty Support. As director, she facilitated the design and delivery of UNM online courses for the main campus. She has taught both K through 12 and higher education, currently teaching for the College of Education, Teacher Education, and Human Sciences and Organization, Information and Learning Science, or fondly known as the OILS program. 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 atopensimcc with the hashtag OSCC20. Welcome, everyone. Let's begin the session. Welcome to networking across the universe, all in this together. I'm Valerie Hill, my co-presenter, Becky Adams, as you just heard, and we're both college educators. My background's in teaching library science, but I was also a school librarian for 20 years. Now, I'm the director of the Community Virtual Library, and our presentation today presents the need to tackle many obstacles that educators and learners face in virtual environments. Because there are so many virtual spaces, it's simply impossible for us to explore them all, let alone build high-quality learning experiences within them all. In addition, we've found, and I bet you probably have too, that often people in virtual environments are simply trying to reinvent the wheel without realizing what others have already accomplished. I'd like you to type a Y in the text chat if you agree. So I believe that thinking about all of this, we have come up with some ideas that would help us all partner, help us network across the metaverse, and later you can bookmark the links that we're going to share so you can access them later. Thank you, Val and Galen. As we consistently were reminded that information was everywhere, and many people in groups were willing to meet with folks in virtual worlds, but finding them was not always easy. We decided to try to bring as much information together as possible in one simple document, and then get it to as many groups and people as possible. This became the CBL education network spreadsheet. You can find it in the URL listed in our chat. As you can see, the document shares information about weekly office hours in Second Life, web-based worlds, Kitely, OpenSim, as well as VR-capable worlds. On their individual tabs, we also tried to include group information for conferences and repeating events as possible, and that's on the last tab. As our spreadsheet states, exploration of virtual environments requires networking. If you have weekly, monthly, or yearly office hours or offerings, we would love to add you to this document. We would also appreciate you advertising it as well. Right now, please contact Val or I to get your repeating events added to the spreadsheet, and our contact information is on the document. To make it easy for you. We've tried a couple of formats and hope this spreadsheet is easy to read, and that including links to where each happening is helpful. The Community Virtual Library, as many groups, has its home base in Second Life, and there is a rich legacy of real librarianship there. However, as other worlds are established, we have been very honored and pleased to expand our reach and skills to other virtual worlds. There are always changing and things changing, and we want to make sure we are where we need to be to make a difference. We feel it's so important that we work together in multiple environments to be able to support each other and to use these amazing tools and environments. Val will be sharing a note card with you that will help with information about connecting and collaborating across virtual spaces. In that, sharing our work with other communities, knowing what is out there, using the CVL Virtual World Database for ongoing projects, sharing calendars and social media, and exploring other tools like Discord and Metaverse Libraries help us stay connected and informed. Do all the virtual worlds, platforms and groups leave you confused and overwhelmed? We so understand, in order to not get so overwhelmed that we can't take advantage of all the great things that are happening around the Metaverse, we must tackle this together. Together we can do this. Over to you, Val. Yes, so we found that one of the biggest obstacles in virtual worlds, and you've heard about it for years, is this deep learning curve. Type of why if you're still hearing about this deep learning curve. We found that quite often administrators are not willing to adopt and many teachers are not willing to spend the time it takes to learn virtual environments. So the beauty of these desktop VR worlds, we call them desktop VR since they don't require a headset, but they're still a part of virtual reality. The beauty of these desktop virtual worlds is that we have so many tools for productivity right at our fingertips. I don't really see that in some of the headset worlds. Educators and students in virtual worlds that are not on a VR headset can create so much content by themselves, which is amazing. All those tools are right at our fingertips. Yet each of us has our own goals, our own purpose for being in a virtual world and our own skills and talents. So it's imperative to let new educators know that they do not have to learn everything. Some of us like to build. Some people like to script and have a great talent in coding. Some share presentations and exhibits and tours. Some are good mentors or good at planning and designing environments and events. So we've come to believe that when you contribute what you really enjoy, we all benefit and we all keep learning. Another obstacle that a lot of us face is that virtual worlds require fairly good graphic cards. I've heard that earlier at the conference today. You have to have a pretty good laptop with a good graphics card. And many schools now are only purchasing tablets or Chromebooks. So we've found that a solution to this problem might be the use of web-based virtual worlds such as Cybel Lounge or 3D Web Worlds. And you'll find individuals on our spreadsheet. If you look at the tabs down at the bottom, we not only have the tabs for Second Life and Open Source Worlds, but we also have tabs for Cybel Lounge, 3D Web Worlds. If you have office hours in these kind of gateway virtual worlds, we like to call them since they don't require any viewer or any download whatsoever. You may hold office hours in worlds such as this, web-based virtual worlds. So look at the second page of the CVL Education Network spreadsheet and don't forget to contact us if you want to add your own office hours here as a way to build a professional learning community. It's essential that we document our progress in virtual environments to help other educators and learners in the future. And that is not always easy. This conference is really showing there are so many of us out there that are working as educators and content creators in virtual environments. And we need to document what it is that we are doing for the future. So perhaps you are ready to explore and continue exploring to find your niche in virtual worlds. Because finding your niche, especially for newcomers in virtual environments, it takes time. So the goal of the Community Virtual Library is to help educators and librarians and lifelong learners to navigate these environments so they can find the best match for their needs. Of course, we already mentioned you cannot possibly master them all. You can't be in every virtual space, but we feel it's important for us all to be aware of the virtual environments that are out there. As these environments continue to expand and to evolve, how can we help you explore? For example, I use my office hours as a way to make appointments to continue networking or to take drop-ins with newcomers. And you can do the same with your office hours in whatever it is that you offer in virtual worlds. So to continue that idea of networking across the metaverse, what about hypergritting? Hypergritting educators, when Second Life made their open source code open and available, many new environments began to arise. And some of these are fairly inexpensive, less expensive than Second Life, certainly. And they offer spaces that are more private than Second Life, which may be good for students. You can share your own open sim world content at the Community Virtual Library Hypergrid Resource Library. We have this in both Kitely and in Avocon, and we would like to expand to other places as well. You can find the contact information for our curator of the Hypergrid Resource Library. On that handout that I gave you, it's Bethany Winslow, a San Jose State University instructional designer. She has curated our Hypergrid Resource Library. We also have other branches. We have a Digital Citizenship Museum and an antique pattern library in Kitely. And we are moving into the VR headset worlds to explore as well. And I'm going to hand it back over to Ellie. My university was fine with me teaching in Second Life, but they also wanted me to be helpful and help the students explore the opportunities in virtual reality. Basically, they said, you don't have to be an expert, just give them a taste of what VR offers, I was told. I don't know if you've had the pleasure of putting on a headset and exploring all that is out there with VR, but these pictures are perfect in my opinion. These are similar examples of my experience as well. This is what I look like with my headset on. Ellie, this is foul. And as our slide shows, one thing we realize is that virtual worlds are also virtual reality without the headset. In fact, we now believe there is room for both desktop and headset VR for specific purposes. I was so excited to find the car, the Virtual Center for Archives and Records Administration, just as they created their exploder team to check out different VR worlds each month. You'll definitely enjoy how they got their name exploder team as well, just ask them. These amazing educators who had enjoyed virtual worlds began to explore the many VR worlds out there, created a survey to find what educators were looking for and began gathering data about the many VR options. They are looking at many elements such as ease of entry, navigation, as well as if headsets are required or if there's a desktop application as well. And if you are one of those interested brave souls, please join us on the third Friday evening of each month at 5 p.m. Pacific time. As you likely know, students often depend on office hours to meet with their instructor. We also enjoy finding those that are doing what we do or what we want to do and spending some time with them to get information and support. For this reason, we have labeled our regular times in world office hours. It's something we all understand as experts giving time to help or connect with others. So we invite you to join the exploder team or join us at other office hours or add your office hours or repeating group events to the CVL education network spreadsheet. So we can all find our way through all the innovation that is happening before our eyes. Val? My research in virtual environments over the last decade has shown me the need to balance. That's a metamodern skill balancing virtual and physical life. I'm fascinated with metamodern digital culture and changing literacy and that's become my research focus. And I'll put a little link to my new book that came out on this topic of metamodernism. Ellie and I believe along with many of you that only together can we navigate the many learning environments available where students will learn and will live in the future. So we'll leave you with this final slide that shows our contact information and a few of the projects that the community virtual library are working on to help us all network across the metaverse. And if you have a question, if you'd IM that today Lynn, we are going to spend a little bit of time answering questions that would help us all better network so that we can move forward across the metaverse. Okay, thank you ladies. I think there's so about just a couple minutes left. So maybe there's enough for one in question. Got a couple questions there in the sky before you if you wanted to choose which one to answer. All right, I see a question here from Sidearm. How did you come to choose Google Docs as your sharing tool? It's probably one of the most useful tools that educators have found because it's so collaborative and because we all know that Google pretty much owns the data universe, which is a good or bad thing, whatever you want to think of it. But it's going to be around we feel for a while. Of course, it's always good to be able to migrate your content. But but for now, it just has so many things that we can all pool into that's why we chose Google Docs. And another question I see is could we define network? Are we talking wires and flashy light boxes or social skills? Excellent question as we talk about digital content. We think of a network as being those wires and the hard wire network. But we're talking about people communities as a librarian. I have changed my tune from thinking that what I share is books. Books are no longer king of the information hierarchy and it's people and communities and content in all formats that I want to share. And so that type of network, it's communities. It's and you it's all of you at this conference and what you are doing. You can be lost out there and no one will ever know what it is you did because digital culture gives everybody a voice. But those voices just become a cacophony that we are all mixed up in. So in order, so that network means to help organize people and what they're doing in virtual environments. OK, well, thank you so much, Val and Becky for a terrific presentation.