 Everyone, welcome back to our 10.30 a.m. to 11 a.m. session of the 2017 Open Simulator Community Conference. As a reminder to our in-world and web audience, you can view the full conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org. You can tweet us questions to atopensimcc or use the hashtag, hashtag OSCC17. This next session that I'm happy to introduce is a terrific session called The Noble Spirit, Transcendentalism and Transdisciplinary. Our speakers today are Andrew Stricker, Cynthia Colloyne and Barbara Truman. And I want to tell you a little bit about each one of these because people that they have great bios. Dr. Andrew Stricker serves as the Air University with advanced and emerging learning technologies into Air Force educational and professional military education programs. Prior to AU, Dr. Stricker was the associate provost for innovation through technology at Vanderbilt University. He also served 27 years as an Air Force officer and scientist specializing in learning sciences, technology, systems integration and human factors engineering. Thank you for your service, Dr. Stricker. Our next guest is Dr. Cynthia Colloyne, aka Lear Lobo on our set here. She is a professor at CTU and CCC online. Lear taught 52 university classes in virtual worlds and received the VWBPE 2017 Thinker Award. Her team won the $25,000 grand prize for the Mars Expedition Space Simulation. Lear, Andy and Barbara published the book Integrating an Awareness of Selfhood and Society into virtual learning with several OpenSim co-authors, including Valerie Hill, Kay Novak and Rachel Umaron. Cynthia, thanks for joining us. And Barbara Truman. Dr. Truman serves as a strategic advisor for immersive learning and collaboration in the UCF's Institute for Simulation and Training in Orlando. She studies presence and collaboration using immersive environments and avatars across disciplines and domains of education, government and military. At UCF, Barbara founded an award-winning department representing online at UCF. Barbara served as the community manager for the U.S. Army's Moses Project as well. With this lineup, we are going to learn something. I want to welcome you all and I'm going to turn the mic over to you guys. Hey, thanks Meg. Can everyone hear me? I know we always ask that and then of course. If you can't, time to complain. Anyway, I want to thank my co-presenters. They are my buddies, my partners, my research community. And of course, we come together, we're going to talk about some of our giants that have influenced our work, and we're going to think about how OpenSim transforms us, how it gives us this opportunity to visualize the things that matter to us. And wonderful, wonderful. And we want you to take this journey with us. And while we're speaking, I want you to think about why are you here? Why are you a part of this community and the things that you contribute to it? And if your contribution is social, that is so important. And if it's entertainment, that is so important. And everything we do, while we talk about game simulations, research, character strings, virtues and values. And we want you to take this journey with us. Now you'll notice I have a slide up, and we call our research virtual harmony. That's the name of our grid. And of course, we are self-hosting. I say we, Andy does all the heavy lifting, right? But and of course, we've patterned this after New Harmony, Indiana, a place where Andy and I grew up, right, when we were children. Of course, we're not children now, we're far beyond that. But and that was where there were two utopian societies that came together and thought of a better way to live and to pull their creative efforts, right? Pull everything they did. And they created over 300 inventions and ways of doing business that transformed our country, right? And so some of my giants in the field are, of course, about games, right? I will write with the Sim, SimCity and Spore, Jesse's Shell with the Elemental Tetrad and How We Design Games. And Jay McGonagall and Constance Steinkuller, who are thinking about why these things matter and how we learn through games. And then Celia Pierce about Avatar as an identity. And then Joseph Campbell, of course, with the story of myth and the hero's journey. So I want to invite you to think about these things as we are moving through this talk. And of course, I'm showing in just a moment, you'll see right now you're seeing scenes from some of our work and some of these places, some are Loire in France, right? Where we gather at the Simone de Beauvoir Salon and think about where we're going, what we're going to do next in our projects. And then why these things matter, right? How they help to transform and make our world a better place. On Tuesday, we're going to invite you to take a tour with us, see some of these things, and then think about your work and what you need for your future. But for now, I'm going to turn the floor over to Andy Stricker, who's going to talk about transcendentalism and, of course, the giants in his area. And then I'm going to turn it over to Barbara Truman, who's going to talk about transdisciplinarity and her research and the intersection of scientists and people to cause great things to happen. And then I'm going to conclude with a few more scenes from OpenSim and then an invitation over to you, Andy. Well, thank you, Sam. Hope everybody can hear me. I'm so excited to be here again for an OpenSim conference. It's been life-changing for me to be a participant of the community. And transcendentalism is near and dear to our hearts in virtual harmony. You know, we really are very intent on representing what transcendentalism means for us and all the possibilities through the use of virtual worlds, such as the OpenSimulator community. And it really has inspiration from German philosophers and English and European romantic authors. And we're going to talk a little bit about the American version. It gets represented in some of the early work of Emerson. You can go to the next slide, Cynthia. And one of the characteristics of American trans-densitalism is a focus on wanting to, you know, put deeper meaningfulness into the lives that we live and escape from the materialism and the over-focused on the sort of isolated lifestyles that we can get caught up in when we're focused on strict materialism. And so Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, and many of his other colleagues, they were very interested in trying to interject into the American experience a closer connection and relationships that we have with one another in our communities. And in particular, particularly with nature. Nature for them was something that was able to uplift us from our intense focus on everyday things to transcend, as it were, deeper meaningfulness and the purpose of our lives and in our relationships and community with others. And so they encouraged people to really get in tune with the deeper sense that we have of why we are here and the importance of our moments together and our time that we spend on things. And one of the things that we try to do in virtual harmony in this spirit is to introduce a way that people can get re-intuned, as it were, to things that have a life-changing kinds of experiences that you would think about things and relate to others in ways that are busy lives apart from these virtual spaces make it very challenging or difficult to do. Next slide for me, Sin. And so what current transcendentalism is focused on is more of a humanistic philosophy where individuals in our lives are extremely important. It's like a Martin Buber concept where the encouragement is to not to see the moments of our lives and just high intensity kinds of activities, but to step back and reflect and appreciate the deep meaningfulness of what we are experiencing. And so we want to encourage people to not look at other people as objects, but more in a close identity of how they are related to one another. And so we encourage that very much. Next slide, Sin. So one of the things that we're doing is following after a French perspective about transcendentalism that we want to encourage people to basically reconstruct their sense of identity and connection and meaning to the world. And so we want to promote that sense of harmony between the things that we have to live with day by day and all the possibilities that our imaginations can bring and to create even a better life experience. And this is very similar to Jane McDonagall's notion of reality is broken in a sense that with our experiences in these immersive 3D worlds, we can have our imaginations inspired and to think of the things that we can make better and participate in and creating a better life and community with others. And so we are very much involved in supporting how we bring ourselves together across all the disciplines to promote transcendentalism. I'm going to turn it over to Barbara, a delightful doing, and she's going to talk about her work in research in transmissibility and how it relates to what we do in virtual harmony. Barbara. Thank you, Andy. And Cynthia as well. It is a mouthful, isn't it? And part of the challenge is to keep track of the difference between transdisciplinary approaches and transdisciplinary. So, and as we think about how we design the environments, whether we're designing for education, training and formal learning or building new smart cities and communities, need to integrate the physical and the virtual world, transdisciplinary approaches create these critical bridges that connect us as diverse people, ideas and cultures. So, transdisciplinarity results when these transdisciplinary approaches show us the benefits of this unification of knowledge, being and even nature. So, in these worlds, we have the ability as we learn from each other to apply all of these philosophical principles, the psychological principles and the art in the science, and we bring it all together. For science, this has been very important for the science of team science. So, in the list of the giants that are on the bottom of this page, we have Bessarab Nikolescu, who's considered the father of transdisciplinarity. I was actually, he read my dissertation and he put it on his website that's in this link. Now, keep in mind, Cynthia was my dissertation chair and Andy was on my committee for my dissertation. So I was very honored to have them and continue to learn from them. I don't know how many people can say that they keep up with their committees like I have had this opportunity to do so, but I would not have had the opportunity if it weren't for these 3D immersive virtual worlds. So, another giant is Dan Stockels. He is actually at the University of California, Irvine, and he is a social ecologist. So, I encourage you to check out his current work. And then, of course, the team of Salas and Fiori. Steve Fiori is actually at my institution, the University of Central Florida. Eduardo Salas has moved on to Rice University now, but they have written a great deal towards the science of team science to help scientists learn how to bridge these disciplinary challenges to see how imagination can impact the development of inquiry. It's not so much about what we know as much as how we can imagine what we need to know. So, also, Jeremy Balanson from the Stanford University Virtual Human Interaction Lab, he has had a great influence on my thinking, and he has presented at some of Andy's conferences that Andy has held with the Air Force. And, of course, Edgar Moran complexity. A lot of people want to avoid complexity. They're afraid of it. They don't see the beauty in it. They can't appreciate it. But with these worlds, we have the ability to model a lot of complexity that helps us bring out all of the benefits that we can find from it. And then, lastly, the pair here are Peter Senge and Otto Sharmer from MIT, who are standing at the Presencing Institute. As part of my research, I suggested that Peter Senge, he's written the book, The Fifth Discipline, but I suggested that the sixth discipline would actually be something they will come out with in the future, and it will be the discipline of presencing. I think that we, this is what we are doing when we are here in these conferences and when we are collaborating to co-create or co-transcend in these spaces. So that's my lineup for these greats. Thank you, Cynthia. And now, these are the tenants that Andy has come up with. And Andy, if you want to jump in here, feel free to. But I love how you have built these notions around this tree so that we have the co-transcendence that you mentioned. It's on the lower right-hand side. But we also have where you've put in how to design for iconic memory and for meaningfulness. Everything that you produce in the world can be packed with meaning and how it connects to both functionality and aesthetics to have the heart and the mind satisfied. But then, you know, designing for these experiences so that we overcome isolation. It's bridging. It's a bridging function. Is there anything we'd like to add on this slide? I think that's, you described it wonderfully. And, you know, we put a lot of attention into the encompassing effect of, you know, the experiences Barbara and incentive highlighted in virtual harmony. And we'll talk here in a minute about a tour. You can actually come out and experience these design tenants. Next slide, please. Yes, and these are just some of the images in virtual harmony that the Hall of Virtues and the upper left-hand side right below that, where we were studying some of the wines in the French Loire region. And then also in the Simon du Beauvoir salon, where we talk about some of these philosophers and how this history has had so much influence over us, but also how it is influencing what we are creating and what we're writing, even if they're boring scientific journal articles. We can still sneak in some interesting meaning that will continue to connect new inquiry. Well, it's not all boring because you see us there on the right enjoying a good bottle of wine. And of course, Andy gave us a wine challenge and said, we all had to bring our own bottles and, of course, come up with our own labels for them and think about our experience. And of course, that's Barbara on the lower left and Andy, Barbara and I in the upper right and the Hall of Virtues. Think of the Arthurian knights and think about character strengths and think about what is it that makes you such a wonderful person and how do you then share and contribute that with the world around you with in virtual worlds as well as in your physical space? And how does this make you a finer person as a result? Well, we're running low on time here, but we we only have a couple more slides to wrap up. And then, of course, there was a break. But here, Andy has designed a tree that we've populated with some leaves to think about the qualities that matter to us. And one of them is mindfulness and this tree, by the way, in the next slide, we show a mesh version and think of it as a navigation device for touring some of our content within virtual harmony. Andy. Yes, we we have our inspiration from the contemplative mind Association and higher education and they have a community of scholars that research, you know, the things that we can do in our academic and private and public lives to promote contemplation and a closer identity and community with others. And so we encourage you to go out and visit that that association and higher education and and network with them. If some of the topics that we're sharing today interest you. But all these areas that we've talked about, you can go out and actually later, I think it's to stay right, saying we can come out into virtual harmony and and you go up to this tree that you see depicted and it will take you around the contemplation areas of virtual harmony with various activities that you could engage in and sort of see the design tenants of what we've talked about as they've been put into the environment. So back over to you, Santa Barbara. Thank you, Andy. And yes, we're giving a tour. I'm laughing because, of course, several of you have asked me to give everything in UTC time. It's 11 a.m. Pacific on Tuesday. And of course, you're welcome to join us. We will have a hyper grid link up prior to the session. We're self hosting, so we're not using another agency. And all of this content is running on Andy's farmhouse. And so I'm so proud of the fact that we have figured out how to I hosted a class or two there and it was an amazing experience, very stable. And and that that's what reminds us of how privileged we are to have access to this technology. And we want to thank everyone who's helped us to to be able to work in these spaces. Well, here's my last slide. And of course, Andy designed a dinosaur for one of his grandchildren or a nephew. And I had to laugh because I just love it. And of course, I'm wearing a bird on my shoulder because we have so many birds living where I live. And so so we have spaces that remind us of ourselves. And we want to we want to thank everyone and the organizing committee of which Barbara and I are members. And of course, everyone who's helped us, the Cordev team, the viewer, folks and and you, thanks. All right. Well, gosh, guys, thank you so much for this. I cannot wait to go to virtual harmony and check it out. Check out the mindfulness area and get in sync with it. Does anyone have any quick questions real quick, quick? How many times can I say quick in a sentence? Ha, but if anyone has any questions, I can take about two questions. We have a comment by Juliet says those of us that are a metaphysician apply the efforts of individuals such as yourselves and your team. It's very inspirational. All right. If someone wants to get involved, i.e. by helping build or create in the harmony, are you guys taking on helpers? Yes, we are. And we welcome people to come out and we usually get together on Sunday afternoons at the salon in the French village to come together and talk about our design work and and research activity. So people are more than welcome to come out and join with us. We'd like that very much. OK, great. All right. Well, with no other questions, I want to thank everybody for joining us this morning. A reminder to everybody that you can check out the schedule for the conference.opensimulator.org and the next session is going to begin at 12 p.m. And it'll be a viewer panel. And because this is a virtual conference, it's so awesome because now we have a lunch break and you could just run to your kitchens, grab some lunch. You don't even have to get in your car and go anywhere. It's the awesomeness of having a virtual conference. I would like to encourage you guys during the break if you have some extra time to visit any of our expo regions. The OSCC 17 poster expo is on OSCC expo three. Find a company information about presenters and explore the hyper grid to our resources and expo two. But check them all out. They're all very interesting. And if you are a volunteer or a speaker or a crowd funder this year, we also are hosting a VIP Q&A and that's located in staff zone one region. And that starts at 11.15. So I want to send out a reminder about that. But thank you to our panel for this great presentation and thank you to all of you. And we will see you after lunch. Have a good lunch.