 So welcome to the Science Circle Roundtable. Please mute the music and media streams before we begin. I don't know if you noticed that this parcel has music playing. So go ahead and please mute that. Our discussion today is led by the four questions that were submitted in our Roundtable proposal. The structure of the Roundtable is to use four directions or compass points to discuss, not present directions on these topics. The north compass point, what else do you still need to know before you fully commit or are convinced? South compass point, what is your stance or opinion on this topic? What are the pros and cons? East compass point, what is exciting about your topic? And west compass point, what is worrisome about your topic and why should one still be cautious? And we have with us here today, so I am facing north. So let me see our... So to my right is Vic Malachek, who is also Phil Youngblood. To my left is Stephen Gager, who is Stephen Zodify. To the north in front of me, I'm facing north, is Mike Shaw. And to the south behind me is Rob Knopp. And each of them will introduce themselves also, give you a little background information about them also. And with that introduction, I would like to turn to Vic, our east compass point, to begin his presentation. Thank you. Okay, hi everybody. I'd like to echo Berrigan's sentiment and to welcoming you to our roundtable discussion. And I'd like to thank you for sincerely taking your time out of the day and the night in some cases to visit with us. Let's see. Okay, the name of the person behind my avatar is Phil Youngblood. But inside Second Life, I go by Vic. I think it's kind of funny that my names are switched on the conference schedule because... But I don't really mind because Vic is as much as what I... Who I am as Phil is out there in the physical world. In fact, if you Google my Second Life avatar name, one of the first things that you'll see is a link to last year's conference, you will also see links to the university degree program I found and headed or head and plus links to the science circle, which is the subject of our discussion today. Now, before I begin, by the way, is that we enjoy active audiences in the science circle. So we welcome your longer questions and comments at the end. But at least in my part of the presentation, I'll try to answer any questions or comments you haven't chat. To start with, if you don't mind, where are you today? In other words, I always find it interesting to see how diverse our audiences are. And I'm in my office at a university in Texas, USA. And I hope that students will read the do not disturb sign on the door for at least 10 minutes. Okay, so why are we here? Well, for me, my job as an educator and administrator in first life and my interest in sharing and learning science related topics as a member of the science circle and presenting here is all intimately related. The round table format has four compass points. And Bergen told you about them. And I elected to speak for what is exciting about what we do, because I think I have the easiest job. Okay, so after all, I know that I don't have to convince you or how exciting second life can be. I bet that each one of you remembers your first experiences here in second life when you met somebody or visited somewhere that was surprising and expected or amazing. In fact, what I found even more amazing than what I, as I learned about this site was or place was that each site and object is the creation of someone's imagination and it embodies no small amount of time, patients and even passion. Nor do I need to convince you the value associated with being able to connect with people from around the world with whom you can share ideas and collaborate. Your very presence here at the VWB P tells me that we have this in common within today's silos that describe social media virtual worlds like second life are like a breath of fresh air in which it's easy to have serendipitous encounters with people from many places in the world. Visual worlds today provide us with a way to visualize not only 3D spaces, but also to express abstract ideas and short, it's a perfect world to fulfill the mission of our group, the science circle. So who is the science circle. Now, I know we have another speaker who will be talking more of this. So I hope I haven't grabbed his thunder, but the science circle is very exciting and I'd like to describe a little bit of my experience with it. The science circle began as a forum for discussion of science related topics back in 2007. Back then we sat in a circle and discussed our views as peers, hence the origin of the name. Today the science circle foundation is a nonprofit organization headed in the Netherlands with an international board of directors and hundreds of members from all over the globe. The mission of the science circle is to enhance understanding and learning to promote promote dialogue broadly across disciplines with an emphasis on the sciences using a virtual environment to allow participation on a global scale. Now I'd like to invite you to visit our website which I just put up there to learn more about who we are and better still come visit us as guests on the science circle. This is Jim and second life our presentations are often on Saturdays at 10am second lifetime. Now back in 2008. I was honored to give the first presentation for a group on the subject of the Anthropocene epic that is how human activity rivals natural processes and impact on the earth. In the last 11 years the science circle has met continuously and sponsored hundreds of presentations on extremely wide range of topics, shared with us by experts in the field from around the world. We engage not only in active presentations, but explore the regions on field trips to areas as diverse as the Grand Canyon and ancient Abyssinia. We also have a number of interactive and informative spaces on our island. So what do we find exciting? Well, besides the very fact that we have the group and that we have members from around the world and can hear from experts. Members of the science circle yearn to learn more about the world around us. We have both current students and lifelong learners with decades of life experience. Some members had to kind of suspend their beliefs and those of their colleagues who often dismiss this place as some sort of video game, which we know it's not. On the other hand, we continue to attract much younger members who are digital natives who grew up communicating remotely, selecting avatars in console or web games who already kind of get this place. Members of our board and many of our presenters who are likely to have gray hair in first life, even if their avatars don't bring decades of experience in science and teaching to the world. We've been learning from each other all generations about the ever-evolving set of technologies that enable us to represent and to present and to immerse people in the wonders of scientific discovery and knowledge. So it's the perfect place to learn. Let me describe some of the ways we do. Virtual worlds are a perfect place to learn and to learn about science. Learning here involves not just textbooks or static pictures that you look at your own or on your own or passive videos that you watch on the web. Here you can see what a heart or a dolphin looks like from all angles, what sounds they make and how they connect with the world. Here your learning can be guided by experts in the field, from people like you with whom you can interact face-to-face instead of just watch from a distance. Learning is not just passive, but it's do-it-yourself. What if I mix the traits of the two parents? What will their offspring look like? What if I change the shape of the tires? Will NASA accept my proposal for the new Mars rover? Learning is not just sit and listen presentations, but dynamic and immersive interaction with others where your ideas are heard. Learning is not just professional presenters sharing subjects with which they're passionate, but a flurry of texts chat among audience members, comments, questions, answers, links, feedback. Learning in the science circle is respectful encounters in which your opinion, your answer, your question counts, regardless of who you are in the physical world. Does it matter that it's virtual? Do you remember it any less? I can still recall my first encounters in Second Life going to a mosque and being asked to take off my shoes, going to other areas and being able to play an instrument in a Korean village, all these sorts of things. I'm sure you've had these same sorts of experiences. I can remember recall walking among the denizens of the ocean deep, tracing Darwin's footsteps, experiencing an asteroid strike on Mars. I've investigated optical illusions, found my way through jungles, sat with a meerkat in Africa, witnessed the span of world art and an open museum on our island that spirals ever upward. Both our real world and our virtual worlds can be exciting places and we're still all learning together and that's what really makes it truly exciting. So what I would like to do is I'd now like to invite you to hear from our other three presenters we'll share with you today and to learn more about yourself about the science circle. Come visit us, learn how exciting things that we can share with you. Now, one of our presenters will be speaking on what you need to know and I, like I said, I hope I haven't stepped on what they're saying. But in science and in education, hearing from different perspectives is where the learning technique is. So thank you and we're coming up on our next speaker. This is a little about who I am, but we'll hear from everyone and oh, hey there, George from Vermont. Okay, so I'm going to turn it over to, I'm a little early, but I'm going to turn it over to the next point. Yeah, Vic, let me interject a little bit here. Our next speaker will be Steven Gager at our West Compass Point. But just the housekeeping matter. Steven, do you want me to click the HUD for you or do you want to operate it yourself? Just, I'm not sure which way is the, okay, you want to do it. I think that actually might be a little bit better if you do it yourself. And we have a minute or so on our schedule. Would like to invite our studio audience to text any remarks or thoughts they have on what Vic just said. Any thoughts? Reactions? We've, we've attracted a pretty good sized crowd here today. Looks like we have 40 people, pretty good. All right, with that then, let me introduce Steven Gager, Steven Zodify here in Second Life. Steven, why don't you go ahead and give, give your remarks. Thank you. Nice to be here and have such a nice audience for today. I posted in my background information and in basics, I am a PhD in molecular biology, but I went and transitioned to teaching. Ended up teaching some classes in Second Life at two different public universities and also helped to try and develop educational activities related to biology in Second Life and Open Stimulator. I am now in the private sector, so I'm not currently in education, but I wanted to provide that information for where I came from and I'm still a very active member in the science circle and trying to get, maintain that interface with education. Vic set up a nice East Compass point and actually I think I have the easiest job because talking about what's worrisome for someone like myself is actually pretty easy too. And the basic worries about integrating virtual world science learning into education are the institutional resistances for wide adoption and the user space of these platforms and people's technology interfaces. My experiences in Second Life, before I began talking about my interactions with science circle, I'd like to give some more details about my teaching background. I taught a non-majors biology course fully enrolled several semesters. While the grant-supporting faculty were very encouraging of the course, the department chair gave grudging permission to actually teach it. It served a very useful role allowing distance education for the wider student body, i.e. the non-majors. But it was not destined to be a course for wider adoption or to ever teach major classes. There was faculty bias against thinking that major courses could be taught well in Second Life or online at all. Now, wider adoption of Second Life at University of New Orleans also did not happen, even with the grants, outside of a few very good courses in education and English. I also found via feedback that when individual students had a hard time with a particular course or Second Life and commented such on course evaluations, this created a fear of alienating individual students among the faculty and this created resistance to adoption as well. Now, Ball State was more supportive in general of applying new technologies to the learning experience and using Open Simulator in Second Life was something I had the encouragement to try out. The I.D.I. Lab, the Institute for Digital Intermediate Arts, there is also a world-class immersive media group which was hosting their Open Simulator red grid, which I used for courses. And I forgot to put in the text. They also used to have ASM in Second Life. With Kim and Ebus, I developed a fully fleshed out virtual epidemiology activity, recreating John Snow's examination of cholera in the 1860s London for it. Its development was supported by an internal university grant. However, there was still institutional resistance in that they were very proactive at making sure officially adopted online platforms complied with disability guidelines and laws, which led to, again, an institutional resistance to fully adopting virtual world courses, activities for courses. And while virtual ability of other talented individuals can help design those for those with physical disabilities, it is an additional development layer and time commitment for the faculty. Now, some other observations. Those have been specific in individual experiences that inform my world view, or my virtual world view. However, I will put forward other observations for my time in virtual worlds and points of view from science circle discussions. We can all admit that Second Life and Open Simulator and other platforms are incredibly immersive and powerful for learning. Others in world and attending VWPE, I've seen many. However, the key question is how many K-12 schools or universities have fully supported these platforms with technical and design personnel. Individual or small group development and implementation, like I've done, helps bring these experiences to usage. However, wide scale adoption requires more buy-in. One of the keys to training students to use the platform, that is one of the keys. This is where the robustness of the platforms can be used as an option because the learning curve is higher. I've personally trained almost all my students to use the viewer. That takes away from instruction and was additional work for me. Institutional inertia. Institutions will, of course, make such efforts if they see the value in the end. Studies that demonstrate learning effectiveness and efficiency will be important for this step. Conferences like this, efforts of individuals all help build this case. Science Circle, with this plan to persistently introduce science learning to individuals, and work with institutions can help advance this case. They can be one of those partners that relieves several burdens, like having to go through purchasing or the design time to set up virtual spaces. I personally use the Science Circle a few times as a study hall location and for presentations. They can be a resource with established land and users that can make things easier for teachers. Platforms. I want to revisit the efficiency effectiveness perspective for learning technologies from the user perspective. There are a lot of options for internet social interactions. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Snapchat and Twitter are all popular social platforms. They're flat, but they are easy to use. They function in bursts of activity, which lets a person be active without long commitments. They can be on mobile phones and are easy to carry. These platforms are where a lot of people are with their interactions with each other on the internet. Users and universities can and have leverage these platforms for their ease of use and what they can do well, they're limited in scope. For decades, universities have used chat boards, even email or even snail mail for distance courses. They're easier to implement and can be good instruction with the right instructor and engaged students. They are good in the efficiency effectiveness equation, virtual worlds are still not perceived that way. Now, Science Circle engagement, Science Circle has been dedicated for several years to engaging its users and welcoming users on multiple platforms. These are ways to make sure that you have an engaged community at the levels at which they can commit. Any more presentations are recorded and posted on YouTube, for example. They have their own dedicated web page and are on Facebook and LinkedIn. Science Circle is also supporting an open simulator group. Of course, for any social media platform, one is competing against lots of information vying for each user's attention. It is important to be ready to compete against those other distractions and that is a danger of using other company spaces. They ultimately do control the interface and the user agreements. So, as a final suggestion and a reminder of what the Science Circle is trying to do is that what we've learned over the years is it's best to find ways to partner with those who know what they're doing and have what you need to ease the transition into virtual worlds. Draw users in and engage on multiple platforms and you have to meet people of what they're comfortable using and doing, but also make it easier for yourself. And that is the end of my presentation. Thank you. Okay, thank you very much, Steven. That was very thorough. I appreciate that very much. Do we have any thoughts from our audience? I do think that it still, frankly, does kind of surprise me how, I guess, just how long or how slow it's been to sort of get educational institutions to accept a platform like Second Life, even in view of the decade of experience with it and how versatile it can be and what kind of interesting demographics you can attract to these platforms. Okay, so we're doing pretty well on time. Our next speaker at the North Compass Point is going to be Mike Shaw. Mike, would you like to operate your own Bikisi HUD or would you like me to click on it for you? I can click on it. My talk is, I thought, well-prepared, but I tend to make live changes to things, so it'll probably be a little bit better for me to go in. I've really enjoyed Phil and Steven's presentations. It brings up a lot of excellent points, especially about the challenges that we face in implementing education in virtual worlds and things like that. Well, I'm Mike Shaw. My background here is coming through on text chat here. I'm at a medium-sized university. It's called Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. We've got about 14,000 students. We're in the Midwest. I don't know a PhD program. My teaching load is a bit higher than what you would expect at a PhD program. It's a good funding opportunity, especially like using research as a teaching experience for our students. It's been a good platform for me being able to do the kind of things I wanted to do on my career. I've ended up being kind of senior here now. One of the interesting things about being more senior is that people just kind of let you do a little more than what they might let a junior member do. There's the 10-year thing. It's like, well, I don't know about them anyway. So I've had some good success in introducing some second life, as is more as illustrations and animations and the science circle to help. My compass point today, let's see, I'll have to click on the speaking easy. My compass point today I wanted to address is how can expert presenters such as scientists and others be engaged in virtual worlds on a continuing basis? And we've touched on that a little bit. Time management is an institutional support, is a... So I like to think about what the definitions are and any question that I'm answering. So the first thing that comes up for me is like what counts as an expert presenter? And honestly, in our experience in a science circle, we don't have to be like a PhD chemist to be able to present. It does help if you have good results, but if you have a lot of knowledge on this, welcome. So we have regular presentations from scientists, educators, MD, people with unique experience and perspective. So a very broad definition. So getting back to the question, okay, how can experts be engaged? You always have to look at both internal motivations and external motivations. If somebody is internally motivated, it basically means that the reward for the activity is a reward that comes from the inside. A general sense of satisfaction from the activity itself. So that can come from a variety of sources. I mean, creating in Second Life is fun. Engaging with others to promote science because of one's own personal beliefs, that's also fun and satisfying. Building good supportive relationships. One of the things I found in Science Circle is that I've made a lot of friends and that would not have happened without the interaction I've had in Science Circle. So basically all these are internal motivations, which essentially boil down like it feels like the right way. So I've been giving presentations for a couple of years now in Science Circle. I'm not one of the early adopters. I've been in Second Life for decades and I've enjoyed the time here, but it's become a lot more fun with the more social interaction. External motivations. Well, how can we bribe people? I use the word bribe because basically getting can be thought of as a bribe and if it's not then you're internally motivated. Okay. For me, there are definitely rewards here. Let's say that I'm out at work about the Second Life thing. I put it in my annual report. I get reviewed on it to get good reviews on it. My colleagues are supportive. And basically so there are professional rewards. Being specific, I would say that one is applying for external funding as a scientist. In NSF there is the broader impact criterion. It has to be addressed in every proposal. In the fall I submitted two proposals. One was funded, one was not. One was for my chemistry activities. I don't think I've shared this with anybody in Science Circle yet, but the chemistry one has a little bit of money in it for helping Science Circle pay for land use. So that's a three-year commitment there. And you know, basically NSF was very supportive of that. Not a huge amount, but every little bit helps. So, yeah, International Conference, I am going to write it that way. So, you know, one thing being a faculty member at a university like mine, external funding gives you a lot of credibility. So that helps with Science Circle and stuff. The other proposal was not funded. It was basically with some of the people in this room, virtual room, and basically we're going to get questions of how to make objects a little more pedagogically friendly in second life teaching. Basically build the pedagogy into objects and animations before just build the objects. That one wasn't funded, but reviews are encouraged. So that's a very good professional stuff. You know, we basically make the normal presentations on science into an activity that counts towards funding. I think that's a good strategy. Increases chances of funding. Next point, partnering with others in second life allows for collaboration. So that was the point of the second proposal that we put in in the fall. And since we have unique population demographics of residents of virtual worlds, that can be very attractive in certain studies. Invited talks go on resume. That speaks to Phil's comment a little bit earlier. And one of the most wonderful things I've found is that the objects that I've designed for talks in second life do double duty. I can use them in my classroom as animated series. Some of my students go into second life. They're the minority because, as Steven pointed, there are institutional barriers. Oh, lost voice for a second there. We do have policies where you can't require students to make external program like second life. So now all of these activities count as science outreach on the annual report. Okay, so I was going to res something at this point, but you guys can come to the science circle site and see some of some of our some of our objects. Okay, no report. Now, one of the things that I found for external motivations, the most engaged presenters seem to have a combination or balance of internal mode. So you're seeing have both index. One of the big things is time. I am going over Matt. Just stop me and activate an animation that makes me stop the bride. I think we still have a minute. So you're okay. Perfect. Okay, let's look at time commons. We talked about time commons a little bit. It takes a lot of time to come up with much of this stuff. And I'll just kind of click through and go through some of the highlights here. There are things competing for one's time. The regular teaching act is the lab time. If one's students, there's service, the rest of my day-to-day service, and then there's home because there is there is the home that has to remain standing. So it is important and I put little plus signs around this. There is a balance that includes science outreach. That means you have to carve time so that you get synergies with any existing time commitments and activities. So I think I'm going to stop there. Yeah. But let's go with, let's go. Yes. Thank you very much. That was a really enjoyable presentation. I discovered my wall clock is about 30 seconds slower than the computer time. So got us a little bit behind there, but I think it was worth it. And now, yes. And so our next presenter is going to be Rob Knopp. All right. And you know what? I will go ahead and try and click and we'll see if it works. Hey, look, it works. I'll use it. So hello, everybody. I am Rob Knopp, currently a physics professor at Westminster College, a small college in Western Pennsylvania. And I'm going off script already. I just wanted to echo what Mike said. He said that he tends to rewrite his presentations as he gives them. Yes, I do that too. In fact, usually when I prepare presentations, I don't have any kind of a script. I have slides. I know what I'm going to talk about. And then I make it all up when I get there. So here I am doing the same thing. My claim to fame from years past, I was part of one of the two teams of astronomers that discovered the expansion of our universe is accelerating. So that was back in the late 1990s is when that happened in 2011. The guy I worked with, Saul Permotter, got the Nobel Prize for that. So there's my claim to fame. Maybe, however, I'm more famous around here because I took two years off from academia, worked at this small company called Blinden Lab as a operations engineer and later as the server release manager. And I was Prospero Linden back then. And some of you may have known me back then as Prospero Linden. But that's been a long time. I think you can still look up Prospero Linden's profile. So the account hasn't been deleted, but whatever. And I will say Prospero Floboz was the name I had before that and that I still use for my second life avatar. But people mostly call me Rob nowadays. The other thing that happened when I was at Linden Lab is I became a founding member of MICA, although some people thought it should be called MICA, the Meta Institute of Computational Astronomy. This was put together by a number of astronomers. Some of you curious, George. George Dragrovsky is still sort of around. Pete Hutt was another one. There were a few others as well. And what we were really trying to do was create a... Well, I'll tell you, but you know what? See, I'm going out of order here. I shouldn't do that. So since then, I've been on the faculty at a couple of small colleges, including where I am now. And yes, I still give public outreach talks. Now in association with the Science Circle, I used to give a lot more during the time of MICA. Nowadays, it's more like two or three a year. And it depends on how good Chantal and Jess are at convincing me to actually get my acts together and do one. So very broadly speaking, my topic is on the question, just cross-talk between second life and other media. Make meeting in virtual worlds for science discussion more robust. You're going to hear some echoes of some things people have already said here because, hey, we're all talking about kind of the same thing. So as I was saying, MICA, I think MICA's experience is relevant. Its goal was to explore virtual worlds like second life as a collaboration platform for astronomers. We called it computational astronomy because several of the... That's just the research area that several of them were in. So we did have in MICA a number of professional astronomers other than just those of us who founded it, come in and give colloquia. But our experience was none of them. None of them stayed in second life. A few of them came back a couple of times and that was about it. The only regulars who stayed with us were the core group that either founded it or were with it from the very beginning. So, you know, that was a little discouraging. Now here's the thing, though. Astronomy as a whole has been very eager to adopt a lot of internet technology. We had a better journal search engine in the late 1990s, which still exists, adsabs.harvard.edu. It's better than what a lot of fields had even a few years ago, and in fact, still today, I'd rather use that than the ones I find on libraries and things. It's a very good search engine. Also, virtual observatories. Curious George, George Shurgovsky has worked a lot on this. There's large surveys out there, and there are software and websites where people can point at places on the sky and then get all the data from large surveys. So it's not that astronomy has resisted adopting technology, but virtual worlds have not had much of a pickup with astronomers. And like I said, we tried, and we didn't really get so far. And so from that point of view, we could view Micah as a failure because we didn't really create an astronomy department in Second Life. We don't still have ongoing professional astronomers coming in and having seminars with each other. Now, when I was involved in Micah, yeah, Enrico, I don't remember what he called himself, but anyway, yes, he's still around. I would say, just as an aside from my own point of view, I picked up collaborators that I met in Second Life through Micah. At least one of them, yes, thank you, at least one of them wrote me a recommendation letter when I applied for a job. I still communicate with some of the others. The research I'm doing is related to some of that. So it was very productive for me personally. It just didn't seem to catch on and catch fire. Now, my role in Micah was I gave a lot of public outreach talks. For a while, I was giving one almost every week, which is hard for me to imagine nowadays. Micah was talking about it takes time to put these things together. Well, I was doing a lot once. So from my selfish point of view, and of course, I am very biased here, the most successful part of Micah was the public outreach talks. And like I say, they continue to this day. Micah no longer formally exists, but the science circle, of course, has picked up and it does public outreach talks in all sorts of different scientific fields. They're still going. I still do them. And I think they work very well. But I'm not aware of any really meaningful scientific collaboration amongst astronomers in the virtual world. So all right, so what's the issue? Why doesn't it work? I think that the barriers for getting into Second Life and if anything more so into open sim worlds remain huge, gigantic. It's just, it's hard. When I worked at Lyndon Lab, we had noticed that the number of people who boot up the client and the number of people who log into Second Life a second time, there's a gigantic drop between those two. And if anything between then and now, I think people's patience for getting going with technology has gone down. Think about apps on phones, right? People expect to pick up their phone, touch a touchscreen and they see their thing. The notion that you might have to spend a minute or two figuring out how to do a thing, I think is getting farther and farther from what people do. So there's a little parenthetical element for you. Now in Micah, some of us felt that the immersion of virtual worlds, which the other folks have already talked about, brought a lot to the collaboration. I think we were in the minority. I think most people found the barriers getting involved and the remove you're at with your avatar as opposed to yourself did not. But those overwhelmed or overcame the immersion that it was worth it. And Stephen was talking about, oh, I should say, there's other collaboration and communication tools like the web for sharing pre-prints is huge. But Micah and Stephen, I think both talked about trying to get college students involved is tough. Stephen, I think, mentioned he had to sit down and work with each and every student to get them going with the viewer. Trying to get college students to do anything other than silently sit and maybe take notes as hard. And so when you have them going into, we try to do active learning and the students, you have to control sometimes. So that's kind of tough. So what does work? Well, public outreach to those who are interested in virtual worlds. And so what I would say I see my mission with the public outreach talks I do nowadays is bringing science to people who are in second life, which, as has been pointed out, are people all over the world. So it's less, we want to try and recruit people into virtual worlds so they can hear my talks and more, hey, there's a lot of people already in virtual worlds and a lot of them are interested in science and so great, I want to do outreach to them. And that's, I think, at least part of what Science Circle wants to do. I will say, secondarily, people watch Science Circle YouTube videos. You can ask Shantel for more information about that. She knows there's numbers of things. It could well be that more people see my talks on YouTube than come into second life and see them, but honestly, I think the interactivity of the talks is part of what's really important about them. Vic mentioned this. In our Science Circle talks, there's always a ongoing chat in text as we're talking, as people ask questions and then I answer questions, or I'll tell you frankly, usually Vic answers the question, right? They'll talk to each other, they'll answer each other's questions, they'll respond. It's very interactive and I think that's an important part of it and if you're just watching a video of the talk later, you don't get to participate in that interaction and so I think that's actually a pretty important part of it. So, that's the end of my prepared notes. I will just say to summarize Science Circle, what I see is it's mission mainly is outreach to the people around the world who already are in virtual worlds. There's a tremendous potential for bringing other people into it, but what's working best right now is talking to the people who are there. So, I will stop there and let Berrigan take it all over. Fantastic. That was really thought provoking. We now have a little bit of time for general discussion and I want to take a moment here to make sure I have time for it. Let's all please applaud and give acknowledgement to Chantal and Jess who worked so hard to pull this presentation together and line up all of our panel members and to coordinate with the VWPBB. So, thank you so much Chantal and Jess and I know, Jess, it must be like five o'clock in the morning for you in Australia so we appreciate your sacrifice to be here today. And I think I'll take a look at our local chat here. A couple of things I'm curious about with regard to the entry barriers is what impact the Mesh Revolution has had for whether Mesh makes Second Life easier to access or more difficult to access. I kind of feel like Mesh has professionalized building in Second Life so much of creating objects for Second Life is now done offline in Photoshop and so forth and imported in. The building tools seem to be used, the in-world building tools seem to be less and less. And in some ways that can make it easier. You can just sort of get something and wear it or put it on your land or something but it does seem like you see less in-world building happening. Well, I'll jump in and agree with you. The Mesh makes things look a lot less cartoony than they did in the old days and I think that may have been something that turned people off initially. And a wonderful thing about Mesh is that you can build it, it's offline, but you can use it in different venues. So, in fact, we use Google Cardboard devices using Unity that we build Mesh objects for so students can actually see these things in class without having to long on to an actual virtual world. Oh, that's very interesting. I would also, while I have the floor here, make a plug for the Science Circle and our Saturday programs and in particular are the panel discussions that I moderate. I think one of the speakers here mentioned the social aspects of the science community here in Second Life. And I think one of the things that our Science Circle panel discussions bring out is a little bit of a less formal, more social way to present scientific topics. I just wanted to make a plug for that. We'll jump in real quick to talk about interactive objects because I made a bunch of chemistry stuff and one of the challenges is how do you translate the interworld activity into a grade that you can document in your gradebook. And I think that that is one of the challenges that is persistently present and that in terms of designing them you might try and find a way to design them in a way that they are tracking the progress or how you score them ultimately. If I can jump in for just a second. One of the classes I did in Second Life I did with a professor in France with students in France, the United States and Mexico and they got together, used whatever language they want. It was a class in Java so essentially they were learning scripting in Second Life, creating objects like robots and cars and a jukebox and stuff and so that's kind of how we translated things so we could grade stuff. Okay, fantastic. And my clock says it's 11.20 pretty much exactly so why don't we go ahead and gavel this panel discussion to a close. I want to thank all of our panel members for all the work they put in for their presentations and just to be able to all get organized enough to all be here together. So thanks to everyone and again thanks to Chantal and Jess. And with that I gaveled this to a close and you're all free to go. Okay, this is just of course the first presentation so have fun at the rest of the conference. This is a great conference.