Joint Eduserv/JISC CETIS Second Life in Education Meeting - 20 Sept 07

This event was intended primarily to showcase the four Second Life (SL) project’s that Eduserv have awarded their annual research grant to. The interest shown in this meeting, and the speed at which it was completely fully booked, just goes to show the level of interest in this area at the moment - and this seems to be growing.

I would have liked to post a screenshot of Heather Makira (me) inside SL whilst at this RL conference to accompany this blog post, but as I was unable to log in to SL this just was not possible. The irony of the inability for most delegates to log into SL whilst at the conference due to firewall issues was not lost on the conference organisers – but fortunately the speakers (through some creative use of cables) were able to connect to SL and so able provide in-world demonstrations of what they were up to.

In addition to the presentations from the projects there were also presentations from Andy Powell (Eduserve) and our very own Lawrie Phipps. Andy used his extensive collection of SL T-shirts as the basis for his presentation (you’ll have to view the presentation to see what I mean) - if only I could script in SL, I'd like to do my slides on an SL t-shirt! Lawrie gave an overview of JISC’s activities within SL (which is not a lot!). JISC is doing very little indeed in SL. There is the emerge island for Lawries user innovation projects and some of the JISC Regional Centres have set up spaces in SL too, but that is about it so far.

The day ended with a lively debate on where we are with SL and education led by Paul Hollins. Overall this was a really interesting day - I made some new SL friends, met one of my SL friends in person for the first time (which was great) and it has inspired me to revisit priorities I had previously identified around virtual/immersive worlds.

Conference url: http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/EduservCETIS_20Sep2007
Venue: London Knowledge Lab
Wireless: Excellent
Power access: Poor but possible

Serious Virtual Worlds, Coventry - 14 Sept 07

I only attended the second day of this two day conference - due to a mixture of other commitments, the relatively high cost of the event and the strong commercial focus (in contrast I will be going to a SL event run by CETIS and Eduserve next week in London which is completely educationally focussed and is FREE!). Although there were some excellent and extremely interesting presentations, I don't regret only attending one of the days as I don't think that I would have got the additional value needed to reflect the increased cost.

Once at the event, I found out that it was being streamed, free of charge, into SL - had I known this beforehand I would have tried to attend at least some of the presentations on the first day 'in world' - if not both days! However, there was a downside to this for SL delegates, in that they could only see the speakers, not their presentations, which was a shame. Andy Powell blogged about this and compiled a video of the experience which is worth a look (I even have a cameo at one point as I did visit the conference in-world as well as being present in RL).

Some of the presentations that I did get to see on the second day were not quite what I expected - but were interesting never-the-less. The keynote, Digital Earth and Virtual Worlds, looked at how serious games and virtual worlds can be exploited to have a positive impact on global issues especially climate (in terms of reducing our combined carbon footprint etc.). Well worth a look. Prof Lizbeth Goodman then gave another thought provoking presentation on what she and her team had been able to do with games and virtual worlds that are having real and positive impacts on the children and parents of children with terminal illnesses. Some amazing stuff.

The other presentations Serious Medical Uses of VW, Virtual Disaster Management, were much more the kind of thing that I was expecting and provided examples of the current and cutting edge developments in terms of photo-realism and how serious games were being used as educating tools within medicine and disaster management - in fact there seems to be quite a lot about modelling terrorist attacks and how different agencies (medical, military) react to them and getting them to improve what they do by immersing the students in what were (in some cases) extremely realistic virtual simulations.


Conference url: http://www.seriousvirtualworlds.net/index.php
Venue: Coventry TechnoCentre
Wireless: Excellent
Power access: Very poor (unfortunately)

Programme Office Liaison Meeting - 12 Sept 07

The main points of interest from this meeting was the decisions made around the progress report template and the next template to be reviewed.

Progress report template(s)
Two progress report templates have been reviewed by the Programme Office. It has been agreed that both templates (with a few minor alterations to ensure heading consistency and JISC branding) would be made available from the JISC website, to replace the current template available to projects. The longer one was submitted by me (on behalf of the eLearning team) and the second, much shorter one, by James (on behalf of the eResearch Team). It was agreed by the group that Programme Managers could use their judgement on which template they use with projects - with the suggestion that projects being asked for less frequent progress updates should use the longer template and those being asked for more frequent reports should be given the shorter one to use for most reporting periods, possibly using the longer one on an annual basis to capture additional information.

Note: It was confirmed that it is not expected that progress reports will be uploaded to JISC project websites. This would be at the discretion of the Programme Manager concerned and if published, should be checked by the Programme Manager for any sensitive data that needs to be removed before being made public.

Next template review
It was agreed by the group that the next template to be reviewed, at the request of me/eLearning team, would be the Final and Completion Reports. Richard McK said that Policy would need to be consulted on any changes to these, but that he was happy for a revised template to be put forward by the eLearning team, which could then be reviewed by the wider Programme Office Liaison Group and Policy.

Action: HW to pull together another small working group from the eLearning Team to work on developing updated Final and Completion Report templates.