Tag: VWBPE Archives

VWBPE 2015: meeting at the Crossroads

Posted on by Inara Pey
VWBPE 2015: the main auditorium stands ready
VWBPE 2015: the main auditorium stands ready

Wednesday, March 18th marks the start of the 8th annual Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education (VWBPE) conference, which will be taking place in both Second Life and the OpenSimulator based AvaCon Grid.

The theme for this year’s event is Crossroads, and will include a presentations by keynote and featured speakers, panel discussions, workshops, social events and more, running through until the conference closes on Saturday, March 21st.

Full details on conference events can be found on the VWBPE conference calendar. However, for ease-of-reference, here’s a quick run-down of the keynote and featured speakers, and the main discussion panels. together with other pertinent information. As always, all times are SLT.

The conference includes exhibition and workshop areas
The conference includes exhibition and workshop areas

Wednesday, March 18th, 2015

Thursday, March 19th, 2015

The VWBPE main plaza in SL
The VWBPE main plaza in SL

Friday, March 20th, 2015

  • 07:00: featured speaker, Jeroen Frans: Creating Dinosaurs & Earning Badges, at the VWBPE SL main auditorium
  • 09:00: Virtual Ability panel discussion moderated by Zola Zsun/Linda Lindsey, at the VWBPE SL main auditorium
  • 13:00: Featured speaker, Sensuous Maximus: Bootcamp for Virtual Teachers, at the VWBPE SL main auditorium
  • 14:05: Quadrivium Networking Topic: Educators and the Second Life Viewer facilitated by Oz Linden, at the VWBPE SL main auditorium

Saturday, March 21st, 2015

Notes on Attending

The VWBPE conference is free to attend, although there are donation options available for those wishing to support the conference.  Those wishing to attend all of the conference activities across the four days of the conference will need accounts for both Second Life and AvaCon grid – please refer to Accessing the Conference for further details.

Additional Links

VWBPE 2015: of deadlines, calendars and registrations

Posted on by Inara Pey

VWBPE_LogoThe 2015 Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education (VWBPE) conference will take place in Second Life and OpenSim between Wednesday, March 18th and Saturday, March 21st inclusive.

VWBPE is a global grass-roots community event focusing on education in immersive virtual environments which attracts 2200-3500 educational professionals from around the world each year.

The theme for this, the 8th VWBPE conference is Crossroads, and the organisers have released an update to remind people that the first set of crossroads regarding their involvement is approaching, with deadlines drawing near.

Important Dates

VWBPE Exhibition submissions extended – but must close on Friday, February 27th

Exhibition space is available at the main VWBPE venue in Second Life, providing the opportunity for exhibitors to display and promote their products and / or services in 3D. Spaces within the exhibition area are limited, and will be provided on a first come, first serve basis, with priority being given to educators, community organizations, and non-profits.

Please visit the conference Exhibits page for further information.

2015 Thinkerer Award nominations set to close on Sunday, March 1st

Named after its first recipient in 2014, Thinkerer Melville (Selby Evans in the physical world), the Thinkerer Award is presented to an individual whose deeds and actions have shown consistent selfless service towards the promotion of learning, community, and educational practices, and who exemplifies the spirit of cooperative development within immersive environments.

Nominations are currently open for potential recipients of the 2015 award, and those interested in nominating someone are directed to the Thinkerer Award nominations guidelines for further information.

Post-Conference Tours – submissions close on Friday, February 27th

Explorations – the VWBPE post-conference virtual tours – provide an opportunity for  educational leaders to share their visions of education beyond the traditional classroom setting, by offering tours of their virtual environments to their VWBPE peers.  These tours have historically generated the greatest excitement in the spirit of inspiration and sharing, and and promise to do so again, both through them and through the use of social media tools.

Those wishing to present a tour of their virtual environment can find the guidelines and submission requirements for doing so on the VWBPE Explorations page.

The Programme and Calendar

vwbpe-15The conference calendar is now available, and can be seen on-line (use the Go To options to advance to March and the conference, if necessary).

Conference events will commence at 13:00 SLT on Wednesday, March 18th, with the opening keynote address by Ebbe Altberg, entitled Education in Second Life and in the Future. This will see Ebbe share his thoughts on the value Linden Lab places on the education market, some of the compelling educational uses cases he’s seen during his tenure as CEO, and his perspective on how virtual experiences and education will be important to one another in the future.

Following the opening keynote, and throughout the four days of the event, the conference will present a mix of keynote addresses, presentations, talks, discussions and more, covering a broad canvas of education and virtual mediums.

Attendance

Attendance at the conference is free, and the attendee registration page is open. For those who which to support the costs involved in staging VWBPE events in both Second Life and OpenSim, can also opt to register using one of the Crowdfunder options available via the registration page.

Sponsorship

Best Practices in Education are at the forefront of a technically revolution that is creating inspiring innovation in the classroom; a revolution which is adding momentum to the intersection where academic learning meets a student’s willingness to engage in simulations which build moral character, leadership ability, and critical thinking.

Be a part of these exciting trends by helping support a conference for educators who use leading edge tools and techniques in the classroom. The VWBPE conference reaches over 3000 educators from around the world who are advancing these educational techniques.

Donations are used to help create open-sourced, peer-reviewed archives which extend well beyond the 3-4 days of the VWBPE conference, as well as permit teachers and educators to learn how to work with changing technologies in the classroom.

In addition, your brand recognition will expand well beyond a simple 4 day conference given that it will be part of the public record and accessible through the US Library and Archives. You can view past conference proceedings at the Journal of Virtual Studies.

There is no better investment than in educating the future leaders in advanced education, so learn today how to become a sponsor for the 8th Annual Best Practices in Education Conference.

Related Links

VWBPE 2015: Ebbe Altberg, a final call for papers, and sponsors

Posted on by Inara Pey

VWBPE_LogoThe 2015 Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education (VWBPE) conference will take place in Second Life and OpenSim between Wednesday, March 18th and Saturday, March 21st inclusive.

VWBPE is a global grass-roots community event focusing on education in immersive virtual environments which attracts 2200-3500 educational professionals from around the world each year.

In the context of the conference, a “virtual world” is an on-line community through which users can interact with one another and use and create ideas irrespective of time and space. As such, typical examples include Second Life, OpenSimulator, Unity, World of Warcraft, Eve Online, and so on, as well as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest or any virtual environments characterised by an open social presence and in which the direction of the platform’s evolution is manifest in the community.

As well as keynote speakers, activities include presentations and workshops which span all of education from primary through to post-graduate levels. 2015 marks the eighth year in which the conference has been held.

The theme for this years event is Crossroads, and the event’s opening speaker, as many already know, will be Ebbe Altberg, Linden Lab’s CEO.

Ebbe Altberg: opening VWBPE 2015
Ebbe Altberg: opening VWBPE 2015

VWBPE 2014 marked one of Ebbe’s earliest public appearances before users in an open forum. Over a period of 90 minutes, he demonstrated his willingness to engage directly with people when he took an unscripted questions-and-answers session (full transcript) with the 200 people in attendance or watching the livestream. Since that time, and throughout 2014, he continued to meet with a wide range of groups and communities – including representatives of the education sector.

With the Lab now engaged on both enhancing Second Life to the best of its abilities and in developing a new virtual world(s) platform,  there is liable to be a lot of interest in what is said during his presentation.

Final Call for Proposals – Reminder

The VWBPE attracts a wide range of speakers from the education sector, non-profit organisations, the arts, and so on. As noted in the original announcement that Ebbe would be opening the event, there is an open invitation to anyone who would like to make a presentation or run a workshop. However, the clock is now counting down.

If you are intending on submitting a proposal for a presentation or activity at this year’s event, please remember that the closing deadline for proposals is Wednesday, January 14th, 2015 (extended from December 14th, 2014). Proposals should be submitted on-line via the VWBPE Conference Central site (registration required), and guidelines are also available.

Sponsorship

As a volunteer-based event, VWBPE depends upon sponsor support, and 100% of all sponsorship goes directly to funding each year’s conference to cover expenses such as the provisioning of information systems, development of video and machinima (and associated archives), live video streaming, social activities, professional building (mesh object) design and construction for virtual venues, graphics design and swag bags for attendees. No-one involved in the organisation of the conference receives a salary or stipend.

Several levels of cash sponsorship packages (US dollar value) are available for those interested in supporting the conference. Details of these, and the benefits of sponsorship, can be found on the conference sponsorship page.

Related Links

 

VWBPE 2014: Ebbe Altberg keynote – “The Door is Open” (full transcript)

Posted on by Inara Pey

On Friday April 11th, Ebbe Altberg, Linden Lab’s CEO, addressed a packed amphitheatre at the 2014 Virtual Worlds Best Practice in Education (VWBPE) conference in Second Life. Some 200 people were in attendance in SL, with around 100-150 on the live stream channel for what was almost a 90-minute session, entitled Reconnecting with the Education Market, and which comprised an opening statement from Ebbe, followed by an extended Q&A / discussion session.

The following is a transcript of the session, which includes all questions asked via the moderator, Phelan Corrimal (given in italics). The video is the VWBPE official video, recorded by Mal Burns, and my thanks to him for making it available. Timestamps within the transcript notes indicate the points in the video at which Ebbe’s comments can be heard.

The Summary

Click the timestamp to go the relevant section

  • 0:05:38: Terms of Service – “I am working with my Legal Counsel to try to try to figure out how we can make it more obvious – or very obvious – that the creators of the content own the content … we’re working on some simple tweaks to the language to make that more explicit.”
  • 0:07:26: Brand – “We have an incredible breadth of content creators for all kinds of purposes, and this is kind-of unique with Second Life, and I think it’s incredibly important to support everybody and what they want to do.”
  • 0:08:59: The Metaverse and LL – ” There might be some people who might be interested in my position on the metaverse and OpenSim and interoperability, and that whole category.”
  • 0:11:09: Integrating new capabilities – “Some of you might be interested in what kind of integration we can do to make it easier for you to use Second Life in the context that you want to use it.”
  • 0:12:04: Improving SL – “And then I think we still have a tremendous about of work still to be done – actually, a tremendous amount of work has already been done; Second Life today is so much better than it was two years ago.”
  • 0:16:16 Future technologies  – “A little talk about future tech. Many of you have hopefully seen that we are obviously actively developing for technologies that we believe will have substantial mass appeal; Oculus being one.”
  • Questions and Answers / Discussion:
    • 0:21:12 – Are the community liaisons with Linden Lab about to be re-introduced?
    • 0:23:39 – Tier Breaks for Support and Mentor Groups
    • 0:26:28 – Do you feel that communications between Linden Lab employees and content creators are important?
    • 0:31:09 – On users having a voice in the development process
    • 0:35:36 – On Marketing SL, Overcoming Perceptions and Getting People Engaged in SL
    • 0:41:24 – On Opening-up The L$ Beyond Second Life
    • 0:44:44 – Making the Viewer Easier to Use & the Relationship with TPVs
    • 0:48:19 – On a Distributable Version of Second Life
    • 0:50:08 – Is there any hope that shared media, MOAP [Media On A Prim] can be fixed for Mac users soon?
    • 0:50:42 – On Second Life and High Fidelity
    • 0:53:49 – On Network Issues affecting some APAC Countries, Latency & Geographic Distribution
    • 0:56:16 – On Exporting Content
    • 1:01:15 – On the Teen Grid, Student Security and Younger People Accessing SL
    • 1:04:12 – What are Linden Lab’s plans for mainland?
    • 1:05:42: – On Office Hours, Lindens In-world and Community Engagement
    • 1:13:54 – Is the Barrier to VW Mass Adoption Technical, Or Something More?
    • 1:17:26 – On Acquisitions in the Technology Market
    • 1:20:12 – On Encouraging Lindens to Join Groups and Communities
    • 1:22:03 – A Takeaway Message for Educators (and all of us)

0:01:59 Hello everybody. I can’t hear you, but I can sure see you! It’s an incredible sea of people here [approx. 180-200 across four regions]. I’m very excited to be here, very happy for all the work that people are doing to put this conference together. Not only this session but all the other sessions you’re doing through the week. I did pop-in just the other day and listened to Philip, which many of you here might have done as well, and I just wanted to say that I’m really excited to be here.

I’m not going to spend most of this hour just talking. I will be saying a few things up front … putting some topics on the table to discuss and then very much looking forward to it being an interactive conversation between us. I’m mostly here to learn, not necessarily to tell, although I will be speaking about some things that I think matter to you, and some of the things that are going on first.

0:03:06 First, I feel very strongly that the education sector, the education market, is a very important partner of Second Life, and that it’s important to us to make it a great product for all of you. I know many of you have tried and been successful and many of you have tried and maybe not been successful in doing the things you wish you could do, and I’m here to learn more about what we can do to make you successful in the future.

I think the education sector helps us a lot of ways, in that if we can provide a great service to you, you can become great evangelists for the platform, and also in many times I think you are pushing in research and thinking about how to use environments and technologies like this differently from your main consumers. So you’re a very important group of people for us to stay in touch with and learn from and collaborate with.

Continue reading “VWBPE 2014: Ebbe Altberg keynote – “The Door is Open” (full transcript)” →

VWBPE 2014: Philip Rosedale keynote – but is technology really the key to mass adoption?

Posted on by Inara Pey

On Wednesday April 9th, the 2014 Virtual Worlds Best practices in Education conference opened with a keynote address by Philip Rosedale. In it, he covers a lot of the ground he laid-out at the SVVR meet-up at the end of March (which I’ve covered here) in terms of communications in virtual worlds, although things were at times couched in more general terms than being specifically framed by demonstrations of some of High Fidelity has been doing.

The following is the official video of the presentation, recorded by Mal Burns on behalf of VWBPE. Timestamps within the notes indicate the points at which Philip’s exactly comments can be heard.

After a brief introduction by Kevin Phelan (Phelan Corrimal in SL), Philip provides a short overview of Rosedale’s own attraction to virtual worlds – born out of a desire to “building crazy things” which extended into imagining what it would be like to build a virtual world able to mimic the richness of the real world. In this, Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One is mentioned, as is Second Life’s role as a pioneer and validation of what might be achieved if the right tools were in place that would enable a billion, rather than a million, people engage in virtual world spaces.

[12:30] He particularly sees the mouse and the keyboard as major barriers to entry, as they require complex manipulation (keystrokes and mouse movements) to achieve avatar movement, while limiting communications by disallowing facial expressions and / or natural gestures. In this he points to emerging hardware such as the Razer Hydra, Sixense Stem and 3D cameras as overcoming these limitations and opening the floodgates to virtual world adoption.

[23:55] Latency is also raised as a bugaboo issue as well. While I agree that reducing the level of latency is good for communications, I’m not convinced by all of the arguments put forward (for example, I doubt most people using a mobile ‘phone are even aware of the 500 millisecond delay, much less finding it a reason to loathe using their cellphone), which is not to say I think that latency isn’t an issue worthy of being addressed as far as might be possible.

[31:50] Identity disclosure, and our right to determine what is disclosed of our identity and how is very much a fundamental part of trusted use of any system, and as such, is key to the future of virtual worlds. This is something he has spoken about at SVVR and has blogged on the subject as well, indicating that the level of trust sought and identity given should, as with real life, be more fluid, depending upon what we’re doing and where we’re going. This spills over into areas of commerce and into the idea of having the freedom to move around between the kind of multiple worlds the metaverse is envisaged as being, and doing so with confidence and trust in the different environments and having control over what we are willing to reveal to those environments, rather than having them determine what they should take.

[35:07] For Virtual worlds to really grow, he believes they need to be more like the Internet, with people running their own servers and links between them operating much like the Web does today, allowing for complete continuous interconnectedness between servers and worlds, built upon open-source software (again: trust), and which can be properly scaled – such as through High Fidelity’s examination of distributed computing (again, as I point-out in covering the SVVR talk – think SETI@home).

[49:50] Q&A.

The presentation is interesting, and couched in general terms rather than being specific to High Fidelity – which is not inappropriate for the venue. Little of it comes over as hype or a sales pitch. I found the comments on identity, together with the statements made at SVVR and in the High Fidelity blog post, to be very much on-message and highly relevant. The distributed computing approach is an interesting idea as well, and possibly one with a lot of potential if the right value proposition is offered to people – such as rewarding them with crypto-currency credits they can spend on goods and services (or even cash-out over time?).

Where I do perhaps have an issue with things is in the view that the only barrier to the mass adoption of VWs is primarily that of technology. The latter can certainly enhance our experiences once we’re in a virtual world, no doubt about that. There is also no denying that with something like SL, more needs to be done to reduce that initial learning curve for someone entering the environment.

Are motion controllers and the like really the key to unlocking people’s ability to recognise virtual worlds as a value proposition for their time or is something else actually required? (image courtesy of Razer Hydra)

However, like it or not, springboarding VWs into mainstream adoption isn’t purely a technical issue, there is a social element as well. There needs to be compelling reasons to encourage people to turn to VWs instead of other possible options. Facial recognition software and motion controllers may well be wonderful for translating your expressions and gestures to an avatar when communicating with someone on the other side of the world, but frankly, so is a webcam and monitor screen. As such, for many, the technology will not be the value proposition that will encourage them to be more involved in VWs. There needs to be something more.

The need for a real value proposition is perhaps most clearly exemplified by Pamela in the 8th segment of The Drax Files Radio Hour. She dismisses any involvement in a virtual world because she sees no advantage in it compared to what she can do now. hers is unlikely to be a minority attitude.

That Philip Rosedale dismisses this social element so readily in the Q&A session isn’t entirely surprising – he is a technologist, after all – but given his experience in the field, it is disappointing. Technology can and will make immersive VW environments a lot easier to use, for sure. But I suspect the company or group that really cracks the nut of presenting VWs in terms of compelling, mainstream activities people believe should see as a daily part of their lives is actually going to be more responsible for unlocking the door to mass adoption than the company or group that provides a technologically superior means of accessing a VW.

VWBPE 2014: it’s time to make connections

Posted on by Inara Pey

2014 banner

Wednesday April 9th, 2014 marks the start of the 7th annual Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education (VWBPE) conference, which will be taking place in both Second Life and OS Grid.

The theme for this year’s event is Connections, and as I’ve previously covered, it will include a series of keynote speakers and a series of panel discussions across the four days of the conference, and more besides.

To help spread the word / remind people of the event, Mal Burns has published a promotional video on You Tube.

Full details on conference events can be found on the VWBPE conference calendar. However, for ease-of-reference, here’s a quick rundown of the keynote speakers and the discussion panels:

Wednesday April 9th

Thursday April 10th

The VWBPE Central Auditorium, Second Life
The VWBPE Central Auditorium, Second Life, April 2014

Friday April 11th

Saturday April 12th

Notes on Attending

The VWBPE conference is free to attend, and those wishing to do so in-world should register via the conference registration page on Eventbrite. Attendees will also need accounts for both Second Life and OSgrid in order to attend all events on both grids.

Useful Links