25 April 2008 - Erica Driver

I cannot believe that Blogger dropped this post.
It was pure dynamite

Killer apps
- business process rehearsal

Use cases:
Virtual operations centers
Hospital training

Physiological responses to avatar touch same as for real people

26 April 2008 Thinking Out Loud

I first noticed the name Bloomfield yesterday at the vBusiness Expo. It was associated with Metanomics. Today, I see the same name in a Blog. He's having a talk about metanomics. It gets me thinking.

I'm thinking about what F.C. said about mirroring social networks from the real world in virtual worlds. I think they're not similar and are similar.

How and Why?
(1) Access. I met Mr. Bell yesterday and swivelled the viewer to take a snapshot of me (i.e. my avatar) with him (i.e his avatar). I was really excited to meet such a well known figure (well, to me at least). Why did I have this kind of access? Network size? Open access to virtual world conferences so long as people are hunting audiences.

(2) Community. A speaker at the expo yesterday spoke about already knowing most of hte people she worked with in SL before she met them inworld. There is an element of historicity that is important here. When studying the Sociology of Development many years ago one of the ideas that I took from it was that when the first world 'developed', it did so without the interference of the rest of the world. Whereas, the developing world's development is happening post our own development and is therefore affected by that and its own process is influenced by what we happened to do. In the same way, how virtual world networking develops will be impacted by how it already happens in "the real life".

25 April 2008 Mylifebits and Web 2.0 Tools

Mylifebits is something I read about last week on Slashdot (something I only heard of for the first time last week). Microsoft researchers (and Gordon Bell) want to capture every moment of your life. Apparently it will all fit on a DVD. I find this idea interesting in terms of doing my own phd, though I think being able to record every thought or learning or emotion etc would be more interesting (and would not, I think, I hope, fit on a DVD!).

I am learning about Google Reader. I can tell it's useful. But I don't understand it yet. I just set it up last week. And now there are 255 messages in it now I think. So I need to look at it. The header says "Google Blog Search: Second Life". I click on one of the stories. It's about the Diversity Building on Princeton's sim [what's a sim?]. It's from SL iReports. I see a Subscribe button. I click on it. It asks which thingy [?] I would like to use so I see and select Google. Now I've subscribed to it too but I don't know what that actually means. It's tough knowing so little.

[Several hours later and I am still trawling through the 200+ messages in the one feed I signed up to] I have figured out that I can plug RSS feeds into Google Reader (or the Google Homepage). That's very neat. It took 3 iterations (3 signups) to finally grasp what was happening. Now the penny has dropped. Live Bookmarks is another way of doing the same thing. Ah-ha.

Now (several hours later), I'm thinking about Linkedin after a conversation with F.C. I also saw a reference to it in a blog posting (don't think I knew of it before that). The blog says that Linkedin is about identity but other social networking tools are about presence. They encourage you to "get the most from your professional network". Hmm. This is another angle on virtual worlds that I'm not considering yet.

"Social software". New phrase for me. I like it. I read about it on a Clay Shirky Terranova blog entry. I know that name.

24 April 2008 Video Clip

I just found an amazing You Tube clip on using SL for education

Key points
- immersion of learners (suspend belief, feel immersed)
- a sense of being there
- the ability to connect and communicate
- interaction
- walking in someone else's shoes (UCDavis virtual hallucination site)
- experiencing sensations
- collaboration and exchange with colleagues (learners and instructors)
- debabbler for language translation
- possible uses still emerging

Tools mentioned
- Sloodle (mashup of Moodle Learning Management System)
- role playing as an instructional tool
- experiencing periods in history or exotic places
- virtual scavenger hunt (e.g. objects with definitions)
- guided tours of real world replicas (places or a dell computer or a painting)
- virtual sand box
- learner collaboration "co-create virtual 3d objects"
- self-paced tutorials (Ohio learning kiosks
- social nights
- white boards (popular; can be used as powerpoint)
- voice support

What a great video!

23 April 2008

I'm in world today. I'm going to answer some questions for a friend who doing a project on design in SL. So I've logged in and I'm looking around.

I have it in my mind to customize my avatar. I suspect I wont be taken seriously inworld until I do that. I look like (and am) a newbie. I plan to spend more time inworld in the near future. Too much of what I know is second hand information.

I have the SL for Dummies book open again. It's just told me about Movement Controls (p. 68). I'm not clear on how to fly straight up versus flying forward. Wagner Au talks about avatars generally only flying between places and comments that he would have expected more building/activity off the virtual ground. That makes sense.

"Use... to come to a controlled landing instead of crashing down like a newbie" (Robbins and Bell, p. 69). Oops

I've just been offered a texture. I have no idea what to do with that. Hmmm.

I'm looking up the vbusiness expo. I've registered for it. Should be interesting.

22 April 2008 - About the PhD

I have a simile. In trying to understand virtual worlds, it's like I am working with a zoom lens that's finding it hard to get a fix on a subject. The lens struggles to focus on the subject, its little motor moving the lens in and out, trying to hone in on the subject of the composition but until it gets that fix, nothing is clear.

20 April 2008

I have to write the paper today and I'm still reading Wagner Au's "The Making of Second Life". I like the discussion on Web 2.0. It's changed my thinking on the relationship between the two. But this is bad. I'm also downloading Skype. And updating SL (a compulsory update). I have around 500 words. A friend, who's finished her PhD emails and says "PhD experiences are often destructive and fragmenting". I'm trying to be very Zen about all this uncertainty I'm meant to tolerate, but I can't help feeling that SL itself is particularly frustrating. Au argues that "Second life as we know it didn't exist until its original creators had explored it long enough to realize what its purpose was", p. 30. How long will it take me, I wonder.

April 19th, 2008 - Circled R

I need to figure out what to do about that circled R that accompanies many instances of the phrase Second Life. Any ideas? Anyone?

I need to write a paper today for the IIWIS, a pre-ECIS workshop, being organized by the IAIS. It's due tomorrow. I always intended to write it at the last minute. But this isn't funny. My TOC looks like:

SYNTHETIC WORLDS: AN OVERVIEW

1 INTRODUCTION

2 HISTORY AND EVOLUTION OF SYNTHETIC WORLDS
2.1.1 MUDs and MUSHs
2.1.2 MMORPG – Or just call me MOO!

3 DEFINING SYNTHETIC WORLDS
3.1 SYNTHETIC, VIRTUAL, MIRROR WORLDS AND THE METAVERSE
3.2 WEB 2.0, SOCIAL MEDIA, SOCIAL NETWORKING, WEB 3D
3.3 BUSINESS-ORIENTED INTERPRETATIONS: MARKETS AND METANOMICS
3.4 AVATAR, RESIDENT, INHABITANT
3.5 THE SPECIAL CASE OF SECOND LIFE®
3.6 TOWARD A TENTATIVE DEFINITION

4 EXPLORING THE POTENTIAL OF SYNTHETIC WORLDS
4.1 SYNTHETIC WORLDS FOR EDUCATION

5 WHERE NOW?
5.1 BEHIND DOOR NO. 1:
5.2 BEHIND DOOR NO. 2:
5.3 BEHIND DOOR NO. 3:

6 CONCLUSION

It's the first time I've used Synthetic Worlds rather than Virtual Worlds. It's been a very conscious decision: 'virtual' is just too ambiguous.

18 April 2008

I am cranky: tightened braces = lack of food = cranky Niamh

I read today: "The more we know about genes the less we understand". It could easily read: "The more I know about Virtual Worlds the less I understand". Or "The more I know about doing a PhD the less I understand". For the longest time, I had a nice neat conceptualization of virtual worlds. Then I discovered the SL community blogs, mailing lists etc. I started reading what's been published so far (not much). Now I'm confused.

Terms like social media and social networking are a puzzle. I find myself thinking about the nature of my activities here in my little office. A reflexive thinking, I suppose. 12 windows open at a time. Haphazard searching for material. Lists of notes indexing my other notes. I think of Brown and Duguid ("The Social Life of Information") - they talk about contemplating indexing their help indexes. I just read a WIRED article about E. Coli. It talks about the DNA being organized by "transcription factors". It goes on to say: "In the latest issue of Nature, scientists reported an experiment in which they wreaked havoc with E. coli's network. They randomly added new links between the transcription factors at the top of the microbe's hierarchy. Now a transcription factor could turn on another one that it never had before. The scientists randomly rewired the network in 598 different ways and then stepped back to see what happened to the bacteria. You might expect that they all died... About 95 percent of the rewired bacteria did just fine with their new networks... Some even performed better than microbes with the original wiring, under some conditions... scientists don't quite know why a network like the one in E. coli can handle this rewiring so well. The source of their strength lies not in a single molecule -- DNA -- but in a complicated web of relationships. The network itself is the mystery for biologists in the 21st century" - this seems to be significant in some way. Hmmm.

I have decided to embrace the research process today. Sarah "Intellagirl" Robbins describes herself as one of the 'digirati'. It's a nice word. I need to be one. I need to embrace del.ic.ious or whatever it is. Twitter. Etc. I need to figure out how to label my blogs for instance so that I can mine them.

... "It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change." - Charles Darwin

Combine with Wagner Au who talks about "Bebop Reality", p. xvii ..."fundamental laws of physics and identity are open to constant improvisation by its inhabitants".

14 April 2008

I did a quick survey of educational institutions using SL. The responses are shown here. The most interesting development for me from the exercise was the reference to:

Jennings, N. and C. Collins (2007). "Virtual or Virtually U: Educational Institutions in Second Life." International Journal of Social Sciences 2(3): 180-186.

14 April 2008 - Data Management for Dummy

An update: The past few weeks have been interesting. Having been looking initially at educational usage of SL, I found myself slipping into education and out of IS (Information Systems). I thought I would do this by throwing out all I had gathered on approaches to education etc and concentrating instead on technology acceptance and implementation using educators as a group. That was looking good. Very do-able. Totally unlike the process based approach I had imagined for myself. Absolutely non-interpretive all of a sudden. Hard to square that circle. But it was looking good. Then it was suggested that I try out for a book chapter. This really threw the cat amongst the pigeons. I had to apply myself. To whether or not Virtual Worlds are a form of Web 2.0 or not at all. I found this question interesting. I engaged in an unfocused, rambling, information search. Then I really did begin to drown in information, until it was suggested that I comment on that phenomenon in and of itself for the purposes of the chapter (which was subsequently accepted). So right now, I'm looking for ways of going about content analysis. And after a day of reading mailing lists and digests and discovering yet more wikis and blogs, I have rediscovered Denzin and Lincoln. Chapters like "Data Management and Analysis Methods". I am annoyed at myself for not thinking of this sooner. Sheesh.