Teaching Web Design in First Life

So much of our recent conversations and discussions are about the possibilities in Second Life. While all those discussions are wonderful and exciting, I still find myself wondering about what could/should be done to make teaching in our “First Life” here at FIT easier and more effective.

Ironically, as a teacher who teaches young students who will be designing our virtual environment of the future, I believe effective learning of computer technology begins from a well designed physical space. Not all computer classrooms/labs are created equal, and building a successful computer lab classroom takes much more than just filling a space with expensive and cutting-edge equipments. After all, those are human beings in there teaching and learning.

The connection between the physical and social setting of the computer lab classroom and their effect on student learning has been documented by several researches and books. I also found that many schools have published guidelines for the design of their computer labs. I am not sure whether such a document exists for FIT or not. If there is, I would love to learn about it.

I have begun my own research on this subject, and I will share my findings with you on this blog in the future. Meanwhile, please feel free to send me any thoughts, comments, or suggestions that you may have regarding this matter. If you are interested in this subject as well, here are a couple of places to start:

a PDF of the thesis research by Jessica Callahan

a book by Daniel Niemeyer

Advertising in Second Life

There is an interesting post on New World Notes (the blog of W. James Au, our keynote speaker for Technology Day at FIT) about a very successful Loreal advertising campaign in Second Life. Clearly advertising in virtual worlds is very different than real life. Just yesterday, on Metanomics, Michael Wilson, CEO of There.com (a virtual world that takes up much less bandwidth and that is more actively shaped by its parent company, is purely PG, and offers more assistance to businesses who want a presence than SL) talked about the question of how to monetize advertising in Second Life.

Technology Day at FIT

I’m really excited about our upcoming conference: Teaching and Learning in Four Dimensions — on April 25th. The focus is teaching and learning, with a special emphasis on 3d technology and virtual worlds. The conference is open to the public ($25 registration fee) and is free for FIT employees.

If you are a faculty member, we are looking for proposals.

Click here for a schedule and call for proposals.

We have some great speakers lined up –

W. James Au & Janine Hawkins, The Second Life of Fashion Design: Metaverse as Prototype Platform
James was a contract writer for Linden Lab, creators of Second Life, primarily hired by the company to cover SL as an embedded journalist in an emerging society– its controversies, its personalities, its innovations and ambitions, along with larger themes of identity, social norms and organization, and cultural expression important to online worlds in general. His book is coming out this month — The Making of Second Life. Janine has been covering fashion for James‘ blog, New World Notes and was featured in a recent NY Times article.

Shenlei Winkler, Fashion Research Institute
Leveraging the Power of Virtual Worlds for Product Design

Raymond Yee, Create Mashups To Make the Web Your Own
Yee is author of *Pro Web 2.0 Mashups: Remixing Data and Web Services* (Apress, 2008) and Lecturer, School of Information, UC Berkeley. He is also a data architect, consultant, and trainer. He is currently a lecturer at the School of Information, UC Berkeley, where he teaches the course “Mixing and Remixing Information”. While earning a Ph.D. in biophysics, he taught computer science, philosophy, and personal development to K-11 students in the Academic Talent Development Program on the Berkeley campus. He is the primary architect of the Scholar’s Box, software that enables users to gather digital content from multiple sources to create personal collections that can be shared with others. As a software architect and developer, he focuses on developing software to support learning, teaching, scholarship, and research.

Elaine Polvinen, Buffalo State College, SUNY
My Avatar Myself: How Avatars are Transforming Product Development, Marketing, Retailing and Education
Elaine is Coordinator of Fashion Program at Buffalo State College is teaching Fashion Design in Second Life. She also keeps a blog about the transition and expansion of 2D traditional to 2D Digital to 3D virtual for apparel textile product design, development and retailing.

Mary Ellen Gordon,
Dressing for Two: What Avatars and their Humans Buy and Wear
Results of a new survey of Second Life residents’ preferences and purchase habits pertaining to wearable items for avatars and the real life people who operate them will be discussed. Mary Ellen will talk about the most popular types of wearable items in the virtual world, differences among SL residents in terms of how they choose to dress their avatars, and similarities and differences between what people wear themselves and what their avatars wear.

Mary Ellen is Managing Director of Market Truths, the winner of the
Edelman/Electric Sheep Company business plan competition for Second Life. She is also an active member of the Second Life Business Communicators group. Read more about Mary Ellen here.

FIT in Second Life — the Community Grows

In the last week or two I have seen so many FIT faculty and staff in Second Life –

Hildy Gardner (Fashion Design/Art)
Janet Brav (AMC)
Brian Emery (Photography)
Allison Wermager (Photography)
Kurt Wendt (Computer Graphics)
Steven Zucker (Graduate Studies)
Meredith Sharp (IT/TDT)

and I know Robin Sackin has an avatar — bubbles teichmann… maybe bubbles will be joining us soon!

and our very own CIO, Gregg Chottiner.

Brian wants to mount an exhibition of senior BFA Photography student work on the island where we have FIT’s campus (our campus is on Learning 2 — a New Media Consortium island, where we can use the really lovely “common” spaces — a gallery, classroom and meeting space). We’ll have an opening, and hopefully some videos and slide shows up as well. How exciting!

Also, this week we met up in Second Life with several of our TechDay speakers — Mary Ellen Gordon (of MarketTruths), W. James Au and Janine Hawkins.

We meet every week on the FIT campus at 8. If you don’t know where it is, just email me your avatar’s name and when I log in, I’ll teleport you over and make you a member of the FIT/SUNY group. Each week we’ve been visiting different interesting locations (to see art, or go shopping). We also help each other with audio and practice building.

Please email me (beth_harris@fitnyc.edu) if you need more info or some personal assistance!

IBM’s Virtual Product Development

Those of you who came to the Second Life workshop last semester were fortunate to hear Shenlei Winkler talk about her work with IBM on a virtual PLM Solution.

Well, watch this video for more.

FIT’s New Home in Second Life

FIT has a new home in Second Life, on Teaching 2. Coordinates: 169, 231, 25.

Several of us met in Second Life last night for our weekly FIT get-together. We were joined by Elaine Polvinen from BufState.

Please join us! If you need help getting an avatar and getting started in Second Life, please email me, beth_harris@fitnyc.edu.

And thanks to Steven Zucker, we have a fabulous, new building designed by Rem Koolhaas. The sad looking flagpole is my first creation…

The 3-D virtual world is coming…

In the past week, I have come across so many 3-d technologies…

On monday at FIT in the CET at 1 we (me, Jeffrey Riman, Karen Pearson, and Eileen Karp) listened to the Metanomics series in Second Life, where Robert Bloomfield hosted David Wortley, Director of the Serious Games Institute, which is associated with Coventry University in the UK. Serious games involve the use of electronic games technologies and methodologies for primary purposes other than entertainment. The purposes include:

• e-Learning
• Simulation
• Team building
• Collaboration
• Social Networking
• Opinion shaping

Obviously, this involves virtual worlds.

Then today, browsing the web, I came across something that the folks at ARTstor had mentioned — Photosynth, which “takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space, showing you how each one relates to the next.”

Check out this demo on TED.

I just downloaded the client, and watched the demo that uses images of St. Peter’s Square. Way cool.

Then, I came across this description of a possible future for education in the metaverse roadmap (very cool):

“Games that attempt to educate by recreating fragments of reality, “nonfiction games,” also called serious games, were scarce in gamespace until the early 2010’s, when three of the largest publishing houses…began releasing “gamebook” worlds in conjunction with their top selling nonfiction titles. While limited in scope, these worlds had competition, mystery, and suspense as elements, in addition to the possibility of social interaction among the players, and were designed to teach the inhabitants the basic paradigms of the book through experiential learning. The addition of monetary prizes and social acclaim to those who successfully navigated levels/chapters greatly increased the gamebook’s appeal over traditional audiobooks, print books, and even linear videos. By 2016, nonfiction games (gamebooks and other e-learning environments) had become 15% of the total gaming market, and were projected to keep growing relative to the saturating market for fiction games, up to a projected 40% share, the same share nonfiction holds in the trade book market.”

Then, there’s the new IBM technology that will bring the catwalk into your living room – “changing the face of fashion and retail.” Click here to see the video. Involving our sense of smell too!

AND, last but not least, the virtual reality room in Second Life, which the NMC is making available to educational institutions. I wonder what we can do with that? A photo-based real-3-d experience of a space, experienced by your avatar…hmmm… the Pantheon? St. Peter’s Square? I checked this out last night on Info Island, it was thrilling!

What a wonderful time to be alive…