DE Oracle @ UMUC

2008 CIP Symposium: Presented in Second Life

Jack Boeve

Instructional Support Specialist

Center for Support of Instruction

Published: September-October 2008

Category: » University-showcase » Classes-programs

Background

Since 2001, the Center for Intellectual Property (CIP) has hosted its Annual Symposium on Intellectual Property, providing professional development for nearly 1000 individuals. While the great majority of participants have represented a spectrum of interests in higher education, the symposia have also drawn participants from the nonprofit sector, business and industry, and the legal community.

Everyone in the Sandbox

Keynote Address by James Boyle in Second Life

This year, in addition to a face-to-face audience and a live webcast for individuals and institutions across the country, the CIP was inspired by its symposium theme—Copyright Monopoly: Playing the Innovation Game—to offer an additional symposium venue that would bring the face-to-face and online participants closer together in a networked learning community. We thought that an excellent way for both the CIP and its program participants to explore playing the innovation game was to do so within a metaverse, an environment rich with innovation and creativity. Thus, the CIP presented its unique symposium program in the virtual world of Second Life (SL).

Over three days, the CIP synchronously streamed the keynote addresses, panel presentations, and Q&A sessions occurring in real life to online participants from across the U.S. and abroad, represented by avatars in SL. The program agenda also included roundtable discussions on topics related to the symposium theme. While real-life participants gathered in small group discussions, SL participants met concurrently with fellow avatars in small group discussions—one of which was facilitated by Kathleen Puckett from UMUC's Center for Support of Instruction (CSI). Through text chat in SL and facilitators in both SL and real life, we were able to open channels for dialogue between the two worlds during Q&A sessions and reporting out from the real-life and SL roundtable discussions. One result of the roundtable sessions will be a Best Practices Document composed of all the contributions from roundtable participants in both SL and face-to-face environments.

The Experience

Two large projection screens in the physical conference room occasionally displayed the live action from SL so that real-life participants could see the SL participants and occasionally themselves on the screen in SL. Camera views in real life were able to pan to bring images of the speakers, presenters, and other real-life participants to the SL audience. SL participants could, at times, also see themselves on the screen in SL when the cameras captured the images from SL being projected on the screens in real life. The entire experience had a definite "wow" factor.

Keynote Address by Georgia Harper in Second Life

CIP's invaluable partner in this endeavor was the New Media Consortium (NMC). In addition to providing the secure, participants-only online conference environment and the means of streaming into SL, NMC also provided within its conference center multiple virtual signs displaying CIP images (e.g., symposium graphics, free virtual t-shirts) and links to resources for both the symposium (e.g., readings, agenda) and the CIP more generally (e.g., publications, RSS feed of the CIP blog). For the roundtable sessions, NMC created whiteboards in two smaller classroom settings on which were projected the discussion questions for each session. In addition, NMC personnel conducted two orientation sessions for participants a few days prior to the event to acquaint participants with SL and the conference center so that everyone would feel more comfortable moving about and engaging during the actual symposium. Finally, NMC provided in-world support via avatars, a virtual help desk, e-mail, and a toll-free phone number.

Look, Ma!

The CIP had a camera crew in the real-life conference room, which provided a live feed to the Internet for webcast viewers and also provided a video stream to a computer in the room managed by Laddie Odom of CSI. Combining the video stream with an audio feed from the Marriott house audio, Laddie used streaming server and broadcaster software to send the feed to a server hosted by NMC, which in turn streamed it live onto a projection screen located in the Babbage Amphitheater within the NMC Conference Center in SL.

The CIP, and, by extension, those in SL, experienced no problems in transmitting or receiving the symposium, with two exceptions. First, a small issue arose one morning before the program began when a few avatars experienced being temporarily blocked by SL from access to the conference location, but this issue was quickly resolved. Second, we experienced a larger technological issue during one panel session when we attempted to have an individual panelist from within the SL conference center join the other real-life panelists by bringing live audio from SL into the physical conference room over the house audio while showing the avatar on the projection screen. The difficulty was an audio feedback loop being generated and multiplying as the audio from SL and real life mixed. The culprit, we believe, may have been inadvertently having open microphones or audio sources across the multiple computers in the chain. Unfortunately, time and circumstances did not permit a second attempt to bridge the two worlds in this more significant manner or a move to an alternative for bringing the avatar's audio into the real-life conference room. As a result, the two audiences regrettably missed an opportunity to feel that much more connected to each other, with the real-world audience not being able to hear the SL panelist and interact with him via Q&A, and the SL audience not being able to have the program happening directly in front of them and to feel as though they were in the primary venue instead of watching it remotely.

All in all, though, and without question, using SL as a venue for the symposium worked very well and generated enthusiastic responses and questions from participants all around. This inter-world symposium was engaging for attendees in both locations, and perhaps especially for those of us privileged to stand on the technological bridge between the two and observe what was happening in and between the two worlds. Whether we consider that we helped forge connections between participants in real life and SL or that we facilitated forming connections between real lives in the real world via the SL platform, the 2008 symposium in SL was a first attempt at education in a new environment—one which we certainly do not anticipate being the last.

Second Life at UMUC

The UMUC Second Life Evaluation Committee is in the process of reviewing how SL enhances learning. The committee consists of members from across the UMUC community who are evaluating policies and best practices to determine the direction of SL at UMUC. For more information on the committee's findings, contact Loyce Pailen, Associate Provost for the Office of Instructional Services and Support.