We’re still building the MOOCs at this time–I’ll post more when we get ready to take on participants!

Until then…see you inworld!

Filed under: Conferences/Meetings, Projects Tagged: machinima, MOOC, networking, research

I’m no gamer and my recent stint in WoW isn’t making me into one–I’ve made pretty much every mistake imaginable with my little characters.  For someone who is a former theatre geek and writer, though, the settings and narrative are easy to get swept up in.  I’m constantly at odds with myself over letting myself get swept away and experiencing flow first-hand or staying objective and looking at the process with a critical eye.  There is something here for educators, particularly instructional designers.  Some would mock my saying that, but the designers of WoW are brilliant at scaffolding and gauging the zone of proximal development to keep people going through the quests.  The “levelling up” process is all about external motivation.  The combination is amazing and, we, as designers, would do well to see what we could do to harness this system and tweak it to our own ends.  Does that mean we have to bring students into WoW?  While there are educators doing just that with varying levels of success, we don’t have to bring students into the game to bring “WoWology” (I just made that up) into the classroom–by creating quests that get progressively more involved as our students are able to do more, providing surroundings that inspire exploration, and supply plenty of badges, prizes, gifts, etc. as our little gamers/students move up through the levels.

That’s just my 2 cents–I’m still loving exploring and digging out gems in this new (to me) landscape!

So far, I have 4 characters that I’ve been working through–two Alliance (supposedly the “good guys”) and two Horde (supposedly the “bad guys”).  For whatever reason, I seem to gravitate to the short character races (gnomes and goblins) and the classes that have pets or assistants (warlocks and hunters).  I’m sure there’s a whole field out there in sociology and psychology about avatar/character preference and what that says about the psyche–but I won’t get into that in this post.  Through levels 1-10/12, new players get to know the background narrative of their race as they’re learning how to work with the controls in WoW.  Want a different narrative?  You can just make a new character with a different race.  The story arc closely resembles The Hero’s Journey archetypes written about by Joseph Campbell–so I could certainly see it being used in a mythology or literature class alongside readings of Campbell or ancient epics.

Interested in trying out WoW?  Go to http://us.battle.net/wow/en/ and download the game (it’s a rather lengthy download)–you can play up to level 20 for free.  The educators’ guilds are on the Sisters of Elune server, US side.

My WoW characters, posed against the standard backgrounds.

Over on the JokaydiaGrid, Aether Isle and Steeltopia have now been born–I’m responsible for two new baby sims.  Aether Isle is starting to come together.  The basic design plan is for a volcano-type island that blew the center out but the minerals within the stone have such properties that the chunk that was blown skyward just stayed there.  (Okay, stretching the realm of reality into fantasy a bit–okay, a lot.)  The idea came from combining my former sim in SL, Caledon Wellsian with another of the Caledon sims, Morgaine.  Eventually, when I get everything built and scripted, I’d like to have info on the island on using virtual worlds to create educational machinima and graphic novels/comic books–and hopefully the island will be a great background for visitors to create their own!

First views of the “baby” sim of Aether Isle on JokaydiaGrid

Finally, during the second week of the Virtual Worlds Massive Open Online Course (VWMOOC) over on P2P University, we covered machinima making.  I’d done a few hit or miss things before, but mainly what I’d put together was simple talking heads kinds of things, just to supply an teaching agent to talk through a project.  For the VWMOOC, I was encouraged to get creative–we had a theme of “cowboys vs. aliens” and less than a week to put something together.  We then had a “world premier” event at the Gaiety Theatre in Caledon Penzance to show off what we’d done.  Below is my machinima created for the week, “They Came for the Cavorite”.

The above was shot in two days in Second Life (using CamStudio), followed by an all night editing session with MovieMaker to get it to some semblance of a finished product.  It was a fun little project to do.  I’m certainly itching to do more, though I won’t try to take on all the production end myself and will make sure I have more than a few days to complete it!

Filed under: Conferences/Meetings, Cool Places/Tours, Other Virtual Worlds, Personal Experiences, Projects Tagged: Aether, Aevalle, conference, JokaydiaGrid, machinima, MMORPGs