Three Continents Meet: Metaverse for Higher Education

Spotlight talk in the ‘Creativity and Innovation in Design, Practice and Learning’ track at the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education (VWBPE) 2022 Conference: Phoenix Rising on 31st March 2022.

Presenters:

• Murat Gülmez / Magua Theriac, Çağ University;
• Acuppa Tae / John O’Connor, Technological University Dublin;
• Lissena Wisdomseeker / Lynne Berret, Whole Brain Health.

TU Dublin in Second Life (Acuppa Tae, 15 minutes):

I first found Second Life in January 2006 and had immense fun exploring the world and making new friends.
I had always been attracted by the idea of virtual worlds but this was the first time I got a real sense of a ‘world’ rather than a chat room. Second Life seemed to have come directly from the pages of William Gibson’s ‘Neuromancer’ (1984) and Neal Stephenson’s ‘Snow Crash’ (1992) and I was instantly smitten.

It didn’t take too long to recognise that the potential for education was enormous. I had already led the development of an undergraduate degree in visual art designed specifically for remote delivery on a small island of 120 inhabitants off the Atlantic coast of South-West Ireland. This kindled two particular interests of mine at that time. Firstly, how to use available technology to connect isolated communities with universities; and secondly, how to explore the potential for remote teaching of practical disciplines, such as art and design.

Working with a grant from the Learning & Teaching Technology Centre at the university I designed a prototype semester-long module to test teaching in a virtual world and offered it on a pilot basis to lecturers in Ireland and the UK in January 2009. Claudia Igbrude (aka Locks Aichi), a learning technology officer at the centre joined me to co-teach. The participants were an eclectic group comprising an engineer, philosopher, sociologist, pedagogical theorist, and musician among others. The key learning outcome for the pilot was to ensure participants experienced a genuine sense of working collaboratively in an online environment. This was achieved, in part, by setting a team project to be completed during the semester, which the participants were required to present in front of an invited audience at the final class meeting. The pilot was a success so, we submitted the module to the university programme board for formal validation as an undergraduate 5 credit elective module. This means about 100 hours of work for the students over a single semester. Delivery of “Virtual Environments: Is one life enough?” (aka IOLE) commenced in September 2009.

One of the lessons we learnt from the pilot was the necessity of supporting the development of a ‘learning community’ among the participants, as described by Lave and Wenger (1998). I already had experience of this approach with mature learners, so feedback from the pilot was a further indication of how useful it might be in the online context. The participants had experienced difficulty engaging with the team project which led to a slightly disappointing conclusion for some of them. I hoped that fostering a learning community would help future participants to support one another and result in a better team spirit.

Although the funding provided by the grant would have paid for the development of a private island for our campus the university’s finance procedures were so bureaucratic that I had already decided it would be simpler to teach the class on my own land. This worked well. However, within the first year we encountered a vibrant community that literally pulsed with excitement: Dublin Virtually Live had begun as an Irish Pub shortly after the launch of Second Life, but was now expanding to become a virtual recreation of Dublin city in Second Life. The community supported music performance, storytelling, DJ sessions, a St Patrick’s Day parade, informal gatherings and much more. It was managed efficiently and effectively by Sitearm Madonna (aka James Neville), on behalf of Ham Rambler (aka John Mahon), the entrepreneurial owner of the domain. We struck a deal with Ham which saw him provide a replica of one of our university buildings to host the class in return for two free places on the course for his Dublin residents. The people who availed of the places brought useful virtual world experience, real world experience, and maturity to the group of otherwise young undergraduate participants. It also extended the discipline base of the group from art and design to include linguists, engineers, sociologists, and PhD candidates. Basing ourselves in Dublin Virtually Live also embedded the course within an already established virtual community so, the participants were looked after by the members and could draw on community resources to integrate with greater ease.

Another unexpected benefit was that some of these participants subsequently became contributors to the module, enriching the content. Sitearm became a good friend and colleague and he joined the teaching team as a guest lecturer soon after completing the module. His expertise, his long career as an engineer with Exxon in the US, and his interest in the theory and practice of team work has contributed to the development and success of the module ever since.

Another key participant was Dudley Dreamscape, in Real Life: Dr Dudley Turner, a professor at the University of Akron, in Ohio, and Dean of the College of Creative and Professional Arts. Both he and Sitearm came to Ireland to speak at an annual conference organised by Second Life activists. “Meta Meets” took place in a different city in Real Life each year and we hosted it at TU Dublin in May 2010. The opportunity to meet virtual colleagues and friends in Real Life Dublin was very exciting at the time. It led to Dudley and I deciding to form a partnership and offer the module as a joint experience for students on both sides of the Atlantic. Dudley took the module descriptor back to Ohio and had it validated by his university as an elective module. In 2014 we brought our students together in class and co-taught the module over the following three years

Bringing students from different cultures and time zones together in a virtual space was new territory at that time. In order to ensure full engagement we split the participants into teams to work on the major project. Each team had at least two members from each university. The students needed to negotiate suitable meeting times outside of formal class meetings, taking account of the time difference. They gained invaluable experience from working with people they would never meet in Real Life and learning to use communication tools and virtual presentation methods that they might not otherwise have had the opportunity to master. (We wrote up the outcomes for a conference paper ‘Inter-University International Collaboration for an Online Course: A Case Study’ (2014).)

From the beginning, guest speakers in Second Life were generous with their time and experience, and contributed a wide breadth of knowledge to the module. Residents such as Karly Charlton (owner of EZ Living stores across SL in the early days), the late Circe Broom (developer of Sunset Jazz Club and Laurel Arts Isle), Elfay Pinkdot (host of the weekly jazz show Coffee and Pajamas) Ham Rambler (founder of Dublin Virtually Live), Symeon Siamendes (owner of Lauk’s Nest) and many others welcomed our students and generously shared their time and experience with us giving the participants a fully rounded experience, and understanding of the potential of virtual worlds and online collaboration. Such access to guest speakers from around the globe is just one of the significant advantages afforded by virtual worlds. In addition, professors from TU Dublin presented their work to the class. Dr Noel Fitzpatrick reported on his research into the philosophy of technology, with the French public intellectual Bernard Stiegler and Dr Glenn Loughran spoke about the impact of climate change, and possible interventions based on the latest archipelagic thinking.

Since 2015 Gentle Heron has been hosting a field trip to Virtual Ability Island. The visit never fails to have a major impact on students. For the first time, they really get a sense of what it means to be part of a community in a virtual world. Members of VAI share their life experiences with sensitivity and generosity giving an insight into the community, and the important role it plays in their lives. They demonstrate the seamless integration between the virtual and real worlds.

More recently, Valibrarian Gregg has been welcoming the class to the Community Virtual Library and introducing them to the concepts of metaliteracy and metamodernism. She explains the proposition in her recent book “Metamodernism and Changing Literacy: Emerging Research and Opportunities” (2020) and also introduces what it means to be a digital citizen and how important it is to be conscious of, and conscientious about, our responsibilities in this regard.

Most recently – Wisdomeseeker, Magua and I embarked on the most ambitious collaboration so far. Bringing together two universities from the opposites ends of Europe: Turkey, at the extreme East of the continent, straddling Asia and Europe Ireland so far West that it is not even physically attached to the continental land mass and a non-profit organisation based in the United States but operating largely in the metaverse. This was a challenge that each of us embarked on with some trepidation but also with relish!

I had been introduced to Wisdom a few years ago when she invited the class to visit Whole Brain Health on Inspiration Island. She, Thujia Hynes (Tooyaa) and Francisco Koolhoven (Fran) gave us the grand tour. In addition to hearing about all that goes on at WBH the students had the opportunity to play. They rode scooters and magic carpets, flying dangerously around the island and tried out yoga and tai chi moves with amazing ease. They even had an opportunity to show off their avatars’ dance moves. ‘Physical’ activity like this is very important to retain attention and even though it is done virtually by our avatars, it does help us keep our attention in focus.

Shortly after that Lissena introduced Magua to me. Facilitated by Sitearm, we three met to consider a possible collaboration. Then, meeting almost weekly over the summer of 2021 we explored options and possibilities for a new shared module. Soon we were joined by Tooyaa, Fran, Ghaelen and Catseye from WBH and Besitaa from Çağ University. We developed as a team and learned what was important to each of us.  It was time well spent as our mutual respect for each other grew, and we developed our working methodology. This all led to the ‘International Student Project’, which took the best of what each of us had been doing so far and combined it into a new offering. It is clear to me now that the experience we each brought to the table provided the basis for a more rapid development than might otherwise have been the case.

We are now in the middle of the second semester of delivering the ‘International Student Project’ module.
Each of us contributes an essential part of the learning, but together we are offering students a singular and unique experience that is rich with cultural diversity.

From the beginning we intended to disseminate the lessons learned from this experience. We agreed that our collaboration would not merely be about designing and teaching the class but would also encompass conference presentations, papers for academic journals, and any other opportunity for sharing of our knowledge and experience that might turn up. Our intention is to encourage others to take up the challenge of working together and exploiting the unique opportunities offered by virtual worlds. The quality of volunteer work in the metaverse is an indicator of the potential for good and underlines the desire to support one another that is unlocked by positive community engagement.

That is the real story that lies at the heart of our collaboration.

Anois teacht an earraigh...

Antaine Ó Reachtaire (1784–1835) was better known as Raifteirí an file (the poet). Blind since early childhood he was one of the last generation of traditional wandering Gaelic bards – playing the fiddle, singing and also composing. It was only after his death that his work was written down. The poem ‘Cill Aodáin’ celebrates the Irish tradition of welcoming spring on St Brigid's Day, the first of February. The poet yearns to return to his home village, in place and in time, as the second verse reveals:

I will leave here and my heart will rise,

As the breeze lifts or the mist clears,

When I think of Carra and Gallen below,

On Sceathath a’ Mhíle and the plains of Mayo;

Cill Aodáin the town where everything grows—

There are berries and raspberries and respect for all;

And if I could stand among my people,

Age would flee and I'd be young again.

—Translated by Shane O’Connor (1931–2005)

The opening lines Anois teacht an earraigh beidh an lá ’dul ’un síneadh, ’S tar éis na Féil’ Bríde ardóidh mé mo sheol will resonate with Irish people from the generation that heard them in primary school. They certainly made an impression on me and I have long wanted to celebrate the beauty of the words and their intention. My late father translated from the original Irish for me but it took more than fifteen years to deliver them on the postcard above.

Singing at the tops of our hearts

Just having pledged to support the crowdfunding campaign for singer/songwriter Pierce Turner’s new album I remembered writing a short piece for Ruth Fleischmann’s 2005 book celebrating the Cork International Choral Festival. Here it is.

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John O’Connor, Dublin, Former Member of the Newbridge College Boys Choir, Co Kildare reminded of the Cork Choral Festival by Pierce Turner1

It is a dark, smoky, club in Dublin some time in the late 1990s. The magical Pierce Turner is halfway through his set and he has us in the palm of his hand. This singer/songwriter’s peculiarly unique style of performance is well suited to the intimate atmosphere of Whelan’s. Pierce likes it up close and personal so he spends most of the gig running up and down the tables in the club: face to face with his audience. What you see is what you get with Pierce Turner. And he gives all he’s got. Meanwhile, his frenetic energy is balanced by the calm of the string quartet supporting his performance.

As he starts into You Can Never Know the sweat is high and the concentration intense. The first chorus is a nod to Lou Reed’s Take a Walk On The Wildside:

It felt so good to hear those coloured girls sing...

But the second time around the chorus has become

It felt so good to hear those choirboys sing.

Following on from:

You can never feel what it felt like standing in the church
Full of boy sopranos all singing
Faith Of Our Fathers at the top of their hearts.

As the song draws to a close Pierce gently begins the hymn and, before long, we are all drawing on our childhood memories of Sunday morning Mass to join with him. After a few bars we are belting it out at the tops of our hearts and, as I sing, I am transported back to the Newbridge College Boys Choir. I am a twelve-year-old soprano, singing at the Choral Festival in Cork. The hairs rise up on the back of my neck and the sheer joy of singing with a choir is awakened.

Our choir never actually sang Faith Of Our Fathers. Our repertoire for Cork in 1973 contained more of Back and Mozart. But most vivid now is the excitement of singing with the choir: the beauty of the music and the force of our combined voices really did lift the soul. That experience was even more important than the fact that we won the schools section of the competition.

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1. Pierce Turner, from Wexford, now lives in New York. His first album in 1987, It’s Only A Long Way Across was produced by Philip Glass who also contributed what some have said are the most gorgeous string arrangements in rock history. Liam Fay of Ireland’s answer to Rolling Stone, Hot Press Magazine, enthused: ‘Joyce with a voice, Yeats on skates, or Brendan Behan with an electric guitar, Pierce Turner is a great artist.’ Christy Moore has notably championed Turner by performing many of his songs.

See Pierce Turner's website for details on how to support his crowdfunding campaign.

Community engagement in Second Life

Last week I took part in a panel discussion titled 'Virtual Ability: Support, Collaboration, Research, Community' at the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education Conference 2015 that was hosted by the virtual world Second Life. I provided a brief outline of the class I teach, 'Virtual Environments: Is once life enough?' and described a field trip to Virtual Ability Island, a community established specifically to enable people with a wide range of disabilities by providing a supporting environment for them to enter and thrive in online virtual worlds like Second Life.

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I have been teaching a class in Second Life (with my former DIT colleague Locks Aichi) called ‘Virtual Environments: Is one life enough?’ since 2009. The class is delivered entirely online, with weekly meetings in Second Life and regular engagement through student blogs and social media. My first students were undergraduates from the School of Creative Arts taking it as an elective.

 

Panel members with Acuppa Tae (aka John O'Connor) fourth from the left.

  

One decision we made that might be considered unusual for a university was to forgo the use of a private island. Instead we came to an arrangement with the already vibrant community, Dublin Virtually Live. Established in the early days of Second Life, by real life Dubliner and world traveller Ham Rambler, the Second Life version of Dublin provided an ideal cultural context for the class. To some extent it mirrored DIT’s position as a university in the centre of the city. But, more importantly, Dublin offered an already established cultural backdrop in which the students could be immersed. Sitearm Madonna, the virtual city manager, took an active interest in our activities and also attended as a student. This engagement has continued and he is now a regular contributor to the class.

 

With Sitearm’s encouragement we soon decided to offer places to Second Life residents who wanted to take the class on a stand-alone basis. This resulted in our meeting a broad range of professionals from diverse backgrounds who added experience and depth to the class. Many of these became friends and have also returned to the class as guest lecturers. They have also introduced us to many new communities over the years, including Virtual Ability Island.

 

Last year we started a new development and were joined by Dudley Dreamscape’s class from University of Akron, Ohio. Dreamscape (Prof Dudley Turner in Real Life) participated as a student in the class the previous year and following that we met in Real Life at a conference in Dublin. Over the course of a few days we planned a methodology that allowed us to commence joint delivery. The Akron students come from a more diverse range of disciplines than the Dublin students: engineering; nursing; education; dance; accountancy and so on. This brings not only a disciplinary richness to the class but also a cultural breadth that many participants would not otherwise experience.

 

The current class has thirty students with about fifteen from each university and the main aim of the module is to introduce the participants to online collaborative working. Second Life provides the virtual space for class meetings but we also explore the use of tools such as blogs, wikis, social media and so on. This prepares students to engage professionally with building their own online reputation and personal brand.

 

In order to experience online collaboration first hand students from each university are put into mixed groups to work on a project throughout the semester. This ensures they learn how to use a range of online tools to work together and plan effectively. They must decide how to communicate asynchronously across different time zones and cultural norms to produce a coherent presentation by the conclusion of the semester.

 

A key element of the module is the number of field trips arranged for students. These are mostly organised by our guest lecturers who introduce the class to a range of diverse online communities. Elfay Pinkdot, a long-time collaborator and former host of the Second Life jazz radio show Coffee and Pajamas, introduced us to Circe Broom’s Sunset Jazz Club and to some art collectives.

 

Dudley Dreamscape made contact with Gentle Heron and Virtual Ability Island, one of the very dynamic communities to inhabit Second Life.

 

A view of the conference location in Second Life.

  

The recent class field trip to Virtual Ability Island had a very distinct impact on our students. Gentle welcomed us and gave a brief outline on the genesis of the community and how it functions. Many of the students began to realise, for the first time, the potential of virtual environments for filling gaps in real lives. Speaking directly with the residents of Virtual Ability Island they began to understand that online engagement is not merely about games but can be an important social and professional space for people who might not otherwise be able to engage in this way.

 

Our hosts in Virtual Ability Island are open and welcoming – and willing to share their stories with the class. They answered questions and even asked some of their own! The interactive nature of the engagement shone through and impressed the students with its sincerity. (An account of the visit can be read on the module blog.)

 

Many do not quite understand the power of Second Life in some people’s lives. It is only when they meet those who rely on the environment and its communities for their social interaction that the power of this engagement is revealed. The opportunity to speak to members of the community and hear their stories first-hand is very powerful indeed. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid propose that

...the more isolated learners are, whether physically or socially, the more they need access to peers, communities of practice, and other social resources”. [note 1]

The same goes for most of us: community engagement is a fundamental human need. When this is denied us in the Real World Second Life truly offers a second chance.

Design thinking and creative intelligence

If we are to take Bruce Nussbaum’s word for it the role of ‘design thinking’ in business development and innovation has been in decline since 2011 when he called it a ‘failed experiment’. Nevertheless, I suspect that its value as a methodology for re-framing ‘wicked problems’ (Rittel and Webber 1973) has yet to be fully realised. Undoubtedly, there remains considerable confusion around the notion of design thinking. For example, 'Designing Growth', a discussion hosted by Dublin City Council in 2013 to explore how design could be harnessed to drive economic growth in Ireland revealed competing understandings of the role of design in design thinking.

The international panel of experts held divergent opinions – as did the audience, largely made up of members of the design community. The event was intended as 'a discussion on ways to develop new and better public services, communication platforms, education and business models through design' but had difficulty getting beyond a debate on the value of design itself, never mind design thinking. This was a disappointing, if not altogether surprising, outcome: all the more so due to the missed opportunity to convince John Moran (the panel’s deliberately selected sceptic and influentially positioned Secretary General at the Department of Finance) and other policy makers of the value in utilising alternative methodologies to plan the rebuilding of the national economy following its collapse in the recent recession.

The confusion between ‘design thinking’ and ‘designing’ in evidence at the event is not unusual. From an academic perspective Lucy Kimbell writing in 2011 suggests that:

Even on a cursory inspection, just what design thinking is supposed to be is not well understood, either by the public or those who claim to practise it.

In 2007 Nussbaum was a proponent of the role of designers:

My own current thinking is that designers must play a critical role in the creation of this new field of design thinking. The whole core culture of design is essential to design thinking.

Later that year Nussbaum's thinking has developed to the point where he is recommending that CEOs:

have to understand design thinking – using the process to manage the company. That is what [Steve] Jobs does – he isn't a trained designer but he gets it. He focuses on what is important these days. And it took him a while to get these skills. Remember all those mistakes along the way?'

This understanding of design thinking as an approach to problem framing and problem solving – derived from the design process – emerged from business schools. Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management, interviewed by David Dunne in 2006 says 'today’s business people don’t need to understand designers better, they need to become designers.' Martin had gained an insight into the design process from encounters with a small design firm in Toronto and a later involvement with IDEO. He was fascinated by the way designers approached problem solving by accepting constraints and ‘creating something that looks great and sells’. He also recognised that the same approach applied in business:

As I watched it, I saw that this is what great business leaders do. They enter some kind of constrained environment where they want to do something that is near impossible. They have to figure it out by thinking differently from anybody else. The best of what I see in the best business people is the same as what I see in designers at their best.

Kimbell cites Martin, from the Design of Business (2009) describing design thinking as having:

something important to offer managers, enabling them to shift from choosing between alternatives to helping them generate entirely new concepts.

Designer and writer Aiden Kenny (Notes and Thoughts from the 'Designing Growth' Event 2013) proposes that it may lie in ‘collaborations between business strategists and strategically-minded designers’. This all suggests a particular application for design thinking as a methodology for re-framing problems that society is having great difficulty addressing. But, just as it appears there may be a consensus developing Nussbaum appears to change his mind. In 2011 he writes that:

The decade of Design Thinking is ending and I, for one, am moving on to another conceptual framework: Creative Intelligence, or CQ.

A cynical response might be that his conversion is simply a strategy to support his new book, Creative Intelligence (2013). But, in fact, he attributes it to the failure of CEOs to understand and implement design thinking correctly and opportunistic designers misusing it to increase business. He reports a conversation with IDEO’s Tim Brown and quotes his analysis:

Design consultancies that promoted Design Thinking were, in effect, hoping that a process trick would produce significant cultural and organizational change. From the beginning, the process of Design Thinking was a scaffolding for the real deliverable: creativity. But in order to appeal to the business culture of process, it was denuded of the mess, the conflict, failure, emotions, and looping circularity that is part and parcel of the creative process.

The ability to live with mess, with uncertainty, and with the looping circularity of creativity is something that John Cleese (The Origin of Creativity 2009) talks about also. He acknowledges the instinctive urge to move from uncertainty to decision and argues that it limits creativity. The longer one is willing to live with the discomfort and continue exploring solutions the better the ultimate result.

It seems that some of Nussbaum’s motivation in describing creative intelligence is to move away from the preconceptions he believes have limited the potential he, and others, saw in design thinking. He recognises that the wicked problems have not gone away and they require attention – as a matter of urgency. By changing the context in which they are addressed participation in the search for solutions is opened up to everyone. No single profession, design included, can claim ownership of the creative process so perhaps the new terminology will support the framing of problems in new ways that lead to the development original solutions.