Possibilities

Edtechatouille?

A quick, off-topic post related to a second blog I write.  If you are subscribed to the feed for my EdTech related blog - EdTechatouille - you are receiving this feed temporarily.  EdTechatouille, a personally hosted WordPress blog, was hacked a couple of weeks ago, and I've not had the opportunity to repair the damage.  As soon as that blog is back up and running, I will redirect this feedburner feed back to that blog.

Institutional IPR, Purchasing Issues & Custom Last Name in SL

As the institution begins to move tangibly forward with our Second Life implementation, I find myself revisiting a few issues related to purchasing guidelines and intellectual property rights.  I've discussed these issues previously, one and two years ago, in some respect.  I have a solution in mind for two potential issues.

First Issue.  How does a college employee get the funds they need to make in world purchases?  How are those purchases tracked and documented?  The source of both questions is the need to avoid "a gift of public funds."  Given the budget based on taxpayer dollars, a transfer of college funds to an individual prior to the purchase of any goods is not permitted; plus, the purchase of $Lindens, a virtual currency, isn't exactly covered by current purchasing guidelines.  I know there's a tremendous amount of gray area in which we could play - describing $Lindens as software to avoid the currency issue - however, approaching the implementation from an institutional perspective suggests we shouldn't sidestep the issue or work in gray areas.    

Second Issue.  When a college developer or faculty member creates/builds items in world with the support of college funds, the college must retain ownership.  IF $Lindens are transferred to an individual representative of the college, any non-consumable byproduct of that transaction must remain the property of the college.  The intermediate, hands on solution is to ensure that all assets are transferred with full permissions to the college; problem is, what "is" the college within Second Life?  Further, that solution presents an administrative nightmare from an auditor's perspective, and the "creator" of the item will, to my knowledge, still be listed as the original developer.  

Solution.  I believe one solution addresses both issues.  Purchase a custom, institutional surname from Linden Lab; any employees developing institutional resources with the support of college funds does so with an institutional surname account.  The college retains ownership of all accounts using the institutional name including access to the login credentials.  With that arrangement, the college never transfers funds to an individual - as Lindens$ or US$ - and any items developed begin and remain college intellectual property.

Since I originally started this post, I had the opportunity to chat with ChrisG Techsan (RL: Chris Gibson) of vTSTC  in-world.  I learned that the Techsan name is in fact a custom, institutional surname purchased by TSTC, originally for use by their core Second Life development team for several of the reasons I mention above.  Namely, any items created using those accounts remain clearly identifiable in world as belonging to TSTC.  Other benefits of the institutional surname have been realized since then.  Many, but not all, faculty and staff use the institutional name, and it has become a marketing and identification tool.  Currently, however, learners are not issued institutional surname accounts.  

Does your institution have an institutional surname?  How is it used and by whom?  If not, to your knowledge did your institution ever consider the option?  Why?

A useful tool regarding Second Life surnames is SLNameWatch.com: founded in May 2007., it is a database of the last names available for selection inside Second Life. Both currently available last names as well as "heritage" last names are tracked. Statistics are collected on the usage of the names, and the date span of their availability (provided they were released after May 2007).

Types of Island Planning Decisions

A few posts back, I suggested Determining a Build Philosophy as the first step in planning an institutional presence in Second Life.  To continue that thought process, we've identified a number of other issues and decisions we're beginning to address.  Most of them seem to fall into four interdependent areas which are listed below along with thoughts or considerations our planning & development group have already discussed or at least listed. 

An Architectural Plan for common/institutional areas (as opposed to parcels allocated for individual faculty use).  In the common area, we'd like a consistent appearance between structures for the virtual installation to appear as a coherent whole.  What's the general architectural approach?  An affordance of Second Life is that we aren't necessarily limited to conventional, contemporary architectural styles.  As we discussed ideas, I suggested two factors which should impact the decision: prim consumption and development cost.  The architectural plan should not consume excessive resources in terms of prims or development time/cost.

A Terraforming Plan impacts he layout, traffic flow and overall appearance and usability of the space, and looking at other builds, the terraforming may represent much of the character of the island and build (see Etopia Island as an example).  So, we believe terraforming decisions need to be made early on to have an idea of how that influences the rest of the space.  In addition to the topography, we're considering the island geography and flora as well; Oregon Community College SL space chose terraform, flora and geography representative of the state, in a traditional/replica vein.  Ultimatley, the terraforming seems to the master layout and the architectural plan.

The Master Layout Plan considers how the island will be layed out and navigated.  For the initial build, we want to have a common/institutional area which is the official shared space of the institution, but we don't want that to consume the entire primary vertical space.  So, we are going to divide the island into parcels to make space on the primary level available for individual faculty instructional projects.  Related to that and part of the master layout is the navigational elements: welcome center, footpaths, signage, teleport centers and automated tours.  For the navigational elements, I believe we'll draw on the work of Jennings & Collins (2007) to inform our planning and decisions.

The Island Administration decisions probably are the most critical over the long term; we'll be relying on consultation from the New Media Consortium regarding security and access, at least at the outset as we experience the learning curve; that consultation is included in the lease agreement for the space.  Additionally, we also will be addressing: project communication, island use scheduling, faculty parcel/project application process, island use tracking and project evaluation, purchasing guidelines/issues, acceptable use considerations, and general student use of and participation in developing the space.

I'm interested if your institution or group seemed to go through the same issues and/or identified them similarly.  Were there other issues you've addressed during an island planning process?  Was your process more or less defined?

Who's Involved in the SL Island Planning Process?

Given my role at my institution, any advocacy for and planning of a Second Life presence has occurred at an institutional level. While it's taken us a little longer to engage Second Life, we're doing so with a full, funded commitment by the institution; we have institutional buy-in, and we're involving a wide range of stakeholders. Currently for our instructional project, we have two groups involved in the process: an advisory group and a planning and development committee.

I've read as much as I could find regarding the planning of an institutional Second Life presence, but I haven't seen much about how *institutions* are approaching - internally - the planning and development process. If you have experience with various groups within your institution, I'd appreciate hearing about your experiences. Our experience may be nothing new, but I hope blogging about it may be helpful to others somewhere along the way.

Our advisory group includes roughly 11-13 representatives from each service area of the college which may or should be impacted by the institutional presence in Second Life. The purpose of the advisory group is to serve as a flexible oversight group that provides feedback to and generally approves the broad direction of any subcommittees; the bulk of day-to-day decisions, however, lies in the smaller committees. The advisory group includes what may be the usual suspects in a Second Life build: faculty, multimedia development and instructional design/technology. But, it also includes:

• Information Technology Services. We wanted and are getting direct support for installation, bandwidth, system compatibility, and other technical support issues. We've been discussing Second Life with at least one Director in the ITS group for 2+ years; we've worked to have open discussions, and we've had a healthy exchange and give and take during that time (that's an entirely different post).
• Data/Web Development. This is a subgroup within ITS; however, we included a member of this team as well; as Second Life and the web continue to evolve - and perhaps merge - we may have increasing need to integrate the two. Having this group present may enable a public-facing Second Life project presence via our website in the short term and, hypothetically, something like a custom institutional account creation site for our faculty and students in the long term.
• Training. We have a small group of technical trainers that to this point have focused primarily on the business administration systems and MS Office; we hope that group will be branching out a bit in the near future in collaboration with the instructional technology group to provide training on a broader scope of applications, so we included that department in the advisory group.
• Student Services. Instead of approaching student services and development independently as we consider student interest areas frequently found on educational islands, we wanted to involve student services and development from the ground up. We're hoping to engage that group in a manner similar to the instructional group by pursuing a student services project in the space.
• Marketing. We are willingly approaching the development of the island to include established branding and marketing strategies; I don't expect we'll be using the space as a marketing or recruiting tool per se, but we do want to make sure the space is definitively recognizable as belonging to our institution by matching the graphics, logos etc to those used in other areas. The Second Life space will be an extension of what we're already doing rather than independent of it.
• Facilities. Our build likely won't use the traditional/replica or traditional/mimic approaches I described in a previous post. We didn't include our facilities group to help us define what our Second Life facilities should be or look like; given the different needs and capabilities of 7m tall, flying avatars that might actually be counterproductive. We do, however, have a recent bond issue passed which will bring to our physical campuses a number of new buildings; we're hoping that our institution might leverage Second Life in the planning and development process of the physical buildings to be.
• Purchasing. We're working closely with our purchasing group to try to define what has yet to be defined: procedures for managing the purchase of goods and services that are even less tangible than other technologies. I've yet to find an institution that has defined a process through which Lindens can legitimately be distributed to faculty and or students for use in Second Life to the benefit of the institution.

Currently, we have one smaller subcommitee: planning and development. This group, lead by the project manager, is much smaller and simpler. The decision makers on the committee include two faculty and a Dean that represent our three campuses, respectively. This group researches and makes decisions in the planning process by relying on the resources represented in the advisory committee: training, ITS, marketing etc. By consulting with those recognized representatives, by the time we reach a point at which we need general approval of the advisory group, we're hoping that process will be a formality.

At your institution, What's your experience? process? involvement?