Virtual Worlds

Virtual worlds have been around forever, first as religious edifices (recreating heaven on earth) then as plays, opera, and movies (recreating distant and past events in the here and now.) They have been mostly passive, up until the 21st century at least. Computers, now, allow us to interact with those virtual worlds. I found some 1st generation approaches to this still around. Some are simple click and go websites -- http://www.photographymuseum.com/guide.html Some others attempt a pseudo spin and zoom in that format -- http://www.villa-rustica.de/tour/toure.html.  Then cranking it up a notch to this "Virtual Worlds for Art History Teaching" site -- http://www2.gsu.edu/~artwgg/atmos.htm -- using a 3-d viewer -- to virtualize ancient sites.

A screen shot from the "Virtual Worlds for Art History Teaching" site

 

Then there is Secondlife

http://secondlife.com/
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Second_Life_Education

here's a video:

Here's another: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOFU9oUF2HA and lots more videos where that came from, you see them all stacked on your right as you watch.

You have to join, then log in, get an avatar, before you can go anywhere or do anything there. There are more than 100 education destinations. I found the virtual University of Delaware art gallery there. Secondlife is being used as a virtual classroom facilitating discussions and other group projects. If you have the time and expertise to set up something there, it looks like a great place to teach. A caveat: it’s still mostly a social site and like a real campus, students might rather spent time at a party than in class.

 

Wide, Wide World

‘Virtual worlds’ is a big topic, too big.

A scene from http://www.lascaux.culture.fr/#/en/02_00.xml

Look at the site on my Virtual Cave page for an immersive but controlled experience. Look on the Virtual Tours or Google Art Project pages for experiences as immersive but more self-, or teacher-directed. You could say they are more web-2.0ish if you like jargon. You, the instructor could use these sites “flying” from feature to feature teaching as you go or even better, your students can do it themselves in a treasure hunt kind of way.

However, I have stumbled around enough to realize the one novice e-teacher is not going to create anything like these by himself in time for next semester, or at all, so I narrowed my goals. Look at the work involved in making this Virtual Museum:

The site is here:

http://www.annefrank.org/en/Subsites/Home/Enter-the-3D-house/#/house/20/

Virtual museum in PowerPoint

To make a virtual world for a class I have set my sights lower; make a virtual museum in PowerPoint. There I can create a museum with several galleries that a student can wander through. Some rooms could be examples of the completed project as art on the wall  and the how-to Jings linked to sculptures in the center of the room. There could be non-skill related, but still task-specific rooms for history or current-master galleries. The museum format would allow the student to go through the sequential project rooms in order but wander the other galleries by their own inclinations.

I think I could take some tutorials in Dreamweaver, make some slicker images then the clunky PPT ones in Photoshop, but that would take some time, which I don’t have right now. But in either case, Powerpoint or Dreamweaver the lesson plan is the same; what I do first in power point  I can translate into a Dreamweaver later.

So watch this video:

You can download the grand entry PPT template from here: http://christykeeler.com/EducationalVirtualMuseums.html  Or go here: http://www.classhelp.info/virtualmuseum.htm They have PDFs, step by step for building a museum and some examples.

A screen shot from the museum building PDF

Then there is this: Prezi. http://prezi.com/index/ a free alternate to PowerPoint. They claim to be able to add fades, pans and zooms to the slide show, sound and imbedded video too. We’ll see.