Community College Librarian

The New Media Consortium announced today that it is entering into a partnership with Sun Microsystems to form “The Virtual Worlds Project.” Here’s the best part:

In launching the Open Virtual Worlds project, the NMC will build on its extensive presence in Second Life and add to the services it offers educational institutions with a suite of services aimed at those who need a secure extensible platform or simply prefer an open solution. Open Virtual Worlds will be a new project housed within NMC Virtual Worlds, along with its extensive Second Life project.

Read the rest of this news item and see the video here .

The idea of an open secure solution and something that is scalable is really exciting for Community Colleges and smaller edu’s that are looking for more portable solutions or just want to try virtual world education on a smaller scale. Love the NMC!

Please click on “Resources” to see a current list of Colleges who have declared their presence in SL. Not on the list? Email me at notmarian@gmail.com or leave a comment.

4-27-08: Update! The CCSL wiki has the most recent list. PLEASE add your College information! http://ccsl.wetpaint.com

The Community Colleges in SL group met again to talk about issues with some of our colleagues in IT being none-to-thrilled about our wanting to teach in virtual spaces. After much deliberation (and mutinous grumbling), we finally came to the conclusion that it is not so much that our IT people want to stop us from using SL but that our networks simply cannot handle it. This is not a problem in just a few Colleges. It seems to be everywhere. No matter how much pipe we have, it gets used up. Some IT departments are forced to lock down services like Youtube at peak times just because the network needs to be available with relative speed to what is going on in the classrooms and libraries. (sigh). But there is hope. Technology has a way of catching up and we will be there!

Another challenge discussed was that some IT people do not see the value of virtual worlds in teaching so they just discourage it as much as possible, to anyone that asks about it and will listen. The general feeling of the group is that IT does not drive curriculum. Period. If something is really impossible, then this conclusion should be based upon evidence and should be drawn with the faculty and instructional designers’ input and participation. Gone are the days when technology was this mysterious thing and our IT departments all-powerful. Welcome to 2.0 collaboration!

There were several people who are working directly with their IT departments to make something happen in SL. Very encouraging.

NIU COD, originally uploaded by notmarian.

The College where I work is a sister school to NIU. Many of our students go there after they complete their first two years with us. We are all so very shocked and saddened by this tragedy and feel a profound sense of grief. Its difficult to know what to tell students when we feel just as vulnerable as they do. Our College has done a great job offering counseling and banding together as a huge family.

We should also remember the 3 students that died on February 8, 2008 at Louisiana Technical College at Baton Rouge. A troubled nursing student came to school with a gun and killed two of her classmates then turned the gun on herself. This Community College did not get the press that the killings at NIU and Virginia Tech did. I will not speculate on that. But I am thinking about Karshieka Graves, Taneshia Butler and Latina Williams of LTC in Baton Rouge.

The College of DuPage is now taking applications for its next Resident Librarian! This program trains a recent MLS about the type of library they rarely learn about in grad school (sigh). I know this program is great because I was the first-ever CC Resident Librarian. (yes, I’m proud.) Read all about it here: http://www.blog.codlibrary.org/?p=100

Ok, so librarians get all twittery when they encounter masses of full text. Myself included.  It doesn’t matter what kind of full text either: journal articles, research reports, newspaper articles and, of course, books.  Though we love the fact that google is cranking out the e-books as fast as we can catalog them…there’s a big HUGE problem.  Google book links are not always persistent.  That’s bad.   That’s very bad.  But here’s the cool tool for your iGoogle desktop anyway. You know you have one.  http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2007/12/go-go-book-search-gadgets.html

Oh, there’s also a gadget for google scholar. I know! Pass the smelling salts.  Too bad Scholar makes me want to cry since the student can’t get to the full text most of the time. Then they call to ask me why.

on/off London Fashion Week, originally uploaded by notmarian.

Here is a great opportunity for fashion design students to experience London Fashion Week’s OnOff event. This exhibition features both established and up and coming designers. Each designer represented has photos of their designs and videos of the catwalk will be available as they happen in London.

Regardez ici: http://www.thedoll.org/onoff

SL Location: http://slurl.com/secondlife/doll/14/114/41

Second Life is a wonderful training ground for designers of all sorts and fashion is a major player. Not only can students create fashion for avatars in SL, they can attend events like London Fashion week! Above is my avatar at the LFW event.

Want to see more fashions in SL? There are scads of blogs and websites about fashion, but these two are my favorites so far:

http://www.achariya.net/

http://www.sge-sl.com/elric_anatine/ 

Croquet, originally uploaded by notmarian.

Just attended a session on Croquet at the IOC 2008 conference. Mark McCahill (Duke) discussed this open source 3-D virtual environment for education.

Totally fascinating take on 3-D virtual worlds from a veteran techie who developed some very early web apps like Gopher. Yes, he does think that people paying money for virtual “land” on a grid is ridiculous because virtual space is a limitless commodity. However, for those of us in Community Colleges who do not have adequate computing infrastructure and massive IT departments…well, that topic is best saved for another day. These commercial virutal worlds are a place where we can experiment with very little risk and without our partners in IT suffering nervous breakdowns.

The most striking difference between Croquet and other 3-D virtual worlds like Second Life, at least to me, is that it is not a client-server application. It is peer-to-peer, meaning that instead of us all interacting with a server, we are interacting with one another’s computers! There would not be a burden on a server network or a bandwidth problem because we would, in theory, be simply passing “copies” of the world from computer to computer. A server would keep a back-up of the world and at least one Croquet computer keeps the latest copy of the world alive at all times for people to connect to. Of course, this is my low-tech take on the Croquet infrastructure.

Another totally exciting difference is that the institution “owns” the world their students and faculty create. So, no paying a company to keep your world alive and no risk of the world suddenly disappearing. The Croquet environment can be as visually rich as Second Life and even more robust so there’s much to be excited about. However, the development burden on the institution would be a huge limitation; it would be one of those brick walls barring our way to innovative teaching that most of us have to deal with or succumb to.

From a librarian’s point of view, Croquet is very exciting. We can enhance our library’s collections, build upon them, re-package our content and so much more in a 3-D world that is “owned” by our institutions. Additionally, we could add this 3-D content to our collections. Not to mention that gone would be the content licensing issues that we face in commercial virtual worlds! We could really deliver our collections to our students in the virtual space. Swoon!

There’s about a million more points to make about Croquet and this post will be the first of many about this technology in the CC Librarian Blog. Go to to the Croquet Consortium Web-space to get all excited here: http://croquetconsortium.org/index.php/Main_Page

The State of Kentucky is instituting a program to get people who have completed some college credit to come back to school and finish their degrees. The program, Project Graduate, is offering incentives such as improved registration/advising processes, some financial aid, professional development for faculty who teach adults and gearing course schedules to accomodate working adults. This sort of program has been instituted in Ohio and New Mexico and has been met with success. Who woulda thunk it? I wonder, though, what could have been done to keep these all-but-degree students in school in the first place. Now states are spending bundles trying to get the people back that they likely should have kept an eye on.  But, some of these programs do focus on what community colleges do very well like nursing education, job skills training and, of course, teaching adults so I’m all for it. Here’s to waking up and smelling the coffee about the importance of people over 35 earning college degrees!