Thursday, November 21, 2019

Multiverse Masters Open Educational Practice design science museum and support center for educators in virtual worlds.




The above link is the short edited version. 
The video below is 5 minutes longer and follows the provided transcript.



Welcome to Multiverse Masters. My name is Salie Davis, and this is my final project for my master’s program at Empire State University of New York for Learning in Emerging Technologies, with a master’s Certificate in Teaching in Emerging Technologies. Behind me you will see just part of Multiverse Masters Educational Support Center. 

Multiverse Masters is actually a four sectioned Island, the educational center is the main Island, within this main island is educator supports, tutorials, and ideas, so educators  can come here and collect free resources that are open source, they can find items that I myself have created to share with the open source community, they can find tutorials, lesson examples, and more.  

When they arrive at Multiverse Masters they will come to this area and find navigational aids that will help them get to the areas they need the most support in. When you first arrive, at Multiverse Masters you can see the welcome area, you are welcomed by Suny Sweet, the School Girl and the Multiverse Master themselves. Those are in scripts and may be future tutorials on the blog and website so that educators can reproduce them. Examples include badges and introduction boards, again these may be future tutorials for educators as well as papers, for example how badging can be used in gamification and learning. 

There are full tutorials and lesson examples such as this one which is a storyboard and film tutorial and lesson plan. These include slides shows and activities, assignments and assessments. With permissions people could do these lessons here or copy and reproduce similar lessons on their own virtual world. 

That is what the purpose of this island is, to give inspiration, support, ideas and tools to educators so that they can see what they can do in these environments with their students. I found that having lots of navigational tools was very important so that educators could come and find exactly what they were looking for, these include navigational arrows, as you can see they point to the speaker prep lounge, which teaches educators how to create presentations themselves and offers different options for presentations and lectures. 

This navigational board with landmarks shows the whole Island including the immersive learning area, the student area, which educators can duplicate as restricted areas on their own islands for students. In the upper part is an educational lesson-based adventure and fantasy world that may be removed and redesigned but will be cataloged on the website and blog as well.  

This is how Multiverse Masters, with it blog and website, along with its ever-developing virtual space will become a museum for virtual design science, and open educational practice examples.  When exhibits or areas are removed, they will be cataloged and can continue to inspire educators.  

The Island currently features resources for avatars, avatar clothing, with lots of teleport options to get you directly to where you need to go. Other navigational tools have just the main Island, and link to the websites, blogs, YouTube channels, Facebook and other resources.  

You can also hyper grid from Multiverse Masters to other grids all over the world.  The navigational aids here give visual representations to the different support areas and exhibits, I wanted to give people the option to browse freely and interact with the objects such as this light share.  More exhibits are upstairs, and even more can be accessed at the train station. 

The train station itself is designed to be immersive in its build. Inside the Train station office is scripts and navigational supports to help instructors in their own designs. The information signs give note cards on the exhibits and you can teleport to the different exhibits listed here. 

These examples are complete curriculum with assignments, some supports and assessments, videos, quizzes etc.  The interactive aspects of this area help the instructors decide which areas are most beneficial for them to visit.  

Some of it of course is just interactive fun, bikes that can be rode, food items given that the avatar can eat, but it is all a part of the engagement in this environment. The original design was an open source design that I altered. I have added areas for news and open simulation community blogs, supports and sites, such as the virtual library. 

The shops were also pre-designed open source that I added to for the benefit of educators who themselves must learn how to use the tools in this virtual environment in order to teach students effectively with in it. Going upstairs, there is the ESC and GSC rooms, supplies for avatars, and avatar accessories and classroom examples that include the free resources to replicate them. These include presentations and student examples from ESC. 

These areas show educators the various ways they can set up their virtual classrooms and the various tools they must present information and interact with their students.  The computers in the virtual world actually work for browsing the internet, each independently, you can play videos that are pre-loaded, leave notes, or instructions on white boards,  You can place pictures and easily edited sticky notes, slide shows,  allow student to drop notes in the "mail" or leave short text messages, all in the world,  or write on graffiti boards. 

All of these allow for synchronous and asynchronous learning. and different classroom environments. Above us is links to different student Islands from ESC as well as college and GSC websites.  There are lots of options for communication, exploration and the sharing of information. 

Even when the student is alone in the virtual world, they can interact with all the non-player characters and objects to learn and be directed. One example here, is Professor Brown.  Other options include note cards and choice scripts. Some are just for fun. These displays show formal and informal learning environments and provide the tools educators need to reproduce these environments as well as try out the various forms of communications and ways of presenting information. Although this area is outside the educational center and will be changed, here is the example of the active and immersive educational area. 

This area is a gamified learning environment with quizzes, and mysteries, where the student interacts with the environment and non-player characters to receive clues, answer questions for clues and rewards, gather tokens and go on quests. This is where the light share comes in handy. You have the bright day light and the scary night. 

As you can see it really changes the appearance of the environment and sets the mood for adventure. That was my quick tour of just some of the aspects of Multiverse Masters  designed to inspire educators and help them in their virtual exploits. Thank you very much for watching.

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