Documenting Educational Experiences using Machinima

and Object Displays

Marie Vans/amvans.Lapis

MLIS Student, San José State University

May 20, 2014

This: and this:•

Why Should we care?

Became This: And This:

What if we want to re-create our builds or experiences?

Intricate Builds Modified over time

Similar Experiences & Events

Saving our work in Virtual Worlds• Vast amounts of data may be generated

during the semester:• Objects created in-world including revisions• Project data used to create objects• Educational events• Avatar interactions

• Probably not feasible to preserve all data for reuse in later courses• It is possible to document essential data

for later development of similar courses.

Challenges for Documenting Virtual Worlds

• Objects exist only in inventory or in the VW environment if pulled out• No other way to back up your work in-world

– Except maybe give copies to another avatar• Other VW programs may let you import/export objects, but

generally not at this time in Second Life• No way to do a complete snapshot of a multi-prim build

without linking everything• Murphy’s Law states you will forget to link something.

• Collaborative builds are difficult due to permissions structure of objects

• Can’t rely on access to a specific sim in the future• Sims often disappear without warning

Capturing Spontaneous Events

Palace in The Reign Renaissance Island

Meeting new friends Renaissance Fair

Document Builds

Inside Outside

DownstairsUpstairs

Creating Displays

Books about Cathedral Dome Book that can be thumbed through

Artifacts related to Renaissance Florence A Machinima documenting the Renaissance Faire

Machinima, Photography, & Machinima of Photography

• Take pictures & record video everywhere possible and save them to hard drive.• In-world events• Field trips• Own builds• Other people’s builds• Environment

• Machinima from video footage• Machinima from sequence of photos

A Tale of Woe

• During the Renaissance Faire I shot ~6 hours of video and took hundreds of pictures.

• After creating six machinima and uploading them to YouTube, I “thought” I had moved the footage and project elements to an external drive.

• I then erased the whole directory on my primary computer.

• Somehow all that work was irretrievably lost.

Google to the Rescue (sort of)

• After surviving the heart attack, I realized all was not lost:• I had inexplicably uploaded many of the photos to

G+ before sending the originals to pixel heaven.• I could download all my finished machinima from

YouTube• A great deal of disk space was freed up by not

having all the footage I didn’t use lying around taking up space.

• I learned a very valuable lesson

Final Remarks• Videos and photos can be kept outside of the VW

environment• YouTube, Vimeo, Picassa, Facebook, other Social

networks• But… no guarantee your favorite social network will

still exist in 3-5 years• So…keep copies of your photos and videos backed

up on your own computer &/or storage devices (2 copies if you are like me)

Don’t do disk cleanup tasks while tired.