Week 8 Assignment: Final Course Paper Top of Form Instructions: Your final research paper will be based on a topic – holacracy.Please remember this is an academic paper and 3rd person is required....

Week 8 Assignment: Final Course Paper

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SPECIAL FOCUS PAPER COLLABORATIVE AND SOCIAL LEARNING USING VIRTUAL WORLDS: PREPARING STUDENTS FOR VIRTUALLY ANYTHING Collaborative and Social Learning Using Virtual Worlds: Preparing Students for Virtually Anything http://dx.doi.org/ijac.v4i3.1734 Kai Erenli and Gerhard Ortner University of Applied Sciences bfi Vienna, Vienna, Austria Abstract—"Teams, increasingly more than individuals, are charged with the most challenging and mission-critical pro- jects. Leaders need to evaluate and motivate from a distance. And the makeup of teams is increasingly complex – they’re bigger, more diverse, more geographically distributed, com- posed more of specialists than generalists, and much more dependent on technology than in the past. And difficult eco- nomic times only accent these challenges." This statement made by Reeves and Read in their Book “Total Engage- ment” perfectly summarizes the challenge we as University of Applied Sciences and especially our degree program "Project Management and Information Technology" face while preparing students for their work life. While the use of e-mail and video-conferencing systems substantially sup- ports the members of ever more globalized project teams, we have witnessed that the developments regarding Virtual Worlds and Communities may have a big impact on project management in the future. The paper shows what approach was chosen to take the skills already adopted by the “virtual natives” e.g. our students, what tasks were given to them to improve those skills and what lessons learned were made by the teaching stuff. Index Terms—collaboration, decentralized teams, project management, student projects, virtual worlds I. INTRODUCTION "Teams, increasingly more than individuals, are charged with the most challenging and mission-critical projects. Leaders need to evaluate and motivate from a distance. And the makeup of teams is increasingly com- plex – they’re bigger, more diverse, more geographically distributed, composed more of specialists than generalists, and much more dependent on technology than in the past. And difficult economic times only accent these challeng- es." [1] This statement perfectly summarizes the challenge we as University of Applied Sciences and especially our degree program "Project Management and Information Technology" face while preparing students for their work life. While the use of e-mail and video-conferencing sys- tems substantially supports the members of ever more globalized project teams, we have witnessed that the de- velopments regarding Virtual Worlds and Communities may have a big impact on project management. Therefore we have analyzed and evaluated this impact within a pro- ject called "PMIT+" with a special focus on the practica- bility of new tools and applications. Since many work packages were realized by students we have – as a by- product – also evaluated the use of the Virtual Worlds as possible e-learning tools within the curriculum. The out- come of this evaluation will be presented in this paper. II. IDEA AND TASK The reasons to use Virtual Worlds as educational tools are various. From our point of view at least three im- portant ones must be mentioned: 1. Commitment to use. Research shows that young people grow up with the use of Virtual Worlds (e.g. see [2]). Therefore the commitment to use Virtual Worlds in their everyday life and in different situa- tions e.g. for educational purposes must be accounted for. 2. Appealing Virtualization. The state-of-the-art tech- nology provides users with attractive and easy-to-use applications and appealing virtualizations. This also increases commitment and therefore the motivation to use the Virtual World. 3. Fun. Most Virtual Worlds have been “Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games” (MMORPG) by definition and have been very popu- lar for generations. The evolution of Virtual Worlds into Social Virtual Worlds [3] began with Linden Lab's Second Life entering the field and has pro- ceeded to many Virtual Worlds for working profes- sionals. The use of moving Avatars and the "Uncan- ny Valley Effect" described by Mori [4] increase the fun factor during the learning process as well as ac- ceptance for gathering knowledge rather than experi- ence points (normally gained in MMORPGs). The task of the “PMIT+” project was to "find a Virtual World that can be used as a main collaboration tool for project work. Use the tool extensively within the “PMIT+” project and evaluate the tool during the project". Then operate and control a small project using the tool. Several phases where implemented to reach the mission statements: 1. work on a simple definition for the concept "Virtual World", 2. compile a long list of Virtual Worlds, 3. prepare a criteria catalogue, 4. select a Virtual World to use during the project, 5. document findings and lessons learned and 6. deploy the student project as test case. iJCA – Volume 4, Issue 3, August 2011 23 http://dx.doi.org/ijac.v4i3.1734 SPECIAL FOCUS PAPER COLLABORATIVE AND SOCIAL LEARNING USING VIRTUAL WORLDS: PREPARING STUDENTS FOR VIRTUALLY ANYTHING A. Definition of "Virtual World" As mentioned before, the first task was to find a suita- ble Virtual World. Therefore, it was necessary to define the term "Virtual World" in order to separate Virtual Worlds from "classic" collaboration tools, which are often inaccurately defined as "tools for virtual teams" and cause misunderstandings for the potential user. On the other hand, most of the tools established by Web 2.0 can be seen as virtual tools. In order to separate Virtual Worlds from these social networking websites/tools and e- learning tools, we defined measurement categories for Virtual Worlds [5]: 1. coded, 2. ability to communicate with others (through voice or chat), 3. 2-D or 3-D visualized reality, 4. persistency, 5. run in real-time, 6. client- or browser-based. All factors had to be fulfilled cumulatively. B. Long list of Virtual Worlds The Virtual Worlds chosen to be on the long list were: Wonderland, Active Worlds, Entropia Universe, Gaia Online, IMVU, Kaneva, LambdaMOO, Maquari, World of Warcraft (MMORPG), EVE (MMORPG), Papermint, Se- cond Life, There.com, Vastpark, Sloodle, Cobalt, virtu- alheroes, Teleplace, Vside, Twinity, Meetsee, Spiral ma- trix and Protosphere. Virtual Worlds discovered during later work (e.g. OpenSim) were evaluated during the project (see II.c), and have been stored on a "Side List". They are awaiting fur- ther evaluation. C. Criteria Catalogue To provide a qualitative comparison of different Virtual Worlds, it is necessary first to determine key criteria by which to evaluate which worlds are considered relevant and which are negligible. The criteria selected were:  administration/user groups,  data security,  resource sharing ,  communication/interaction tools,  modifications/customizing,  support (documentation, manuals, tutorials),  costs/licensing,  available languages,  usability – client,  assessment prerequisites (hardware, resources, …),  project management relevance,  e-learning relevance. Criteria Points A d m in is tr a ti o n 0 no user roles 1 no specific user roles 2 classified rules (user, admin) 3 classified rules (user, admin, co- admin) 4 individual user roles can be defined 5 group-based rights Figure 1. Example of the Category Administration Features Each of these categories was assessed by giving it 0 to 5 points representing the performance level of the related Virtual World. The Top 10 of all Virtual Worlds evaluated are: 1. Teleplace (Qwaq) 2. Protosphere 3. Wonderland 0.4 4. Active World 5. Cobalt 6. Meetsee 7. World of Warcraft 8. There.com 9. IMVU 10. Kaneva Virtual Worlds that did not meet minimal requirements (knockout criteria) had to be excluded from the evalua- tion. Knockout criteria were e.g.:  most MMORPGs failed because of the lack of pro- ject management or e-learning relevance, but were tested initially to observe the fun factor and evaluate the criteria catalogue itself;  resource sharing was limited to ftp transfers;  many MMORPGs require a state-of-the-art graphic hardware which cannot be found in most stu- dent/office notebooks. Worlds which were eligible but still under strong de- velopment, e.g. Wonderland, were put "on hold". There- fore the evaluation performed can only be regarded as a "snap shot". Each Virtual World has to be reevaluated when a new version is deployed. D. Selection of the Virtual World used Wonderland and Teleplace were put on the shortlist. Since Wonderland was awaiting a major release update (0.4 to 0.5), Teleplace was selected to be used in the PMIT+ project. E. Project Management Approach The study program “Project Management & IT” is not affiliated with any of the Project Management methods established worldwide. Therefore the students could de- cide on their own which method to choose. The team de- cided to use the method established by the IPMA (Interna- tional Project Management Association) which is also very popular in Austria. III. DOING PROJECTS IN A VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT The following findings document the most important issues that were observed during the project. They can be seen as work in progress, since the observation is an ongo- ing process in current projects, which are also deployed in virtual worlds. The demonstrations of the findings are in chronological order and are all related to the PMIT+ pro- ject. A. Technical Issues & Team Building Due to a lack of preparation the first meeting in a virtu- al meeting room ended in disaster. Neither the project manager nor the project team had tried the virtual meeting room beforehand, so the meeting had to be classified as “trial & error”. Problems encountered were:  team members could not hear/talk to each other, 24 http://www.i-jac.org SPECIAL FOCUS PAPER COLLABORATIVE AND SOCIAL LEARNING USING VIRTUAL WORLDS: PREPARING STUDENTS FOR VIRTUALLY ANYTHING  communication was very chaotic due to a lack of communication rules,  open microphones with a lot of background noise,  lag issues (network),  poor avatar controlling skills,  poor moderation skills of the project manager. The meeting was aborted after 30 minutes and its sub- sequent improvement was given as task to