Presentation given at Archiving'15

1. Preserving Virtual Worlds
Educational Events using
Social Media Networks and
Cloud Storage Services
Patricia C. Franks & A. Marie Vans
San José State University
San José, CA, U.S.A.

2. Agenda
1. What are Virtual Worlds?
2. Why Preserve Virtual
World Experiences?
3. How do others preserve
them?
4. iSchool Virtual World
Courses
5. Student Expectations
6. Student Generated Data
7. Using Social Media
Networks
8. Archiving & Documenting
Virtual Worlds Experiences
9. Conclusions

3. What is a Virtual World?
• A virtual world is “an interactive simulated environment accessed
by multiple users through an online interface.”
• Six essential features are prescribed:
– shared space (multiple users),
– a graphical user interface, immediacy (“interaction takes place in real
time”)
– interactivity (“the world allows users to alter, develop, build, or submit
customized content”)
– persistence (“the world's existence continues regardless of whether
individual users are logged in”)
– socialization, or a sense of community. --- Virtual Worlds Review

4. Why Preserve Virtual World
Experiences?
At the San José State University, School of information, several
16-week, graduate-level courses have been run entirely in virtual
worlds.
These worlds are created to reflect a specific historical time
period.
A large amount of data is generated that should be preserved
for reuse in future distance courses.
Artifacts connect past educational experience with future design
of educational material for distance education in Virtual Worlds.

5. Why Preserve Virtual World Experiences?
• Historical time periods change when new course starts.
• Older worlds are “history”: they disappear once a new world is
created in the same space.
• These worlds are used as classrooms
– They have a history of their own in terms of events and activities that
occur within them.
– Some record should be preserved to help creators & instructors learn to
develop their own courses from prior experiences.
“Virtual Worlds are History,” (Henry Lowood, 2011)

6. How do others preserve VWs?
• Virtual worlds are frequently compared to games
– Use preservation practices when preserving virtual worlds
• Archival Information Packages (OAIS)
• Preserving game objects for well-defined games with expected interaction
between players
– Major drawback: investment in time and cost
• Ideas from digital curation of 3D CAD models
– Challenges similar to those for virtual world objects
• We need to document experiences AND in-world objects

7. Virtual World Courses
• “Living in Tudor Times: Traveling through Time and Space”
• Second Life (secondlife.com), fall 2013 for 16 weeks
• First time such a course was offered at San José State University, School of
Information
• The goal was to teach using:
• Principles of Instructional Design using Discovery Learning
• Constructivism
• Social Development Theory
• Communities of Practice
• Utilizing a virtual world distance-learning platform.
• Realized through series of in-world projects, events, presentations, and the use of
social networking sites for student assignments.

8. Virtual World Student Expectations
• Students are required to:
• Assume a character from the
Tudor Time Period
• Create a living space in accordance
with their societal station
• Provide tours of their homes
• Attend in-world lectures
• Present on various aspects of life
• Attend special events where
required to appear “in character”
• Attend field trips to similar sites
within Second Life
Tudor Times

9. Virtual World Student Expectations
• Complete a machinima
• Document information about
character
• Provide tour of home and a
discussion of important aspects of
culture.
• Create an in-world exhibit based on in-
depth research into aspect of life during
the time period.
• Present research during a Renaissance
Faire event.
• Submit papers and discussion
assignments using Ning (ning.com) or
Spruz (spruz.com).
Renaissance Italy

10. Student Data
• Each student creates machinima & uploads
to own social website.
• Provides link in fulfillment of assignment
• Student videos spread across the
Internet
• No control over preservation.
• Links can disappear at any time
• Social Media class sites disappear at end of
semester
• Cost too prohibitive to keep up
• Images stored on student computer
drives/accounts
• Objects created in-world by students owned
by students.
Prerevolutionary France

11. Data Woes
A vast amount of data, both textual
and visual, was being generated and it
was spread across the Internet.
What is needed is an implementation
plan for archiving this data for future
use
6th Annual VCARA
Conference

12. Social Media Archiving
• Goal: to manage content in several
different social networks and other data
as cohesive package
• Documentation & preservation scaffold:
• a school- sponsored blog
• centralized social media
o YouTube
o Google
o Pinterest
o WordPress
o Twitter
• Server storage space 6th Annual VCARA
Conference

13. Using Social Networks - YouTube
VCARA Videos:
www.youtube.com/channel/UCe3kkz
yWCmzLGBXulzn3mzg
• No limit on number of videos
• Size limit :128GB
• Maximum duration: 11 hours
• Ideal for public access to the videos
• Allows others to learn how our course
was delivered
• Students can provide videos for upload
• Drawback:
• YouTube can change limits/disappear

14. Using Social Networks - WordPress &
Pinterest
VCARA Blog: WordPress
(ischoolapps.sjsu.edu/blogs/wp/vcara/
• Documents upcoming and past events & acts
as our Website
• Space very limited – 10 MB
• Old posts saved as HTML files and uploaded to
storage server or Google Drive
• Very few images due to space
Pinterest Boards
https://www.pinterest.com/mnemosynesemina/
• Boards contain images documenting events
• Pinned from Google Drive
• Limit on number of images uploaded
• License grants them full use of your content

15. Using Social Networks - Google+ & Twitter
G+ : M. Mnemosyne Seminario
https://plus.google.com/u/0/105118653646237279676/posts
• Newest addition (added in March)
• Tied to Gmail
• Advertising for events, blog postings, new Pinterest boards,
YouTube videos.
• No formal documentation/archiving process at this time
Twitter:
@Mnemosyne_SL
• Used to announce events, blog postings, new Pinterest
boards, YouTube Videos
• No formal documentation/archiving process at this time

16. Archiving VW Educational Data
Current Situation:
• Some data frequently backed up to space available on
school’s servers
• YouTube videos
• VCARA Conference Keynote & Student presentation
materials
• Slides & audio from 2010 - 2015
• Some images
• Saved blog pages in HTML
• Maximum allowed space limit has been reached
• Starting to utilize Google Drive for much of the data

17. Archiving VW Educational Data
Archiving Options - Amazon Glacier Services (AWS)
• Cost of Service: $0.01 per gigabyte of data stored per month.
• Terabyte : ~ $10.00 per month.
• Exact cost depends on number of times the data is accessed
(uploaded or downloaded) and the number of bytes.
• Cost effective for us:
• Will upload data a few times per year, accessed infrequently
• Data transferred using SSL
• Automatically encrypts data for security
• Data redundantly backed up on more than one system
• Drawbacks:
• Archival standards /procedures have to be developed locally
• Retrieval time: can be as long as several hours

18. Archiving VW Educational Data
Archiving Options - Preservica
• Archiving system supports OAIS-compliant workflows
• Can run on top of Amazon Glacier Services
• Addresses issues inherent in archiving digital assets
• Migration of obsolete media and file formats
• User-friendly data management
• Automated data ingestion
• Customizable interface for use by internal and external users
• Most cost effective product: $3,950.00 per year for 100 gigabyte
• 250 gigabytes: $6,950
• Not as cost effective for us
• Most data is video: our videos from three semesters consume 332
gigabytes

19. Archiving VW Educational Data
Archiving Options - Google Cloud Storage Nearline
• Recently announced
• Matches cost of Amazon Glacier Services
• $0.01 per gigabyte of data storage per month
• Nearline promises to respond within 3 seconds
• AWS much slower by comparison
• Redundant storage at multiple physical locations
• Fully integrated with other Google Cloud Storage services
• Designed for data not frequently accessed
• Leaning towards this option for near term

20. Conclusions
• Social media popular & easy to use
• Now possible for instructors to conduct distant learning
courses using technology students already know
• Issue is course material & student-generated data spread
across Internet and not very stable
• It becomes feasible to use social networking systems for
learning and they contain data for archiving
• Price of cloud storage services is economical and removes the
need to maintain computer equipment and manage updates
• Procedure for periodically archiving data is straightforward
and could be automated using web automation software.

21. Thank you for your Kind Attention
Patricia C. Franks
patricia.franks@sjsu.edu
Marie Vans
marie.vans@hp.com
VCARA Blog URL: http://ischoolapps.sjsu.edu/blogs/wp/vcara/