Diaries of Viki Silvansky – Planning and conducting a workshop, February 22, 2009

Dear Diary
Another interesting thing happened in my life today and that was my first ever official workshop.
As a part of my MUVEnation activities, I had to design a workshop and manage everything else around it…
For me choosing the topic was not that hard as I had some ideas in my mind…
I had a very good feedback on my hypnotee so I though I can teach everyone else to make one.
The planning and preparing took quite a time specially considering my virtual disabilities (not having WIKI) but I managed to finish everything a day before with the help of my amazing friends (specially Anna).
I build my own platform, wrote my workshop materials, create an evaluation form, take photos of my step by step creations and putting them as slide show.
Everything was ready and at 1:00pm people start to arrive at my skybox…
It was a great feeling… everything was going so smooth that I was wondering is this for real?
It didn’t take much until I make a disaster… not exactly a disaster but something wrong and funny…
I deleted my own platform ) Imagine that…
Why may ask how that happened… and why that funny…
Story started days back when I attended Cvetka’s workshop. Someone mistakable deleted her platform which created a bit of unwanted break. Seeing and knowing that, I decided to lock my platform to prevent that… and I did…
After the first session of the workshop, i gave a short break to everyone else and in the mean time i decided to turn back the wings left from other participants. Now you can imagine what happened next..
I clicked and choose delete…
Got a message telling me “the object is locked, are you sure you want to delete it?”
And my answer was “YES”
The next second I was watching myself falling down from 400m above the ground and laughing out loud as I did such a mistake…
Anyway… as we were in the break and everyone else was sited nothing serious happened and I was back on track after 2 min with a new platform.
But all that though me something… it’s better to have your feet on the ground
Most important thing was how my brain fooled me… thinking that I have locked the platform and nothing will happen to it make me be so sure about deleting even though I saw the message…
Other than that most of things were just great…
Participants were my best friends who I always enjoy working with them and we all managed to do a great job.
I guess everyone learned a lot… and that includes me too…
I have realized some many new things….
For example, as part of event discretion I mentioned that all levels (newbies, experts) are welcome and I really included all the instructions necessary for every level…
But during the workshop I realized that is not they day to do it because those participants who were experts might get board of my detailed instruction that I was giving newbies and the pluses within the workshop. On the other hand, newbies are ever feeling worse, getting anxious that everyone is building quickly and they don’t even know how to drag an object.
After all everything went on and we ended up with 5 wing trees for session one and 4 flexi wing trees for session two…
The results were amazing, and I am really happy about them.
It was another day in SL to remember

Diaries of Viki Silvansky – A very long lovely Monday, December 8, 2008

Dear Diary

Today I’m ganna try to describe what happened at 8^th December and history behind it.

Let’s start like this … at 8^th of December, University of Idaho was going to have a big news breaking tour of SL for wider range of audience, broadcasting live in their university’s common food court and I ended up being the host of the whole tour.

You may ask “how on earth that happened?”

My answer is “I don’t know”. Not that I completely didn’t know what happened but things happened in a way that I wouldn’t expecting them.

Let’s start the story from the scratch…

Me and Jorjia Blackburn, have a long history of friendship and collaboration.  This started exactly a year ago when I was flying on blue empty skies of educational places, saw a green dot in university of Idaho island, landed there and end up becoming friend with Jorjia… she and her class helped me a lot in my projects and then we arranged a presentation in their university about “machine ethics” which was upstanding really.

Based on this history, about 2 months ago Jorjia send an email to me, telling something like this: “we are going to have an in-world tour for people who don’t know much about SL… would you like to be part of it?” and my answer was simple  “YES” but if you think I had a clue about what I was going to do, you got me wrong… I mean I had some clues at the time but it was not exactly what was going to happen..  I was thinking that they are going to have some students with their newbies avatar and we have to teleport them here and there and show them the places in SL which might be interesting and that was how far my mind could imagine.

In the mean time, Jorjia was talking with a member of the group to arrange things with me which happened to be the designer and owner of VTD (Virtual technology and design centre)  …Eyem Beck… the guy that I admire him for his great creation of art for university of Idaho and other projects around. I can’t remember exactly whether I contacted him or other way around but I had a chance to get to know him… and after some days he was standing next to me in Surrey Island and giving feedback on my creations…. I’m happy that in SL you can’t see RL reflects because I was jumping up and dawn in RL but still trying to act smart in SL (I’m not sure how smart was my fake actions)

Anyway, so the group came together and after a month delay on the programme we were starting to get ready for the tour. As I was in my “happy go lucky character” I didn’t realize much of the points related to the tour until 3 or 4 days left, which suddenly the reality hit me

Hello Viki… wake up…. you are the host of program… they ganna broadcast your broken English, live in university of idaho’s common food court honey….you have to have interviews with Metanomics guys, Lee Frankton from IBM and William The Wise Goodman from Etopia…WOWWWWWWWWWWWW

And that was when I went back to my “control freak” character and trying to make sure about everything even my cloths. And finally we were at a point which we had 5 min before start of the tour.

Cloths —-checked

Mic— checked

List of the places— checked

Background of people— checked

Landmarks— checked

Every one ready —- ACTION—-  you are now on air

WWWWWOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWW

Everything was going great and I started to enjoy the hosting process. We told everyone that we are moving to Metanomic, being hosted by Jane2 McMahon before their Monday discussions with Mr. Seller and Hamlet Linden (one of my idols) starts. We arrived there realizing that Voice is unable because there are due to the start of their Monday show. I couldn’t see things in Idaho but even imagining that sudden silences was enough for me to pass out, however, I didn’t even had that choice because I’ve realize Jorija which had to be there as Backup was frozen (or at least that what I assumed). There was no way to have the voice on while people in university couldn’t read the text so we decided switch to the Monday meeting and let people see the meeting. the next stop was IBM so i decided to change my cloths,  I was trying to relax in the main time that my colths were being rezed when suddenly Echer’s computer which was the camera of the group and the main view of the show went blank and Eyem let me know that we are totally off until Echer can bring his computer and SL back to life…

At that time I was officially dead  from stress as Lee Frankton was waiting for us in IBM and I couldn’t reach Jorjia to ask for advice…those moments were really bad and I can just remember Eyem’s IM’s telling me “DON’T FORGET TO BREATH”…

After some minutes we were back on the track and I started disaster recovery and telling audience what happened, where were we before, where we were at the time and why we didn’t have the voice and then some background of Lee Frankton. He kindly offered use a personal tour of some of their retail places and then give us a tour around the island with automatic machine that had place for two … so we decided that me and Echer as the host and camera will go and I will tell things in the main time….. And this time it was time for my computer the freezeeeeeeeeeee…. basically I had to try 5 times before I could catch the machine and start the tour… I was really upset but then encouragement from others specially Eyem about how things look from their side and that everything is OK, was helping me to stay in control over my voice as the main tool of communication.

After IBM it was time to go to Etopia to see William The Wise Goodman but I don’t know how, we were some minutes earlier and as in Etopia you can’t fly there was no way for me to check out the dots on the island and find William… so we had to come up with things to keep the audience engaged like saying the background of the island and William itself. But then he found us and in matter of seconds his caring and lovely character took over the show and let me breathe for a while. His was so passionate to show and describe things that there was no need for me to say anything other than asking my own question.

After Etopia we went back to university of Idaho for Q&A on their catwalk stage and that was basically the end of the tour and a day full of excitement and experience and I learned my lesson:

“Viki, just be yourself and Surrender the Control, let SL run the show, there is no way you can control SL”

IT WAS AN AMAZING EXPERIANCE AFTER ALL… I didn’t die from the stress but basically passed out and slept for 3 hours afterwards….

 

Only thing left to say: I’m really thankful to everyone that made this happen