However, since Musca is also the generic name for the house fly, and since I have a lovely view of Darwin’s Beagle from the lab window, I thought it would be appropriate to building something about the evolutionary genetics of flies — fruit flies in this case. 

 In 2007, the genomes of 12 species of Drosophila were published (appropriately, in the journal Nature, providing a rich resource for understanding the genetics of speciation.  I haven’t fully worked out the exhibit yet, but it will include information about the genomes of the 12 species:  D. melanogaster, of course, and its close relatives, D. simulans and D. sechellia.  Other species from the melanogaster group are D. yakuba, D. erecta and D. ananassae.  Species outside the melanogaster group include D.  pseudoobscura, D. persimilis, D. willistoni, D. mojavensis, D. virilis, and D. grimshawi. 

Because genomic rearrangement is an important mechanism for speciation, I’ll also want to include syntenic comparisons, i.e. comparisons of similar chromosome blocks in the 12 species.  All Drosophila species have about the same chromosomal composition:  usually 5 long chromosome arms and a pair of tiny “dot” chromosomes.  The long arms can either be paired in some combination to form a large metacentric chromosome, or unpaired as medium acrocentric chromosomes.  There are also a few surprises, but I’ll save those for the exhibit.  Stop by Musca in a few weeks to see what is going on!

This year, however, our guest presenter will be Apaul Balut from Second Life.  Apaul’s other persona is Dr. Alan Hudson, Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at the medical school of Wayne State University.   Apaul will be talking about his research on Chlamydia as a triggering agent of chronic diseases like arthritis.  His presentation title is  Reactive Arthritis and the Problem of Persistent Synovial Chlamydia Infection. 

Apaul’s audience will be looking in on Second Life from a classroom at Texas Wesleyan.  His slides are loaded into Krull Aeon’s slide viewer, which can be run pretty much like a PowerPoint presentation in a regular classroom.  The viewer is set up in the Genome Science Theatre just below the Abbey.  Apaul will be using voice for his presentation, and students can use chat for typing questions they might have during or after his talk. 

Mixed reality events are one of the many things I love about Second Life.  Students and other guests have the opportunity to interact with experts from various disciplines, but nobody has to pack a bag or get on a plane.  How cool is that?

However, this evening I went to look around a new SciLands Sim, over on the other side of the NOAA islands, from U. T. San Antonio.  The island is called Tejano Tech (http://slurl.com/secondlife/TejanoTech/154/159/21) and will be combining science with history and culture.  Of course, I have a soft spot for other Texas Techies.  So far, I’m the only serious SL user at my own university, so I’m thrilled to find other Second Life Educators only a few hundred miles away! 

ConstructivIST Solo showed me around the island.  Tejano Tech is still in the early stages of development, but already has a number of learning spaces suitable for student groups of different sizes.  From a coastal fishing shack, you can watch the sun rise with a few friends.  There is a small cafe that will accommodate several groups of 5-6 students.  There is a open colosseum that can seat about 85.    A library area effectively combines an open-air structure with cozy seating alcoves.  A stage area with stadium-type seating is set up for powerpoints or other media presentations. 

One of my favorite spots is the Learning Tree, where about 20 students can sit in delicate flower-like cups in UTSA colors around a small demonstration platform.  I like this so much I may have to building something like it on Genome!  There is a lovely underwater art gallery where students can experiment with both 2D and 3D art projects.   A Learning Maze has been designed and built by a Ed. Tech student; in the maze students will turn left or right, depending on their answers to questions posted at various points in the maze.  To get to the center of the maze.  all the answers have be be correct.  This looks like a fun and flexible assessment game. 

The terraforming on the island has been cleverly done to give each structure its own visual space, as in a Japanese garden.  The island is already being used by students in some classes at UTSA, and I’m sure they are enjoying it.  I’m looking forward to watching this SciLands neighbor continue to evolve.  It is off to a super start!

What a difference a year and a half makes!  SciLands has grown from about 30 islands to over 50 and the Seacoast of Bohemia is now much reduced.  Genome Island is almost entirely landlocked, as is the real Bohemia –  Biome on the West, ToxTown to the North, the impressive multisim NHS complex to the east and Science School to the South.  There is still one open space on the northwest corner, where I hope Cell Island will someday be.  I have kept my coastlines, breaking waves, and seabirds, but Genome has landbridges to Science School and to Biome.   I had set up possible entry points on the North and East sides, but NHS has quite a lovely void sim (this doesn’t mean it’s empty — just low-prim) to my east, and ToxTown has a pier with sailboats on the north, so a land connection would disrupt their design.   However, if you don’t mind a little underwater stroll, you can walk to either destination.  It’s very nice to be connected to the neighbors!

Oddly enough, the intervening year has taught me something about how people move around in Second Life.  Genome gets a fair number of visitors, but almost NOBODY comes in at the entry points.  This makes perfect sense.  I almost never stroll over to Biome or Science School.  I just pick a spot on the map and do an instant teleport.  I checked how people come into Genome recently, using Maya Realities (http://mayarealities.com) visitor monitors, and it looks like this:

I AM A SLACKER.  However, in the interest of being a good SciLands (http://scilands.wordpress.com/) citizen, I will try to do better.   I actually had two new posts started at the time that I became an aspirant to slackerhood.  “Started” in this case means that I had a title that was supposed to remind me to come back later and fill in.  One of them was called “Linkage” and the other was called … um, something else.  Actually, I think I remember what Linkage was supposed to be about.  So maybe I’ll reinstate that one in a separate post.

Wish me luck and a sturdy character!

To help get them started, I gave each of them four simple pre-scripted interactive objects with instructions on how to modify the objects and the embedded scripts.  Each of the objects was a prototype of objects to be found in many places around Genome Island. 

One object was a Notecard Giver, typical of the informational or instructive notecards associated with each of the activities on the island.  A second object was a URL Giver, typical of activities that ask visitors to use an external resource, like a stored spreadsheet, or a database, or a bioinformatics program.  Another was a simple Object Rezzer that popped out a cone when clicked.  The fourth prototype was a color/texture changer that changes the appearance of each member of a group of objects linked to a click-activated trigger. 

In each case, the students were invited to save a reference copy of each object and then make changes in either the object itself or its script.  The objects could also be unlinked so that the individual prims and their scripts could be saved to inventory as separate items.   An early result of this experimentation, after one of the students discovered the sculptie folder,  was the wealth of apples.  I think the apples actually started life as an object label!  Another of the students jumped right into experimenting with object dimensions and textures and filled her space with huge multicolored sculptures. 

I can’t wait to see what these items will morph into next!

Last week I put proximity sensors all around the island to see where visitors go.  There are twenty of them, carefully laid out and sized to avoid overlaps.  The sensors are the Freebie version of Hackshaven Harford’s splendid data collection system, which he offers at Maya Realities.  

The commercial version offers a huge amount of information to sim owners, but even the simple sampling I can do with the freebie version is making a data junkie out of me.    Basically it tells me how many unique visitors have wandered into the range of a sensor and how long they stayed there.  This gives me some idea of how much different parts of the island hold a visitor’s attention. 

It doesn’t tell me what time who went where, but it will give me readouts for the previous hour, day or week, so I can track visits just by collecting data periodically and pasting it into a spreadsheet.   So what have I inferred so far?

1.  People seem to like the Cattery.  The job of the cats is to demonstrate an X linked trait, so each of the parental combinations produces a different progeny set when clicked.  They will also meow at you.  One of my favorite computer simulations for genetics is Judith Kinnear’s CatLab.   The Cattery is my homage to Dr. Kinnear, who is now Vice Chancellor at Massey university in New Zealand.   

2.  However, near the Cattery is a sign that advertises NPR’s Science Friday, which has been broadcasting for the last few weeks from the Science School, my neighbor to the south.  The sign contains a landmark to the Science School Science Friday site and a link out to the Science Friday web site.   Sci Fri at the Sci School is attracting a lot of visitors, so I may be seeing some fallout from that terrific show.  Go Ira!

2.  The numbers of people in various parts of the tower seem to be similar, so people who get to the tower may actually visit all or most of its 20 odd floors! 

3.  The dihybrid test cross is seeing a lot of action this week.   This makes me happy, because my students are working on a linkage assignment there, and are actually spending a lot of time on the site.   YAY!

4.  The big cell on the Terrace gets a lot of attention.  I think people like to pop in and out of it.  I find it sort of energizing myself to get in there and hang out with the mitochondria. 

4.  Nobody loves my giant ribosomes.  I guess this means I need to finish the protein synthesis game!  Maybe the class would like to take this on as a project. 

Now that the sensors are laid out, I will report periodically on what seems to be attracting visitors. 

As you can see, the students are becoming more adventurous with their avatars.   They’ve been given a small allowance and Landmarks for good freebie places and they’ve been shopping!

This week the speakers were installed in the computer lab, so we have sound.  Somebody dropped a nice music streamer off at genome recently, and I’ve set it up on the terrace, so the students can pick their own music.  Since there was nobody nearby to be disturbed by the unlablike sounds, we had dancing in the dihybrids, complete with rave sticks.  I love the ability to get outside the usual classroom mold in Second Life.

Lesson of the week:  only one student at a time can generate a big data set within the chat radius of 25M.  Otherwise the chat record gets muddled.  This means they have to check with one another before pushing the button!  Not a bad exercise in group cooperation. 

But I remain a big fan of text chat, which seems to have some special advantage for teaching at Second Life.  I saw just a few of them with the genetics class this week.  We were continuing to review Mendelian inheritance patterns, doing intermediate dominance, and the Mixollamas among other things. 

Since the experimental objects deliver data via the chat channel, the text record also is a raw data record.  Not only is the data recorded, it is time stamped, so in addition to being able to check data summaries against the raw data, I also get some idea about who is doing what when.  This is quite useful for understanding how students move around the island as they work. 

How they move around the island was one of my weekly AHA moments.  One of their tasks was to see how frequently specific patterns in the colors of the mixollamas emerged and also to see if any of the possible patterns might appear more frequently than others, or if all seemed to be equally probable.  The “main herd” of the mixollamas is around the apple tree near the gazebo in the Terrace area.  However, there is another gazebo down behind the Abbey, installed to make the east entrance to the Island a little more friendly looking.  Because I think the mixollamas are cute, I put a couple of them by that gazebo, nibbling on the grapes that climb the gazebo walls.  They have the same scripting as the main herd mixollamas, so they produce the same coat patterns with the same frequencies, BUT there was no instructional sign with those llamas.   In my mind, they weren’t part of the herd. 

Wrong!  A couple of the students saw those llamas behind the greenhouse and ran their experiments with them.  However, they didn’t have the instructions that live in the sign that explains the features of the main herd, including how to reset the counters that record the clicks!   Fortunately I was hovering,  so I could explain the resetting process and also put up another copy of the Mixollama sign.   

I have a certain picture of the navigational layout of Genome Island, that is,  the “natural” routes that people will follow as they move around.  There are sidewalks, stepping stones, lighting fixtures to mark the main routes.   And besides, the first thing everybody gets is a Guide to Genome that tells them where everything is.  But my mental map of Genome is,  like my posted office hours,  a snare and a delusion.   Students drop in and see me whenever they like.  They mostly don’t read the Guide.  They forge new paths around the island, and end up in unexpected places  Too bad they can’t leave wear patterns in the grass and tell me where the sidewalks — and maybe the llamas — SHOULD be!

But more about text.  After everybody had finished the intermediate dominance experiments, we gathered in the Abbey to discuss dominance and genotypes and predicted vs experimental ratios and good stuff like that.  We sat at that anachronistic glass table and chatted.  In text.  We could just have talked, since we were all in the same room, but I wanted to try an in-world chat, so we typed.   It was a slightly out-of-body experience, since there we all were, dumb as stones, and typing away.  But I discovered something interesting.  It’s extremely difficult to do the “articulated pause, ” like, you know, ummm, like, well, YOU know.  In text chat, YOU HAVE TO SAY SOMETHING!  You have to figure out what you are trying to say and say it.  It’s wonderful.   Long live the Chat Log.