I must admit to not being convinced of the actual benefits of this, but a proper Facebook group has just been set up for the Virtual World Watch project. You can find it here:
Dec 17
A message in from J Ross Nicoll at St Andrews University in Scotland. You can reply to him directly at: jrn2005 (@) cs.st-andrews.ac.uk
I’ve been looking at this. From what I can tell initially, there’s a development kit available to PS3 developers (great), but being a PS3 developer means getting a €7,500 PS3 dev kit (not so great). Querying locally to see if anyone would object to a project to recreate an archeological site in Home (we’ve got all the models already, and a version in Second Life, so makes for an obvious comparative study), and hope to approach Sony before the end of the year.
I’d love to know if anyone else is doing anything. Also, if you have any ideas where we could get funding for hardware
http://www.scedev.net/home/ is the URL for people to express interest to Sony, for reference.
Annabeth Robinson is a regular contributer to the VWW surveys and a well-known SL developer in UK academia. She also has a beautiful-looking personal website that, for academics with virtual world interests, is well worth a look through. And she is one of the academics having a good exploration of what Playstation Home has to offer. She has a set of pictures on Flickr, of which here are a couple:
Lakeside Apartment in PS3 Home
Making a furniture den for the Bears
Dec 16
And it’s time for another UK university and college virtual world snapshot…
Bored over Christmas with the television? Fed up of listening to the family bicker? Feel you would like to review and summarise, this being the end of the year, what you have been doing in virtual worlds? Here is your opportunity.
Full details are on this page. In view of feedback, this time we have collapsed the questionnaire to just six questions, most of them open-ended.
Responses from people in UK universities and colleges are appreciated. This is your chance to promote (for free!) what you have been doing in virtual worlds such as Second Life.
I must stress: the unbendable closing date for responses to this snapshot is TUESDAY JANUARY 6TH. The VWW officer is too old to work through the night on a data processing crunch, and so time is needed to get through the replies. The earlier responses come in, the better.
Thank you to everyone who responds.
Dec 11
Playstation Home goes Open Beta today. This event is widely covered in the mainstream and gaming media.
The BBC news website has a good introductory article on this games console-based virtual world.
From the article:
PlayStation Home will let gamers create their own avatar -a virtual representation of themselves – and then interact with other users in a 3D environment. Players can chat to other users, invite them into their own “home”, and stream music and videos via virtual Sony TV’s.
VWW has, though not currently in possession of a PS3, had a look at an earlier incarnation of PH. The environment does look good, with lush graphics and backdrops. However, options for building or manipulating content seem either very limited or non-existant, which will be of concern to practitioners in the education sector. Another Google Lively from a functional (or lack of) point of view won’t help the education sector much.
The Wikipedia entry (base reference unknown) hints at future customer optimisation options:
Every user has a private apartment space that they can modify and change over time. The basic apartment is free and will offer users lots of options for customisation and personalisation. In the future, Sony will provide tools that will enable users to have an even greater ability to create their own Home spaces and content.
And this statement (base reference unknown) in the same article is, well, kind of vague:
In the future areas can be developed by major companies outside of gaming. The then Executive Vice President of SCEE, Phil Harrison stated that locations built around famous coffee companies, famous drinks companies, clothing companies, record companies, major retailers and so on could feature depending on whether these companies felt it worthwhile to create something for Home.
(Basically saying “Well, Starbucks might have a presence in Home. Or they might not.”)
Facial detail on avatars does look impressive:
Is it worth experimenting with Playstation Home? Unsure. The PS3 is the most expensive of the three games consoles on the market, and it is very unlikely that every student in a class (even of games programmers) will possess one. Kitting out an academic laboratory with PS3s will be difficult to justify.
Having said that, it may be worth exploring Playstation Home to see what is currently technically possible from a high-end, closed technology, virtual world.
Has anyone in the UK HE/FE community experimented with Playstation Home from the perspective of learning, teaching or education? Or are thinking of doing so? Please do let us know if you are. Thanks.
Dec 10
In May of 2008, the NMC conducted its second annual survey of educators in Second Life, provided as a yearly snapshot of the demographics and activities of educators who are active in Second Life. A link to the survey was sent to by email to individuals within the NMC’s Second Life communities and to the Second Life Educators Listserv (SLED). This year, 358 individuals responded to the survey.
The NMC snapshot is a global one, as opposed to the UK-only nature of the Virtual World Watch snapshots and associated surveys. The highlights can be found here, as well as downloadable summaries and results.
A few of the highlights, which may be indicative of trends (though it should be noted that we are still talking of small numbers of SL educators):
- This year 29% of survey participants report holding virtual office hours in SL; 37 of them (12%) have taught a class entirely in SL (up from 14 or 8% in 2007).
- The percentage who have been in Second Life for 1-3 years increased from 30% in 2007 to 56% this year.
- More then two-thirds are between 36 and 55 years old [Is this a surprise? This is the main age range for educators].
- Also similar to last year, about half of the respondents find time for Second Life by watching less television.
The primary activities educators are doing in Second Life remain the same. The top five activities that educators report as doing in Second Life have not changed from 2007:
- Random wandering (86%)
- Listening to presentations and talks (84%)
- Meeting new people (82%)
- Participating in meetings (80%)
- Building things (64%)
Dec 04
Back on 19th November, Google announced that it’s Lively virtual world service would close at the end of the year.
We will shut down Lively on December 31, 2008. Embedded rooms in blogs and other web pages will continue to show an image, but users will no longer be able to enter Lively rooms and interact.
Between now and the end of the year we encourage you to capture all your hard work by taking videos and screenshots of your rooms. Thank you for sharing this experience with us. We’ve learned a lot about how users interact in rich social environments, and we hope you’ve enjoyed your time with Lively.
Virtual Worlds News had an interesting take on the development, while some media outlets used it as a primer for the “X is closing, so what is next to close” theme of story.
On the plus side, it is good that there is plenty of warning, and some recommendation of what people can do to preserve some of their creations in Lively. On the negative side, some way of Google making the created content more easier to capture or replicate (instead of the onus being in the users) may have been better.
Google Lively was examined by quite a few academics in UK Higher Education; the most recent snapshot report picked up several of them commenting on it. The general reaction from those and other comments seems to be “Interesting, and good looking, though not functionally useful for academic purposes.”
This particular quote from Information Week was particularly cutting:
Beyond technical troubles, the reason Lively failed, suggested Greg Lastowka, an associate professor at Rutgers School of Law and an expert on law applied to virtual worlds, is that “there’s nothing to do in Lively if you’re not talking to someone.”
VWW hopes that Google does stay involved in the virtual world sector. One of several ways it could contribute is to help solve the thorny problem of “search” in virtual worlds. For example, in Second Life, because of how data is structured and the lack of metadata such as tags, searching for specific or generalised “stuff” e.g. the ‘University of X’, or all UK universities, can be extremely difficult. It is here that Google, with their unparalleled experience in search and considerable resources, could form a useful relationship with Linden Labs.
Dec 02
A re-blog posting of a twitter tweet from Pauline Randall:
virtualewit A boost to virtual worlds from the new President? http://tinyurl.com/69tq9o
If you follow that link, then you’ll see the news story:
Barack Obama Appoints Two Second Life Innovators To His ‘Innovation Agenda’ Group
…which is well worth a read. Whether this makes Second Life, and other virtual worlds, more credible or ‘legitimate’ in some sectors, or whether there is a more tangiable outcome, remains to be seen. It is, however, only a good thing that several people close to the president-elect are informed practitioners of virtual worlds.
Dec 02
Virtual World Watch will next be speaking at an all-day event in Glasgow, Scotland, on January 16th 2009.
Maximising the effectiveness of virtual worlds in teaching and learning
Target audience: Learning Technologists, Policy Makers, HE and FE Lecturers
This joint event organised by JISC CETIS and Eduserv will provide a range of perspectives on the use of virtual worlds in HE from experienced practitioners.
Specifically, this event aims to explore the following issues:
- What are the teaching situations for which Virtual Worlds are best suited?
- What are the policy issues which arise from using Virtual Worlds for Learning and Teaching?
- What are the technical characteristics/constraints of Virtual Worlds which have an impact on their use in Learning and Teaching?
In addition, attendees will gain an understanding of why some experts believe that Virtual Worlds will have a large impact on Education.
Virtual World Watch is speaking at this event, between 10:45 and 11:25: Who’s teaching? Who’s learnng? The state of Second Life in UK HE and FE.
The whole programme is interesting, with experienced SL practitioners speaking, so consider signing up.
