Survey response: Leeds Metropolitan University: from Second Life to OpenSim

Another interesting response today to the latest snapshot survey, this one from Ian Truelove, a principal lecturer in the faculty of Arts and Society at Leeds Metropolitan University.

Ian is an experienced developer in Second Life, and has contributed to previous snapshot surveys. Part of his issue with Second Life concerns the ongoing saga of payments for the islands that he, and the faculty, use for teaching and learning.

Ian researches on the JISC funded Open Habitat project; he blogs about his virtual world activities, and you can also find him on Twitter. You can visit LeedsMet island at:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/LeedsMet/128/128/128/

Are you doing any teaching or learning in virtual worlds such as Second Life?

Through the Open Habitat project, we are piloting various approaches to teaching and learning in Second Life and OpenSim with Art & Design students based at Leeds Met. We’ve been mostly using OpenSim standalone to provide large numbers of students with a quick, sign-up free virtual world hit, following this up with a more intense Second Life project with a smaller group of volunteers.

Do you think you’ll do more virtual world “stuff” in your institution in the next academic year? What will this be?

As the ongoing saga between our finance department and Linden Lab continues (I just got an email to say that one of our islands was about to get sunk due to confusion around payment), and as a result of our findings from the Open Habitat project, I am determined to make 2009 the year of OpenSim.

We plan to set up our own OpenSim server for our 600 art & design students to enjoy, free from some of the obstacles that we have encountered whilst trying to use Second Life.

Tell me interesting “stuff” – anything you think is relevant.

The Open Habitat project has highlighted many issues regarding the use of virtual worlds in formal education. Whilst I value the power of role play and the endless sources of learning in a truly massive online world like Second Life, I also need a more controlled environment that all of my students can easily access. I am nervous about requiring students to sign up to a commercial service, and I can envisage a situation in the future where we provide a closed virtual environment to support our enrolled learning community, with an option to enter an open grid, either via the OpenSim hypergrid or Second Life (or both).

I am excited about the potential for welding together bespoke web-based tools with OpenSim to provide students with a virtual studio environment to support the studio-based learning approach that has proved so successful in art & design education. We are currently testing out our own eportfolio-like tool in the School of Contemporary Art & Graphic Design at Leeds Met, combining the best ideas from Web 2.0 to provide a tool that serves the needs of our students. The addition to this tool of a virtual world that uses the same user authentication, and accesses a central database of student generated content, is an attractive prospect. I think that OpenSim currently looks like the best candidate for this job.