The Open University Virtual Worlds Project is delighted to announce that the Vice Chancellor of The Open University UK, Martin Bean, will be talking about innovations in learning technology on Open University Island in Second Life at 3:30pm GMT (7:30am SLT) on the 16th of December, in a session chaired by Claudia l’Amoreaux, Education Programs Manager for Linden Lab.
If you are a confident avatar driver and would like to be in the inworld audience please send your avatar name to virtualworlds@open.ac.uk with the subject line ‘VC EVENT’. In order to manage the closed nature of the event, landmark and access details will be provided when we confirm your virtual seat.
Sorry to say that live audience capacity is restricted to 50 places, but the session will be recorded and archived online for those who can’t attend in person.
The annual JISC online conference is open for registrations, and is worth considering.
This is now open for pre-event activities, such as reading and guided tours. The conference proper runs from November 24th to 27th. Being online you can, of course, access it from anywhere; no travel, train or plane costs, required.
Note that you have to register, and there’s a small fee.
There’s two sessions on Second Life. One is by Kathryn Trinder from Glasgow Caledonian University:
The other is by Virtual World Watch:
In addition to this, there’s a number of scheduled events and guided tours in Second Life, facilitated by the JISC Regional Support Centres. So not bad – a conference that runs for several days, costs only £50 for attendance, travel and accommodation, and has hardly any climate impact. To quote James Clay …
Information from UK universities and colleges on their virtual world activities is still welcome for the latest snapshot survey.
One of the responses in so far is from Bex Ferriday, the lead teacher at the School of Education and Training at Cornwall College. Here’s what she says:
What we are doing
Cornwall College is using Second Life to collaborate with other in world educational establishments and to deliver teaching and student support to Higher Education students studying a range of subjects. We have also designed our sim (Cornwall College Island) to function as an interactive representation of the architecture, geology, geography, sociology and politics of Cornwall. As a result, visitors to the island are as welcome to surf, sunbathe on the beach, hang-glide, share a pasty or walk around a virtual tin mine as they are to enrol on a course of study, have a tutorial or join a class.
A number of projects are currently at various stages of development. Cornwall College’s School of Education and Training (SET) has been delivering a successful introductory teacher training programme using blended learning methods for a little over three years now. Course members study using a mix of asynchronous online sessions uploaded to the college’s Virtual Learning Environment (moodle) and attendance at traditional classroom based sessions. In February 2010 the college will pilot a version of this course whereby all classroom based sessions will be delivered in Second Life. This opens the course to students from all over the globe, and also asks the question – can traditional teaching skills learnt in a virtual world transfer to practice in the real world?
Partnership
The college is also involved in setting up a partnership with Université de Bretagne Occidentale at Quimper using Second Life. It is hoped that students from both sides of the Channel can meet each other and staff can share lessons and resources. This should enhance the college’s current involvement in the Erasmus (European Community Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students) partnership and hopefully lead to students visiting one another in the real world.
Arts and construction
Arts and media students are looking to hold an exhibition of 3D art and sculpture in the gallery that floats above the island as part of their assessed coursework, making work that defies the laws of physics in the real world yet still adheres to assignment briefs and course requirements in the real world.
Meanwhile, construction lecturers are setting up a project which involves a group of students building a house in Second Life while peers studying for accreditation in other construction-based trades such as plumbing and carpentry work closely together in order to make the house function. This will have the duel benefit of honing students’ skills in a safe environment and giving them the opportunity to learn how to work as a team.
Spreading the word
“Spreading the word” is still proving to be difficult. Despite a flurry of interest at the college’s annual ILT Fair held in July (with four Second Life introductory workshops being full to capacity) teaching staff with packed schedules and low confidence in their personal ICT abilities feel that they don’t have the time or ability to engage with Second Life – and many fear they don’t have the imagination to use it effectively or dynamically.
Reasons cited commonly include the lack of time because of workload pressures, the perceived (or real) steep learning curve that is attached to learning to navigate in a virtual world, age (it being seen as something for “young people” despite the suggested average age of a typical Second Life user as being 36) and it just being “weird”. Typically, this “weirdness” boils down to a group assumption that Second Life is a glorified orgy of virtual sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, though in recent months this world view hasn’t been as vehemently stated as, say, this time last year. A sign that attitudes are changing, perhaps?
The future
With momentum starting to build, it would seem rather churlish to stop now. With the new Nebraska “Behind the Firewall” project in alpha stage the college can consider running a standalone instance of Second Life and in doing so could make access easier for students under the age of 18, as well as those students who are considered more vulnerable. It may even help to allay the fears that many still seem to have regarding adult content. As more and more educational establishments seem to be joining Second Life in order to collaborate and educate, this can only be the start of something good!
Glasgow Caledonian Unversity is planning to use Open Simulator for (some of) it’s Virtual World needs and is going to provide a Module about Virtual Worlds (Second Life and Open Sim) in semester B, starting early 2010. But there was no simple, straightforward way available to register an Avatar in this Open Simulator. You’d need to do this manually, from a command prompt, dive into the world of RegAPI (by Linden Lab, with all it’s disclaimers, Logo’s, Trademark issues, Terms of Service and what have you not) or hack your way into something called OpenSim WebInterface (redux).
Or, alternatively, you create one from scratch, which is what Glasgow Caledonian University did. It is as of yet very basic and built in PHP/MySQL, talking to the same database your OpenSim (grid) instance uses. And it works. But it’s a start. It’s not finished yet. It’s intended to be a starting point and grow, depending on the functionality required by users from UK’s educational field. It will, after some testing, some debugging, cleaning of code and documentation be made available under the GPL so other HE/FE institutions can use it for user registration on their own Open Simulator virtual world.
Anybody who is interested in this web user registration can have a look at http://opensim.gcal.ac.uk It is only available to people with an email address that ends with .ac.uk but if there are other domains required this is extremely easy, just send a request.
The GCU would very much like to get in touch with anybody who is interested in ultimately creating (the tools for) an Open Simulator based Hypergrid of Virtual Worlds for the UK educational field at large. So, if you want to stay informed, help with testing, discuss the steps we need to take to achieve such an Hypergrid, send a mail to opensim@gcal.ac.uk We won’t spam
Ferdinand Francino aka Gwynn Gunawan
Project Manager CU There
Glasgow Caledonian University Web 3D & Virtual Worlds
There is a description of the project, plus a video on YouTube showing some of the Second Life areas, features and a small sample of the substantial collection of audio material:
However, it’s more fulfilling to explore the environment in Second Life itself. Go in, wander, listen to some of the audio of the poems being read and descriptions (by soldiers) of conditions there. Try on a uniform, and click on various items around the simulation. In Second Life it can be found here:
Visitors to the virtual trenches are given a unique immersive experience where they can explore a training camp, dressing station, a trench network and No Man’s Land. The terrain is waterlogged and difficult to navigate, rife with rats and littered with poppies. Moving nearer to the front line the clamour of shell blasts and artillery fire becomes louder and louder.
… and …
At the end the visitor is teleported out of the trenches to a teaching area. Here they are asked to consider the memory of the war, and to confront their own prejudices and stereotypes – was the war really all about trenches, mud, and rats, or are their other aspects to it that we now need to consider? Should it only be remembered as mass slaughter, a gross act of futility, or more a collective act of unparalleled heroism that ended ultimately in a victory for Britain and its allies?
Survey request from Dr Ahmad J Reeves, the Open University.
Are you an academic supervising research students (MPhil/PhD) at a distance, using either traditional 2D technologies (like Moodle, Skype,
Elluminate, email, etc.) and/or an immersive technology (like Second Life) as well? Or maybe you’re a student who is being remotely supervised by one or more of these technologies?
If so, we would like to hear about your experiences regarding topics such as the supervision process, enhancing research skills and building a research community.
We would be grateful if you would consider completing one of these short online questionnaires to provide information about your experiences in these areas. The questionnaires are completely anonymous and should take no longer than 15-20 minutes to complete, with the data being solely used for research and academic work. The questionnaires are part of an evaluation of a Virtual MPhil currently underway at the Open University, UK.
