Kathryn Trinder response for snapshot #9

Kathryn Trinder, from Glasgow Caledonian University, has got her response in for snapshot 9. You can too – the deadline is the end of this month in order to go into the draw for a crisp ten pound note.

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1. What are you doing in virtual worlds? Teaching, learning, research, publicity, and/or anything else?

Nothing new for me just now. Finishing off projects started a couple of years ago, collecting data, writing up, looking at how lecturers can move onto second & third stages of their exploratory projects. Other stuff is going on around the Uni, but lecturers are to a great extent now “doing it for themselves” (with the developers).

Still exploring intergrating Second Life with Blackboard. Still looking at if we wish to use any Virtual World element on the LTHE PGCert.

2. Going well? Not? Want to say why?

Going fine. It’s gained its own momentum and is rolling along nicely, and whilst not at the speed we initially envisaged, it IS rolling along. The concept of Sl/VWs has become commonly accepted in the Uni, and is now seen as a serious learning technology/learning environment, which is a huge change from 2 years ago! We are no longer looked at strangely… So, successful in many ways.

3. Money is tight. The ‘golden age’ of education money may be ending. How are you getting funded? How do you think your virtual world activities will be funded in the future?

If it becomes an intergrated learning environment to use then it hopefully having the technology will still be funded at central level, as are our other accepted learning technologies (VLE, etc).

Lack of funding will impact more on opportunities for substantive research than for development. Lack of extra funding will slow down learning and teaching innovation as people will not be able to buy our time for design of learning activities/courses, etc.

4. Long distance travel is increasingly precarious. Ash, strikes and airlines going under ground flights. Travel is expensive (even in the UK with extortionate train fares) and takes up a lot of time. Virtual Worlds could, possibly, be used instead of many workshops, conferences, meetings et al. Your thoughts on this? And how do virtual worlds such as Second Life stack up against other event-replacing media such as Elluminate and Skype?

It has potential. But I’d like to see some more integration of tools such as Elluminate/Skype mixed into SL/VWs, and also the asynchronous nature of some online conferences should not be lost. I dont think it’s necessarily a one-or-other situation. They all have good and bad points. But I do think it will happen that we remotly conference more in the future, and a 3D environment has much to offer that experience.

5. Second Life. Using just that, or considering other virtual worlds? If so, why?

Too much buy-in to a commerical system that has so much control is not good for education, IMHO. Its holds us hostage to their whims, downtime, pricing… As long as we can export to other VWs then SL will continue for a while, but I eventually would prefer to see this as a technology that we host and control (us as individual institutions, or collaboratively, across the UK) and can steer its development more for our needs.

6. Problems with universities blocking access to Second Life. Is anyone still having that, or are we over it now?

Not blocked, and its now on the standard desktop image (yay!), but we still have issues of ‘training’ as part of general IT skills. Its still seen as something not yet standard.

8. What do you think of the new Second Life viewer, both the UI/ usability changes and the new functionality it enables (e.g. media on a prim)?

The UI confuses me , but media on a prim is fantastic news.