Daniel Livingstone, University of the West of Scotland
The response to snapshot survey #9 from Daniel.
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What are you doing in virtual worlds? Teaching, learning, research, publicity, and/or anything else?
Continuing to use virtual worlds for teaching, learning and research.
Going well? Not? Want to say why?
Quite well. The biggest challenge personally is balancing teaching and research – something that is likely to be increasingly challenging for many folk as the cuts come in.
The best recent development is that our university island is now being used by people in other parts of the university (esp. Lifelong Learning) – this has taken far too long, but it’s happening now.
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?
I was fortunate to receive funding from JISC – it was very competitive, and only possible I think because we had a collaboration where all partners had significant prior experience with virtual worlds. The bar has been raised somewhat I think!
Our project has been funded by the JISC LTIG programme: Supporting Education in Virtual Worlds with Virtual Learning Environments (VW/VLE)
The consortium consists of the University of the West of Scotland (Daniel Livingstone), The Open University (Anna Peachey), University of Ulster (Michael Callaghan) and Imperial College London (Maria Toro-Troconis). The project will run from 1st July 2010 to 30th June 2011.
This project will analyse and catalogue emerging pedagogical opportunities offered by integrating virtual worlds and web-based virtual learning environments. It aims to show how the relative strengths of each platform, i.e. administrative capabilities of virtual learning environments and the presentation layer of virtual worlds, can be exploited and subsequently enhanced through such integration.
The project will develop, evaluate and disseminate effective models of good practice, where little guidance or structure currently exists and based on experiences from pilot groups use this integrated approach for teaching and learning at multiple institutions.
We will be looking into areas such as using VLEs to support greater personalisation of learning in shared 3D spaces, supporting accessibility, and improving reuse.
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With a squeeze on UK funding, charity and EU funding initiatives will be more attractive, as will work with companies and industries looking to save on their travel budgets relating to training programmes – and where online training will be increasingly desirable.
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?
Virtual worlds ‘must do better’ in this regard. Elluminate doesn’t require a 3 hour induction session – and neither should a virtual world.
Second Life. Using just that, or considering other virtual worlds? If so, why?
We have a little work with OpenSim, primarily still Second Life.
Problems with universities blocking access to Second Life. Is anyone still having that, or are we over it now?
Generally over it, but staff still need to fill in forms to open the required ports for connecting to services like Second Life.
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)?
New media capabilities are a great improvement. I generally like the new UI – but it does need some streamlining, and some things can be a bit hard to find. Some aspects are not obvious. It is certainly much more welcoming than the old UI. Sadly the new client does not work well with OpenSim.
Do you have a view on the new Second Life Terms of Service conditions and ownership rights which are creating a bit of a hoo-hah in some quarters? Do you think it will affect you? Does it matter in the grand scheme of things?
On the plus side, from my reading of the terms, I can take a screenshot of SL and not have to ask Linden Lab for permission to use that image in a paper or publication. That is different from the legal situation for just about every other software package you can think of!
What I would like is better support (legally and technically) for taking in-world content out of Second Life.
