Marc Conrad’s submission to snapshot #10

Here’s Marc, from the University of Bedfordshire, with an update on what they are doing with virtual worlds and links to further materials.

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1. What are you doing with virtual worlds? (And how long have you been doing it?)

We use virtual worlds for teaching Project Management and performing research on identity and other aspects of virtual worlds.

These activities are well documented under http://sl.sanfoh.com/. I supervise currently one PhD and one Master by Research on virtual world aspects.

2. Which virtual worlds are you using? Why those in particular?

We have used OpenSim this year for the first time. We were using two providers: http://www.3dmetaverse.com/ and http://reactiongrid.com/. They are both fine and I can recommend them. Details about these can be found on a paper I published at ReLive’11; see http://sl.perisic.com/relive11/ for details and presentation.

The reason we moved from Second Life was because of their poor customer support. The person who maintained the avatar that owned our island decided to give up this avatar and Linden Lab was not able to transfer the island to another avatar. This is well documented in various communication I had with them. Therefore we have to decide at very short notice to switch to a different provider.

3. What support do you get in your institution in your use of virtual worlds?

Virtual worlds are now an integrated part of our teaching and are therefore funded as part of the usual expenses, similar as this is the case e.g. for software licences. In particular, OpenSim based solutions are much cheaper in setup and maintenance fee.

4. What do you like/dislike about the virtual worlds you are using?

OpenSim is OK, but it is not Second Life i.e. the context and immersion Second Life offers does not seem to happen in the OpenSim; see the Relive’11 paper for a lot of reflection about this.

5. If teaching using virtual worlds, what’s the experience been like, for you and/or the students?

The students are doing it, but I don’t think they are particularly excited about this.

6. Any thoughts on the integration of virtual worlds with other learning technologies?

Ask the Sloodle people; they know better than I do . It’s certainly bound to be happen somehow (providers of these Learning Environment are under pressure to ‘add value’ to their systems, and doing virtual worlds is an obvious extension). But I wouldn’t be able to predict how it will happen exactly.

7. The catch-all: anything else you’d like to say?

Yes, indeed.
First: John you are doing a tremendous job to put this all together. Excellent work.
Second: we are trying to explore the utilisation of Open Sim vs. Second Life a bit further as part of a research project. Anyone volunteering to be interviewed in that matter is very much welcome to contact me (marc.conrad@beds.ac.uk).