One of the updates in from Bromley College for snapshot #8 comes from Clive Gould:
+ + + + +
This academic year at Bromley College we have moved away from using Second Life to trialling OpenSim.
We have production and test Linux servers running OpenSim 0.6.8 and staff and students have access to OpenSim, both from within College and externally.
We have found that two of our computer rooms already have graphics cards which are Meerkat compatible and are converting two more rooms of PC’s by adding appropriate graphics cards.
Using a standalone installation of OpenSim means that it is much easier for us to provide and control access to the MUVE. Although OpenSim is currently in in alpha we have found it works well in the classroom environment.
This academic year we are using/planning on using OpenSim with two groups:
1) National Diploma IT year 2 – Developing and assessing skills in Object Orientated Programming.
2) FdEng Software Development year 2 – Investigating Web services practically as part of a Database Development course.
I am continuing to maintain the Linden Script exhibition in Second Life on Hyles Infopoint. However I have also ported it to OpenSim to help our students learn LSL. Additionally, I have made the exhibition available as a download so that others can install it into their own OpenSim standalones.
The Virtual Worlds Teaching Guide produced by University of Derby and Aston University in collaboration and funding from the Higher Education Academy Psychology Network and JISC is now available in hard copy.
Please email Simon Bignell (s.bignell (@) derby.ac.uk) if you would like a copy or to save paper you can download it directly:
Social Influence in Second Life: Social Network and Social Psychological Processes in the Diffusion of Belief and Behaviour on the Web
The PhD thesis, under a Creative Commons licence, of Dr Aleks Krotoski is available through her website; there’s some interesting wordles on there as well. Go here:
(It was thanks to Aleks showing me around Second Life several years ago that I had the ‘Aha!’ moment, so without her there may not have been a Virtual World Watch and accompanying snapshots.)
Aleks is a media and Internet journalist for The Guardian, and a presenter on what many regard as the best TV programme on video games to date (BITS). She twitters, and is also the presenter of The Virtual Revolution, the forthcoming BBC series about the Web:
The University of Nottingham have provided an update of some of their Second Life activities; thanks to Andy Beggan for the update and the screenshots:
Nottingham has been in Second Life for just over a year and now has 2 islands:
Both teaching and research activities have taken place and this year a research project organised by one of our medical students – focused on placebo in a doctor-patient style consultation – is being supported as well.
We are keeping an eye of other virtual worlds and have participated in some conversations between Kings, Brunel and the Open University around next steps.
We have a dedicated area on our island to support information skills training called the ‘Library Garden’. The Library Garden is an interactive learning experience for students to explore on their own, with a librarian or as part of a lecture. There are a number of pathways within the garden leading students to different activities. One pathway advises students about the research process from finding research partners and working collaboratively to finding information and publishing research in a variety of ways. Another path covers basics such as reference styles.
We also have areas supporting pharmaceutical lab simulations, virtual maternity wards, virtual wind farms and interactive performance spaces for active learning environments. Interest in language teaching is also popular, with an Arabic course run in Second Life.
We demonstrate Second Life through our e-learning community group meetings, one-to-one support, groups presentations plus releasing podcasts. To support the developments, a Second Life steering group was established, with members drawn from Schools, International Office, Marketing, IS, Learning and Teaching committee and the Student Union, the group provides guidance and advice on future development activities.
To help staff and students get used to Second Life, we have prepared support materials on our e-learning support web pages, el@n, (http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/elan/yourquestions/), as well as offering training courses in Second Life. There is also an orientation platform and a public Sand Box on the island, with examples and tutorials to help new users get to grips with the building tools available.
We don’t see Second Life as necessarily a recruitment or marketing tool, due largely to numbers visiting. A closer analogy for us is the ‘holodeck’ in Star Trek, a user defined space which you visit for an immersive experience. This has guided projects supported and our developments.
We have also opened an Open Educational Resources area on our island to start sharing much of what we develop openly. We already share quite a bit and see it pop up in other HEI’s spaces from time to time.
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?
(n.b. Virtual World Watch takes a neutral ‘reporting what is happening’ approach, and does not endorse any particular product)
One of the criticisms levelled at Second Life by respondents to most of the snapshot surveys is that security is compromised at the firewall level; in addition, it would be nice to create and control an environment ‘locally’. These issues have helped persuade several groups in UK universities to experiment with OpenSim.
The following announcement, lifted from the Second Life blog, is therefore intriguing. Hopefully, someone in UK Higher or Further Education will evaluate this particular variance of Second Life and come up with some findings; VWW will be happy to help disseminate any results:
In April, we announced that “Second Life Lives Behind a Firewall,” and that our new product was in Alpha. Since that time, the Enterprise Team has been hard at work evolving and deploying our software into many organizations–both as an Alpha and closed Beta. Now, I’m proud and excited to share that we’re ready to announce general availability of the Beta product next week.
On Wednesday, November 4th at 11:15 am – 12:00 pm PST, Doug Thompson (SL: Dusan Writer) will moderate a mixed-reality panel at Enterprise 2.0 in San Francisco and Metanomics inworld with Mark Kingdon, Linden Lab’s CEO, Neil Katz, IBM Distinguished Engineer and Director IBM Virtual Spaces, CIO Office Innovation Initiatives, Steve Aguiar, Program Manager at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center’s (NUWC’s) Metaverse Strategic Initiative, and Douglas Maxwell, Program Technology Lead also at NUWC’s Metaverse Strategic Initiative.
As shared on the Metanomics site,
“Mark Kingdon, CEO of Linden Lab, will unveil “Nebraska”, a stand-alone solution based on the technology that runs the popular Second Life virtual world. “Nebraska” is the much-anticipated behind-the-firewall solution which will allow enterprise to host their own virtual world environments within their organizations. Mark will talk about the benefits of the platform, the intended audience, and how it fits into the broader challenges and opportunities of “enterprise 2.0”. Mark will be joined by a number of customers who have used Nebraska during the closed beta phase of development. The panel will explore the benefits, lessons learned, barriers and opportunities which arise from integrating virtual world solutions into the enterprise.The event will include panelists appearing live in San Francisco and others who will join from the Metanomics Main Stage in Second Life.”
So, mark your calendars and come join us–physically in San Francisco at Enterprise 2.0 or virtually on Metanomics that will also include a webstream, courtesy of Treet.tv, starting a bit earlier at 11:00 am.
For additional details, check out the Metanomics site.
