Where are virtual worlds going within the education space? The changes in Linden Lab’s management, direction and pricing, the work of the IEEE Virtual Worlds Standards working group (and others), the onward march of OpenSim and public sector cut-backs are just some of the factors causing educators (and those supplying them) to re-assesses how they are using virtual worlds, and where virtual worlds are going.

We have though progressed significantly from where we were 5 or 6 years ago. A large number of us have now had several (even many) years experience of using virtual worlds in education and learning. We know there are benefits to be gained, but we still struggle to get management, funders, other teachers and even students to buy in. And we still have to cope with significant uncertainty around choice of platforms, technical difficulties in deployment and shortfalls in stability, functionality or both.

We would like to start a dialogue amongst experienced virtual world educators and trainers in the UK about where virtual worlds are going, and how we can ensure that education gets the best out of them. We want to do this by sharing knowledge, by building scenarios and road-maps around possible futures, by building shared systems and by trying to influence at a national and international level, and even by finding funding. The end-point, possibly, could be an English or UK Virtual Grid for Learning.

To achieve this we propose a series of virtual and physical world meeting, augmented by on-line discussion and information sharing. We invite you all to participate.

I’m sure we all dream of a virtual world environment that is as easy to create, deploy and use as the World Wide Web. Let’s see what it will take to build it.

To kick-start the process we are arranging an in-world meet at 4pm (UK Time) on Wed 17th November at:
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Learn4Life/166/152/25.
This will be an open meeting to talk about the need and appetite for this initiative, and how to drive it forward in the physical and virtual world. Our hope is that after a couple of virtual meets we can set up a physical meet/unconference early in 2011.

If you would like to attend, or want more information then please contact leon.cych@supareal.com or david.burden@daden.co.uk, and feel free to discuss on the relevant JISC, SLED, Linked-In, Facebook and other groups.

• Space
• Identity and embodiment
• Learning design(s)
• Evaluations
• Impact of innovation on student learning

This event will provide opportunities for discussion, collaboration and interaction on the topic of issues in learning in immersive virtual worlds. It is a free one day event with refreshments and lunch provided, presentations from virtual world practitioners and live streaming into Second Life.

The agenda, abstracts, and how to navigative the nightmare that is the Coventry road system with the aid of magic satellite navigation are all online.

* * * * *

The Virtual Worlds Project team at The Open University have put considerable legwork into establishing a comparison matrix of virtual worlds for educational purposes. We started out by listing all the qualities we are looking for in a VW environment for educators, trying very hard not to think about the ones we are already familiar with, and rated each one according to significance and value. The OU VW Steering Group gave their input to the list and ratings, and several iterations later we had a set of 73 criteria for checking against the available platforms. We started out with about 50 environments, and knocked out many of them against a few basics such as no game narrative (bye bye World of Warcraft) and no brand narrative (see you later BarbieWorld), along with basic requirements to support synchronous communication etc.

This took us down to a remaining 69 criteria, which we then applied to 18 platforms. Often there was no online documentation and we relied on setting up an account and getting into the environment to explore responses to the selections. There remained a number of unknowns in the final matrix and in these cases having exhausted all reasonable avenues of exploration (including email and telephone support) we marked them as nos. The final weighted ratings put Second Life at the top, closely followed by ReactionGrid and then OpenSim, so our project recommendations are to stick with Second Life for the moment, with a contingency plan and a watching brief on RG and OS, and we’re writing a paper with more details about the whole selection process.

However! Since we did this at least two of the platforms we looked at have gone, and there have been updates and changes to many if not all of the others, so our matrix is already out of date. We always planned to offer it up to the community and hope for corrections where we’ve got it wrong (and there will be corrections), and we’re doing this now in the hope that people will find it useful, and that it can be a resource for anyone who is interested in platform selection and justification. Anyone can look at it here:

http://www.open.ac.uk/wikis/virtualworlds/Main_Page

…please email us (virtualworlds@open.ac.uk)

if you have corrections or suggestions (eg for new criteria) to offer, or if you have a particular interest in taking on editing rights. We welcome constructive criticism and discussion.

There’s some details on the secondlife.com blogging area about the new pricing. In a nutshell, as of the start of 2011, Linden Labs are removing the education and non-profit discounts.

This is, obviously, a development of interest to current, continuing, and thinking-about education users of this particular virtual world. Stay, and swallow the increased price? Move to OpenSim or some other virtual world? Discontinue (for existing people) or not use a virtual world at all (for thinking-about people)?

There’s some ongoing debate about this on the JISCmail Virtual Worlds mailing list. Please do join in and chip in with your opinions.

In addition, Rockcliffe University Consortium will be hosting a public forum on the impacts of the Linden Lab pricing policy on Wednesday October 6th at 12 noon (Virtual Worlds This Week). Part of the discussion will be to help determine a constructive manner of feedback to Linden Lab as to the impacts of their announcement of the removal of the educational / non-profit discount. All are welcome to attend.

Rotunda (seats 150 so lots of room) – SLURL: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Rockcliffe%20Library/229/26/25

Friday October 22nd 2010
University of Ulster, Magee Campus, Derry, Northern Ireland.

CALL FOR SPEAKERS/WORKSHOPS/DEMONSTRATIONS

IMMERS[ED] 2010; the Second National Workshop on Teaching in Immersive Worlds will be hosted by the School of Computing & Intelligent Systems and will take place in the Great Hall of the University of Ulster, Magee Campus, Derry, Northern Ireland on Friday October 22nd 2010. The objective of the event is to raise awareness of the benefits and possible pitfalls of using virtual and immersive worlds in an educational context and will provide practical advice and demonstrations from leading educators and industrial experts in this area.

The workshop is organised by the Serious Games & Virtual Worlds Research Team and the Intelligent Systems Research Centre, the School of Computing & Intelligent Systems, Faculty of Computing and Engineering, ARK/CAIN/INCORE (International Conflict research) and co-sponsored by the University of Ulster, Office of Innovation Knowledge Club Program.

CALL FOR SPEAKERS/WORKSHOP/DEMONSTRATIONS PROPOSALS

If you are currently working in this area and would be interested in presenting a talk, workshop or demonstration on your research at this event please email a one page abstract/summary of your proposed topic/workshop/demonstration to Michael Callaghan (mj.callaghan@ulster.ac.uk) or Kerri McCusker (ka.mccusker@ulster.ac.uk) before 31st May 2010. Please clearly outline the objectives of your proposal, its intended audience and outcomes and include recent references where appropriate. Talks/workshops/presentations will typically last 30-45 minutes.

TOPICS OF INTEREST INCLUDE (BUT ARE NOT LIMITED TO…)

• Advantages/limitations of teaching in virtual worlds
• Practical usage of instructional tools in virtual worlds
• Case studies of effective uses of virtual worlds for teaching activities
• Effective evaluation and assessment in virtual worlds
• Interdisciplinary curriculum and instruction in virtual worlds
• Educational and research ethics in virtual worlds
• Bridging virtual worlds and virtual learning environments
• Conflict resolution in virtual worlds
• Best practices, lessons learned, innovation in virtual world educational activities

IMPORTANT DATES

• Submission deadline: Monday 31st May 2010
• Notification of acceptance: Monday 14th June 2010
• Submission of final presentation: Friday 30th September 2010
• Workshop: Friday 22nd October 2010

+ + + + +

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.

For more information please visit our blogs:

http://bcopensim.blogspot.com/
http://www.linuxtraining.org.uk/blogger4.html

Please email Simon Bignell (s.bignell (@) derby.ac.uk) if you would like a copy or to save paper you can download it directly:

http://previewpsych.org/BPD2.0.pdf

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:

http://alekskrotoski.com/post/academic-dissertation—social-influence-in-second-life-social-n

(Shortened URL) http://is.gd/75yo9

(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 tweets, and is also the presenter of The Virtual Revolution, the forthcoming BBC series about the Web:

Nottingham has been in Second Life for just over a year and now has 2 islands:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/University%20of%20Nottingham/100/122/22

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.

Friday 18th December. 11.30-12.30 (UK time).

An opportunity to meet and take part in a discussion: Virtual worlds: are they the future?

You need basic skills in Second Life to take part: enough to teleport to our location and communicate via chat or sound with colleagues in world.

This is an opportunity to meet others and consider different viewpoints regarding the potential and value of Second Life in education.

Email c.appleton@staffs.ac.uk if you would like to participate.