Feb 24

Leeds Metropolitan University in Virtual Worlds: update

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Here’s the submission from Ian Truelove, from Leeds Metropolitan University, for snapshot #8. As with other people who get their accounts of what they have/are doing in by the end of the month, Ian goes into the draw to win a freshly minted ten pound note.

Ian can be followed on Twitter.

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The pressures of running a large undergraduate provision have left little time for virtual worlds lately. However, having ultimate responsibility for the learning of 330 students does tend to focus the mind on the practicalities of scaling up the use of virtual worlds in a real world educational context. Motivated by its potential scalability and configurability, I have redoubled my efforts, and have finally got my OpenSim grid up and running. It’s currently only running behind the University firewall, but it’s working exactly as I had hoped. I can pre-register all of my students, which cuts out the nightmare prospect of a Second Life registration session multiplied by 330. I can get student’s real names floating above their new avatar’s heads, which helps them to make the connection between avatars and their real life puppet masters, and avoids premature fantasy identity overload. I can avoid the complications of noob-learners making fools of themselves in front of rude strangers and, most importantly for design students, I can get them building things straight away.

I see OpenSim as a means to an end, rather than the end itself. It will provide me with a safe training space – a studio space – for my students to mess about in and learn the ropes. I’ll then encourage any intrigued students to venture out into a truly massive multiuser virtual world like Second Life. I don’t think I’ll need to hold their hands in the same way that I did when we all jumped straight into Second Life in the early days. Once acclimatised through fun-time in the OpenSim playground, students should be able to confidently explore Second Life and beyond without a tutor cramping their style. They can always ask for help if they need it, and we will provide guidance and coaching as we do for all our students, but they will be in control. They can go where they like and do what they like, just like in real life. We will encourage them to report back on their discoveries, if they are relevant to their learning. They can show us snapshots of their exploits, and they can quote freely from their chat-logs as they reflect on their learning. They can even log-into our OpenSim studio and discuss their pseudonym’s exploits with their real life virtual friends and tutors.

I am of the opinion that students should have access to a private, institutionally managed virtual world, which is linked to their authentic, accountable, assessable and accredit-able enrolled identity, but should also be free to roam a public virtual space in whichever manner and attire they choose.

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Feb 22

Bromley College in Virtual Worlds: update

People, Surveys, Worlds No Comments »

One of the updates in from Bromley College for snapshot #8 comes from Clive Gould:

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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

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Feb 06

Bromley College in OpenSim

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From Barry Spencer at Bromley College:

In the last week we have begun to open our OpenSim platform for student access here at Bromley College. We thought it would be a good idea to have a record of their progress in the virtual world, and so we have launched a new blog: http://bcopensim.blogspot.com.

Please feel free to visit and comment.

if you have any particular questions or requests then again please feel free to contact either Clive Gould (Clive Pro) cliveg (@) gmail.com or Barry Spencer (Vega Starlight) barrys (@) bromley.ac.uk

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Dec 12

Activity snapshot #7 (Winter 2009)

Reports, Surveys, VWW 4 Comments »

This report is available in PDF format.

Summary

From input to this and previous snapshots, plus background research, institutional website searches and anecdotes, it is evident that every UK university except one (the University of the Highlands and Islands) has members of staff who have developed, or are developing, something in a virtual world – though that ‘something’, and the use and educational relevance of it, varies extremely widely.

This snapshot includes input from new respondents. In addition, several academics who are at the early stages of using virtual worlds chose not to report for this snapshot (and will hopefully do so for the next one).

Overall, the picture is one of more virtual world activity in UK academia than in previous years. Several universities, such as Edinburgh and the Open University, are into their third or fourth year of using Second Life and an academic development community continues to grow, though steadily rather than quickly.

As the snapshots reflect only what is reported to us, rather than giving a comprehensive overview, caution has to be taken in comparing activity by subject area. However, some subject domains do appear to be making more use of virtual world technology than others. The biological, health and medical sectors, in particular, make up a large proportion of virtual world activity in UK academia.

Language learning, patient treatment, computer science, health and safety, and art, performance and design stand out as subjects where several institutions are actively using virtual worlds in teaching. Academics in a range of more specific subject areas, such as criminal detection, electrical engineering and midwifery, have used virtual worlds in their teaching.

All 13 of the JISC Regional Support Centres responded to the snapshot survey request for information. The picture they present is of virtual world use being much more isolated and infrequent in further education (FE) than in higher education (HE). Institutional technical barriers and support are still major issues for further education staff. Where institutions have overcome these, substantive virtual world developments have occurred.

The RSCs themselves are providing support in different ways, e.g. events, forming a national coordination grouping, and levering the experience of HE institutions to support FE colleges. Across the 13 regions, staff hold widely differing views on the effectiveness of virtual worlds in education.

As with all previous snapshots, Second Life is the predominant virtual world of choice. Having said that, OpenSim is being mentioned by more respondents than in previous snapshot surveys, though actual implementations in UK academia remain few and far between.

This is the fourth academic year covered by an Eduserv virtual world snapshot, as the first one covered the tail-end of the 2006–07 session. While cases of virtual world use in academia have steadily risen, evaluations and evidence of their effectiveness has been fragmented and low-key. Though the same observation could be leveled at many other technologies – take a bow, Virtual Learning Environments – used in education.

Many academics – possibly a significant majority – are still wary, sceptical or openly hostile to virtual world use in education. More visible proof of where it works may swing the more open-minded of them. With the mass of teaching and research activity currently under way in higher education, it’s only reasonable to hope for more (and better) evaluations, and clarity concerning where virtual worlds can be put to good use and where not. For proof, evidence, data and convincing arguments, 2009 to 2010 feels like the year of virtual world expectation.

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Nov 04

Open Simulator Web Registration at GCal

Worlds No Comments »

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

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Oct 29

Second Life “behind the firewall” product

Events, Worlds No Comments »

(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.

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Oct 27

Snapshot survey #7 of virtual world use in UK Higher and Further Education

Social media, Surveys, VWW 2 Comments »

This is a “Request For Information” for the seventh Virtual World Watch snapshot survey.

This time, there’s just one main question, and a few side points. The main question can be interpreted as broadly, or as narrowly, as you wish. As before, the scope is limited to UK Higher and Further Education.

Blue Mars by Flickr user Connie Sec

The question

How are you using virtual worlds (e.g. Second Life, OpenSim, Metaplace, OLIVE, Active Worlds, Playstation Home, Blue Mars, Twinity, Wonderland) in teaching, learning or research?

Things you may want to include:

  • Why you are using a virtual world.
  • If teaching using a virtual world, how it fits into your curriculum.
  • Any evaluation of the experience of using the virtual world.
  • Will you do it again next year? Why (or why not)?

A few side points

  • Do you know of any other individual, group or project at your institution using virtual worlds for teaching, learning or research? If so, a contact detail would be appreciated.
  • Do you have any interesting screenshots of what you’ve been doing in virtual worlds? If so, then please consider submitting them to the Virtual World use in UK Education Flickr group – thanks.

Group of Second Life avatars by Flickr user James Schwarz

Deadline

Please send your contributions, in whatever format (e.g. email, Word, text) to john (@) virtualworldwatch.net by the end of Friday 20th November. Relevant content submitted by then is guaranteed to go into the report; content received afterwards is unlikely to make it in.

Thank you for your contribution,
Virtual World Watch

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Oct 20

JISC Innovating e-Learning Online Conference, November 24-27 2009

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If you are a researcher, institutional manager or practitioner involved in technology-enhanced learning and teaching, Innovating e-Learning 2009 will be of interest to you. Delegates from further and higher education and from overseas are welcome.

Proceedings take place in an asynchronous virtual environment which can be accessed wherever and whenever is convenient to you. The 2009 conference also includes opportunities to participate in real-time sessions in Elluminate® (a tool for interactive online collaboration, provided by Netskills), see presenters on video, meet other delegates in the Virtual Coffee Shop and try your hand at new tools and techniques. There will also be sessions using Second Life, with the support of the Regional Support Centres.

The online conference website contains further details of the event and how to participate.

There are two sessions focusing on virtual worlds. These are in theme 2, which runs for 48 hours from 8.30am on Thursday 26 November 2009:

Exploring the potential of virtual worlds for teaching & learning
Kathryn Trinder (Glasgow Caledonian University). Facilitated by David White.

What is it about 3D Virtual Worlds that have captured our interest so much? The educational community is all a-buzz with these things, possibly more so than any technology we’ve encountered before, even the humble iPod… but perhaps this provides us with a clue?

VWs, such as Second Life, are not just one technology – they are infinite yet initially empty spaces, provided with tool kits that are full of developing & evolving technologies that can make up an entire world, bulging with possibilities as yet unexplored. Or at least they can be if, we are told, we have the imagination.

Over the last couple of years Glasgow Caledonian University has been exploring, developing, and teaching in Second Life. This session will present the background of the work plus demonstrations of some of the projects. With the help of the teachers, and maybe one or two learners (if we can catch them for a moment in their busy lives), we will show a range of subject disciplines and consider some of the findings from these projects.

As you will see GCU has been, like many others in H.E., piloting ideas and building on those, but the rhetoric in our educational communities suggests that we should already have moved on from these early stages of development. But how, and what?

Have we, perhaps, been conned by the speed of ‘change’ on the Internet into rushing to judgment about the role of new platforms? How much do we really understand at this point, and how much more will evolve over the next few years?

Perhaps we should consider how we can avoid repeating what we already do in the physical world, and, instead of building 500 seat virtual lecture theatres, embrace pedagogies beyond our traditional models? Or what about the broader issues around social cultural boundaries and internationalisation? And can we make use of all of this to extend the use of VWs to better support our students who increasingly reside online?

Choosing the best virtual world for your teaching needs
John Kirriemuir (Consultant). Facilitated by David White.

There are many virtual worlds, of which an indeterminate subset have potential use in education. Wikipedia lists [1] 66 pages for “Virtual reality community”, most (but not all) of which are arguably stand-alone virtual worlds. Yesha Sivan [2] quotes “more than 100 other worlds”. And these virtual worlds are being developed, and eliminated, at a rapid rate …

An increasing number of these, such as Second Life, OpenSim and OLIVE, have been used in a wide range of teaching and learning situations, in universities and colleges across several countries. A sample of UK university academics who responded to an October 2009 Virtual World Watch [3] report on choosing virtual worlds had considered, or used, 15 different such environments between them.

Even when an academic has a stable list of virtual world options, the criteria for comparisons is a complex area in itself. Websites are littered with comparative charts of different complexity and criteria. Sarah Robbins, as part of her PhD research, undertook a facet study [4] of around 60 virtual worlds. From this, she has made a useful Google spreadsheet of her data available online. But many teachers and lecturers in academia do not have the time, or knowledge base, to develop and use their own complex framework.

So how did they, or should they, choose which virtual world is the most appropriate for their particular teaching needs? Are their selection criteria driven by pedagogic needs, or by resource, time or political pressures? And when should an academic consider using a virtual world at all?

And what of your experiences with virtual worlds? Having used one in a formal teaching initiative, would you choose a different one if repeating the exercise? What were the most important advantages, or disadvantages, of using the virtual world that you did?

We do not necessarily have the answers either, but we hope that you may…

References

1 Wikipedia index page for Virtual reality communities: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Virtual_reality_communities
2 Sivan, Y. (2009). Overview: State of Virtual Worlds Standards in 2009, 2(3). https://journals.tdl.org/jvwr/article/view/671/539
3 Virtual World Watch: http://www.virtualworldwatch.net
4 Virtual Worlds Facet Study, by Sarah Robbins: http://is.gd/3PtmL

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Oct 19

Choosing virtual worlds for use in teaching and learning in UK higher education

Reports 8 Comments »

This report is available in PDF format.

Summary

Virtual World Watch asked previous respondents to snapshot reports – UK university and college academics who develop and use virtual worlds – what worlds they used and why they chose them. Second Life and OpenSim were mentioned or used by most respondents.

Second Life is attractive due to its constant development over six years, there is no need to acquire a server or significant local technical support, the large community of experienced practitioners, and the variety of already-created objects and structures that can be quickly re-used cheaply or for free.

OpenSim is attractive because, compared to Second Life, ‘land’ does not carry the same expense, there are fewer security issues, there is no dependence on a single commercial vendor, and it is easier to configure how private your environment is; content can also be ported from Second Life.

Apart from Second Life and OpenSim, over a dozen other virtual worlds or environments were mentioned; of these Metaplace and Forterra’s OLIVE appeared to pique more interest and use, from an educational perspective, than the others. Some respondents had examined a range of virtual worlds. Sensibly, organisations such as St Andrews University are examining these from the perspective of the educational or project requirements, rather than the attributes of the particular virtual worlds.

Several respondents contributed their criteria lists (given in this report) for evaluating virtual worlds. A few are creating or using more complex frameworks: the Open University, for example, is developing a matrix of virtual world needs containing around 70 weighted criteria.

However, examining just one virtual world from the perspectives of teaching, learning, build, functionality, security, stability and many other criteria of importance to academics is not a trivial operation. Consequently:

  1. Some academics, though they would like to examine more virtual worlds, tend to default to examining just one or two options due to a lack of time/resource. Usually, Second Life or OpenSim is one or both of these.
  2. Many UK universities are, independently of each other, examining a range of virtual worlds. This time- and resource-consuming operation results in a significant amount of duplicated activity across the sector.

Recommendations

  1. It would assist other academics in making a more informed choice, and reduce the significant amount of duplicated activity across UK higher and further education, if institutions would rapidly disseminate their virtual world comparative findings. As virtual worlds are being developed at an extremely fast pace, the traditional academic timeline for dissemination is of no use; a matter of weeks, rather than months or later, and such information becomes outdated.
  2. A number of similar responses indicate a common need for an OpenSim – or similar – platform for current and prospective virtual world users and developers in UK higher education who do not have server and technical resources. As well as providing a low-cost environment with relatively high (and configurable) security and privacy, such an option provides a ‘back-up solution’ for previous and ongoing work created in worlds such as Second Life. Whether this could, or should, be provided by an academic institution or consortium, or by a technology services company, is a debatable point; ReactionGrid appears to go someway towards this requirement.
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Feb 17

Virtual World use in HE/FE (Spring 09)

Reports, VWW No Comments »

The Spring 2009 snapshot report is available online for viewing and download.

Summary

This report is the fifth in a series of snapshots of virtual world activity in UK higher and further education. It is the first to be conducted under the umbrella of Virtual World Watch (VWW). VWW and the previous snapshots are funded by Eduserv and supported by the Eduserv Foundation.

Questionnaire data for this snapshot began to be collected at the end of December 2008. Several staff within the JISC Regional Support Centres provided additional information; together with monitoring mailing lists, ‘soft’ information from contacts and searches of the web and Second Life, this contributed to a more rounded picture of virtual world activity in UK academia than was achieved in earlier snapshots. However, this report focuses on the 54 valid responses to the survey questionnaire.

Four main geographical clusters of academic Second Life activity have emerged in the UK:

• Edinburgh: the University of Edinburgh and nearby Heriot-Watt University.
• Milton Keynes: the Open University.
• The West Midlands: Coventry and the nearby universities of Birmingham City and Warwick.
• Leeds: the universities of Leeds and Leeds Metropolitan, and Leeds Art and Design College.

A number of universities, such as Lancaster, Southampton, Teesside and the West of England, have seen Second Life developments and teaching across several departments, and there is evidence that nearly every UK university is using Second Life to some extent for development or teaching work. However, in further education colleges the picture is more sparse, with evidence of development and student activity in a minority and little or no evidence of activity in the rest.

Eighteen uses of virtual worlds in UK higher and further education were identified, each described in several survey responses. Learning and teaching activities predominated, with these supporting many subject areas; however, the medical sciences, mathematics and art and design were mentioned more often than others. Simulations, the visualisation of complex structures and safety role-play were also described by several academic respondents.

Many universities are studying the use of virtual worlds – mainly Second Life – in education. There does appear to be a large amount of duplicated research in this activity. Some are using virtual worlds in courses about e-learning, while others are teaching staff how to use these environments to best effect.

Second Life remains the virtual world of choice for learning, teaching and research in UK academia. However, a cluster of universities, groups and lone academics are starting to experiment with OpenSim as an alternative.

Respondents to the survey reported mixed attitudes to the use of virtual worlds from both students and peers; however the large majority of respondents said they planned to do further virtual world learning and teaching in the next year.

The practice of solely creating an exact reproduction of the university campus in Second Life is now somewhat rare. Most institution-wide, in-world campuses make fuller use of available virtual world resources, for example providing teaching facilities for departments and courses, and exhibition spaces for student work.

Thank you

Thank you to the many people who responded to the survey, or passed on the details.

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