It’s been awhile since I logged into SecondLife. I updated my app and fired it up today, after talking with Patti about possibly holding a TLC session in SecondLife to help expose faculty to the concept. I don’t want to be championing it, but many faculty are curious, and a guided tour might be helpful. I decided my previous avatars – a Cylon Centurion and a Dark Wraith – were maybe a bit far from what I need to look like when talking with faculty. So I updated my avatar to something I can relate to.
I can’t seem to get the clothes to be a bit looser, so it’s a good thing I’m in such awesome shape.
I’ll be gathering location landmarks to build a tool of some interesting (and not interesting) things in SecondLife. So far, I want to start with the NOAA island, the NASA museum, and a handful of other places. Any recommendations?
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Gina Trapani posted just this morning about discovering worthwhile places in SL: http://smarterware.org/1228/my-first-time-in-second-life
Check out Macheth (disclaimer it is an NMC project. Great educator resources at jokaydia. Daren has cool web SL demos. There is a great map collection esacping my still on vacation memory. Come find my junkyard
@Boone thanks. I’ll check out her links.
@Alan I’m going to mine all of the NMC articles/projects for this, of course
A decent place to check out is our PSU Education Gaming Commons http://gaming.psu.edu … if you have trouble finding stuff let me know and I’ll put you in touch with Dr. Brett Bixler. Brett is on my staff and is heading up our EGC efforts. He is a wealth of SL knowledge! BTW, the tight short looks almost as good as in first life!
D’Arcy
I have a SL spaces tour setup already for visiting education and education related spaces in SL which you are welcome to use …. let me know if you’d like some help with things like this for your setup.
I’d strongly recommend having a couple of teacher and/or students in world for them to talk with in voice. This had the biggest impact on them when I did this 18 months ago, where I had two of my students inworld for them to ask questions to, which I relayed via a headset mic and they heard the replies over the speakers in the room. Like your situation, our faculty were curious and I was not championing … more to let them know this is out there and some of the developments going on with virtual worlds in general for education.
I recently co-facillitated a 6-week workshop for language teachers from around the world taking them from account creation to team teaching in that time frame (120 in week 1, 240 by week 6 and the community is still growing ad going strong) … but that’s another story for Monterey.
@Cole thanks! That site will definitely come in handy!
@Nick thanks for the tips. I don’t know if we’ll need a space of our own – I’m not sure how I’ll handle the whole “you have to pay the reaper to rent server space on Linden’s farm” angle. Hopefully, we can do it without anyone having to drop a credit card to use it in their course.
I’m also going to be exploring the open source alternatives – the whole commerce layer makes me break into hives, especially if we’re going to be sending students to it as part of a course.
You might want to take a look at the EU project RealXtend http://www.realxtend.org/ and also this blog post http://tinyurl.com/d9v4pf from Linden might be of interest (Alan of course knows more about this) – but basically this looks like it will be the same fir an institution as buying any other software / web service, as far as I can see.
What’s 2nd life again?
Definitely have a look at OpenSim. I’ve been using it for the bulk of the Virtual Worlds in Education course I’ve been teaching this semester, and I’ve been pretty happy with it.
It’s still alpha, so we do see a glitch now and then, but overall it’s been reasonably stable and usable. Also it seems to like to be restarted once a day or so — there may be some resource leaks going on in there.
It’s compatible with the normal SL client (if you pass the proper parameters to make it connect to a different host), or the third-party SL-compatible viewers.
It’s written in C# (ugh), but runs fine under Mono on both Linux and OS X. Our server is running on a Mac.
It’s compatible with SL client? awesome. Checking that out right now. Thanks!