the value of simulations

I've mentioned before that there is debate about whether we should be trying to recreate real life in Second Life in our educational spaces, but there is not much debate about the value of recreations of historical, artistic, and cultural spaces. Recently I visited two interesting spaces: the Great Wall of China and the Frank Lloyd Wright Museum. Both visually stunning and experientially engaging, these are two examples of places in Second Life where students can supplement their on-ground learning.

The Great Wall, on Mao (http://slurl.com/secondlife/Mao/155/137/22), is a coastal representation of a section of the wall. The setting highlights the structure, and avatars may walk on the wall as they would the real one.

The Frank Lloyd Wright Museum (http://slurl.com/secondlife/DiLemma%20City/115/245/22) is actually an island containing a museum and individual replicas of well-known Wright buildings. Pardon me for lingering so long at my favorite, the Robie House. The opportunity to gaze at and walk through this house was a treat for me. And isn't that what we want to hear from our students.

what's been going on?

If you haven't looked at our Second Life space, please do visit. Still in progress, we have the basic campus setup, with a floating campus center, an homage to the raised Metro campus (without the parking underneath LOL), composed of three lobes, representing the three campuses. The three spaces are set up for a variety of uses: presentations, meetings, information. On the ground underneath the center is open ground with teleporters to faculty sandboxes. We may add more content there, but we are trying to save prims to allow faculty to practice building. Next to the campus center is an informal gathering space, comprised of three seating areas on the ground, with water views, and a more-private floating pod. I hope you notice that the campus has a futuristic design in white and glass--why would we want to replicate real life in a virtual world? The original, and more traditionally designed sandbox, with wrought iron fencing and lamp posts, still resides on the far end of our space.

We recently conducted three workshops, two for beginners, and another for building basics. Everyone built a replica of the pavilion and flagpole you see here. It seems like a small, uncomplicated item, but it required learning most of the basics of the SL building tools. You can still see the original on the Eastern Campus sandbox.

The campus sandboxes are in the sky, BTW, to keep the main campus area neat. Keep an eye out for more workshops, including repeats of the originals.

Capetown student housing project

Here's a terrific student project from Delaware Technical and Community College that takes advantage of Second Life's building feature. Students were challenged to design sustainable house prototypes and then build models--you couldn't easily do that in RL, but here all you need is the space on which to build.

I think you can read on the photos the description of the project, that combines cultural and environmental and geographic concepts with building. What a great result for these students to be able to demonstrate their ideas in a concrete, if virtual, format.

Read more about the project on this blog: http://slafrica.wordpress.com/2009/05/17/cape-town-housing-project-in-second-life/

Update: The SL display is no longer available (unless it has been moved to another piece of land). This occasionally happens with educational builds that depend on donations of land space. That's why I take pictures when I visit interesting spaces.

*click on any photo to enlarge

SL blog post for newbies

A nice SL Blog post for beginners. You can download a very useful Quickstart Guide, view some videos, and find a whole host of resources to get you started.

creating (and wearing) clothing

Wondering how to create a new shirt? Torley tells:

National Library Week in Second Life

A couple of SL events for National Library Week:

On Thursday, April 16, at noon (Eastern), there will be an ALA Connect Presentation by Jenny Levine/SL's Cielo Paris on ALA Island. http://slurl.com/secondlife/ALA%20Island/128/107/29/

On Friday, April 17, at 3:00 pm (Eastern) there will be a Doctor Who Discussion/T.A.R.D.I.S (Time And Relative Dimensions In Space) on ALA Island. http://slurl.com/secondlife/ALA%20Island/196/209/29/

mapping out Tri-C space

We're in the planning stages of building on our piece of Outreach island, trying to decide what to put in besides the original sandbox, and whether to limit building on the entire space to our faculty--after all, we have a limited space, with a limited number of prims for building, and visitors can find many open sandboxes in which to build.

As you can see in this snapshot, I put in a Commons Area, just to see how much room such a build would take, and I put out a bunch of Builder's Grids to see what land space is left and what we might do in it. Don't forget that you're just looking at the land and that we can build in the sky, so we have lots of room. We could build a nice facility for meetings and such on the ground and create some practice building space in the sky, out of view.

it's all about information--well, not all

Popped in at ISTE island and looked around the Blogger's Hut and Podcasters' Place to see what was new. I think the last time I saw them--a long time ago--they were in production. They are a good example of the current information-dispensing model of educational spaces in SL. No, you can't really sit down in Podcasters' Place and have your avatar create a podcast. Too bad. Will that ever be possible? Well, I still keep my Jetsons dreams alive and hope so. But you can get a lot of information about podcasting, both on in-world notecards and via links to web pages, and podcasts are useful in your land if you have a streaming server. Here's an example of a notecard:


In the Blogger's Hut, there are links to many technology blogs, and you can submit a link to your own and vote on ones you like. I submitted the link to my other blog.

Educators shouldn't underestimate the value of giving information to students or other SL residents. Information can be for promotional purposes, familiarizing more people with Tri-C or with your program. For students, notecards can provide background information on a topic and instructions for proceeding through a virtual tutorial or role-playing experience.

There are still limitations in Second Life in terms of what you and your students can do when compared with RL situations, but we still ought to try out what's possible, and perhaps think differently about how to use the space, rather than trying to replicate what we can do here just fine, thank you.

SL Education Support Faire

The Second Life Education Support Faire runs this week from January 25-30, so there's no excuse to miss it. Maybe you can't see it all, though, so start here at the SL Wiki overview to the Faire: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Education_Support_Faire

Scroll down to a list of all the booths and their SLURLs. What looks good to you?

I will be taking some snapshots as I wander around and will update this post with them. First up, the Pavilion where you can visit live presentations.

Then I stopped at a few booths on Monday: NCI: New Citizen Incorporated, the Ohio Learning Network, and Earworms, a mobile language tool. Notice all the Ohio schools that are participating in Second Life. Let's hope that we will be in that display next year.

animated gif on a prim

Here is an example (with no audio) of putting an animated gif file on a prim. You have seen those sorts of images, perhaps with a little character that jumps up and down or runs, like the Sonic Hedgehog, or one of my favorites, the Hello Kitty writing in a notebook.

Through a service provided by Peregrine Salon, you can upload your animated gif--providing the file is not copyrighted or has a Creative Commons license that permits free use--and the file is created in what looks the series of animations separated into frames. Don't worry about how it looks. Download the file to your computer; upload to SL for L10 and apply as a texture to any prim. In this video, you will see it on all sides of a cube or one side of a flattened cube.

When Peregrine Salon creates the texture from your gif file, it also gives you the animation script. Create a new script in the Contents tab of the SL editing window and replace the default script with the new one and save it. That's it. Your image will animate. You can change the frames per second in the script, which is initially set at 8. On the cube, I change it to 3. On the flat prim I make in the video, I change it to 2.




What uses can you think of for your animation? Maybe a nice sign that attracts attention to a display of art or an item you are selling. Let's not get carried away and make anything that is disorienting or that turns avatars away, but you decide.

The details of how to pick or create an animated gif that will work well are here.

Here is the original animated image.

SLeducation 2008 Review

Here's a nice list reviewing the educational highlights from 2008 in Second Life from the Second Life blog. And don't forget that there is a Second Life Education blog.

interactive options

After today's two sessions on Second Life at the Faculty Colloquium, followed by an in-world meeting of the SL Education Roundtable and it's special panel discussing the possible, probable, and preferable futures for SL, I did some wandering of my own.

I love the idea of making abstract concepts concrete, and in SL that is more literal than figurative. Take for example the interactive rendering of Bloom's Taxonomy from Iowa State. Clicking on any of the terms in the grid of blocks gives the visitor an explanation in chat, as you can see in the second image:

Then I looked at the map view of the NMC islands, just browsing the names and the looks of the islands in map form, which gives you a kind of birds-eye view. The NMC Arts Lab map looks like a work of art itself, so I went there and discovered up in the sky a tiered set of walkways/art displays, many of them interactive, and so engaging that I spent at least an hour there:

Two very different kinds of uses of SL, one meant to convey concepts used in designing learning experiences, the other a demonstration of the best kind of 3D interactive art possible. Both are must-sees.

new year, new learning potential

I don't think I will be giving away anything by showing you the space in SL that Tri-C Distance Learning will be occupying soon. Here are some photos of the space as it waits for our ideas. We lease the space on one of NMC's many islands and have some nice neighbors (NYU, for example), and nice common space in the center. The map shows the relative size of our space, which will be quite enough to create some great learning spaces--don't forget that we can build up as high as desired, so the space is much bigger than its footprint.

Philip Rosedale on TED Talks

Watch and listen to Philip Rosedale, founder of Second Life, on TED Talks.

second life ephemera

On the SLED list, the listserv for Second Life Educators (join here but know that it's time-consuming), an announcement of the dismantling of St. Catherine's Monastery reminds us all that, like dead links on the Web, some SLURLS cease to transport us to favorite places. In this case, it's a see-it-soon-reminder before the dismantling begins. There could be some behind-the-scenes wrangling to save the build or move it to a sponsored region, as with the terrific Dante's Inferno and Linden Hills build, but just in case, I returned to the Monastery this morning and took some snapshots for us. I hadn't been there since early in its construction, and was pleased to see the full build. See for yourself, then read on.

Someone on the list suggested that we should not expect permanence in SL, that it should be transitory in nature. In that case, some of us SL elders (I will be two next month) will have had experiences that we can only share in picture and memory. Read about ephemera and think about SL as a space where change is a constant. I wouldn't want to think of great builds like the Monastery as something to be thrown away, but maybe we will decide to turn some items into SL Collectibles.

In terms of higher education campuses, I've never been much for the idea of recreating identical SL representations, because they suggest that what occurs in SL is identical to what occurs on the RL campus. We ought to expect more.

But in terms of the recreation of historical spaces, like the Globe Theatre on Renaissance Island, the Sistine Chapel on Vassar Island, and the Monastery, just to name a few, they offer us and our students the opportunity to walk through history or through the spaces of imagination, such as Van Gogh's paintings or Dante's Inferno. I heard recently that the Van Gogh site was gone, and that's a pity. Luckily, I have a photo of my avatar sitting in his Café Terrace at Night to remind me of the experience. If you've been hearing about places to visit, better not put it off too long.