Education – Page 2 – Ciaran Laval

August 14, 2015

Fusion Fail To Do Their Homework Regarding Education In Second Life

I’m not quite sure what to make of Patrick Hogan’s article over at Fusion; We took a tour of the abandoned college campuses of Second Life. Patrick does not seem to have done his homework, but I’ll come to that later. The article paints a picture of Second Life from its hype cycle back in 2007 :

Colleges were among those that bought the hype of the Linden Lab-developed virtual world. Many universities set up their own private islands to engage students; some even held classes within Second Life.

Most of these virtual universities are gone –– it costs almost $300 per month to host your own island –– but it turns out a handful remain as ghost towns. I decided to travel through several of the campuses, to see what’s happening in Second Life college-world in 2015.

There are some glaring problems with this paragraph. Linden Lab reintroduced the 50% discount for educational and non-profit organisations in July 2013, meaning the cost is not almost $300 a month. Now there’s no doubt that Linden Lab’s initial to remove the 50% discount and the ageing platform did reduce the number of universities in Second Life, but even a casual glance at the Education & Nonprofits section of the destination guide reveals that there are more than a handful of universities in Second Life.

I’m a bit bemused at the timing of Patrick’s article too, he visited American universities, so term times are probably different to the UK, but the middle of August does not seem the ideal time to go looking for university classes in action to me.

Patrick does make a good point regarding the design choices of universities in Second Life :

The college islands are bizarre. They mostly are laid out in a way to evoke stereotypes of how college campuses should look, but mixed in is a streak of absurd choices, like classrooms in tree houses and pirate ships. These decisions might have seemed whimsical at the time, but with the dated graphics, they just look weird.

And weird is the overall theme of this trip, which begins in Arkansas.

Bizarre is actually good, the idea of a virtual world space should not just be to recreate the physical world space, virtual worlds provide the opportunity to do things you can’t in the physical world, that’s a plus, not a minus.

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March 23, 2015

VWBPE 2015 Was An Important Event For Virtual Worlds

The importance of a conference such as Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education should not be underestimated when it comes to putting virtual worlds on the map. Most of the chatter I’ve seen has, unsurprisingly, been about Ebbe Altberg’s keynote speech. Nalates Urriah has taken a very interesting and in depth look at Linden Lab’s nextgen virtual world based on this speech.

Avataric looks at VWBPE from other perspectives, including how even in a virtual world being shy has its challenges as she braved being a host, as well as a participant, at the conference. There’s even an inworld/real world crossover with a husband hitting a wrong button. This wasn’t as painful as it may initially sound!

Beyond that the conference touches other parts of the virtual world sphere with links to OpenSim and Unity 3D demonstrating that education and virtual worlds are willing to tackle new technology when opportunity arises.

The conference also involved communities such as Chilbo and Seanchai making their mark in the education space. Interactive storytelling as a teaching tool is a development I’m eager to see progress, but Seanchai play an important role in bringing storytelling to new audiences full stop.

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March 20, 2015

Oz Linden Meets The Educators At VWBPE 2015

Unfortunately I did not get to see Oz Linden live at VWBPE 2015 this evening, which was disappointing because I wanted to see this discussion, alas I had to go shopping and then got into family matters, which changed all my plans.

However over at the VWBPE website there is a small part of Oz’s appearance where he answers questions. This video is not the full appearance of Oz the Great and Powerful, you’ll have to keep your eyes peeled for that. However it contains enough information for us to take a look at the sort of challenges educators using Second Life face compared to individuals. However don’t think that the information does not apply to people who aren’t educators, there’s interesting news of developments for all here.

One of the questions Oz got asked was whether or not screen sharing would ever be available in the Second Life viewer. Oz’s answer was a very sensible one. Oz pointed out that screen sharing is an area whereby other people have already developed solutions, and those solutions work well. Oz said that he himself will use applications such as Skype to share his screen with other people to look at bugs, new features etc.

That’s a very fair point and sometimes we overlook the fact that there are other applications dealing with matters very well that will work with Second Life.

However as an example of the fact that not all apps that do something well work with the Second Life viewer, a rather fascinating issue was raised. Someone pointed out that the Second Life viewer accepts typed Chinese characters, there’s a Google App (which wasn’t named) that allows people to speak Chinese and then that spoken word is entered into a document or a browser, so we’re probably talking about a speech to text app. However that app does not work with the Second Life viewer, if it did students would be able to interact with NPC’s in Chinese.

Oz was totally honest and admitted that he wasn’t familiar with the app, so therefore he didn’t know how it injected characters. However he says that he could not think of an architectural reason as to why it doesn’t work, but there is one extremely big problem in terms of Oz looking at this, he can’t speak Chinese.

However we then saw an example of how Linden Lab’s community can assist, Oz suggested that this may be something he could put on a list for Open Source developers to take a look at because there’s more likely to be an Open Source dev who can speak Chinese than there is a person at Linden Lab who can speak Chinese and work on the problem.

The question of education pricing was raised and Oz, honest again, replied that this really wasn’t an area he could discuss as it wasn’t within his remit. However he did point out that Ebbe Altberg had touched upon pricing in his keynote speech.

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March 18, 2015March 18, 2015

Ebbe Altberg Opens VWBPE 2015 With Keynote Speech

“I’m afraid you’re going to have to remove your weapon.” the woman told me.

“I’m a Dwarfin King, a King! Do you understand me?” I replied.

“Don’t take that tone with me or I’ll have to ask you to stand outside the room.” the woman sternly replied.

I bowed my head and removed my sceptre. Yes, the educators are in town and Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education 2015 has officially opened with a barnstorming speech from Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg.

Now if you’re looking for a transcript, I’m sorry but I’m not going to provide one. I’m not a big fan of transcripts, but more importantly, my notecard was eaten halfway through so I lost all my notes! However thanks to the power of my memory (this might not end well) and Daniel Voyager’s Twitter stream I may be able to provide some information. An important thing to note is that Ebbe Altberg’s speech may have been aimed at educators but it was extremely relevant to virtual world fans of all types as he delved into the future of Linden Lab’s top secret, but so far unnamed (other than being not Second Life 2.0) virtual world.

Ok so the bombshell news, the nextgen virtual world from Linden Lab will have an age rating of 13+. Now before we all panic too much, Ebbe pointed out that legally there’s really no difference between a 16+virtual world and a 13+ virtual world.

Another bombshell for those looking forward to getting an early look at Linden Lab’s nextgen virtual world is that initially Linden Lab will be hand picking participants and they will be looking for participants who know Autodesk Maya and can create experiences for Virtual Reality and a PC platform.

Concerns were raised as to why Linden Lab were looking for people with skills in what is a rather expensive piece of software, rather than an open source product such as Blender. Ebbe assured people that they will be looking for the nextgen virtual world to be open to many different creation products, but for the early testing, they want people with Maya skills.

In terms of costs, Ebbe is looking to lower land costs and increase sales taxes in the new platform. Linden Lab are spending a decent amount of time trying to find the ideal balance here, although it’s much harder to change the balance for Second Life than it is for the nextgen platform.

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March 16, 2015

Don’t Get Twitchy, Look Forward To Virtual Worlds Best Practices In Education Instead

Iris Ophelia has received a reply from Twitch regarding whether streaming of Second Life via their service is allowed : Update: Twitch Responds With Their Stance on Streaming Second Life. The long and short of it is, that Second Life streaming is indeed prohibited :

Second Life is not permitted for streaming and those accounts reported for doing so will be suspended. Content in this game is unrated and often sexually explicity, which is content we do not allow on our services. We also do not permit Adults-Only rated games and games where nudity is the core focus, feature, or goal.

Please read our Rules of Conduct regarding sexually explicit acts or content for more information:

http://www.twitch.tv/user/legal?page=rules-of-conduct

I could write a long rambling post about this, or point out that Grand Theft Auto, an 18 rated game, is happily streamed. However I’d rather just point people in the direction of The Drax Files : World Makers on YouTube, which is certainly not a series that exemplifies nudity being the core focus, feature or goal.

Another virtual world event that doesn’t have nudity as the core focus, feature or goal is Virtual Worlds Best Practices In Education, which starts on Wednesday of this week and it’s a far more important topic. This is the 8th annual event and here’s a brief explanation of what it’s all about :

Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education is a global grass-roots community event focusing on education in immersive virtual environments. This open conference is organized by educators, for educators, to provide an opportunity to showcase the learning that takes place in this community of practice. All educators are encouraged to present, attend and take part in this discussion of collaborative deeper learning and co-presence in virtual worlds and games.

The Opening Keynote speech will be from Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg in Second Life, however this conference does go beyond Second Life, other featured speakers include :

Pam Broviak – Manages the Public Works Group, an online resource offering information related to public works, government, and social media.

Gord Holden – Recipient of the Virtual Education Journal’s Reader’s Choice Award as the Edovator of 2014.

Jeroen Frans – One of the three Founders of the Vesuvius Group, LLC, and functions as Executive Director and Virtual World Technology Specialist.

Sensuous Maximus – Co-founder of the renowned Builders Brewery within Second Life.

Susan Toth-Cohen – Professor and director of the post-professional clinical doctorate in occupational therapy at Thomas Jefferson University.

John Fillwalk – Serves as the senior director of the Hybrid Design Technologies initiative [HDT] and as the director of the Institute for Digital Intermedia Arts [IDIA Lab} at Ball State University.

Jay Jay Jegathesan – Holds a Bachelor of Commerce (Hons) from the University of Western Australia (UWA), majoring in management and marketing.

For more detailed biographies about these speakers go here : http://vwbpe.org/conference/vwbpe-2015-keynotes-and-featured-speakers

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