Online Higher Education in Second Life? 67
XxtraLarGe asks: "As both a technician for my college's Distance Learning program and as an avid gamer, I have been tasked with investigating Second Life as a possible way for us to extend and enhance our online classes. I've done a lot of research, reading about what other schools have done. While I personally think it is a really cool idea, I am somewhat skeptical of the actual practicality and value of what seems to be a glorified chat room. I'd like to hear from others about their education experience in Second Life, particularly if you've been involved in setting up any online classes or taken any online classes. What sort of training would be required for the faculty, and is it really worth it?"
Does your school want to be taken seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Does your school want to be taken seriously? (Score:4, Interesting)
Second life is a game, education is not. Get the education through known (quantifiable) channels before playing with games.
Employers can be finicky about all aspects of your education, someone who gamed their diploma will struggle even if they are the best for the job.
And what if... (Score:1, Interesting)
And what if it is a school for videogaming? (Programming and Animation in particular, such schools exist).
Anyway, in my experience. employers for technical jobs care about competence more than education. And if they are competent, they can tell if you have the stuff or not by the end of the interviewing process. They won't care if you did your classes standing
Re:And what if... (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't see how having the school _in_ a video game would help with either. You could use a video game as an illustration or assignment, maybe, but having virtual avatars dicking around in a virtual world? Seriously, how's that going to help?
Except those are very specialized simulators, extremely close to the real thing. I can't see how playing any game would help programming in the same way. If you play MS Flight Sim, you might actually learn something about airplanes, but if you click around a virtual classroom in Second Life, all you've learned from there is to click around in a game. Maybe a valuable skill for something else, but it won't make you a better programmer no matter how you want to slice it.
Additionally, SL does have the dubious reputation among many people of being basically a 3D cybersex game, and of pink flying penises. Deserved or undeserved, I'm not discussing that at this point. Just that it has it. So while many employers could maybe live with getting your courses online, many _will_ be turned off by such an association. It's basically on par with saying that you got your education at the local brothel. You know, one of the hookers also was good with computers and stuff.
I'm not sure putting a silly avatar on it would help that horribly much. Or not enough to offset the other problems.
I'm guessing it would take a lot more than a week or two, including dealing with disruptions, pranks and whatnot. The pink flying penises aren't just a wisecrack, that's just what happened to someone's press release in SL.
Plus, I see it as more work for the teacher all semester long, if they actually want to simulate all the advantages of a real school. Just seeing the teacher standing there isn't going to do much.
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It took me a lot of grinding, but I finally levelled up in my scripting skill!
Seriously, SL is just as much of a game as IRC or Slashdot is. You can play a game through it (by posting chess moves for instance), but that doesn't really make it a game in itself.
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Education happens when people learn, and people can learn in a variety of ways that do not involve sitting in a chair with your fellow students. There have been online telecourses for a while now, and video courses for much longer (I took a physics class in college where all the lessons were on a cable channel). To say that Second Life is a game and that's not a forum where education can occur really pigeonholes Second Life and ignores one of the key ways people learn - interacting and building r
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Seriously, I tried to play it once and within five minutes of creating a character I had one female avatar offer to go offline and have "sex via instant messaging" for cash and another try to sell me some random crap that I didn't have a clue about. Needless to say, I deleted the game and never played again. N
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My god (Score:5, Insightful)
But it is chat. Only chat. Chat that you can't archive, that is done with word bubbles, and without a moderation system. What on earth would make you think that this would be a good platform for instruction?
Additionally:
- It's a beast on the requirements side, you need a ton of 3D horsepower and a fat network pipe to use it effectively
- Large groups of avatars clustered together hammer the client, turning things into a 4fps slideshow
- Server uptime has historically not been stellar, though that may have changed since I was involved
- It's distracting as all hell - your students will spend all their time customizing/scoping out each others' avatars
Please, for the love of pete, get over the hype on Second Life.
Re:My god (Score:5, Informative)
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So what exactly would make you feel so superior? I would hope that the prestige of one's education is based on its quality, rather than on where you got it.
Here in Spain we have the UNED, a distance university. I think it's the spanish university with the highest number of students. You can pretty much study everything
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Re:My god (Score:5, Informative)
As for archiving, there are linux-based scripts to intercept the text chat and store it. So no issue there, either.
It's not THAT bad on the client side. If you don't get crazy and build a complete model of your real building in-game, you should be able to get quite a few people in the same area without issue.
Server uptime is questionable at best.
It IS distracting for sure.
Getting your slideshow to work can be an exercise in profanity.
And people can just wander through uninvited, unless you make everyone part owners and use special scripts to keep others out, etc... A real pain.
How do I know this? I used to go to the RoSL (Rubyists of Second Life) weekly meetings to listen to them talk about the cool Ruby stuff they were working on. Why don't I go now?
Because the idiots that staff Second Life can't fix my account and don't want to even talk to me about it. They had numerous security breaches, and on the first one, made everyone reset their password. Mine won't, it just gives an error and tells me to contact support. Email support claims they can't help other than to send the same broken url that's on the website. The phone support always does one of the following: disconnects immediately, puts me on hold forever and disconnects at the recording, puts me on hold forever and PROMISES they'll contact me and let's me record a message and then doesn't contact me, or goes into an infinite loop and won't let you do anything. I don't think there even ARE live people on that thing. I've certainly never talked to one in 6 MONTHS OF TRYING.
Seriously. If you have ANY issues whatsoever, you can kiss your precious class goodbye.
That's the real reason to stay far, far away from Second Life for anything non-trivial.
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The advantage of using second life is that you can provide visual examples.
You could accomplish the same thing, however, using Sauerbraten. You would need some custom additions to do much other than pull cubes around; building is a VERY slow process and cloning objects etc is somewhat nonintuitive. But it allows in-game collaborative building, and it doesn't cost
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Then again, not so likely if we're discussing a real-life CS/IT/Videogaming degree with more than its fair share of pasty-faced under/overweight male geeks.
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Chat can be archived, you can access a log in SL (ctrl+H), and it can be moderated. If you own the land you're speaking on you can kick people out, ban them, or make the land accessible only to people on the allow list.
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One thing that you didn't mention that would also be a HUGE potential problem are griefers. They are not quite as common in SL as people think (they generally prefer harassing clubs and tend to avoid discussion/education/art
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I don't know about you, but when I went to school in first life, I spent a lot of time scoping out female avatars... I'd much rather leave my room to go to class if it means that I'm more likely to get laid!
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If you were teaching something like architecture or carpentry, you could show full 3D models to students and allow them to view the models from any angle, copy the models, modify the models, etc.
For an online-only class, Second Life could be better than WebEx or whatever other crap we have out there. Especially in certain domains.
By saying it's "just chat" you prove that you aren't qualified to comment on t
Well... (Score:3, Funny)
slashvertisment (Score:1, Funny)
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Why not? (Score:1)
Forget trying to teach people, you could probably even make a profit off it by charging people admission. I'm sure even if the concept of learning was useless, you'd make money just based on novelty.
And I wouldn't worry about lag too much, its not like
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Because it's retarded.
I'm all for innovation, but if I was a student at wherever this guy works, I would be incredibly pissed off that any amount of time was spent even talking about this idea. College tuition and fees are already unnecessarily high pretty much everywhere, and crap like this, which at least two people had to have spent time on the clock talking about and this guy has apparently spent time "researching" (Read As: Playing Second Life) on the student's (and possibly tax payer's)
Overhyped (Score:5, Insightful)
Second Life is what YOU make it (Score:3, Interesting)
I think attempting to bring learning systems to SL does have merit. The tools actually are shaping up and aside from the universities that are already in SL, I know of a few other educational offerings that are being developed now that could demonstrate value for educators and students.
I think that this type of immersive long-distance multiuser education is here to stay. Whether it will gain public acceptance during the platform life cycle of Second Life really depends on whether innovative educators keep coming into the virtual world prepared to push it forward. So if you are looking for a polished educational software platform to set up and get rolling quickly, then SL is not for you yet. On the other hand, if you want to be a pioneer and expand your thinking on how virtual worlds can fascilitate education then you should invest a little funding in SL and see what you can make of it.
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Glad to hear it works well, though. Maybe when it's actually implemented people will stop bitching about it. I suspect those with something to hide will always resent it. And it wil
Online Classes (Score:2)
Someone to cooperate with you (Score:3, Informative)
People can build things together without having to know 3-D instructions of 3-D software. People can program in a C-like syntax, event-driven. It has produced a great result in beginning programming classes, since students have been able to produce enticing results from their first 'for','while', or if... And they find an immediate use for maths (3-D movement) and for lots of algorithms.
For instance, my undergraduate students are producing in Second Life "products" that behave as if they had RFID tags and are now developing a traditional Windows application for managing e-mails sent by those "products" - without actually having to acquire RFID tags. And they are just beginning their programming.
On the other hand, one of my PhD students is trying to integrate Second Life with teaching management software like Moodle or like our in-house system. There is an open source platform for accessing Moodle content from Second Life (Sloodle), but not the opposite.
I think you two could exchange interesting view. Get in touch.
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Building products in SecondLife that act like RFID is interesting, but with what applicability? None fo
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Bad Idea (TM) (Score:2, Informative)
1. Unplanned outages. These have been there from the start, but for the past 3 months or so it has been horrible. Expect at least 2 to 3 days a week where no work can be done due to the fact that people can't log in, can't get to the assigned location, can't chat properly because their chat lines are coming out in jumbled order or not at all.
2. Griefers. SL is so full of these it's going to kill
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As for griefers I have this to say: What griefers? Maybe I don't hang in the places griefers do but I don't see them. Besides, griefers tend to avoid cultural/educ
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Rolling restarts tend not to take too long, I don't consider them a major annoyance.
As for the recent reported inventory stuff, I haven't experienced that at all. Someone was reporting issues in a group IM once about their problems and everything was just fine for me. I'm using the First Look viewer
The client does need more work, but each newer maj
second life is not enabling for education (Score:2, Informative)
Having held two seminars in SL - at the request of other players - as well as doing the same in a real university I think I can fairly comment on how lacking SL is as a teaching medium.
The seminars were a "101" style introduction to a scientific subject. I prepared for it much as I would have any presentation. I made my standard dull yet structuring powerpoint slides, exported them as jpegs and scripted a slide viewer in LSL. The seminar was well attended, drawing 20+ attentive students to each two hour s
SL has a discount for educators (Score:1)
I'm not sure if a whole sim would be needed though, but they have advantages over normal land as you get a lot more control over them.
Slogan (Score:3, Funny)
Short answer... (Score:1)
SL Still Only Half Baked (Score:3, Insightful)
The hardware issue makes me think that while Second Life is not, strictly speaking, a game, it would be a good idea to create an optimized client for game consoles like the Xbox 360 or Playstation 3. These two consoles have the raw computational power and graphics capabilities that should make for a smoother in world experience. Plus, game consoles are standardized platforms that are widespread and easier to support than PCs at lower cost to the user. Sony's virtual world project Home (beta soon [homebetatrial.com]), may point the way for Second Life on a console.
In a lot of ways, Second Life is glorified chat. But don't forget, in the early days, AOL made a lot of money off of mere chat. And now chat and online forums, etc. are being used effectively for online instruction. So it's just a matter of time and technology before many of us will be taking our seats in a 3D virtual classroom, hopefully free of flying male anatomy!
Online learning and Second Life (Score:2, Informative)
Second,
It can work (Score:1)
You WILL need voice. In my lectures, the prof talked while the class messaged. SL has the goods for doing that.
It is easy to establish a group and restrict parcel entry to that group. You can also restrict object rezing and such to the parcel owner. There are lots of trespass bots available in SL that will eject intruders and in
Some Viable Alternatives... (Score:1)
Alternatives (Score:2)
There are other systems perhaps. I have not used it but Squeak (language) has
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Some basics you should know going in (Score:1)
As a student (Score:2)
Positive experiences with SL in the classroom (Score:1)