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?"
Re:My god (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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.
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 it off soon. The flying penisses are not a joke from some journalist and they are not the only griefer tool by far. The prime target to aim these puppies at is anything that takes (second) life too seriously. I'd say that makes serious education the #1 target.
3. Huge performance trouble on the backend, with asset servers that looked meager a year ago when there were on average 10000 concurrent users online. At this point the number of concurrent users goes over 30K every single day, and as soon as they hit 20-25K, any use of inventory items will become impossible. This includes opening scripts and notecards (the SL equivalent of books), building stuff, accessories for your avatar, etc. To make it clear, this happens
4. Total impossibility to get any form of compensation for lost items, work and/or time. Linden Labs, the company behind SL, is not interested in what you lost. The best you'll get is a quote from the EULA, if you are one of the lucky few that get a reply at all.
SL is barely suvivable as a form of entertainment at the moment. Using it as a platform for business or education is complete idiocy. Have a look at the Linden Labs SL blog and read the comments to the post relating to technical problems and outages. You'll see what I mean.
PS: I've been playing SL for about a year.
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 seminar. I had built a classroom facility that allowed all to sit close enough to me to be "heard" and able to see the slides. The seminar consisted of about one hour of me "chatting" through the slides and an hour's worth of Q & A. The slides and the chat transcript were made available and requested after the seminars.
Here were the advantages: it allowed people from any internet equipped, English understanding country to attend. It did communicate the information fairly well although it was a little taxing to IM chat continually and substantively for that long. The attendees were quite interested in the subject and were extremely polite; as far as I could tell, most were probably more focused on the chat and slides than on other avatars. Given the format, if I had to do it again, I'd have streamed audio from me to all of them and used the IM-style chat for receiving questions.
I needed two thing that I wouldn't have needed outside SL. The first was a sergeant-at-arms to watch for and ward off the disruptive "griefers" that uniformly invade any significant gathering of players in SL. The second was an assistant to ensure that questions were vectored into me as it is difficult to raise a virtual hand or grant the floor to a questioner.
I also was using something that in no way enhanced the quality of the seminar: SL. The slides could have just as easily been on a web page, and the dialog would have been equally well served by any generic multicast chat service. There is no inflection or gesturing that I'd have done in a real world seminar; I doubt anyone even looked at my avatar as it was sitting and IM-ing. Chat is about as narrowband a communication medium humans have ever used, and the incredible amount of bandwidth required for the 40-person-hour seminars would have been just as well served by IRC.
With the possible exclusion of 3D models for demonstration, SL affords absolutely nothing to the teaching or learning; indeed, the seminar was significantly slowed by the medium. Furthermore, these seminars were at least a year ago. These days, I'd have had to use a private simulator to ensure that 20 people could attend and the extremely overburdened "content" servers may have difficulty in getting the next slide image to the 20 attendees in the time it takes me to chat through one. The only way I have seen SL used as an effective teaching medium is to teach others to use SL itself.
Online learning and Second Life (Score:2, Informative)
Second, there are two basic kinds of online learning: asynchronous environments and synchronous environments. SL would fall into the latter category, so that is where you should focus your attention.
Third, there is a literature on using MOOs and MUDs (the predecessors of SL and other virtual worlds) for educational purposes. This is also a good place to look for what works and what doesn't. Lynn Davie and Jason Nolan are two researchers who have written about this. As well, Edward Castronova's book, "Synthetic Worlds" also deserves a look for a general introduction to a variety of aspects of the current crop of virtual worlds.
Fourth, whoever is using SL or any other online learning environment should be made aware that online learning of any type proceeds differently than face-to-face classes. One of the biggest mistakes that an instructor can make to to try to port their f2f class directly and without change into an online environment. There is a learning curve, and there is information on what works and what doesn't (see above.) They need to look at it.