e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Second-Life

  • Welcome Guest Blogger Nicole Yankelovich

    In a couple of minutes, I’m going to be publishing a guest post from Nicole Yankelovich, Executive Director of the new OpenWonderland Foundation. For those who don’t know, OpenWonderland is an open source platform for creating virtual worlds similar to what you would find in Second Life. The project was originally hosted at Sun, but Oracle chose not to continue development and worked with the OpenWonderland Foundation to make sure they had what they needed to be able to continue the project independently.

    My own sense of virtual worlds for education is that we’re in the trough of disillusionment on the hype cycle:

    On the one hand, the majority of “teaching” activity that I have seen in Second Life has consisted of rooms full of virtual people sitting in virtual chairs looking around the virtual heads of other virtual people to see virtual screens upon which actual PowerPoint slides are virtually projected.

    Waste. Of. Time.

    But on the other hand, it seems to me that anyone who thinks that’s all the value there can be in virtual worlds is experiencing a massive failure of imagination. At the very least, if simulations have proven to be valuable educational tools, then why shouldn’t Second Life be at least as valuable as a flexible simulation environment? And I think that’s just the beginning. Coincidentally, Alan Levine recently posted a great rebuttal to the SL haters that includes good examples of the value of a virtual world.

    I think you’ll enjoy hearing what Nicole has to say.

  • Looking for Advice On Creating a Second Life Simulation

    I received an email from a reader who is working on a worthy project and is looking for advice on Second Life. Since I generally avoid SL myself, I was hoping some of you might have some tips for her. 

    She writes:

    My goal is to create a simulation that can be used by a non-profit consulting firm, where I intern, to allow employees and field representatives engage in a fun and useful tool to educate themselves about the intricacies of implementing a project. Many of our employees are at field sites around the world, and we wanted to use a platform that would not require us to all sit in a room and do a tabletop simulation; instead, using the virtual world of Second Life seemed like a perfect place where individuals could learn and interact.

    We work on international health projects, primarily sponsored by USAID, and have allocated overhead money to cover the cost of purchasing an island where the simluation can take place. As many activities have input from a variety of stakeholders, our aim was to use Second Life as a place where individuals could adopt the role of the Minister of Health, a donor, a community health worker, etc. and experience what it was like to participate in the negotiations that take place in determining priorities, indicators, targets, and other necessary tenants of our projects.

    I know that explanation is laden with international health jargon, but here are a few of the questions affiliated with it…

    • Is it best to set up seperate SL accounts attached to avatars that we can give to the individuals participating in a given round of the simulation, or allow people to create their own avatars and attend the simulation, just taking on the role in the way they behave?
    • Beyond purchasing the island and the “rent”, what other costs can we expect to incur if we don’t need any particularly fancy infrastructure? We work in developing countries, so a bare-bones facility will suffice just fine.
    • What is a realistic time frame to conduct an online learning module like this?
    • Any other advice/caveats/words of wisdom?

    Well?

  • Web Analytics, Gaming Technology, and the LMOS

    A while back, a blog conversation between Mark Oehlert and Lee Kraus regarding how to knit together lots of embedded, widget/gadget like learning applications into a coherent picture of what and how learners are doing. To begin with, the idea they’re toying with is very similar to the LMOS but focused on a corporate market and workflow learning. What really got me thinking, though, was when they started talking about a dashboard somewhat like Google Analytics to track learner progress. (Those corporate folks sure do love their dashboards.) Something about this really clicked with me, but I couldn’t quite articulate how I would want to see this work in an academic environment.

    That is, until Raph Koster’s post put me onto VisitorVille–“Web Stats in Video Game Format!”

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  • Second Life: A Simulation Wiki?

    As usual, Jon Udell is onto something interesting. A company called Linden Labs has produced a MMORG called Second Life. Three things make this particular venture somewhat unusual, though. First, they bundle a free development environment, so that people (theoretically even non-programmers) can create their own clothes, bodies, objects, buildings, and so on. Second, it’s not so much a game as it is a virtual market. People own the digital objects they create and can buy and sell them. And finally, they are actively recruiting educators to use their virtual world.

    All in all, it’s vaguely reminiscent of JotSpot, in the sense that it’s a consumer-oriented social canvas for creating certain kinds of applications. In the case of Second Life (SL), you can think of it as a simulation wiki.

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