Thunder

Last month I attended, and spoke at, a virtual worlds in education conference at Birmingham University.  The delegates were all educators from the West Midlands, it was great to hear what other educators were doing and to be able to create partnerships.  Following the conference I have made contact with Mark Taylor from the prison service, we are looking at building a virtual prison on our teen island and to run several projects based around it.

For further details on the conference follow this link.

On 27th November I delivered the first training session for educators from WMnet, this session took place at Longton CLC (Stoke on Trent). Prior to the session I liaised with Les the technician to ensure that Second Life worked on their machines and was not blocked by their filters etc.

I arrived shortly after 9am and checked that Second Life was indeed working, and I was happy to see that it was, at this point I didn’t do anything other than login in and move around a little. 10am came and we had 10 educators ready to go, everyone logged on to their machine and clicked on Second Life - this was our first problem, for some reason as we were all logging on using the same account it wouldn’t allow anyone else to run the application. Phil (superstar) Gregory who was a delegate on the course, but also worked at the CLC ran out to the room to find some technical support, the agreed course of action was to create individual accounts for everyone. While these accounts on the RM network were being created, I asked everyone who hadn’t already created a Second Life account to do so, this was the second problem we came up against the filter blocked the webmail accounts people were trying to use!

The network accounts were soon created and everyone was now able to run Second Life, after logging out and in again as their new login. Almost everyone was now able to log in to Second Life, we were waiting for the webmail sites to be unblocked. Once people had logged in to Second Life I invited them to be my friend and offered them membership of the wmnet group within Second Life, as soon as the accepted these invites I was able to send them a teleport request to the WMnet island. The WMnet island is a private island for the use of educators from the West Midlands. 11am had arrived and it was time for a coffee.

At this point our third problem occurred, after random periods of time the desktop machines rebooted themselves or just crashed. To begin with we couldn’t understand what was going on, the technician had now taken up a permanent place in the room and was trying to fire fight as we went along. Bob from Thomas Adams checked out the minimum recommended spec for machines running Second Life and this was when we figured out the issue, the graphics cards in the RM machines were not up to speed. With everything going against us I decided to change direction and rather than the planned hands on course, I was going to model what could be done on the WMnet island and highlight some of the educational benefits of Second Life. After a brief demonstration my machine crashed, luckily lunch was ready - new plan have lunch and go home!

During lunch I spotted a set of imac’s and asked Phil if they were connected to the net, they were so we decided to install Second Life on them and maybe we would be able to have some hands on in the afternoon. On the otherside of the corridor form the imac’s there was a set of Dell pc’s, the centre technician informed me that they had decent graphics cards in so he installed Second Life on them. After a wonderful lunch we decided to give it one more shot.

Everyone was now able to log in, webmail accounts had been accessed. Apart from Phil, Steve and myself everyone had opted for the PCs. I soon had everyone on the WMnet island and allocated a plot of land for them to build and explore the functionality of SL. I now spent the rest of the afternoon moving around working with individuals to get them started.

As the afternoon progressed the delegates started moving from the dells over to the iMacs, was it the lure of the nice large screens or the improved performance???

By the end of the afternoon everyone had a building on their piece of land, was the afternoon successful, I guess the answer will be if people return and continue to experiment in play in the environment.

On a personal note I would like to thank Phil & Les for all their help in making the day run smoother than it would have done without them.

Following on from this post on the Official Linden blog I decided to check out Veodia, Veodia allows you to broadcast high quality live video to sites, blogs and mobile phones (and to Second Life).

I set up a tv on wmnet island ready for my broadcast and popped back to Veodia to start it up, once the broadcast was rolling I copied the url onto the television and I was away..

There you have it Tarannau Wollongong watching me.

This has tremendous potential for running cpd for staff and students, as far as the Shropshire Teen Island and the diploma I see huge potential for using this technology to get high quality speakers from industry to talk to our students.  I will certainly try to deliver part of my next ICT subject leader course using this technology within Second Life.  I am also thinking that I will broadcast our Create IT awards (April 14th 2008) via Veodia in Second Life.

Last night in Second Life following a link from a secondlife education mailing list I popped over to LeedsMet island (slurl.com/secondlife/LeedsMet/105/108/22/). What an interesting place it is, but what was more interesting was chatting to Cubist Scarborough and trying out some of his free objects for use within Second Life.

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Via Technorati I found this post about displaying Flickr images within Second Life.  This object is excellent, it allows you to enter either a flickr user id, flickr group or flickr tag and it will display 10 photographs that fulfil the criteria.  I have rezzed a copy of this object outside my house on WMnet island, the image below shows one of the images that has a ‘teachmeet07′ tag.

Unfortunately neither the code used nor the object are open source so I can’t figure out how it works, and the object will only work for the duration of the Burning Life.  If anyone knows how this works and is willing to share the code please get in touch either here or in SL my avatar is Tarannau Wollongong.

Over the last couple of days I have added several objects to the WMnet island within Second Life:

Sand Box - area for anyone to build within

Freebies - A collection of free objects, textures and a prim rezzer

WMnet Office

My House (from the outside)

My House (from within)

The WMnet island is now up and running in Second Life.  the purpose of the island is to give teachers from WMnet educational institutions the opportunity to investigate the potential of this virtual world for teaching and learning.

This is a private island, if you would like to visit it you will need to send me an email [steve at it4L.org] containing your avatars name, can you send the email from your school address so I can validate you are from a WMnet school.

Education UK Island is delighted to announce a new programme of free land grants. This new programme offers the opportunity to apply for one of four plots of land on Education UK island within Second Life completely free, for educational use for 6 months [January 2008 – 31st July 2008].

Applications are invited from UK organisations / practitioners whose classwork or staff CPD can be extended by using the simulation and creativity tools available within Second Life. In addition to the free land grant, the programme also offers:
A startup grant of $SL10,000 Linden  Dollars
Dedicated and password protected audio  channel
Access to other island facilities.
Access to a community of support for the duration  of your project
Successful applications will be announced by mid November 2007 and plots of land will be transferred as soon as practicable after that, so that teachers can plan for the inclusion of Second Life delivery within courses and/or CPD beginning January 2008. The land will be granted free of all charges until 31st July 2008.

Documentation should be submitted in electronic format to: chris@sleducationuk.net  . Closing date for applications is Wednesday 31st October 2007.

For more detailed information, including application form visit: http://www.sleducationuk.net/?q=node/21.

with very best regards…Chris…

Education UK Island

Second Life

I think when you start off in SL you tend to be more of a builder than a scripter, I didn’t have a clue where to start when it came down to scripting.  My strategy was to get hold of an object and study the code to try and figure out how it worked. Via the SLED mailing list I came across the ‘Script Me‘ website:

This site will help you create scripts for your Second Life objects. These scripts allow you to add interactive elements to your builds without knowing how to code. All of the script are released under a creative commons license, which means that you can use them freely!

Having given the site a go, it is very easy to use and works well, this would be a nice way to introduce the scripts to students.  I hope they can come up with some more scripts.

Over the last six weeks I have spent quite a bit of time in Secondlife trying to find my way around, learn the basics and gather as much educational ’stuff’ as possible.

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