Experiences Building an Educational Environment in Second Life

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Experiences Building an Educational Environment
in Second Life

• New Horizons Conference
• May 20, 2008
• 830am 915am

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Goals

• Introduce you to Second Life
• Get you started in Second Life
• Demonstrate steps in setting up an educational
  environment
• Discuss applications and research

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Topics

• The Grant
• Getting Started
• Land
• Terraforming
• Building
• Creating a Learning Environment
• Freeview
• Research
• Problems
• Future Work
• Questions

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The Grant

• 2000 Bluegrass Community and Technical College
  Innovation Grant
• Supported
• Books
• SL Memberships
• Land Purchase
• Create and test a SL education environment and
  the feasibility of an SL college presence

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The Grant Team

• Kevbo Cryotank/Kevin Griffis - BCTC ITS Staff
• Maverick Saeed/James Hogan BCTC ITS Staff
• Seamus Horsforth/James Kolasa BCTC CIT Faculty
• Turtle Sands/Connie Rine BCTC ITS Staff
• Dr Rosenblum/John Story BCTC PSY Faculty
• Tupan Tarantal/Loren Zink BCTC ITS Staff

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Getting Started

• What is Second Life?
• Second Life is an online, 3D virtual world
  imagined and created by its Residents.
• Potential for filling a gap in online education

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Hardware/Software

• Minimum Requirements for Windows
  (secondlife.com/corporate/sysreqs.php)
• Cable or DSL
• 2000, XP, or Vista
• 800 MHz Pentium II or Athlon
• 512 MB or more
• 1024x768 pixels
• NVIDIA GeForce 2 (for XP/2000), GeForce 6600
  (Vista)
• Installation
• Secondlife.com/support/downloads.php
• 35 Mb Installer

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SL Accounts

• Accounts
• Creating
• Secondlife.com click the big Get Started!
  Button.
• Different Types
• Basic FREE!
• Premium - 10/month, can purchase land

www.secondlife.com
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Creating an Avatar

• Demonstration

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Land

• Buying Land
• Current Land Prices
• Why an island?
• Restrictions
• Educational pricing
• 50 Off
• Process
• PO Filed April 14
• Added to Delivery Queue May 2
• Received BCTC Island on May 6

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Terraforming

• Four choices of initial terrain
• Modifications
• Select Land
• Flatten Land
• Raise Land
• Lower Land
• Smooth Land
• Revert Land
• Demonstration

Island 2
Island 3
Island 4
Island 1
Terraforming BCTC Island
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Parcels

• Why establish land parcels?
• Different restrictions
• Different media playing
• Teleport to different parcels
• Plans
• Virtual Campus Orientation
• Classrooms/Departments
• Student Support Areas
• Sandbox

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Building Objects

• Objects
• Prims
• Construction
• General Tab
• Object Tab
• Features Tab
• Textures Tab
• Content Tab
• Camera Controls
• Textures
• Building Demonstration

Snapping to Grid
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Creating a Learning Environment

• Building for instruction
• Seating
• Beanbag, stadium seating
• Presentation devices
• FreeView
• Discussion areas
• Virtual discussion area
• Chat and voice chat
• IM vs Chat
• Voice Chat Setup

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Presentation DevicesFreeView

• What is it?
• A Second Life video picture viewer
• Written by CrystalShard Foo
• Allows users to select URLs from bookmarks and
  view them
• Also has facilities for accessing videos listed
  at SLGuide.com
• Where to get it?
• Do a search within SL for CrystalShard Foo
• FreeView is available at his SL store
  (Script-Foo) for free
• Other users can copy FreeView

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FreeView

• How to set it up.
• Get FreeView
• Rez the object by dragging it out of your
  Inventory
• If rezzing onto group owned land
• Deed the screen to the owning group
• FreeView will not play without the deed
• The screen can be resized to the maximum prim
  size
• The picture will need to be readjusted by going
  to Video -gt Configure and clicking on Align ON

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FreeView

• You can set the video being played several ways
• Through the parcel Media Tab
• In FreeView by selecting Set URL under Video
• By selecting Bookmarks under Video and browsing
  and selecting a boockmark
• By acessing TV Guide under Video (this goes to
  SLGuide.com in an SL browser window

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FreeView

• TV Guide requires the FreeView Remote to be
  rezzed and set up
• Not really recommended for classroom environment
  so I wont cover setup here
• Bookmarks can be edited to provide content
• Found in bookmarks file under Content
• Format ltDescriptiongtltURLgt
• Good way to set up instructors with content
• Demo

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Research

• Main Hypothesis
• On line students participating in a classroom
  discussion in a 3 D virtual environment (Second
  Life) will have a greater sense of classroom
  community than students participating in a
  traditional chat room.
• Primary measurement
• Classroom Community Scale (CCS)
• Measures both connectedness and learning
• Participants obtained through PY 110 on line
  sections at BCTC Summer 2 and possibly Fall 08
• IRB

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Problems

• Client Bandwidth
• Lag
• Freeze-up
• Public Access to Classrooms
• Abuse and Ejection from SL
• Permissions Settings

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A Few Tricks

• Reduce prims by using textures
• Choose your island wisely
• You can go back to Help Island
• Key combinations
• Alt-zoom
• Using grid
• Client/Server menu Ctrl-Alt-Shift-D

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Future Work

• Create campus orientation area
• Usability improvements to FreeView
• Expand Linden Scripting Language (LSL) knowledge
• Continued development of classrooms
• Integration into online offerings
• Sustainability

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Questions?
http//bluegrassit.org/SL