Educational strategies

[Graham Mills]

How do you use (or want to use) virtual worlds for education?

Do you have lesson plans or strategies to share or critique, issues encountered and overcome, tips to pass on? Please post them here.

If you want to connect with a wider body of OpenSim educators, consider joining http://list.opensim-edu.org/listinfo.cg ... im-edu.org. The associated blog provides generic "getting started" advice: http://opensim-edu.org/blog/

OpenSim is also a supported platform of the Immersive Education Initiative: http://immersiveeducation.org/

[Graham Mills]

I'm not sure how successful it was but this year I got students to build-out a tower-based poster gallery to accompany an open access book. Each group of three students had a chapter to update and extend. Each group had a level in the tower and each student a sector within a level that was their responsibility. I provided them with a multi-purpose display board which they used mainly to display textures with associated notecards.

This kind of approach has a couple of potential benefits:

• Students have to collaborate within the group to ensure that the visitor's experience is planned as an integral whole (and some marks were allocated to that aspect);
• They can look at what other students and groups are doing as the build progresses and incorporate features as appropriate into their own sector/level.

We had some problems with lag (27 students, Microsoft Update, Lisbon 1755, limited local bandwidth?) so I ended up making a virtual tower with three groups/levels per region and a teleport system that worked transparently both within and between regions. Being able to clone regions on Kitely is a major benefit if you need to make ad hoc changes like this.

It has historically been a problem with OpenSim that moving large goups of avatars between regions at the same time generates lag and the same can be true of log-in. Accordingly, you may want strategies to phase such events or otherwise reduce the need to teleport by using megaregions. Note that this observation preceded introduction of the new Kitely inventory service which has most likely improved matters considerably.

[Graham Mills]

I just ran a f2f taster session for 11 Masters students (+ me). It was the first time I'd run that session so I'll reserve judgement on the lesson strategy and implementation but I just wanted to say that Kitely's performance was significantly better than in October. Yes, it was a different PC centre and we had the occasional rebake required, a couple of stuck animations and "avatar drifting off into the distance" events, plus one teleport that (really) failed but otherwise students had no problems using scripted gizmos, teleporting to and from the region, building in the region, etc. I did ask them to dial back the graphics to Medium but doubt that all did. We were even able to watch YouTube video on a prim! Anyway, colour me a happy customer performance-wise.

The only moan I would have is getting the students inworld as we can't use the plugin. It would help if there was an updated screencast to reference. Also, one student got stalled at email verification and the imposed delay got him a little annoyed.

[Ilan Tochner]

Thank you for your input Graham.

[Patrick Reece]

Nice post !