Second Life Circus

My teaching life got all the more chaotic last week with the introduction of Second Life into my classes. As I have mentioned before I am using SL for my 4th year undergrad and MSc module in Multimedia Design. I coaxed the university into buying an island, and the students will be terrforming throughout the module. We started the class with nothing at all on the island - a blank canvas - and it is their job to design and build whatever* they want on it. They will be assessed by 100% coursework from a portfolio in SL which contains: a multimedia tutorial to help other students learn SL, a fun interactive object of their choice, a section of the island which they have created with a group of students, a peer review and a learning diary.

I got quite excited by all this. It's all nice and constructionist, and community of learners-ish. It's the intersection of user generated content and social networking, and fits in with multimedia research grand challenges (as defined by the ACM special interest group on Multimedia). (See my intro slides for the class for more about this). And it sounds fun. I would have liked to do something like that as a student.

I spent a lot of time (A LOT) during the Christmas holidays teaching myself the scripting language in SL and learning how to build objects. Scripting in SL is never boring. You're programming in world - the scripts are running as you work on them so the objects do all kinds of unexpected things. I was playing with a giant strawberry trying to make it float like a ball (to learn the physics functions) and it started rolling down the hill I was standing on, gathering speed until it crashed into the sea. I had to gallop down the hill chasing after it. To this day, the sea round the island is littered with strawberries. I was also pursued by a giant snowman of my own making, but that is another story. Now this is the kind of programming I like. Beats writing a calculator in reverse polish notation, huh?

Well, the first class came along and I managed to get the 4th years all fired up about it. Or as fired up as students get about these things. (The MSc students gazed at me in mute incomprehension as normal. Sometimes I think they must think me entirely mad). Anyway some of the 4th years went off to the labs and started up Second Life immediately, before even the first lab class. And that, gentle readers, is when the circus began.

We have two multimedia labs full of computers which are meant to be our souped up fast computers for this module. Alas, these computers meet only the minimum spec for SL but not the recommended spec. This is the difference between a happy well adjusted lecturer and a raving maniac. The computers keep crashing. Sometimes they run terribly slowly. And to add to the circus, there were intermittent network problems. The upshot of all this was that the students got frustrated. Very few of them managed to complete the lab exercise, and lots went home to do it on their home computers which , belonging to computer science students, are far superior to our lab resources. We went from a class of mostly enthused playful students to some frustrated, apathetic students. By the Friday lab class for MSc students we had a computing officer there to view the carnage and also my pal the Flexible Learning coordinator from the university to witness my pain. :-) There were some incidents where male students found themselves with female avatars. Grey, naked female avatars. Luckily they found this quite funny. But at the end of the class a (mature) student told me quite sternly that these working conditions were unacceptable and that they couldn't be assessed on work which had to be done of such poor facilities. I completely agree with him. I tell you, this is exactly the sort of interaction which haunts my dreams and makes me wake up in a cold sweat.

<rant> I had to endure various comments from colleagues about how I should have checked this out in advance. I DID! I got it installed early Nov. I ran a pilot lab class in mid November. I've been planning this since September!  It's just the problem only started to show up when more students used it and for longer periods. In fact, it showed up first late Dec because some students had to do an assignment in SL for another module. And did the lecturers for that module check it out?  Err, no. </rant> Sorry, about that. I feel better now.

Well, where are we now? The computing staff now agree with me that the problem is caused by not having good enough graphics cards, the Computing King has agreed to upgrade the machines and they have now ordered some graphics cards to try out so they know what to upgrade to. Most of the students are signed up with SL and some have started building things on our island. My Flexible Learning pal emailed me the other day to say: "Well, anyway, there I was, sitting around on the HWU island  and a student was madly building. Car, objects, a whole house, and other weird and wonderful things... he came up eventually and handed me a cocktail, which I kept". Note that the lab class on building is tomorrow so this guy is ahead of the game.

By the way, the HWU island is open only to students on the module just now and once they have work they want to share I will open it to the public.

Enough. I have classes to prepare for tomorrow. But I will keep updating the blog with (shorter) bits of news about how it is all progressing. Who knows what this week will have in store for me?

*(When I say "whatever" I have told them it has to be PG. Can you imagine the headline in "The Sun  ": "University students create strip bar for course work"? )

Comments

[Nicole Cargill-Kipar]

"The MSc students gazed at me in mute incomprehension as normal. Sometimes I think they must think me entirely mad"

Well, what was one of the results of the "Digital Playgrounds/Circuits of Cool"? There are no geeks anymore in the emerging generation, becaue they are all geeks, and technology has become such anorganic part, that it is invisible.

So .. enthusiastic about Second Life? Nah, that's "for old people, and it's weird". (quote from another source) ;-)

Anyway, some of the comments on Friday were fascinating, albeit not surprising. I especially liked "But I [!] am weird!" when the avatar had changed into some strange shape that didn't reflect the user.

I should really go and check out that fancy virtual cocktail that I got. (just tell them to get rid of those weird earphone thingies for me, please ...)