Suffern Middle School in Second Life

An interesting blog from Peggy Sheehy at Suffern Middle School in New York, primarily because it shows real use of Second Life for learning by children.

I'm no expert, so I can't comment on the pedagogic aspects of what appears to be happening there, but it is very nice just to see practical examples of learners in world and engaging with each other.

Good stuff...

Second Cite - a PURL-based persistent citation for stuff in Second Life

I blogged a while back about the problem of stuff in Second Life moving, thus rendering any public SLURL-based links somewhat useless.

I proposed the use of PURLs as a solution, suggesting 'Splurl' or 'SL PURL' as a name for the resulting way of doing things.

In the pub the other night, someone used the phrase 'second sight' (not referring to SL as far as I recall) and it made me wonder whether there was any mileage in using 'Second Cite' as the name for my suggested approach.

Therefore, a Second Cite is a convention for using PURLs to cite and link to things in Second Life in a persistent way and that is independent of their current location.

Sculptured prims

I don't think this is going to have such a dramatic impact on the usefulness of Second Life as the addition of voice, but the addition of sculptured prims will certainly change the way the world looks quite significantly.

Personally though, I'd prefer Linden Lab to spend their development time improving the ability to dynamically integrate content from external Web 2.0 services into SL.

SJSU SLIS machinima

Eight letters... quite a mouthful! But the machinima that summarises the San Jose State University School of Library and Information Science island (OK, I see why they shortened it to eight letters now!) is very nice. I'm secretly wanting to play with creating a movie about Eduserv Island, but there's not quite enough there yet and I don't have enough free time :-(.

Holodeck teaching/meeting space on Eduserv Island

I liked the concept of a Second Life 'holodeck' so much (see my previous post on An English Village) that I decided to experiment with building my own version on Eduserv Island.

I used the idea of a flexible meeting/teaching space in an unused corner of Eduserv Island as the basis for my experimentation.

First I built up three differently configured seating arrangements for the available space, one with 10 seats arranged in a circle, another with 20 seats in a square and a final one consisting of 40 seats laid out theatre style with a screen at the front.

For each arrangement, I linked all the prims together to form a single seating object which I then copied to my inventory.

So far so good...

Next, I created a touchable object, a white post with a ball on top, that is used to hold each of the seating objects and that rezzes those objects on demand (i.e. when it is touched). The post contains a simple script, as follows:

integer controlchannel = 999;
integer current;
integer num;

default
{
 state_entry() {
  num = llGetInventoryNumber(INVENTORY_OBJECT);
  current = 0;
  llSetText("Touch to\nrearrange\nseating",
            <1, 1, 1>, 1.0);
 }

 touch_start(integer total_number) {
  //llSay(0, "Touched.");
  llSay(controlchannel, "kill linked objects");
  vector eul = <0, 0, 180>;
  eul *= DEG_TO_RAD; //convert to radians
  rotation quat = llEuler2Rot(eul);
  llRezObject(llGetInventoryName(INVENTORY_OBJECT,
              current), llGetPos() + <5.25, -5, 0>,
              ZERO_VECTOR, quat, 0);
  current++;
  if (current >= num) { current = 0;}
 }
}

What this script does is to query the post's inventory to find out how many seating arrangement objects there are (llGetInventoryNumber()). Each time it is touched (touch_start()) the post sends a simple chat-based message to the currently rezzed seating object, telling it to delete itself (llSay()), then rezzes the next seating object in the list (llRezObject()).

Each rezzed seating object also contains a simple script, as follows:

integer controlchannel = 999;

default
{
 state_entry() {
  llListen(controlchannel, "",
           NULL_KEY, "");
 }

 listen(integer channel, string name,
       key id, string message) {
  if (llToLower(message) ==
      "kill linked objects") {
      llDie();
  }
 }

 on_rez(integer param) {
    llSetPos(<35.384, 22.658, 25.126>);
 }
}

This script listens for incoming messages from the white post (llListen()), kills itself on demand (llDie()) and positions the seating object in the correct location when it is first rezzed (llSetPos());

It's a pretty simple approach, but seems to work well, at least within the fairly trivial set of functional requirements I set myself.

Oxford Uni in SL

I note that the University of Oxford now has an island in SL. See their Web site for details - hey, there can't be many Web pages containing both "Second Life" and " Michaelmas"!? (Nope, I'm wrong, there are actually 209 currently! :-) ).

Referring back to my last post, I also note that they are planning on using an internal competition to design and build part of the island.

An English Village

Sounds rather quaint doesn't it... thatched cottages, flower beds, tea on the lawn and cricket on the green??

The (virtual) reality is rather different. The English Village is a SL island dedicated to language education.

What makes English Village interesting (to me) is their use of holodecks to provide a strong scenario-based context for language learning. Want to try out your use of English to navigate an airport and get on a plane - do it in a simulated airport. The resulting approach is referred to as 'holoteaching'.

It's a neat idea, and one that appears to have been implemented very nicely. Take a look.

Their Web site provides more information, and Fire Centaur, the owner of English Village, also maintains a blog about his activities.

I'm not sure what technology has been used to build the holodecks, but a quick Google search turned up a commercially available holodeck tool from Inside this World.

Another thing that interested me is that they have used a competition to generate new content for their holodecks. It'll be interesting to see how successful this has been. I'm very tempted to try the same sort of approach on Eduserv Island.