Posts Tagged ‘Second Life’

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Transforming the Classroom Using Online Virtual Reality

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

Virtual reality is no longer limited to video games. Now, educators are turning their classrooms into a virtual environment to enhance learning. Research has uncovered that at least 300 universities around the world teach courses or conduct research using virtual technology, and it’s used in more than 80 percent of universities in the U.K. alone for development, teaching and/or learning activities. Virtual world technologies are being embraced by educators worldwide and are changing the way we use the Internet to learn.

Using online virtual reality in education can be the most realistic option. Some course topics require role-play to teach students how to respond in certain situations, but building these real-world scenarios can be costly and isn’t always realistically possible. For example, a training course on emergency management needs to visually demonstrate defensive actions in various crisis situations and put students at the front line. Using games or computer animations to do so can be expensive and might contain more entertainment than educational value. The problem that many educators face is finding a low-cost and effective way to produce role-play simulations that cannot be done in real life. Since it is difficult to give students hands-on training, how can educators provide this type of engagement without creating it in the real world?

The answer is using online virtual reality. A 3D world like Second Life allows users to create a customisable character to explore thousands of places, build and interact with the world and other users. Today, hundreds of colleges, universities and e-learning providers use the virtual platform to teach subjects such as science, interior design, hospitality management, architectural design, legal practice and real estate.

Let’s look at the benefits of using Second Life in education:

* Second Life’s digital world offers a low-cost environment for building role-play movies, allowing educators to immerse students in real-life experiences and allow them to act according to what they have learned.

* The online virtual reality platform allows for hands-on interactivity and overcomes physical constraints of typical classroom education.

* Second Life provides multiple channels of communication with students. This includes the use of images, audio, video, voice, and public and private text. The platform also supports multiple languages and chat translation.

* Visualisation is achieved more effectively through online virtual reality. Normally, something that is hard to explain or show to students is easily demonstrated in three dimensions.

*Second Life can be used for research and as a way for instructors to hold office hours, meeting with students in the online world to save travel costs.


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A Whole New World of Studying

Tuesday, May 26th, 2009

Technology is transforming the way online students learn. This article from The Guardian explains how educators use Second Life’s virtual reality scenarios to give students a “hands-on” look into many careers like architect and certified emergency manager.

There’s not a red pen in sight when Russell Stannard marks his master’s students’ essays – but it’s not because the students never make mistakes. Stannard doesn’t use a pen, or even paper, to give his students feedback. Instead – and in keeping with his role as principal lecturer in multimedia and ICT – he turns on his computer, records himself marking the work on-screen, then emails his students the video.

When students open the video, they can hear Stannard’s voice commentary as well as watch him going through the process of marking. The resulting feedback is more comprehensive than the more conventional notes scrawled in the margin, and Stannard, who works at the University of Westminster, now believes it has the potential to revolutionise distance learning.

“It started when I began to realise how useful technology can be for teaching,” he says. “I wanted to help other teachers, as well as general computer-users, to learn how to use tools like podcasting, PowerPoint and BlackBoard, software that a lot of schools and universities use to allow teachers to provide course material and communicate with students online.”

Follow the mouse

So he set up a site to teach people how to use the technology, providing simple, video tutorials where users watch Stannard’s mouse pointing out how to use the software, with his voice providing constant commentary. He used the screen-videoing software Camtasia, and the site rapidly took off: it now receives more than 10,000 hits a month.

Then he started considering integrating the teaching style into his own university work. “I was mainly teaching students on master’s courses in media and technology, and I realised that while I was talking about the benefits of new technology, I should be making the most of the opportunity to use it,” says Stannard. “That’s when I had the idea of video marking. It was immediately well received. Students receive both aural and visual feedback – and while we always talk about different learning styles, there are also benefits to receiving feedback in different ways.”

Stannard says the technology is particularly useful for dyslexic students, who appreciate the spoken commentary, and students learning English as a foreign language. “I started my teaching career in language learning, so I quickly realised that students learning English would benefit from video marking. They can replay the videos as many times as they like and learn more about reasons for their mistakes.”

Stannard also believes video marking is “perfect” for distance-learning students. “It brings them much closer to the teacher,” he says. “They can listen, see and understand how the teacher is marking their piece, why specific comments have been made, and so on.”

The technology is already being used for informal distance learning, as Stannard uploads the videos he makes for his lectures at Westminster to multimedia trainingvideos.com. Now 60,000 people a month view the videos.

Second Life

Online marking is part of a package of new technology that is transforming the face of distance education, from Royal Mail-reliant correspondence courses to online, interactive learning. This is clearly evident on Second Life, the virtual world where users create personalised avatars (characters) to interact, which is home to scores of UK universities, with some teaching entire distance-learning modules through the site. Kingston University has developed a virtual courtroom for law students to practise on the site, while e-learning specialists at St George’s, University of London, have come up with a program code enabling Second Life users to create training scenarios.

One sees paramedic students enter Second Life to attend emergency scenarios. The characters have to assess and treat patients by speaking to them, checking their pulse, dressing wounds and administering drugs. They have to transport the patient into the ambulance and to the hospital, and then write handover notes, which are emailed to their real-life tutor for feedback.

While the technology is currently being used in-house at St George’s, the developers have made the code available for other universities or individuals. The code, Pivote, can be freely downloaded from Google Code, where techy types can then use it to create virtual worlds to run other courses.

Dr Terry Poulton, head of the Second Life-academia link-up at the university, says the code has potential applications beyond single disciplines. “The technology could enhance any course with a focus on solving real-life problems, such as architecture, law, or engineering,” he says. “It could also be useful for professional development, particularly when preparing staff for crisis situations that they do not often face.”

Other academics are already using new technology to make university courses more accessible to working professionals. At Bournemouth University, a part-time master’s in creative media practice, launched in 2005, is run entirely online. Recruits are all working people who want to undertake further study but cannot commit to a face-to-face course. The students – over a third of whom are international, living in South Africa, Mexico, New York and Finland – use blogs, podcasts and Skype, the internet telephone service, to study. The first time the students and their tutors meet is normally at graduation.

Jon Wardle, associate dean of the media school at Bournemouth, says the course represents a changing mood in academia. “Higher education has recognised the need to provide opportunities for lifelong learning for a long time, but the early work in the area was poor. Now, because of sites like YouTube, Facebook and Skype, these courses are really able to hit the spot and meet learner needs.

“Lecturers and students are both starting to understand that online learning doesn’t have to be a poor alternative to traditional campus-based courses. The days of the very bad, old-school correspondence courses are over. Now the future is about trying to discover new pedagogies which might not work face-to-face, but work wonderfully online.”

Virtual Worlds Bring Added Value to Business Resources

Monday, April 13th, 2009

Game Forward

In the current economy, businesses are wise to seek new and improved ways to stretch their dollars. For those with the capital to invest, virtual worlds offer an incredible resource for real-time collaboration beyond local office space and international borders.

The three-dimensional environments bring workers together virtually, allowing them to share and collaborate as if they literally sat across from each other. Though the technology continues to be fine-tuned, the potential of virtual worlds for businesses goes as far as the mind can reach.

As virtual worlds expert Nick Wilson explained to Game Forward, the main value of these meeting spaces is to complement real-world business by reducing costs and increasing productivity, reach and organizational effectiveness. But before a company decides to jump into virtual world technology, several important factors must be considered, as each world available on the market offers its own set of benefits and drawbacks.

As one of the two members of Clever Zebra, a company that specializes in virtual worlds consulting, Nick Wilson spends a lot of time in-world. In his online book, Virtual Worlds for Business, he breaks them down to help companies find the right fit. The publication is updated quarterly and new case studies are constantly added to the site.

Wilson and his partner work exclusively in-world and having tried them all, they prefer Second Life for its diversity and community. “I’ve never met our Operations guy, Caleb Booker. He lives in Canada, I live in the UK and we live, work and play in virtual worlds. Our office is a broadband connection to the 3D web,” added Wilson.

“We generally use Second Life,” Wilson said. “A typical meeting sees us hanging out on the balcony of our offices overlooking the sea and the rest of the island as we chat. Sometimes we have our meetings in text or private voice while attending other events also.”

While Second Life is better known for its entertainment uses, which some tend to dismiss, the virtual world is actively used by many reputable organizations including IT leaders IBM, Microsoft, Dell, Sun Microsystems and Cisco.

Second Life was the first to seriously break through into the corporate market. Launched by Linden Lab in July 2003, the platform set the stage for what virtual worlds should be. As such, Second Life is not necessarily geared to businesses. However, the 3D customizable environment and avatars as well as the islands which companies can purchase create the perfect work or conference setting. In-world, users have the ability to communicate in text or 3D spatial voice chat between avatars. During conferences, keynote speakers can address an entire group while subgroups maintain contact and discuss without disrupting the main presentation.

The platform’s main drawbacks are high system requirements, its steep learning curve and that there is no simple way to incorporate office applications. Businesses with privacy concerns should know that Linden Lab records all text conversations, though arrangements have been made against this in specific cases. Second Life can also cause firewall issues in some workplaces as it is hosted remotely.

Second Life’s up and coming competitor is OpenSimulator, an open source platform which is still in development but is already getting attention. The software is noticed for its simple content creation, customizable environments and compatibility with the Second Life client. Companies like IBM, Microsoft, Nokia and Intel have already been flirting with the platform.

For IBM, which held two major events in-world in 2008, a significant benefit of using virtual worlds is the money they saved. In a case study published for Second Life, the company saw a return on investment of around $320,000 by having hosted its Virtual World Conference online.

“With an initial investment of roughly $80,000, IBM estimates that they saved over $250,000 in travel and venue costs and more than $150,000 in additional productivity gains (since participants were already at their computers and could dive back into work immediately).”

But saving money is not the only advantage choosing virtual worlds to organize meetings and events. The benefits are also environmental. The Risk Insurance Management Society (RIMS) used the Active Worlds platform to host its 2008 RIMS Risk Live 3D virtual conference. The older virtual world has low system requirements and is considered easier to master than Second Life. The RIMS two-day event included over 500 participants and saved an estimated 180 tons of CO2 by holding its presentations in-world.

While technical requirements and ease of use are important considerations in selecting a platform, the immersion factor is what defines the virtual world experience. For example, the OLIVE platform developed by Forterra Systems is mainly used as a real world event simulator by government, defence, healthcare, and education clients.

“The ability to see the others there and the sharing of an interesting space together did contribute to a feeling of attending a event in a different way than simply dialling into a large conference call,” commented one participant in the IBM case study.

“When people woke up the morning after the virtual meetings and thought about the day before, it wasn’t like remembering a webcast or a phone conference. We truly felt as if we had attended a real-time meeting, interacting with others and carrying home practical information,” said Craig Becker, Global architect for IBM’s Digital Convergence EBO.

While many are still hesitant to enter virtual worlds, some developers may be able to bridge the gap to make virtual worlds more accessible. This includes embracing Web2.0. In August 2008, Nortel Networks introduced web.alive, a browser-based world that can be embedded within any site just like a YouTube video.

The platform landed its first customer, the Lenovo eLounge, a virtual 3D online retail store, in early 2009. Though Nortel Networks filed for bankruptcy protection in January 2009, the web.alive team expects work to continue on the project over the course of the year.

“While virtual worlds are nascent, they’ve had a lot of money pumped into them and have a lot of tech behind them, yet the designs haven’t had time to evolve, or breathe, across the genre to be meaningful in any way,” Mathew Kumar, contributing editor with Gamasutra, said to Game Forward. “But there’s a seed of something good there that could come out of it.”

It is hard to predict the role that virtual worlds will play within businesses in coming years. While there is much room for improvement, having the support of large corporations who already use them can only help. Already, their benefits are undeniable, as proven by companies who are getting more value for their dollar, using their resources more efficiently and streamlining their operations. Don’t be surprised if find a virtual world being used in your workplace in the near future.

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