Sorting out a few problems.

I have been asked to sort out a few problems with the Factory Simulation. We have been using it within courses but I have been asked to put the documentation on-line and tidy up the exercises so that we don't need a tutor standing over the students while they use it. The most significant technical problem we need to tackle is to make sure that if SL, the uni server or the networks go down it will be possible to bring the simulation back near the point it crashed. You would think we would have thought about this at the start!

Anyway, I have been given a six weeks to get it sorted so that a more robust and idiot-proofed version will be available for the new semester....

Another New Dawn

When I said in my last post that I didnt think anyone in the Uni reads this blog, I was wrong. No comments on the blog, no emails to me, but I get dragged in to see the boss who says that someone has complained that I was being negative about Vue as a whole, which I dont think I was. So I have now promised to keep saying on this blog that everything is hunky-dory and we love all the other schools developing on Vue.

Anyway, to reiterate, everything is hunky-dory and we love all the other schools developing on Vue.

Back to Second Life

I thought I had escaped the tedium of Second Life development, but now I have been thrown back in.

To state the glaringly obvious, the Management School lost interest in Second Life because we (they?) could not see how it would actually support our teaching. Also, apparently, we got into what in Scotland is termed a "rammy" with our neighbours in Second Life, ACE, the Uni's school of Arts, Culture and sonething beginning with "e", who would not remove their big pile of virtual crap next to the Second Life Mangement School. My boss threw all the toys out of the pram and said that if they thought it was a cute postmodernist point to make the uni's presence on second life look like a cyber-breakers-yard and the other depts, who did not have to exist next to this mess, thought it was cool, then why should we put effort in. I did point out that in all the issues raised with Education I had, in spite of his anger management issues, been able to negotiate acceptable compromises, but he just wanted to go over to their office and whack them. "They can stick that in their post-Barthist World-order", he said. . To be fair, the problem with ACE is that they actually want (love?) to stand up in front of audiences and say "We are are proud that ACE's bit of Second Life looks like a tip", as they did in a seminar before Chrstmas, but no-one in this uni has the gall to tell them that this is not supportive of the uni's involvement. I was told that if that was their attitude the whole lot of them could taking a running jump: why should we do anything to make Edinburgh's presence in SL look better and then have everyone clap along with the idea that it should look like a mess?

So I reasonably thought that Second Life was so much last year... we are now into 2008, with its blank calendar pages rolling before us like the Russian steppes, but these things come back to bite us. So now, I learn, the management school's strategy is that the building on the main island is on hold and we (I?) should now promote the activities in Vue NW, where I am now told we have developed a management simulation. Bloody marvellous... I cant bloody wait.

I suppose this will become another boondoggle to keep people from actually doing something so coarse as actually teaching students about management...

Sod the lot of them I say... fortunately, despite my colleagues always making a big thing about the sociological impacts of blogging, they dont read these things.

Graphics Cards

For Second Life to be useful in education it needs students to be able to access it, both from open-access computers in the uni and from their own computers. Unfortunately, when the specification for the uni computers was set it was not expected that students would be doing anything so frivolous as MUVE, so the graphics capbilities are very poor, and most students will be using basic laptops as their own computers, so again will not be exactly cutting edge for graphics. It looks like a lot of these problems are hidden because the people developing SL in universities are the tech enthusiasts who have high spec computers. Up until this week I was using a Radeon X300 graphics card, but then my viewer started to crash randomly, and having updated drivers and ploughed through the SL wikis I found that this card has "known issues": known but not explained. I have now upgraded to a Radeon 1550 with 250 MB, and it is lovely: I can see for miles and the sea ripples most attractively. However the graphics requirements "REQUIRED to run Second Life successfully" listed on the SL website website are limted. In particular, there is no guarantee that SL will run with Intel graphics. When we roll-out Second Life for courses we will find out whether this is a problem or not. V exciting!

Sl in Education

One of my colleagues pointed out to me a recently published report surveying the use of Second Life in UK education, written by John Kirriemuir. The report was commissioned by Eduserv, the UK not-for-profit organisation coordinating, publicising and funding work to develop IT in education. In compiling the report, John spoke to leading and knowledgeable figures in the use of SL in UK higher education, and also to me. His report gives a very good overview of what is going on. The main conclusions that I draw from his survey are that the level of activity is less than one might expect, considering how fashionable SL is and how widely it is being adopted in US universities, and also that most activities are being driven by enthusiasts rather than adopted strategically by the institutions. The former may be due to the residual focus on the RAE and the second impression may be false because universities approaching SL strategically are developing areas in private, ready to launch them fully-formed on an unsuspecting World. John found evidence for this covert development in finding many of the SL spaces being developed blocked to public access.

The list of web pages and slurls in the appendix is very useful when planning trips in SL: use it like you would those lists of archaeological sites in the Rough Guide to Italy. I recommend you read it now, because by next week it will be out of date.

Quintessence of Dust

"the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours."

Vue continues to grow: the Management School have taken on a whole region and my colleague Rad has been busy terraforming it and constructing a building for use in case study exercises. He says he will let me into the region to look around when he is happy with it. From a distance it looks like a big orange box.

Chasing Progress

"In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass."

Shortly, this quiet life of Pimms, rain and watching the tennis from Wimbledon will be disrupted... I have been told that the Management School are moving into an entire island of our own, even though I pointed out that I was only joking when I said Second Life was the future of management education. I am still not clear what we are going to put on over 50k m2 of land.

The clever money is on "factory", though "bypass" or, even better, "open field" would suit me fine.