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.

Buddies in Second Life

To get some ideas about how we can develop the Edinburgh Uni presence on SL I thought I should get out and look at what other unis are doing. Paisley University have a presence called Second Scotland, subtitled a celebration of Scottish culture and innovation. Scottish culture seems to comprise Nessie, Scottish country dancing, sheep, shortbread and Irn Bru... so who drank all the buckie? I hope they are being ironic; it shows that post-modernism is alive and well and residing in Renfrew. Except, there is a really beautiful recreation of a traditional Scottish Italian chip shop, which some un-named person has put a lot of love into. Educationally, you have to ask "why?", but then "why not": it's a bit of Scottish culture worth celebrating.

New Links?

The Vue island has now been extended into a new region east of the first region. At the moment this pristine area looks rather like it would make a nice links golf course: just a large gently undulating space. Making it a golf course would fit in with the vision that Vue is to communicate some idea of Scottishness to the World, but would be of limited educational benefit.

The University of Edinburgh now has two regions on SL of what is planned to be a block of nine or more, and I now wonder what on earth we are going to put in all these areas.

I was reminded of this question by two visitors to Vue. First, Joop blogged about his visit and noted "so far I did not see traces of dramatic activity" and second, I bumped into Skev Writer roaming the island who pointedly stated "there is bugger all here". I must admit that for uses that involve one person interacting with the system it is hard to see how, except for the joy of jumping on the fashion, what SL provides above a bog-standard website. However, for uses that force users to interact with each other, SL has clear advantages. But this raises two problems... First, how many communal activities can the uni dream up to fill this space, and second, to get them to work requires a critical mass of users. Tomorrow Channel Four tv in the UK is showing the 2002 film 28 Days Later, tagline "His fear began when he woke up alone. His terror began when he realised he wasn't.", which opens with great scenes of one person roaming a deserted London. For most visitors to Vue, this must be how it seems: a creepily deserted space. To get it to work needs something to draw in a crowd to make it seem real, but what? Welcome to the Second Life World of asocial networking.

"The £300k uni that gives tutorials on a virtual beach"

According to the online Daily Mail: "Students from around the world are being offered the chance to study their degree in a virtual paradise." Where is this paradise? It is here.

Late last night I came in after an evening hitting the pinot grigio, much better than staying in to watch a depressing documentary on the growing incidence of liver disease, and went for a saunter round Vue. I bumped into a guy called Stormbringer Blackflag who said that Vue did not look like it cost £300,000 to build, an opinion with which I could only concur. He said he had been emailed an article from the Daily Mail saying that Ed Uni had spent £300k (like real pounds, not Linden pounds) in Vue. Something about his name made me think that Stormbringer was not in the core Daily Mail demographic; in fact he said he was from Nova Scotia, which I believe is a virtual representation of Scotland in SL, but had been forwarded the article from the online Daily Mail. So, we are not only rich, we are famous too! I always treat everything I read about Second Life in the Daily Mail as gospel, except of course the articles complaining that foreign avatars are coming over and stealing our jobs from virtually under our noses, but these are technically opinion pieces rather than news. Facts are sacred to the Daily Mail, everybody knows that. Anyway, I have not seen much of this £300,000.

Today I ran into Frank Lassard, one of the developers of the Education area in Vue, or rather he nearly ran into me in his new car. I mentioned the article and complained that I had seen little of this 300k, to which he said I was clearly not very observant and could I please take my dirty hands off his Bentley.

Branded Meeting Places

The Branded Meeting Places project, a collaboration between Architecture, Culture & Environment and The Research Centre for Social Science at the University of Edinburgh, has been developing an area just to the west of the Management School. As this plot has filled up with what seem to be random objects and images I have occasionally wondered what the hell JK Jacobus, a cute little pussy, is up to, but then I realise that in his linking of mobile phone technologies with Second Life he has found the cutting edge of virtual reality and grasped it tightly with all four paws.

Tomorrow they are hosting a workshop on Brands & Meeting Places, the agenda for which sounds intriguing.

Displaying BBC Newsfeed

Hi... I keep getting people wandering into the virtual Management School we are setting up in Second Life asking questions about what we are up to, which, to be fair to them, may not be obvious. Mainly we are hoping to set up a space for student interaction for both our undergraduate and postgraduate business students. To explain in more detail I thought it would be neat to write a blog answering frequent questions, or discussing what I do.

At the moment the building is a bit empty, but one feature we have put in that visitors ask about is the displaying of BBC news. This was set up as a prototype for an interactive screen to display information about courses. The interactivity is modelled on ceefax, famously according to Gary Lineker the best way to watch Wimbledon (the little-lamented football club, not the tennis... although....), with eight coloured buttons below the screen which can be touched to follow coloured links embedded in the pages. The time lags for the updates are annoying, but I think it is quite sweet. The information about the feeds, which are wml feeds produced for use by mobile phones, was found on the v v helpful http://www.backstage.bbc.co.uk/ website... very much an under-recognised resource.