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.