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.