Learning in Second Life 1: Learning content types

Mark Aberdour walks through the various media that can deliver learning in Second Life and shows examples of their use. Warning: may contain traces of technical terminology.

First of all I should say that this is far from an exhaustive survey. Second Life is huge, diverse and sprawling. There may be more examples of e-learning resources I haven’t come across in my time inworld – which has mostly been spent on University and College islands - however, I think I’ve captured the main ones.

Webpages as objects on wall

This launches a webpage in your external browser, so could also launch a webpage that contains a Flash game, for example.

Presentations as objects on wall

This example is a music technology college presentation which you click to start and then scrolls through screens every 5 seconds. This type of presentation would be built in-world using the building tools and scripting language.

Meeting areas with video screens

You click screen to start, requires QuickTime to be installed on the client machine. (QT plug-in can support audio or video feeds into Second Life, with a limit of one per “parcel”.)

Infocards

Infocards can be displayed, as in the bottom left in this example. Infocards contain background information to the location you are in and are sometimes launched automatically on arrival, or you click on an object to open them. They are also commonly used to display instructional text for activities.

Static presentations

These are widespread, such as this art gallery at Ohio State University’s island. http://slurl.com/secondlife/Ohio%20University/50/109/26

Challenge/Best Practices screen.

Good example of e-learning in SL is shown here. It’s almost like a standard e-learning screen type, with instructional text at top, video/podcast display area on left, and three buttons on the right: Take a Challenge, Best Practices and Blog. Take a Challenge launches the Infocard bottom left which contains a scenario for the user to write a response to. The response is typed onto a notecard and deposited in a box on the right. Best Practices and Blog launch external web sites.

Navigation maps

You don’t have to teleport to new islands, you can also teleport to new locations within an island by selecting links on a teleport map such as in this example.

Reuters is also an excellent example of this as their high-rise building contains lots of stairs between floors, so teleporting from one subject area on the first floor to another subject area on the top floor is quick and easy. http://slurl.com/secondlife/Reuters/163/106/24

Interactive Whiteboard

Here’s an example of an interactive whiteboard seen at the Learn4Life location on Education UK Island.

Powerpoint Presentations

PowerPoint allows you to export presentation slides as GIF, JPEG, or PNG files. To give your presentation in Second Life, you need to export all the frames as JPEG files. Next, upload the frames to your inventory - this will cost you L$10 per image. Some basic scripting and you will have your presentation available in SL.

An alternative solution is to upload your images to a web host and use the llParcelMediaCommandList() function to load the images onto the PrimFace (Prim is the name for a building block in SL), since BMP, GIF, TGA, and JPEG file formats are supported. It is a less efficient method as there is a 2 second delay using this function. However, it is good for where the data may change regularly as it can be maintained externally. http://www.oreilly.com/pub/h/5239

RSS feeds

Feeds from external sites can be displayed on an object, e.g. Screen on a wall.

Movies

Machinima refers to the making of animated movies using game engines and virtual worlds. Movies made in Second Life use the world's building, scripting, and avatar customization tools, working in real-time collaboration with people around the globe. You can use Second Life as your own virtual back lot, soundstage, choreography studio, costume and prop repository, and special effects house.

LMS Integration

Sloodle features (all experimental):

• Write to Moodle blog from SL
• Exports SL Chat to Moodle Chatroom
• Do quiz in SL using Moodle quiz questions
• Transfer user profile data between SL and Moodle
• Teleport from Moodle Site into SL Class
• Class setup

RegAPI - the Registration API allows you to:

• Register residents for Second Life from your own website
• Track people registering from your site
• Send them to a location of your choice when they first enter Second Life

It is therefore feasible to use your own registration and tracking application to set up users as SL residents, teleport them to the learning content in SL, and read and write to/from the external database using XML-RPC.