A Second Life personalized virtual learning environment based in a semi-immersive 3D virtual world , bring you an aesthetically pleasing teaching and learning platform.
I found this on the sled, a fascinating blog and must see video
I went along to the education faire 2009 and it seemed certainly from my impression though I actually have no statistics to be the largest to date. Some really interesting and unusual exhibits including a group featuring Shakespeare and it seemed a lot of languages. The universities and companies where out in force and there were plenty of freebies to collect and groups to join and people to chat with. These events are always useful as well as being just plain fun, so well done to the organisers and presenters.
Following the completion of my SecondLife Wind Turbine project January 09, I have published the raw spreadsheet results as a pdf file that you can access from this link. The project was the result of work carried out by a group of my level 3 students at Bromley College who are currently enrolled on the BTEC National course in Software Development.
At this point in time I have yet to produce any charts of analysis of the results, though a superficial look at the numbers do give some encouraging signs for the use of the Second Life platform in main stream delivery.
You will see form the data that students have not attempted all questions and this may be a reflection on the size of the final survey, which was larger than I originally intended.
The questions I used here represent a subset of those contained in an original student survey produced by Tanya Joosten, Learning Technology Center, Department of Communication, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
If you have any comments or feedback on the data I would be pleased to hear from you barrys@bromley.ac.uk
The screen shot taken here shows the second group working on the wind turbine project. having managed to accomodate the building they are now in the process of scaling the blades and scripting in the formula to see just how much electrical power is available. So far this has proved to be a very popular and successful project, my initial reservations of translation problems with students moving from Java to Linden Script seem to have been unfounded I am pleased to say.
This week I started to make formal use of SL as part of my course delivery. We get around the college proxy and closed port issues by have a parallel network on a Linux subnet and a dual boot PC facility in one of our workshops. The task that I had set my students, there are around 20 in all, was to create a wind turbine in SL, whose blades would turn in the wind. To keep the project easy I did not use a physical object but demonstrated how the value for wind speed could be found and then fed into llTargetOmega(). For the majority of the students this was their first time in SL. I sent them all a slurl address, which they loaded into their browsers. It did soon became clear to me that bringing anyone into such a rich, immersive and social environment is going to be a pretty overwhelming experiences for the senses, and so after a basic lightning tutorial I simply let them go and explore the facility and have fun for about a hour, which represented the first half of our double period. 
At the start of the second session, I demonstrated building showing how to access my in-world video tutorials. In the first they simply used a note-card giver that provided them a wind strength script, that they placed into a simple block prim, every time they touch the prim, the chat channel displayed wind speed. This was followed by a tutorial on creating the turbine blades and the script needed to rotate them. Finally they all got to texturise their creations and take copies back into Inventories.
I must say that the end result with so many of the devices running though granted not yet generating power, did impress me.
The project will continue over the next couple of weeks so if you would like to teleport over to take a look then please do at :-
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Maritime%20Greenwich/109/9/21.
One aspect of the exercise that did surprise me was the way in which different personalities conduct themselves in an VR like SL, but more of this in the evaluation phase.
Bye for now Skipper Abel
Well the Shimmer Island facility with its programming and scriptimg tutorials, museum of computing, educators resources and crates of freebies is I am pleased to say back in world and running. http://slurl.com/secondlife/Star%20Beach%20Island/196/185/22. As you will find the the layout of the plac is different, as now I have a low prim quater sim. I have abandoned the beach house and made some accomodation of my own. This year I have finally gotten around to running more by way of formal classes and exercises in-world. The first of these is a wind turbine project that the students developed originally using Java, anyway you can read up on this and watch the supporting video material along with a slide show when you get to teleport along. Look forward to seeing you, please feel free to IM or drop a message on the post board, and if you would like to keep in touch with our activities here then why not join the Shimmer group, its completely free.
Bye for now, back soon with a project report, Skipper
Though the facilities at the former Shimmer Island are in a state of redeployment as I install everything on a new SIM, to be announced soon, my work in Second Life still continues. One of the courses I teach is OOP (Object Oriented Programming), and for the project this year, I decided to task my students with writing an application that would calculate the energy in Watts that could be extracted from the wind by a turbine. I started with a lecture on the basic physics involved, and then presented them with a formula, the idea being that they would be able to assimilate the various values (attributes) and any associated calculations into appropriate classes, and generally this has gone well. The next stage will be for them to code and test this in Java. Once the applications are working I will then send them of in a research kind of way, to place their devices, in an imaginary kind of way, at various locations across the UK for which average wind speeds are readily available, should be good. Then I thought, how about getting them to create a wind class that emulates the way in which wind can vary over time, as indeed it does. Then I thought, the wind blows in SL, so why not get them in-world and have the experience of design / modelling? Of course the Java code will have to be translated into LS, but as I found this is not a major problem really. Anyway I placed my own working version on a small islet kindly provided by Tony Lusch at Greenwich Maritime, thanks again for that Tony, and now its just a matter of waiting for the turbine crop to grow. If you would like know how my students get on, then why not pay us a visit over the coming month or so at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Maritime%20Greenwich/109/9/21
Bye for now Skipper Abel
Well the Daydream Island group is no more and with it goes shimmer island. After a number of failed attempts trying to contact the SIM owner, I finally raised a ticket with Linden Labs and Izzy Linden arranged for me to have limited access so that I could retrieve any materials that were not in my inventory. As you can see from the screenshot of the first floor library at the Beach House, everything has been copied and removed.
Still in an optimistic frame of mind however I did elect to leave a message fpr anyone who may happen past the island in the future, though I suspect that such an encounter is less than likely.
So is that the end of the Second Life virtual learning experience? Of course not, I have acquired another island and am busily preparing it for opening, so stay in touch and we will be back. Bye for now Skipper Abel
If you are a regular or even new visitor to the Shimmer Island Site, then you will have noticed that the Daydream Island SIM is currently not available. I personally have no idea why this is, except to say that the plug seems to have been pulled no doubt as a result of issues between LL and the Owners. At this time I have been completely unsuccessful in being to extract any response from the SIM owner and must assume that they are no more. There is of course the possibility that the SIM will get a new owner and us residents get re-instated, who knows. Not wanting to be entirley at the mercy of forces that are clearly way beyond my influence let alone control, I have managed to acquire a new SIM and will be dropping a posting to this blog in due course. So I apologise for the inconvenience, but rest assured Skipper is on the case and from the dust of Shimmer Island a new and all together better SIM will arise.
Bye fro Now SA
Having recently installed the SOHO feature in the Astro-Park, I was having a browse at the image yesterday when I saw the first sunspot, only a smallish one in the upper right of the image here, but there it is and given the obvious hazards associated with observing the sun, having a picture sent down from SOHO to the net each day is certainly more than good enough for me; a truly amazing project. If you would like to know more about SOHO, you can find out by looking the web site http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/. Basically SOHO Solar & Heliospheric Observatory is a joint NASA / ESA space probe that was launched in 1995 to conduct studies of the Sun. The spacecraft actually resides in an orbit some 1.5 million miles from Earth. Why place the SOHO at such a distance? Well in this position it will have an uninterrupted view of the sun while retaining constant a communication with earth, in other words we are all three of us, Sun, SOHO and Earth aligned, clever stuff.
I must admit to having some difficulty with this web page on a prim in SL of recent, as it seems links seem to drop at almost random times loosing the page, if you are suffering similar, or know of a solution please feel free to comment, it would be appreciated.
Anyway here's wishing you good SL observing while socialising everyone back soon Skipper
I have decided to make more of a feature for our closest solar neighbour the Moon. If you have been regular visitor to the Astro-Park, then you will have now doubt seen the regular Lunar phase chart and my large rotating Moon with labels. The new feature, which I have termed the LunarPod, is a three sided panel and on one side you will find the Lunar Phases, but the other two sides feature Lunar Photo Of the Day, basically a web page on a prim and on the third face an innovative facility from Peter Grego in Cornwall UK, where at times of particular interest such as transits and eclipses and the like he streams live images. The next event is due to come on December 01 2008, with the transit of Venus, I am looking forward this and will try and organise some kind of Moon party maybe for SL residents.
Recently, while I was completing the material for Septembers edition of the Astro_Park , which by the way covers the Aurigid meteors, the constellation of Aries and the planet Jupiter, I had a thought on a further implementation of the Sky-Cam board; If you have yet to visit the facility, then the Sky-Cam board features web-page on a prim, the web page in question being a minute by minute snapshot of the sky above Cambridgeshire England courtesy of Paul Beskeen at http://www.beskeen.com. I must admit to being somewhat surprised as to why the thought had not occurred to me before, but why not have the live sky image textured onto the lens of a telescope? On your next trip to the Astro-Park you may like to take a walk into the observatory and there in the eye-piece of the telescope you will see the invitation to Touch for live image, RL skies through SL telescopes, maybe a first?
The second quarter visitor survey results for 2008 are now available at the Beach House on shimmer-Island. This is raw data and is gathered directly from visitors who are invited to take a simple two-question three-option survey on attending virtual classes at the sim and its aesthetic appeal. If you are considering setting up a learning space, a browse over these results may prove useful for you. If you would like to stay in touch with the work here then please feel free to visit anytime and look around and maybe even join the Shimmer-Island group, its open enrolment and free.
If you have visited Shimmer Island before (slurl) then you will have arrived at the beach house and no doubt ventured to the first floor learning resources, which have been in place for a couple of years now and continue to prove popular. In creating these I wanted to produce a learning space with access to materials that allowed us to return to a more intuitive and tactile experience like books as a means of accessing information; when you think about it, asked if anyone would rather use a new library of operating system to get information, you can hazard a safe guess as to their preference.
Just lately though I have been thinking about the way we associate form with function, not just Oh its book and therefore has words to be read, but also, this looks like a library so it musty be full of books! So I began considering breaking with the traditional associations, form from function and explore the possibility, advantages and preference of creating a learning space that appeared to be more in keeping with a relaxing chill-out space, populating it with learning / information resources whose appeared would be more in keeping with their immediate environment rather than function or purpose. For a location, I bought in a new sky platform “Secret garden in the Sky”, which seemed ideal for the project. 
To access these new resources an avatar simply approaches close enough, within 2 meters, at which point a label appears telling what it is, if you are not interested in the content then simply move out of range and the label disappears. Should you wish to open the resource however simply stay in range and the object will morph into a screen, retexture its surface to the opening page? At the moment until web-page on a prim achieves more functionality, I am still employing the use of pop-up windows. 
There is I feel a more ambitious project waiting for me here though in the production of resources that respond to avatars, rather than avatars having to make all the selections and choices, but as I say that’s a further extension of the project. Please feel free to come along to the main beach house anytime and take the teleport to the sky garden and let me know your thoughts and impressions.
Bye for now Skipper
Object-Name: SIBlog
Region: Daydream SE Islands (232960, 246272)
Local-Position: (18, 92, 24)
Hi, like how the place is developing
Flame Firanelli
If you have been along to Shimmer Island, then I suspect you may have taken a teleport up to the Astro-Park. In recent times I have been populating the park with all kinds of astro type resources, but the one resource I have been on the lookout for is a facility that will allow me to display a live image of the night sky, after all lets face it, surely one of the great pleasures in astronomy is actually seeing real stars. Anyway the other day I decided to get on top of this one and see what could be done and I came across a web site run by Paul Beskeen at http://www.beskeen.com Paul runs a whole sky camera linked to his server that streams images to the web every 60 seconds. Well it’s just as well web page on prim came along recently because it was no great task to get the images displaying. An avatar touches the screen and the stream switches on displaying the latest image, now if the avatar remains within 4 meters, then a scanner will reload the page every minute, if you move away then the default texture is returned and the stream closes. 
So what can you see? Well as you can see this is a day time shot, but I would safely say stars down to magnitude 3 / 4, and we may be lucky enough to capture the odd meteor trail. All in all its well worth a look and by the way if you would like to join the Shimmer group and stay in touch with all our latest resources, then you can open enrol and membership is free.
Look forward to any feedback, by for now Skipper
The title of this posting as you can see is in fact taken from the book of the same name, you can pick up a copy used real cheap from Amazon and I can recommend it. I found my copy in a charity shop and it makes compelling reading. The story line is based around a journey through the RL-VR world of LambdaMOO. If you are intrigued by the blurring and merging of SL and RL, with all the moral, legal, aesthetic and philosophical connotations of functioning in both realities, then I feel you will certainly find this book worth a dip, and when was it published – 1998, that’s ten years ago and eight years before I got into SL!
I ran our first in college professional development for Second Life the other day with staff. Though I know many colleges have vulnerabilities regarding the ports that SL requires to be open, we have managed to get around that by having a subnet that bypasses the firewall and so is physically separate, though of course we do also require a partitioned open Windows build at the client. After demonstrating my place in SL and its main features, everyone went onto the net and signed in for an SL account, logged in and started the tour of Orientation Island. All in all the feedback for the event scored between Good and Very Good, so that’s encouraging. Having started , I guess the next stage is going to be in developing a strategy for the systems deployment as part of our main stream programmes.
