I’m wondering why I haven’t heard more about innovative cost-sharing in Second Life. When I ask people about it, they usually tell me that cost sharing is accomplished through subletting land at a reasonable price. This is often seen as a solution for institutions who are new to Second Life, it allows them to explore their options with little long-term commitment. The New Media Consortium does this; their rates aren’t the lowest, but they do provide a lot of extras (auditoriums, sandboxes, orientation spaces). Gavin Dudeney has sublet land for years now at the Edunation Archipelago. He rents to institutions and individuals, providing the newcomers with a home base, as well as a community of supportive neighbours . There are quite a number of other people who do this, too.
Subletting is a good idea if you are new and like the community support, but it’s not the only model for cost sharing. Ellie Brewster, my avatar, was wandering around Second Life the other day, and she stumbled upon Island 18 & The Strand, which is a good example of what I’m talking about. Ellie, as you may know, is a somewhat reckless and foolhardy avatar. She probably should have asked for an invitation, as this project is under construction, but she poked around these sims anyway. It looks like a great project, a collaboration between the University of Adelaide, Murdoch University and Illinois State University. There’s a lot of good building, particularly the 18th century town that’s at the centre of Island 18.
What is so completely brilliant about this project is the idea of sharing with someone from a radically different time zone. Your students are using it while theirs are sleeping, and it’s really easy for students to work on collaborative projects during the “twilight times.” Unlike most educational sims, which must concern themselves with publicizing the university that paid for the sim (we’ve all got to please the Administration), this sim is themed to the discipline, which makes it eminently shareable. If you know anyone else who is doing this kind of cost-sharing, let me know.
A third strategy for cost sharing is to utilize the open nature of virtual worlds. When we first arrive in Second Life, teachers often dream of doing something really ambitious, but we soon learn that a faithful reproduction of the Great Wall of China or a full-cast roleplay of the Wars of the Roses is going to cost us a lot of time, to say nothing of the institutional cash we’ll have to win with grant proposals. That’s why it’s wonderful that there are so many generous teachers in SL who allow their work to be used by others. Ellie has found a lot in Second Life that connects with her Women’s Studies teaching. She’s taken her students dancing at the Cotton Club in Virtual Harlem, where they explored issues in women’s history, her classes have toured virtual art galleries and museums to critique the way gender is presented, they’ve seen presentations on gender and identity by students at other universities, and they’ve visited the Virtual Hallucinations Lab and partied at Wheelies to learn about inclusiveness. All of this was possible because builders generously leave their sims open to visitors.
Leaving our work open to students from other universities costs us nothing, and if our work is useful to others it can give our reputation a boost. It also promotes social learning among students and allows them to communicate across disciplines and political boundaries. Seems to be a win-win situation.
There is another strategy that Ellie’s beginning to see in Second Life, and she’s undecided about whether it’s a positive one. An example is the Theatron project, an archipelago of theatrical sims associated with The Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College, London.
Ellie had mixed views about Theatron. Some of it is incredibly primmy, with too much focus on detail and little attention to how avatars will really use the space. But there are also some really well-made replicas and historical stage sets, with lots of room for avatar actors. The sets are reserved ahead of time, and called up by a holo-rezzer. A teacher could just bring her class, rez the stage, and jump right into her lesson. There would be no time spent on design, and reserving time on the sim would mean no waste in a teacher’s budget.
The advantages of a system like this are obvious, but there may be a downside. If this model of sim usage becomes widespread, do we risk teaching in a standardized Second Life, producing a standardized educational product? Will there be fewer quirky, individualist approaches to educational building?
Ellie likes quirky. Individualist is OK with her. So she’s not so sure she’s happy about this new approach to content. On the one hand, many teachers either can’t build, they don’t want to, or they just don’t have the time. On the other hand, the ability to create content in Second Life not only enriches what we teach, but can also provoke new insights for both teacher and student. There is probably a middle ground to be found here, but isn’t there a danger that the increasing interest in virtual worlds will encourage for-profit content creators, and establish a less varied educational landscape?
What I prefer when it comes to the set up of virtual environments for clas instruction is, to give each teacher a room we shaped very prim effective. Teachers then have their wellknown material exposed and the students can get back between lessons for additional practise, in case they don’t have a place to rezz the material on their own.
Also for our visitors it’s a good solution, as they can get an idea of the activity at BABEL Language School.
We have our stuff stored in Media Boards, covering pictures/pages and the connected audio content. Furthermore we sell these units for auto didactiacl use, so those, who want to, can try on their own – in these cases there are also task cards incorperated, so the learner gets ways and ideas to actively work with the new language content.
Using the learning material again and again doesn’t mean, that we statically do the same work with each student, but it gives all a structure to move forward to the next level of foreign language proficiency. In addition to the structured educational material we have exposed and in use, the teacher and the students also take supplemental methods and learning activities into account – depending on the needs, the student’s desired language skills lead to.
There is a lot more to say – on our own blog we have published periodically about our approaches.
http://virtualonlinelanguagelearning.wordpress.com/
Mike Meltzer – BABEL Language School at Second Life
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Pak/75.1802/243.052
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Cost-effectiveness was one of the topics I alluded to in my predictions for 2010, including the sim-sharing model (http://tidalblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/predictions-for-2010.html). Nice to see the prediction come true! There are other examples of collaborative discipline-based cost-sharing, one being the closed sim Pharmatopia (http://www.pharm.monash.edu.au/education/epharm/pharmatopia.html). Collaboration with non-profits, having your own builds distributed across the grid and temporary rentals are other possibilities I am being forced to actively consider. The distributed concept was, of course, pioneered by Literature Alive! Gavin is actually reducing his presence significantly inworld though I am glad to say that others are stepping up, an indicator of how successful he has been (http://www.theconsultants-e.com/edunation/edunation.asp).
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Glad you liked the Theatron resources. I was the project manager of the project so thought I’d respond to your comments.
We’d all agree that the last thing we’d want to see is Theatron being used as a model for _all_ educational product in Second Life. The advantage of SL as a platform is it supports not only a wide variety of uses, but a huge range of different interpretations of what it is actually _for_. In fact the way I’ve used Theatron in my own teaching is to take students on a tour of that site, but also theatres created for performance in SL (e.g. the SL Shakespeares’s Globe) and stages that have only ever existed in SL (such as the Caledon Gaiety) and ask students to look at the differences.
One of the big debates when we were originally planning the project was how big to build the models. We finally went for 1:1 ratio after a lot of deliberation. The Theatron team are very much interested in the archaeology of theatres, and although having them inhabited was the whole reason to recreate them in SL, historical accuracy still needed to come first. This can mean that a typical avatar will be bumping its head as it walks around, so we recommend people shrink them slightly. That’s also why there’s the amount of detail that’s there. They’re more there to be looked at than performed in, although we’d also like performances to take place too. In short, we had to choose between augmentationist or immersionist approach and we went for augmentationist, not because one is more valid than the other, but doing both wasn’t possible and of the two, that’s what our priorities were.
If you’d like to use them at any time, please get in touch – my email address is on the website – they’re free for the community.
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Thanks, Mark,
Everyone at Theatron has been so helpful to me.
I’m really looking forward to trying out the spaces, and maybe someday I will live down that “primmy” comment.
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🙂 Actually your comments came at a really useful time for me – I was asked today to comment on the design decisions we made and the line “little attention to how avatars will really use the space” was spot on – not because we accidentally ignored it, but because that had to take a back seat to the other things we were doing. Looking at the differences between our Globe and the SL Shakespeare Company’s underlines the effect of these different decisions. Look for me inworld if you want some support with using the resources : I’m Gann McGann.
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Thanks for this most informative piece. Being an owner of real estate in TSL, Sparta Island, (EduSim) we are always looking for cost cutting ideas in the hopes of riding out this economic storm in education, yet adhering to the goals of the sim. We might be looking into the idea of sub-leasing to teens as a sort of entrepreneurial incubator, as they create their own business.
James Fullerton RL
Jimmie Veeper SL
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Thanks so much for these kind words about Island 18 and The Strand, which I direct from Illinois State in collaboration with my colleagues at the U. of Adelaide, Murdoch U., the U of Tasmania, and the U of South Whales. I’ve never met these colleagues in person but, because of our work together, feel like we’re a kind of scholarly family working together toward the same goals. This is what publishing, sharing research in text, attending conferences, etc. is all about, of course — creating a community and being part of a conversation with others with the same interests, expertise, and goals — but SL has let us realize that in a whole new way.
We’ve only just begun making these sister projects all that we’d like them to be and are relieved to know that fellow SL educators think we might be on the right track. Funding has been a major issue for us. We hadn’t started our collaboration thinking that cost-sharing would be so effective, but it turns out that our universities are also more interested in helping to fund projects with international partnerships, so it’s working for us as faculty/researchers and for the administrations of our universities.
I appreciate so much that you recognized and find value in our idea to make this an environment driven by, and representative of, our scholarly discipline rather than solely by and about our individual universities. We have so much work left to do to get the word out to those out there as passionate about 18th-century culture as we are, but the work is rewarding.
Perhaps it’s because my main research interests are in the archives, touching old books with my hands, looking at bindings and smelling the pages, that I am partial to the pedagogical strategy of having students build themselves, but that approach to teaching a past culture has been eye-opening. My own building process, too, has been enlightening. I feel like I’m learning so much about this period through details I never even noticed or questioned, and that curiosity is contagious in the classroom. Two recent articles are mostly about that. One was out with Academic Exchange Quarterly last winter 2009 on “Composing Virtual Gardens” about how designing and building Alexander Pope’s Twickenham helped a student better understand his poetry, and another essay is due out soon in Educational Research (co-authored by myself and Carol Matthews at U of Adelaide) on how the social-networking tools in SL are helping students realize that literary history is itself a history of social networking.
Anyway, sorry for those obvious plugs, but I wanted to say thank you again as well as provide some more context for the project. We always welcome visitors and feedback even as the project is in progress; really, I think it will always be a rough draft! As my students said last spring, our island is like a homemade birthday card — sometimes not very professional looking, a bit messy, not efficiently crafted, but the thought was in the process!
Katherine Ellison RL
Boswell Sideways SL
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