This post by my virtual world guru, Ener Hax, was too timely not to repost here:

i have written about FERPA a few times in the past, but always in relation to Second Life

FERPA is an American privacy act specific to K-12 and universities – the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. many countries have similar laws and some teachers and professors use Second Life despite violating FERPA, which the Second Life privacy policy allows. Linden Lab collects user account information (of course, or how could it have a log in service) and also “may collect and retain any other information relating to your account data or in-world activities including chat or IM logs, . . .”. that last bit is where FERPA can be violated

i know that's right! =p

it is against American law to disclose a student’s grade on an assignment or course through any means without the student’s written permission (or to disclose any personal information). FERPA is so tight that even a school within a university can not share student information with another school in that same university without the student’s written consent!

to go further, K-12 teachers and university professors can not share grades via email unless it is 100% secure. a teacher at My High School can never send an email regarding grades or personal student information to a student’s Gmail account

that’s what brings me to write this post – Google’s new privacy policy. Google offers their convenient enterprise solutions to educational institutions to use and include email, docs, video, blogs, and almost every Google offering (many schools do use these services)

under FERPA, a school can outsource email but only if the service provider is subject to the same terms that the school is. Google is not subject to FERPA and the burden is on the school and not on Google to be compliant with FERPA

this same compliance applies to virtual worlds. that’s why the safest way to implement OpenSim is on your own institution’s firewalled servers or possibly via sim-on-a-stick (which is ideal since it is a closed individual system – dang, i need to start selling sim-on-a-stick and buy that south pacific island!) =)

this doesn’t mean that educators and students can’t use Kitely, In-Worldz, or 3rd Rock; it just means they need to not talk about grades while in-world

I keenly read Ener’s posts and I am almost as passionate about virtual worlds but from a slightly differing perspective. They can be a wonderfully immersive media that can increase user engagement particularly in training and education.

In education circles we like to discuss learning styles such as visual, auditory, and kinesthetic (tactile). There are other models as well and today we recognize that learners often use a combination and that the styles for a learner may change day to day.

The more styles we can intertwine into educational materials and techniques, the greater the chances are that our learners will learn what we are teaching them.

Reading text and looking at illustrations access certain parts of our brain. Writing information relative to what we are learning accesses other parts of the brain (thus the value of written activities). Reading aloud accesses yet different areas as does teaching our newly learned information to others (such as a mentoring program).

With virtual worlds, I believe we engage additional areas of the brain as well as parts of the brain accessed via “standard” learning styles. Virtual worlds allow us to engage with the learner’s imagination and trigger thoughts of touch, smell, sound, the visual, and the kinesthetic (such as a scripted object reacting to the avatar) – the same senses we access in a real life situations. This increases the learner’s engagement, the immersion provided by the imagination, when their avatar is placed into a virtual world.

I contend that we may even engage more deeply with the user because of the simple look that OpenSim presents as contrasted with more sophisticated graphics such as Blender imported into Unity. This simpler look, sometimes referred to as cartoon class in comments to Ener’s blog, forces the user to fill in details and use their imagination to a greater degree.

Playing ‘Call of Duty: Black Ops’ is something done by millions but I don’t believe it engages the imagination as much as OpenSim can. Think about how Legos engage the imagination, how the unseen movie monster is typically scarier than the one revealed, or playing army or having a tea party when you are little. The imagination lets us fill in what we think the situation calls for.

Happy Halloween and think about how scary the dark can be when our minds are left to wander and wonder.

One of the tenets of Enclave Harbor is to help raise environmental awareness while teaching middle school kids a little “real life” science via virtual field trips.  It is fitting to look at the environmental costs of computer usage since we are using OpenSim on a dedicated server that is on 24/7.

Today a perfect opportunity arose to explore this on a personal level.

I use Defraggler regularly on my work and home computers. Today I updated to the latest version of Defraggler and it has a new “Health” tab (see below). I was intrigued at the total number of hours that my work machine has been powered on.

My work PC has been on for a total of 14,924 hours over the last five years. I am the second “owner” of this box and the only time I leave it on overnight is for Blender renders (time consuming 3D graphics and animations).

If this power supply runs at 500 watts that means the PC has used 7,462 kilowatt-hours of electricity during that time.

In the US, the average cost per kilowatt is 13.4 cents (June ’11 national average – double that for Hawai’i). It has cost my company $999.91 in electricity to power this computer over the last 5 years. That’s only to power the box and does not include the dual monitors or any servers I access for work files.

Let’s compare my machine’s ~$200 a year cost with two hypothetical scenarios – one in which the machine is on eight hours a day, five days a week for 50 weeks a year and one left on 24/7.

• 8 hours X 5 days X 50 weeks = 2,000 hours or $134.00 a year in electricity
• 24 hours X 7 days X 52 weeks = 8,736 hours or $585.31 a year

That is a difference of $451.31 in one year! Or 4.37 times more electricity!

If we extend these scenarios to a company with 300 employees then we would have a difference of $135,393.00 in one year!

The numbers speak for themselves.

also posted on iliveisl.com

I have been following a discussion in LinkedIn’s Virtual World group that has taken a shift into an area of interest to me. It will come to no surprise to the reader’s of Ener Hax’s iliveisl blog to learn that this shift was loudly accented by our own Ener.

Linda Rogers (Bread and Roses | Music Island), whom I have a deep respect for and who has a comprehensive knowledge of Second Life, started this shift and brings up a great point in a conversation with Ener.

With heavy editing below, here is part of the thread to set the stage for my two cents.

Linda: I frequently run into educators that are new to Second Life, because one of the places they tend to visit (if they are interested in the Arts) is my music series. It is amazing how frequently I meet educators in their first week who are just blown away by things they have visited, the virtual Dresden Museum, the virtual Sistine Chapel, historical sims, science sims, space and ocean sims. AND they want to bring their Grade 3 class to see something and explore. That’s when they find out with a shock that Second Life is not open to children.

These educators want a world with the quality and depth of content of SL available in a child-friendly environment.

Ener: well the good news is that educators can have that same experience in OpenSim! =)  because everything that was built in Second Life can be built in OpenSim. a teacher could build it themselves, create a consortium of like-minded teachers and do it as a project, or even hire others

Linda: Linden Lab has indicated clearly that they are disinterested in retaining Educators.There’s clearly room for someone else to take that ball and run with it.

Ener: if a group of teachers can organize, then a great number of things can be built. i think if all disparate OpenSim educational efforts could loosely come together, people would be surprised at the tremendous volume of educational material out there. Linda, you hit on a very good point and i believe that it is up to teachers to form this and not some corporate entity =)

Linda and Ener have hit upon a very good point indeed!

Second Life was the first “create anything you want” virtual world that saw mainstream media attention and attracted many people who did come and build fantastic places.

We all know what Linden Lab thinks of education – the layoff of many that dealt with education, such as Pathfinder Linden, the closure of the teen grid, and the cessation of the educational/not-for-profit discount.

Second Life does have a large amount of interesting builds and, unfortunately, many have disappeared due to a number of factors. However, there is no longer the need to pin all hopes on a corporate entity that will make choices to serve itself over that of education.

The advances and stability seen in OpenSimulator make it nearly as viable as Second Life. The one exception, in my opinion, is the physics engine.

The challenges in creating an educational consortium, which could be as simple as a list of Grid URIs and a sentence about each, include some of the following:

• semi-private grids, such as our Enclave Harbor
• grids existing on local servers, in the school or district
• classroom grids on local machines, such as Eric Nauman’s
• grids behind firewalls
• grids on teacher’s personal computers at home

There are further variations but even with hypergrid-enabled regions, not all grids will be able, nor necessarily want, to connect into a large consortium. With Second Life, we were all in this one single “walled garden” which invoked a community feel that made it more natural to want to share your work. Often, sims were paid for from school budgets and did not represent as deep a personal investment as some OpenSim grids do. To compound this, many Second Life builds were heavily comprised of “things” that were bought or found for free.

To use Enclave Harbour as an example, Ener has created every item we have in-world, even trees. This makes for a more personal investment into OpenSim than in Second Life. Buying a chair for fifty cents is easier to share with others than a chair you may have spent a few hours creating. Add to that the more “gritty” feel that running your own server has and its expense and somehow it feels more emotional than it did in Second Life (even though we pay what one educationally discounted sim cost and have 16 sims). This may simply be my own bias, but I am protective of Ener’s work and value it greatly. I confess to not seeing much value in being open to the public. It may sound callous, but I bet my feelings are not that different from others who have gone through the trouble to establish their own grid and have all of their content custom-made.

However, a consortium of educational OpenSim grids could have great value in the larger scheme of K-16 education.

I would like to see this consortium include linkages with community colleges and universities. The educational grids could serve as “feeders” to higher education institutions and this is something that would hold value to me. If students going through Enclave Harbour resulted in a higher number of students pursuing science studies in college (particularly STEM with emphasis on reducing its gender gap), then I would open our grid up because this meant that a real relationship existed between us and a college (or colleges). This would add value to our grid in a way that benefited us and the partnering college, in effect our program would have value to the students and to the college.

If you are interested in being part of a listing of educational grids, even if you are fully private, let me know. I would be glad to start a listing (perhaps even self-registration via public Google Docs). Private grids being listed may help others gauge the size and richness of OpenSim educational work in a way analogous to Second Life and spark new ways to look at OpenSim for education.

also posted at iliveisl

A US House bill looks to eliminate Ed Tech spending as they “trim the fat” from the Federal budget.

Many Education Technology programs fund expensive endeavors and many of those endeavors are only realised at more privileged schools. Two challenges with the more expensive technologies often come in the form of on-going training for teachers and the maintenance of associated hardware. Many schools in the US have unused technology gathering dust due to a lack of training in their use or overdue maintenance sometimes due to cost. I see 3D projectors following that same route in time – broken and lost 3D glasses, LCD projector bulbs that cost far too much, and the novelty of 3D wearing off for students (a past post of mine on this).

Education Technology includes many types of technology for use in the classroom and in “virtual” schools. In this definition, virtual schools don’t have much to do with virtual worlds. They are a distance learning approach to help reach out to students that are unable to attend a brick and mortar school (this is a gross over simplification on my part). Half of the states in the US have adopted some form of virtual school and we should expect this to grow in importance, adoption, and efficacy.

While trimming Education Technology can be short-sighted, I have always looked at Science in the classroom as a discipline that does not need the “latest and greatest” in order to be effective and even exciting to students.

I did immensely enjoy the multimedia auditoriums that I taught in when I was with Miami-Dade College but that may have had as much to do with teaching as it did with my love of creating content with Flash. It was fun to see my work displayed on a big screen with state-of-the-art audio. However, I also have taught in a secondary school setting where resources where limited and the first school I taught at was one where I would bring my own VCR, strapped to the back of my scooter, to my classroom. The VCR comment should sufficiently date that time period!

Regardless of State or Federal funding, or of the wealth of a school district, technology does not always need to be expensive. OpenSimulator is open source virtual world software and can be run on average computers. While not every student in America has access to a computer, a good deal more students do than those with access to the “latest and greatest” education technology.

If you are in a situation where you do have the latest technology then more power to you but for many schools, even before this proposed budget cuts, education technology was a yearly line item that was often crossed out.

In those situations resourceful and passionate teachers find ways to excite their students and I have seen fine examples using OpenSim for this. A semi-technical and patient person will be able to install OpenSim on a server but barring a server, much can be done with Ener Hax’s “sim on a stick“. The latest version of OpenSimulator is available online as a zipped file that can be run on a USB drive or simply copied to anyplace on a PC (unfortunately this build does not work on Macs).

The “stick” version is for individual use and not for collaborative group work like you could do with a server deployed version (for server installation, see Dr. Lopes’ five step install instructions). Many activities can be done with this stick version when you view it as a tool and 3D application. Science is my focus but OpenSim can, and is, used for architecture, storytelling, filming, engineering, and art.

Imagine creating a water cycle that students could walk around in rather than just looking at a drawing, or having students create a giant plant cell as a project. You are more limited by your imagination than by technology.

Having Federal funding cut for Educational Technology is a shame with long term repercussions but that does not mean your students need to suffer.

Be innovative and explore the possibilities.

With OpenSim on a USB drive, you can explore this while riding the train or maybe visiting the in-laws (shhh, I don’t really mean that . . .).

http://simonastick.com

cinema lobby built on a USB thumb drive

cinema lobby built on a USB thumb drive

reposted from iliveisl

It is no news that iPad fever sweeping the world, but for eLearning it causes grief and some retooling. Many eLearning tools output to Flash and it’s not just video but interactions such as tests, software simulations, and so on. Some of these interactions simply can not be recreated by other means (especially complex, multi-step software simulations). With iPad’s massive appeal and the slowness of Android or Chrome-based tablets to enter the market, the iPad is becoming the de facto tablet in business and schools.

I just read a post about a 1,000 student private school which is making iPads mandatory next year for all students from the 4th to the 12th grade. I do like the use of good technology for education and using tablets can eliminate the need for books and their subsequent weight toted about by students (much research has been done on the negative affects of heavy book bags on developing children).

There are other tablets out there, such as the Kno which is made specifically for education, but they have been slow in coming to market. I have been keeping an eye on the Archos 10.1 which is available for just under $300 but it has not made much of a splash. The sheer volume of iPads out there just make it the easier one to buy and the standard to measure all others against.

I have a client that deployed 2,500 of them last month and they are ordering more! Another client was an early adopter and has over 5,000 in their organization. For me, designing to the iPad is increasingly a “must”.

What about laptops compared to tablets when it comes to education?

The Google Cr48 with the Chrome operating system is being deployed for free in some pilot programs with schools and is designed to run off of the cloud. You can’t install programs on it and, oddly enough, it has no caps lock (a feature this two finger, head down typist would greatly benefit from) but it also faces the iPad ubiquity challenge.

Some colleges evaluating tablets and laptops have found that students are more likely to take notes and be attentive in classes when using tablets. This is in large part due to the tablet’s form factor – it is designed to lay flat and be used much like a paper notebook. You can’t “hide” behind the screen as easily as you can with a laptop. Farmville crops just have to wait until class is over!

How does this affect OpenSim?

Currently, there is no decent way to interact with an OpenSim grid via the iPad. Even with the Google Cr48 laptop, you can’t install a viewer. Browser-access seems to be the only viable option for accessing OpenSim grids but so far no one has launched a suitable way to do this. As Ener Hax reported on iliveisl, Canvas by Tipodean made a small splash in December but seems to have gone silent (five images on Flickr don’t instill much confidence in me nor does Ener’s unacknowledged invitation response). Linden Lab’s Project Skylight using Gaikai‘s cloud-based gaming service also seems to be stagnant but looked very promising.

WebGL might be the answer but would seem to be at least a year off for most of us. Ener Hax explored this with KataSpace and posted a review and a video – this seems the closest thing so far and is available for anyone to try for themselves.

Assuming a workable browser-based solution does come along, how would a finger driven display work for moving your avatar through an OpenSim world?

It would be nice to have iPad and tablet access to OpenSim grids and would help our own endeavor of Enclave Harbour, as well as that of many educators. A “read only” access would meet many needs and keep the browser from becoming a gaming engine (think of this similarly to the Flash authoring environment as the regular viewer where you can build and script and browser-access as analogous to SWF content online where you can interact but not create).

OpenSim is a great tool and, to stay relevant, some way to view it on an iPad is needed.

reposted on iliveisl

Virtual worlds are experiencing rapid growth due to several factors and their future is being defined now.

The first, and most important, are the availability of alternatives to Second Life. There have been, and are, other virtual worlds out there, but with the ease of in-world building tools, Second Life has enjoyed widespread adoption.

Secondly, the cost of the alternatives. The finest OpenSim hosting is a fraction the cost of Second Life. While we have 16 “sims”, in reality we have four SL-equivalent sims when measured by hardware. This results in about $40 per sim versus $295.

A third reason for OpenSim growth is adoption. As more people try it out and report their successes (like Ener Hax at iliveisl.com), more people venture out from Second Life or venture into virtual worlds for the first time as true users.

When OpenSim becomes as common place as Apache then it may become a “one-click install” much like WordPress and MOODLE are through GoDaddy, HostGator, and many hosting companies.

OpenSim is relatively new; it takes a few years for technologies to become the “latest thing”. Twitter was started in 2006 but was not saturated with media coverage until 2008 and 2009. OpenSim also has the burden to overcome some of Linden Lab’s stigma.

Currently, Second Life is a closed system requiring an account specific to it for access. It is natural for others to use this same model for OpenSim. After all, Second Life enjoyed over a hundred million user hours in the last year; not a bad model to want to emulate.

However, to quote Mitch Wagner today: “Second Life is not successful“; so perhaps emulating that model may not be the most prudent approach. It is easy to think that in running your own commercial grid you will not make the same mistakes that Linden Lab has. However, running a grid with 100 concurrent users is vastly different than 80,000.

In my opinion, which is admittedly biased, creating a community grid that is “better than Second Life” will always tie you to a Second Life comparison and inhibit innovation. Placing the same people in the same roles using the same model yields the same results.

“Community” grids have their place of course, just like blogger or Ning, but they lack the flexibility and freedom of self-hosted solutions. In the end, the abillity to host OpenSim on your own server will prevail, much like today’s internet and intranets.

OpenSim grids will, and do, have firewalled intranet-like portions and also external hypergrid-enabled parts.  After all, universities have their websites hosted by their own IT departments in their own data centres, why would they choose a third-party community grid to host their virtual worlds? True communities will emerge from hypergrid technology just as Justin Clark-Casey presented in his Oxford Masters dissertation.

There will always be individuals who choose to be part of communities just like being part of a Farmville group or LinkedIn, but for educational or business use, OpenSim will be on your own turf.

OpenSim will have “arrived” when it is no longer the focus as it is now; when it becomes a part of standard server software and easily implementable by corporate and institutional IT departments, and even individuals like myself who use it for eLearning and education.

Virtual worlds are still novel but will eventually become another tool to communicate with, just like the many technologies that make up today’s web.

the one & only Ener Hax

If you looked at Second Life during the media frenzy a few years ago but could not overcome obstacles to adopt it, it may be time to explore OpenSim. You can even set it up for free and build real content that you can use for eLearning like I have spoken about for the eLearning Guild. In fact, the techniques I presented work very well on a USB deployed version of OpenSim!

I have gone to exclusively using “sim-on-stick” for my eLearning endeavors because I don’t need to hurdle our corporate firewall to obtain access to the proper ports. For educational use, we use SimHost as our solution provider because our grid needs to be accessible by students.

Using SimHost is analogous to using a website host and they offer the most hardware for the dollar and are run by a core OpenSim developer and an OSGrid administrator.

There is no time like the present and it is a very exciting time for virtual worlds.

reposted on iliveisl.com

Education used to be fun. We all remember that one great teacher that turned us on to some topic or at least made it fun. Somewhere along the way, education and learning became somewhat separated. Not intentionally, but as a result of some who wanted to make it better, and who genuinely thought they were making it better.

In the U.S. we saw the development of Federal policy where “teaching to the test” overrode teaching for the sake of education. This is a gross generalization to be certain and chances are that if you have been reading Ener’s blog posts on OpenSim you are not “that” kind of teacher. I would bet that you are the type of teacher that students will remember and the type of teacher that truly believes they do make a difference. And you do.

Using OpenSim is a skill set that you do not need to have to be a teacher. No teacher certification depends on your ability to teleport or terraform. If you are a teacher reading this post and actively involved in using virtual worlds, or just starting to explore them as a possible tool, take a moment to acknowledge that you care and that your passion pushes you to knock your head against the virtual wall. Learning to use virtual worlds takes effort but it can also be fun. And that is the key isn’t it? Learning can also be fun.

OpenSim allows you to create learning activities for your students and allows your students to learn using a very different and rich medium. Depending on your school, resources, students and their resources you can do many things with OpenSim. From assigning projects where students build their own objects or worlds to creating simulations to making large scale models of molecules or even of the human heart that you could walk through. These types of possibilities are why you read all that you can on OpenSim and spend your own time learning it. The biggest limit is your time because, if I have judged you correctly, you have more ideas of things to do with OpenSim than you can possibly create.

Virtual worlds are now on the upswing according to Gartner and decisions like Linden Lab just made about eliminating their educational discount is causing a stir in educational communities. Some of you saw the possibilities of virtual worlds a few years ago but could not take advantage of them because of cost and access. Now with the fresh activity of news you may just be learning about OpenSim and seeing that it is much easier to explore than Second Life ever was. If you have not had a chance to explore OpenSim, maybe try OpenSim on your own. Ener has done a wonderful job talking about running OpenSim on a USB drive, right down to even discussing a very reasonably priced drive that works very well (I now also use the Patriot USB drive and it works very well). The passion that Ener has is only hinted at with the iliveisl blog and what you don’t see are the hours spent exploring things like “sim on a stick” so that an honest and down to earth assessment of it can be made and presented to you.

That same passion is being expressed in our endeavor of Enclave Harbour. We are exploring OpenSim as a contextual learning instrument. True contextual learning involves real places with real meaning to students. For example, contextual learning goes beyond learning that kinetic energy can be harnessed by turbines to create electricity to looking at the world around you and recognizing that there are many mundane instances of kinetic energy that could be harnessed. In the traditional teaching of turbine-generated electricity you could discuss wind turbines, hydro-electric plants, nuclear energy, and tidal and wave power. Those are great examples but many don’t exist in the context the student is living in. They simply become something to learn that may not hold particular relevance and thus may be quickly forgotten.

Ener did a great job, right down to performing the math, in building an example of harnessing kinetic energy that many students are able to relate to - flushing a toilet! In true Ener fashion, this commode is atop a building that is one metre taller than the current tallest building in the world.

When I taught private school, I might have hesitated using that example because of the ensuing chaos that would erupt in class (students making jokes for days, jumping off the virtual building, and other things that I am sure I would need to explain to principals and parents – but after blowing the light covers off a few times with experiments, these activities just get chalked up to “oh that Mr. Miller . . .”). Actually, I would have loved that example and love it when students get so excited about an idea that they run with it, even in silly directions. Some of the silliest things lead to the most serious of scientific discoveries (like harnessing the power of wastewater from high-rise buildings!).

My contention (and seemingly distant Ph.D. rides on this) is that a virtual world, such as one created with OpenSim, can lead to effective contextual learning. Having “physical” places created in a mixed urban and rural setting, such as Enclave Harbour, helps students see how connected these things truly are. This immersion makes learning fun for both educator and student and is, in my opinion, effective contextual learning.

Anything that you build in OpenSim represents something in the real world, at least in the mind of others experiencing it. Even if what you build is pure fantasy, such as a floating night club. You look at the object, maybe even walk around in the object and your mind tries to correlate it to a real object – it tries to place it into context – a context that you can see yourself in.

As another example, Ener is working on a space station to explore various topics taught as cycles – such as the water, carbon, and nitrogen cycles. As soon as you enter a closed system like a space station, your mind starts to wonder “what if” and you can more easily understand how these cycles are indeed “closed”. Then, in moving from the space station to the desalination plant, you can better understand the water cycle and our relation to it – the context of us, as humans, in that cycle.

Contextual learning: it’s one of the many things that makes OpenSim fun for educators, the ability to create a context, and makes for effective teaching and fun learning for students by placing them in that context.

reposted from iliveisl

What is Enclave Harbour and why being counted in OpenSim stats don’t matter?

Counting the regions that come and go in OpenSim is a bit like counting sites using Flash was ten years ago. Flash was new and allowed for new things to be accomplished in the World Wide Web. Today, Flash has enjoyed a bit of news with Steve Jobs waging his war against useless content on the web. Steve Jobs can do anything he likes but I take offense to him making the decision on what is useful and of lasting value on the web.

Apart from that, Flash has enjoyed ubiquitous reach and is a part of a great many things, including being a large and significant part of eLearning. Ten years ago there was a lot of bad Flash and so many “Skip Intro” buttons that it’s a wonder it did become mainstream. Today Flash serves many purposes and for the most part, people don’t realize that they are using it.

OpenSim may become like that one day, a vehicle to deliver an experience, eLearning, entertainment, or any of a number of things that have shaped the Internet into such an important part of modern day life.

No one counts the number of sites using Flash because Flash is so well integrated.

No one needs to count Enclave Harbour because it is a vehicle to teach with. Enclave Harbour does not rent land to others and is just a medium like a photograph in a school text book is. If we do our job well (and Ener is an ace at building these activities out) then the OpenSim part of Enclave Harbour will simply be just the instrument and not the focus.

Our grid runs so incredibly well that no one will think about lag and thus can focus on the activities, which is its entire purpose. When you view this or that on the web, you don’t wonder what version of Apache that site is running. When you watch Lord of the Rings, you don’t wonder what brand of microphones they used or how many they used. If Enclave Harbour can achieve its goal to be part of reaching out and teaching kids science, then we will have achieved a good thing.

I would like to see OpenSim reach the level that Flash has been at for years, to be a vehicle to deliver content. With great hosts like James at SimHost and the passion of the core OpenSim developers, this goal is become a reality.

So don’t count us as simply a set of OpenSim regions, that has little value except to show others that OpenSim is hitting the proverbial nail on the head as a great platform for delivering immersive content.

Now to get back to writing and I hope I do justice to all the wonderful work our Ener is doing!

Ener's OpenSim work

Publication use of OpenSim work

reposted on iliveisl

With Second Life’s Teen Grid closing in December, where does that leave the educational use of virtual worlds?

Adult education can carry on but K-12 may need to change. Certainly those working with students under 16 will need an alternative. Those working with students 16 and older may also want an alternative rather than be tossed into the main grid.

Over the last year, the trend seems to be social use for Second Life and education/business use for OpenSim-based virtual worlds.

Closing the Teen Grid is a clear indicator that education is not a priority for Linden Lab.

One alternative is to abandon virtual worlds entirely. Some educators will do this from lack of time, resources, and/or out of frustration.

Creating a good inworld presence takes a very real commitment. It can also require access to good content.

Not everyone is like our Ener Hax and just makes the commitment to create anything needed. Ener has also developed deep relationships with talented people who contribute to our work in Enclave Harbour*.

Many educators have relied on content available within Second Life which may not be available in OpenSim. Even with equivalent material, such as teaching tools available outside of Second Life, some of these may require reconfiguration and, taken as a whole, moving may simply be too daunting. Some educators will inevitably step away from virtual worlds.

However, many educators will stick with what virtual worlds can do and put in the effort to move. Ener Hax has written many articles on how to move plus the trials and tribulations of moving from Second Life to an OpenSim-based environment (see the iliveisl blog – this post appears there as well).

OpenSim alternatives include (1) installing OpenSim on your own server, (2) contracting a third party to install it for you, (3) having an OpenSim hosting provider create a private grid as a stand alone or hypergrid-enabled grid, or (4) joining an existing grid.

1) Installing OpenSim on your own server gives you the greatest control and the least expense. This assumes that you can do the install or have the IT support to get this done.

Installing OpenSim is within the reach of many and numerous articles are out there on doing this (Hypergrid Business has a current guide which may help you decide if this is a viable option).

Your own installation means you can completely secure your world behind your firewalls. For school districts this seems like a great option.

2) A third party can install OpenSim on your server or on website hosting servers that are suited to running OpenSim. Cari.net is a website hosting company that is heavily used by the OpenSim community. They have dedicated servers allowing root access that run OpenSim very well.

We looked into this and contacted Justin Clark-Casey about installing OpenSim for us on our own box. Justin is one of the core OpenSim developers and is available for hire as are others in the OpenSim community.

3) Another alternative is to use an OpenSim hosting provider. Hypergrid Business maintains an up-to-date hosting directory. Compare not only costs but hardware specs as well.

It turned out to be $100 a month less expensive for us to go with a hosting company than running our own box.

How is that possible? SimHost‘s owners include one of the core developers of OpenSim and an admin of OSGrid and they work closely with Cari.net who helps support the OpenSim initiative.

Going with a hosted solution frees you up to do education. You don’t need to know any of the technical aspects and this is similar to being in Second Life.

While I would like to have the technical know how, I would rather focus on our endeavors. For us, virtual worlds are simply a means to deliver science education content, much like a photograph in a textbook. I do appreciate the expertise that our host has because it allows both of us to concentrate on creating immersive 3D educational activities.

Being hosted offers additional options to consider. Similar to a self-installed version, you can be a private grid with your own registration page, you can be firewalled, or you can be part of an existing grid such as OSGrid or ScienceSim. As a private grid you also have the option to be hypergrid-enabled which would allow you and/or visitors to travel to other hypergrid-enabled regions.

4) Joining an existing grid has benefits and some hosting providers run their own grids, such as Reaction Grid. Reaction Grid has a business and education specific grid which is safe for use by students and allows teachers to network. We were with Reaction Grid for 10 months and they are an excellent option.

It seems that private grids, where you can turn hypergridding on and off, are becoming the preferred choice by both educators and business.

OSGrid is somewhat analogous to the internet. You can hop around regions (about 5,000) and hypergrid to private grids. The advantage with OSGrid and a private grid is that you could use OSGrid for your avatar account rather than create accounts for each private grid you visit.

There are many things to consider but there are also many choices. Those choices are growing rapidly.

If you have been thinking of trying OpenSim or are being forced to find an alternative, do your homework, study the offerings, and take the plunge. It certainly can be rough but once done, it is well worth it.

*- Enclave Harbour is a joint venture enjoying the talents of Dream Walker, Nickola Martynov, Micheil Merlin, Ener Hax, and David Miller. Its goal is to serve as a virtual field trip “world” to explore environmental science for middle school students from public, virtual, private, and home schools. To date there are 50 workbook activities developed with additional ones in the works. Expected launch is summer of 2011.

serious builder

Enclave Harbour is hosted by SimHost and runs on a dedicated 64-bit server with 8 gigabytes of RAM, 4 CPU cores, 500 megabyte hard drive, 100 Mbps dedicated port, and 32.4 terrabytes of monthly bandwidth. Our server has been heavily customised beyond the standard install to give us options such as the ability to have 4 GB RAM per sim and additional web interfaces.

This has also been posted on the iliveisl blog.