OpenSim Educators’ Consortium at subQuark

OpenSim Educators’ Consortium

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

Don’t forget John Rogate’s educational enclave on OSGrid — http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2011/06/educator-calls-for-college-enclave-on-osgrid/ — which is moving ahead very quickly.

Meanwhile, personally, I’m the opposite about sharing content. I am much more willing to donate things that I have made – especially if to a good cause, like education — than I am to share something that I’ve bought. Maybe I value my time less than my money. :-) Or maybe it’s the licensing issues.

But I routinely donate writing work to worthwhile causes.

It helps that I’m not in the virtual world design business. I’d probably be a bit more reluctant to donate virtual designs if that was how I made my living. And would not donate at all to for-profit organizations. (They’re going to profit from it, then they should pay for it!)

Maria Korolov

27 Jun 11 at 9:53 pm

Oh, and there’s also the Immersive Education Initiative here in Boston — I hear that they have a large community of educators that are sharing immersive learning content.

27 Jun 11 at 9:54 pm

I think it makes no sense to divide educators into two camps, those who use SL and those who use OpenSim. Linden Lab and the Immersive Education Initiative fall into that trap from opposite sides, VWER, CLIVE and jokaydiaGRID don’t.

Graham Mills

28 Jun 11 at 4:15 am

For the European market there is the virtyou grid. Lots of educators moved there allready. Very stable, reasonable pricing and great service. Lots of freebees like all Sloodle objects working in Opensim.

Niick Zwart

28 Jun 11 at 4:49 am

I think it would be helpful if content creators willing to create and contribute free (CC) material came together as well, and made sure that in this central grid or hypergrid there was a mechanism for sharing the prime educational content that can benefit others. A large problem that makes some teachers and schools slow to adopt OpenSim is the time it takes to “reinvent the wheel.” Grids like Jokaydia are fantastic, but many K-12 schools and districts have policies that would prevent their students from entering these regions. These policies and concerns are often alleviated if the schools can self-host the environment, but they don’t want to have to recreate everything themselves.

I’m not saying Jokaydia et al need to suddenly distribute OARs and IARs of all their material, but it would be valuable if more and more OpenSim content was created for free distribution, and identified in a known, central location so others can download and use it themselves. Right now, the content is scattered all across the web. It would probably be more useful if the downloads were always linked within the virtual world itself. Perhaps a set of “guidelines” for any educational sim wishing to join the common hypergrid could be laid out, so there’s some unity across the sims.

There are some other features that could be implemented in select regions, if an owner chooses, such as region reserving. A script could be added to regions that allow teachers worried about student safety to “reserve” an area for them and their students. During this allotted time, anyone not on the “reserved” list would be kicked out. A public calendar listing all the available regions could help coordinate this.

Also, it would be helpful if available activities were tied to curricular standards. While most teachers are capable of figuring out how to use regions on different grids for their own purposes, it would be helpful to clearly spell out some possible activities, and even which standards/objectives they may apply to in their own state, province, or other location.

Justin K. Reeve

28 Jun 11 at 9:33 am

Hello Maria, I think I am more reluctant to share server time with the general public than content but it is also Ener’s content which is forming the centerpiece of my offering. Our goal is to help reduce the gender gap in STEM careers by encouraging more kids (and particularly girls) to study science in college.

That is the goal but our mechanism is to do this with a workbook and Ener’s builds. This is a venture intended to make money by selling books. The books, hopefully, will be profitable. We have not sunk a large sum of money into this, about $3000 so far plus Ener’s time in creating the builds and my time in writing the exercises, but in the end this is about selling workbooks.

Giving away Ener’s builds is to give away what I see as a large part of what makes this a valuable offering to parents and students. The same with open access. If I were independently wealthy, then I would probably create this as a public resource because Ener would go nuts doing this for the public (just like she blogs for no compensation).

I have thought about running ads in the workbook and in-world to pay for this (the book costs $11 to print), just like you have ads on your blog, and would approach companies such as those actually making wind turbines. However, it adds another step to two already stretched people (we do have someone with 25 years of experience, looking at federal grants as well as partnerships with federal, state, and other institutions).

Great point Graham and it certainly reads that I was proposing an OpenSim-only consortium. A joint resource would be better without a doubt. I think I was framing it (in my mind) as a resource that would work for all of K-12, not just those 16 and older. I was also thinking about how SL has this somewhat done already and that there is no central place for OpenSim or both. We can’t list our Enclave Harbour in any Second Life search nor can we setup an outpost in Second Life that could lead to a visit to our grid.

A single resource, even just a list, including all virtual worlds, would have the most flexibility and power.

Thanks Niick, I will look into virtyou, this is the first I ave heard of it.

Justin, that is a very good goal and with the new hypergrid advances it becomes more possible. Ideally, one central location would be good and it would get filled with crappy tsuff, just like freebie places in Second Life, but that comes with the territory. Maria does lists freebie stores in her Hyperica directory. The challenge, like any of this, comes from resources and they cost money unfortunately.