One of the struggles of building good educational content is making it engaging, something books and games have been doing for ages. Join us for a light-hearted look at the narrative possibilities of an interactive medium and some of the weird hybrids (successful or otherwise) that people have tried. Can we learn from history to make better learning materials in Second Life? (Yes.)

This is a presentation that steps a little outside of Second Life to look at how other mediums deal with the kinds of challenges that Second Life creators face when they are building compelling interactive content.

This session will be about analogy building. We’ll look at how game makers and book makers have approached the kinds of problems that Second Life content creators face. You’ll come away with some new ideas about how narrative and interactivity fit together as well as ways in which they can fall utterly flat.

And you’ll have fun.

With that in mind, here are some things that virtual worlds do really well:

1. Give a sense of space. This is the number one promise of virtual reality – that you can explore a 3d environment. In education this could mean exploring an ancient ruin, comparing the scales of different stars, or flying through the structure of a protein.
2. Bring people together remotely. No surprises here, this is the promise of the Internet as a whole. Unless you are teaching a distance learning course, this feature may not seem very useful. But consider arranging an exchange with students in another school somewhere across the globe. How about having an expert come in remotely and interact with the class? The Exploratorium in San Francisco sends teams to the best spot on the planet to observe an astronomical event and then uses Second Life to broadcast live solar eclipses to people all over the world.
3. Allow multi-channel communication. In virtual worlds, you’ve got a whole host of streams of communication available at once. This allows a highly granular flow of communication. For example, students can send in questions over private chat without disrupting the larger flow of the lecture. It is very easy to convene and flow between groups, simply by setting up small group chats.
4. Offer easy light interactivity. Although the scripting languages used in virtual worlds are robust and powerful, they can grow very complicated. But for simpler needs, it can be very easy to script interactions, allowing for lessons and demonstrations that respond to the actions of students. This can allow them to investigate things at their own pace, watch key events over again and generally engage with the materials in an exciting way.
5. Provide easy resets. If you’ve ever spent several periods setting up some kind of demonstration and lesson, only to have to do it all over again for your second period class, you’ll greatly appreciate this. Like any computer file, you can save your virtual environment at a specific point or set up scripts that allow you to recreate certain conditions. This means that students can come in, mess around with the environment to their heart’s content and if there is a problem, it’s easy to start over, and it’s easy to reset for the next class.
6. Take us to other worlds. Dream big! A virtual world allows you to create places that are impossible in the real world. Whether it’s back in time to historically recreated environments, across space to a place you can’t safely or affordably visit, or to a realm of fiction, be it from a book or your own students’ imaginations. Create a movie studio, visit a volcano, soar through the solar system, explore 1920s Harlem, map out Hamlet’s Denmark.

They key term when it comes to virtual worlds is the second word, “world”. Virtual worlds allow you to collapse and transform geography. Communicating over remote distances, teleporting, and flying, these are the basic moves of the virtual world. People from opposite sides of the planet can be in the same place, and the place they are in can be very interesting.

When you are considering a lesson plan that makes use of Second Life or OpenSim, ask yourself “does my lesson mostly revolve about space, geography or communication? If so, you are probably on the right track.

The answer we give is always the same: “You can.”

But then we have to quickly follow up with some clarification. Because the problem is that they’re asking the wrong question.

Technologies like OpenSim and Second Life are designed to be incredibly flexible. Any virtual world worth using will offer a robust scripting language and with good scripting, the possibilities of what you might create become nearly limitless, given enough time and ingenuity.

Educators, however, don’t have limitless time, especially educators who are just trying to get up and running, or learning to use virtual worlds for the first time. So the real question to ask is “Does what I want to do suit the medium?”

There are some things that virtual worlds do very well, and others that can be done but that go against the grain of the technology. For instance, you can surf the web from within the world. That’s pretty cool, but you are almost certainly better off using a regular web browser day-to-day.

It can be easy to get wrapped up in the excitement of what you can do in a virtual world to the point of forgetting to wonder if it’s what you should do. When planning a new project it’s always worth stopping and asking, “Would I be better off just handing out pencils and paper for this lesson?”

Meerkat is a project of the Open Metaverse Foundation (OMF), and Pleiades has been actively contributing for some time. We see the ability to customize a viewer for educational users and content builders as the path forwards for wider adoption in virtual worlds. To that end, we showed off a few of the new features in Meerkat including:

• The Avatar Radar
• Tweaked usability and better defaults
• Higher precisions and tweaked buildings tools
• The ability to build content offline and import it to Second Life and other Virtual Worlds
• The Grid manager and grid-to-grid teleporting, allowing you to switch between Virtual Worlds without quitting the client.

Pleiades’ involvement with the OMF is part of our wider vision for a metaverse of loosely coupled virtual worlds. Our long term goal is to get Meerkat compatible with as many grids as we can. We want Meerkat to be the link between SL-like virtual worlds, similarly to how a web browser allows you to switch from Facebook to MySpace without any trouble.

Please, check out the lastest build of the viewer on the project’s website. It is available for Windows, OS X, and Linux. And if you are interested in getting involved with the project, please get in touch.

The project source code repository will be based at the Open Metaverse Foundation (OMF), which will also communicate data to users of virtual worlds everywhere.

“We want to give developers and users of virtual worlds the technical information they need in order to make informed platform and software design decisions,” says James Neal, President of the OMF. The OMF also maintains the source code base for the Meerkat viewer.

John Hurliman, Intel’s leading analyst with respect to virtual worlds, describes the technical situation as it stands. “Many virtual worlds are being developed independently with a wide variety of architectures and protocols. There is a range of open and closed source implementations and an increasing demand to connect worlds together and provide common services. All virtual world platforms are currently plagued by scalability problems.”

Pleiades has long sought a means to scale up the services educational institutions provide and connect them across platforms, including virtual worlds.

“A better scaling and connectivity model for educators means a better price and quality model for learners,” says Patrick Edwards-Daugherty, President of Pleiades.

Initial results from the project can be expected as soon as March 31, 2010, according to Project Manager Amanda Levin.

“Virtual worlds offer an opportunity to experience a sort of language and cultural immersion that once required us to live abroad. Coupled with the motivational and addictive qualities of play, we are presented with a new set of tools with respect to language acquisition.” Mr. Edwards-Daugherty was addressing to an audience of design, management, and computer science graduate students.

Developers at Pleiades, the Sorbonne, and at the University of Central Missouri have been cooperating on a virtual world based on Montmartre, a Paris neighbourhood, in the 1920s.

“Meerkat will leverage the knowledge and skills of the open source community and leading virtual world firms to advance the platform,” says James Neal, President of the Open Metaverse Foundation. “Our goal is to expand the scope of metaverse development.”

Pleiades is contributing source code to Meerkat. “We see this viewer project as an opportunity to experiment with new features for educators and students,” says Amanda Levin, who manages Pleiades development efforts on Meerkat.

“Pleiades is extending its long-standing policy of cooperation with open source projects and developers into virtual worlds,” says Patrick Edwards-Daugherty, President of Pleiades.

Professor Bryan Carter, who has been involved for more than ten years in various 3D modeling projects related to the Harlem Renaissance, will be using Virtual Harlem for pilot studies.

“Teaching methods will evolve to match this amazing technology,” he predicts.

Virtual Harlem was built by Pleiades, which retains an interest in any potential commercial revenues it generates.

“We are continuing to develop and expand Virtual Harlem, both within the Second Life grid and beyond,” says Project Manager Amanda Levin.

Virtual Harlem can be found in the Second Life grid at:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Virtual%20Harlem/127/130/30

“This is the first and only way for applications written in PHP or Perl to interact with Second Life,” explains Pleiades software developer Andrew Ortman. “It will let developers like me run web services that can access data Second Life exclusively provides to users of its client software. I think the community will find that very exciting.”

Pleiades President Patrick Edwards-Daugherty has indicated the code base will be available to developers. “RESTbot and its related plugins will be open source. They use the .NET framework and a Mono compatible codebase, which in turn are open source. That means developers will be able to extend the RESTbot code base freely. It is a key component in our latest immersive learning environments, and we expect other developers will benefit from, and add to, RESTbot.”

At a pre-launch demonstration of the technology, Ortman showed how a simulator monitor written in Javascript was able to use RESTbot to capture simulation statistics in real time. “Pleiades is looking to web services providers as early-stage adopters for the RESTbot technology,” he noted.

Pleiades Vice-President Jonathan Freedman will be on hand at the launch tonight to demonstrate the technology and to answer questions.

“There is an evident need for technological development in Second Life, and there are great opportunities for e-Learning there. The growth in the community has been impressive. Cutting edge schools are looking to get involved,” explains Ms. Zwicker.

Pleiades intends to take an active role in the development of immersive virtualization techniques. The company is already engaged in scripting and content development.

“We will not only be an early adopter of this technology,” says Vice-President Jonathan Freedman. “We will also lead in developing and extending it.”