I spent Thursday and Friday in Orlando at FETC (Florida Educational Technology Conference). I attended a talk from some people at Appalachian State who are using Active Worlds (www.activeworlds.com) to facilitate some aspects of their courses (as a side note, my team my have lost to Ap State this year, but at least we didn’t lose to a team who lost to Ap State). They are using it for online office hours, library services, with a live librarian, and to facilitate assignments, in some ways much like an LMS.
The thing that I liked about Active Worlds, as opposed to Second Life, is that when you buy a space it’s just your space, there’s not this whole expansive network around it. The reason I like that is because while I think it would be cool to get some space in teen second life, doing so means our students could get into our space there, but they could also go into wherever they wanted to in teen second life. Not that I care if they do that in their free time, but I could easily see parents upset that students were exposed to things in teen second life because they created accounts original intended for school use. In Active Worlds, you just buy some land and pay for whatever number of users you want on that land. Now, I am curious about how the building compares to the building in Second Life. I asked, but these people had very little experience in SL so they couldn’t make a comparison.
Another option they showed was Croquet (www.opencroquet.org) which is open source virtual world software. One advantage of this program is the ability to create 3D objects in other programs (like sketchup) and import them into the world. Qwaq (www.qwaq.com) is a program that is based on Croquet and was specifically developed for virtual meeting spaces and online collaboration.
Now, I don’t claim to be an expert and the pros and cons of all of this as compared to Second Life, but what I saw, from a Secondary School standpoint seems to be a better option for me although I will need to do much more research to be sure.
-David
4 comments:
As it is true with all new media, computers, robotics et al. the speed at which they develop is exponential. The reason we are using Second Life for this class is because it has enough of a user base already to make it a meaningful test bed for a variety of projects, without having to do everything from scratch, although that itself is very debatable form my point of view. This class could have also been based on Google Earth with its infinite number of layers and possibilities. It might very well be the next generation browser and Sketchup is a perfect companion for that.
The program that you mention (Croquet) is not only another alternative. It is in fact a real solution to many of the problems that you mention and of course it is 100% open-source (unlike SL which is still partly proprietary.)
Croquet is the new incarnation of Squeak which came from Smalltalk etc etc, a long way back to one of the very successful object-oriented languages. What all this means of course, is that while we talk and sleep the avalanche or tsunami previously mentioned is advancing towards a singularity. We might not even notice when it arrives.
Hey, David - Thanks for posting your thoughts on the FETC. On thing I did notice about Active Worlds was that they don't offer a Mac OS X client.
These days you could always run Windows or Linux on your Mac and use the program that way, but I found that omission a little bit surprising.
Part of the issue is security for business and government. Last week I attended a session of the Metanomics presentations in SL. At 11AM ET every Monday, Dr. Robert Bloomfield of Cornell University interviews key players in the arena of virtual colonization. That session was on Federal Agencies in Second Life. A critical issue for such agencies is how to conduct business behind a firewall, but still be accessible to the public. These are the kinds of issues large commercial businesses will face too.
To see video or a transcript of this session, go to
http://metanomics.net/
and scroll 3/4 of the way down the page to the federal agencies session links.
Doug
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