Second Life at UWE

The first class we have held in SL was a couple of weeks ago, after we had done the treasure hunt, described below. Basically it seemed to go well, but it was rather an artificial setting as we were all in the same room! But, it’s probably best to begin thst way, just in case anyone has difficulties and they need help to get around, chat etc. We did find that the elevator is a really good place to hold a meeting, oddly enough. But, of course, our elevator is rather different from the usual real life variety where you are shut in a small box.  We have several seats and it flies out of the building between floors; more like Willie Wonka’s chocolate factory. We’ll be holding many more classes in the next academic year, with more research methods Master’s students, and students undertaking sociology first year studies in methods of enquiry.

We’re now well on with our planned interactions and activities in the RO in SL, including an animated “decision route” that is intended to help users focus down on their research topics. The picture here shows part of the Focus Room with the panels that ask users about their proposed research. The user sits on a seat by the large diagram panel and then is carried around the room to interact with other panels.  For example, one of the panels that doesn’t show in this picture is a bot that asks users to think about issues that might affect the feasibility of their research. The activity proceeds by users considering the questions they are asked and then deciding if their proposed topic fulfils the requirements for each panel. Then they can click on yes or no, and are whisked off to another panel, depending upon their reply! Manuel has done a fantastic job scripting all this – now I’m lagging behind a bit with designing the panels and the questions, but we hope to have it largely completed by the end of this week.

 We’re just beginning to get our first small group of students (MSc Software Engineering) to use Second Life. 4 have created avatars and we held a treasure hunt last Wednesday as an orientation exercise.  You can download this exercise to see what we were doing (SL treasure hunt).  We’ll be holding our first research seminar for real this Wednesday – I must admit to being a bit nervous about it!

We are making good progress with the content and interaction side of the RO in SL now.  We have experimented with streamed video, but have found a few quirks in SL that can make it rather clumsy.  For instance, when you first land on a site that has streaming media you are asked if you wish to play it. If you click yes, the media begins to play, but you will not be at the right location on the site to be able to see it! There are also restrictions on our site regarding the number of media parels we can have (i.e. 1 !) so we can’t have more than one video playing on the site. Because of this we have opted not to use streaming media for the moment – it’s going to take us a little time to get the hang of it, I think.

 So far we have the following content and activities in the RO in SL:

• A welcome greeter bot that gives out a notecard explaining what the RO in SL is all about and also keeping track of all new visitors to the site – we have had 30 in the past week or so
• Links to the RO website activities that open in the SL browser – individuals can do these or they could form the basis for group discussion during symposia
• A couple of example questionnaires/surveys – we feel that this could be quite a useful method of formative assessment in SL
• The beginnings of our research interviewing techniques bot – currently it is in the form of Max Headroom (for those of us old enough to remember Matt Frewer’s brilliant persona!). We intend to use this bot to enable students to practice different types of question and then identify the type and the use to which they could be put from the answer they get from Max. Early days yet, but this is showing great promise.

Much of this content creation is down to Manuel’s hard work – he’s really getting to grips with scripting in SL.

Here are two more pictures of the RO in SL now that the basic build is complete.
 

The first picture is the underwater “chill out” chat area which, unlike the main room and pods above it, does not have a specific theme regarding research.  This area is to sit and chat and decide what to do with your time in SL.  I particularly like the fish – they even move out of the way when you walk towards them!

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In the second picture I have set the environment to sunset, a lovely time of day in SL when viewed through their new WindLight viewer.  If you haven’t looked at SL through WindLight yet, check it out on the SL website.  You can see that the bridge and the ceiling to the ground floor are lit, for night time viewing. 

If you visit the site at the moment you’ll see that it is complete from a construction point of view, but has little content. That’s the next part of our project. The plans for this include:

• the “bot” talking head idea to enable students to practice different approaches to asking research questions during interviews: below you can see a simple example of a talking head avatar, created on the Voki website. This isn’t a bot, but you can have an asynchronous discussion by leaving comments on the avater viewer.
• streamed video of the students undertaking exercises in the RO in the classroom, to enable them to reflect on their approaches to learning
• streamed videos of students’ views and comments, YouTube style
• once Linden Labs enable live browsing in SL (should be summer-ish I understand) then the RO can form the basis for an interactive session for an in-world workshop or class
• explanatory texts re how the RO in SL works, e.g. the elevator
• a space where students can “stick posters” about their work

and loads more!

Here is a brief update on construction so far. This is a picture of the basic building for the grounded meeting room and information space – you can see that it is suspended over the water, where there will be further spaces for recreation, meeting and symposia.  You can also see the particle stream/light elevator, which takes you up through the pods that relate to each of the rooms in the RO.

We have just signed a contract with a consultancy company that specialises in design and build in Second Life – Citrus Virtual.  The design is ongoing at the moment, and the build will begin in earnest on 4th Feb, with a projected build finish date of 15th Feb.  Following that, we’ll be holding Master’s research student seminars in SL and undertaking evaluation research to see how it is received, and what value there may be in virtual worlds like SL for research education.

 Just as an outline of how the design for RO will look in SL, we don’t intend to build a building in the traditional sense – no brick walls, floors etc! Our concept is for a ”grounding” area for initial symposia and discussion. Above this, and accessible by a particle stream elevator, will be a number of floating pads/pods that support each of the rooms in the RO, topped by a pod that is open to the sky for future-gazing and new idea creation.  You can see that these ideas build upon the winning designs from our design competition below. We will also have more water than we do at present, for underwater chill-out areas.  Our colleagues in Computing are working on the idea of a “chatbot” to inhabit one of the rooms – possibly a Max Headroom  type of personality on a screen, that visitors can ask questions.  The programming behind the bot will “scrape” parts of the Web for the answers, and/or the RO website too. If you haven’t seen a chatbot, take a look at Alice.