Why An SL Educator Switched to Mobile Apps Instead

Educator Joe Essid has a good explanation of why he switched from being an evangelist of Second Life as a pedagogical tool to getting behind mobile apps. (Replete with an increasingly obligatory Second Life problems meme.) Sample:

Whoever gains (or in Apple's case, maintains) dominance and establishes the standard matters less to me than the fact that SL and OpenSim do not run well, if at all, on tablets. Unity 3D does for iOS and Android... Concurrent to all this churn, we are moving to tablets on our campuses for consuming media. If Moore's Law holds true, these devices will become better and better at creating content. One does not wish to be on the wrong side of history, and I think SL evangelists are clearly on the wrong side, unless they are early in their careers and have a Plan B for research and teaching.

Read the rest here, it's full of good points. However, I do think Second Life has significant advantages over tablets for many educational applications, which mysteriously, are still under-utilized. For example:

For collaborative filmmaking, architecture, 3D and 2D art, industrial and fashion design, 3D game prototyping for PCs, etc. etc. (And students in those fields are much more likely to have a laptop that can run SL.) The mystery to me is this why so few educators in those fields have experimented with Second Life as a teaching tool.

Tweet

Comments

[Account Deleted]

It's a mistery to me too.
As a Physics Teacher and Researcher, I find SL so unique because of its quite well-developed physics engine (Havok) that I don't (yet) consider moving to other virtual worlds.

[Ferd Frederix]

I am wondering why they do not teach physics in SL. Many experiments can be run there easily and cheaply, and you cannot get the answer out of a textbook.

Some experiments can be run that are NPIRL, such as playing with zero gravity ( or negative! gravity ), and learning how the wind affects various flexible objects. There would be differences, of course, but teaching that 'sticks' is about how to think about the problems, and not so much doing formulas like F= MV.

As an example, what is the friction of the various materials? You would have to slide things around and time how long it takes to slow down to a stop, and from that make predictions about what a given mass would do when sliding. SL is ideal for that, as simple scripts can time things, objects are essentially free, and the results can be calculated with LSL.

This also teaches programming skills, which every researcher must have today.

[Graham Mills]

@Ferd Good ideas. Indeed, I remember talking to someone in 2007 who was doing just that -- though the physics engine was actually not so accurate in those days and effectively a limiting factor.

I quite like LSL but I suspect few would promote it as the ideal first programming language (Scratch seems to have won out there).

Ultimately Linden Lab, for whatever reason, decided that education was no longer a priority area for them. The way in which this was done necessarily engendered doubt in the minds of educators. This, allied to limited interest from hard-pressed colleagues and students, not to mention financial issues, led to education scaling back, migrating to OpenSim or withdrawing completely.

The significant news this week may not be Joe shifting platform but the announcement of edX, the partnership between Harvard and MIT to certificate free courses delivered on their platform. I suspect there may be a metaverse niche there somewhere.

[Iggy]

Irony of ironies:

After writing the post Hamlet references, I was asked by my departmental chair to instead teach a first-year course that includes, as a final project in lieu of a traditional exam, work in a virtual world + a reflective essay or digital story.

I think we missed the fall deadline for iPad grants! So no mobile for me, in all likelihood, until the 2013 academic year.

For the final we'll use my build in SL (if the sponsoring uni does not leave SL this summer because of tier costs) or the full version of that build, an entire region worth of Poe-themed content, in Jokaydia Grid.

I pay my own way there...that's another obligatory meme, Hamlet: 6 months of OpenSim tier for half what one month costs in SL :)

[Iggy]

As to Hamlet's question about why more educators have not tried SL:

1) Tawdry rep of SL from the hype era + (good news in the long-term) slowly eroding resistance to anything "gamelike."

2) Unusual UI and fear of not being expert at something. One music faculty member who tried SL reported "My avatar bumped into walls, kept falling down, and I felt folks were laughing at me."

3) Lack of use in everyday life. I'm finding that faculty and students who carry mobile devices are more likely to try a new app and play a bit.

Mystery: a laptop is very portable and can run SL pretty well. What is it about laptops that keeps faculty and students from trying out new apps, as compared to mobile devices?

The Physics faculty member I note in my post found Sky Safari, and saw an immediate use with our campus telescope. In a sort of augmented-reality setup, students use the app alongside the RL scope. They use the iPad to take notes for class assignments and upload that to the course blog.

SL could not do that, even in a cool 3D astrophysics simulation; you don't point your laptop running SL at the sky to get a sky map. Sky Safari, on the other hand, is all about that feature.

[foneco zuzu]

Still if not Sl, many are using Open sims, so Educators did not loose a amzazing tool, they are simply not paying outrageous prizes for its use!