While many of us have talked about how the addition of offline mesh transformed Second Life into a consumer-focused world, educator Joe "Iggy" Essid offered this comment on how it hurt virtual world teaching projects like his:
I recall when Mesh arrived. Most of us in the .edu sector had already left, but I thought "there goes another magical SL experience": team-builds in-world. I think two students I knew could make things in Blender, and even then, it would be made outside SL and imported.
The magic of SL was always when folks interacted, in there. I didn't mind how much more realistic mesh avatars looked or how clunky the physics-engine proved; we were not building avatars or scripting HUDs, but we were making the spaces where avatars interact. I'm not a coder, so I imagine in-world building tools for mesh would be laggy and complex, but then building itself was complex already, the permissions system a mess, and the UI for SL clunky in the extreme.
Had in-world mesh tools existed, some of us in education would have soldiered on and given away Creative Commons content to colleagues, as a brave handful still do in OpenSim. Sure, we could keep using prims, but after a while, our builds would resemble the black-and-white people in Snowcrash's color Metaverse.
We dismantled our project, a virtual House of Usher peopled with actors, one of whom went on to win SF's Nebula Award. I also took down the version in OpenSim, after the host we had closed shop.
A former Linden told me "hey, buy some cool stuff from Turbosquid and import it to jazz up your build."
Sounded good until I priced it. Four items would blow the entire budget. We had already lost two hosts because of the .edu discount coming to an end. Game over.
Essid discusses his project to create a roleplay experience based on Poe's Fall of the House of Usher in this academic paper here and for HyperGrid Business here.
Continue reading "How Offline Mesh Hurt Educational Projects in SL (Comment of the Week)" »
In Coronavirus' Wake, Virtual World-Based Educator Using Both Zoom and Second Life to Teach Her Classes (Comment of the Week)
As educators discuss the appeal of Linden Lab's new post-Coronavirus land discount for schools, teacher and reader Kaylee West offers a unique perspective on using virtual worlds as a pedagogic tool now that her students can't be in the same room as her:
Hopefully someone at Linden Lab notices that last request. Kaylee's been using Second Life as a teaching tool in her university for 12 years, and has noticed some interesting (and positive) advantages to that over the years:
Continue reading "In Coronavirus' Wake, Virtual World-Based Educator Using Both Zoom and Second Life to Teach Her Classes (Comment of the Week)" »
Posted on Wednesday, March 25, 2020 at 01:58 PM in Comment of the Week, Education in SL | Permalink | Comments (4)
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