The report highlights 3 main issues faced by academic developers working in SL, namely cost & time, whether to replicate real life or create new environments, and getting support from your institution.

This regularly updated list indicates the range of educational institutions and organisations with a presence in SL.

Edinburgh University has a significant presence and is putting considerable resources into establishing their Virtual University of Edinburgh (VUE).

Their School of Management has a building with a video promoting their MBA. The School of Informatics also has a large number of buildings, including a Whisky Shop!

This looks like an interesting first – linking up a tv show with activities in SL. Ewan McIntosh has an excellent post here in his blog.

In the last week there has been much interest in the news that a 15 year-old girl, Katharine Berry, has developed a prototype browser-based SL viewer. What’s even more remarkable is that Katherine has done this in her spare time while also studying for her GCSEs.

At the moment, the main features of her viewer include:

* Basic map
* Teleports
* Accepting/declining teleport offers
* Local chat, instant messages
* Inventory received notifications
* Friend on/offline notifications
* Balance change notifications, etc.

Katharine’s blog makes interesting reading as she explains why she started on this project and where she is up to with it.

There is also an interview with Katharine on the Reuter’s SL blog.

In it, Andy Powell (Art Fossett in SL) from the Eduserve Foundation describes his experience in setting and running the conference, and gives an overview of the structure and aims of the event. He manages to highlight some of the difficulties in running such an event but also talks about some of the benefits. It’s worth a look even if you are a regular in SL.

Speakers at the event included Stephen Downes, Gilly Salmon, Hamish McLeod, Jim Purbrick, Joanna Scott and Roo Reynolds. All presentations from the live venue were steamed into 3 virtual venues in SL. To get an idea of how it looked in SL have a look at this collage of photos posted by Anyaka.

The SL event was plague by a slightly late start (when some people were getting restless and acting like a bunch of ungrateful students) and an upside down and inverted main screen until after lunch (see above). This made it interesting as you had to stand on your head and cross your eyes in order to see the speaker and the presentation.
What they said

Jim Purbrick (Linden Labs)

Presentation

Jim gave the opening keynote , emphasising the wide range of areas that SL has been by: artists, performers, businesses, researchers, charities, casinos (he wasn’t keen on those), as well as an ever increasing number of educational institutions. He talked about the skills an individual can learn within SL, including building, scripting, audio, animation, marketing, economics and event planning.
Roo Reynolds IBM

Presentation

Roo works for a team which facilitates the use of Virtual Worlds within IBM. He emphasised that the Web is now a social space. It is an attitude not a technology

IBM are experimenting with SL for social meetings and there are about 3000 employees now meeting up in varying places. It allows employees from around the world to meet up as an alternative to conference calls and email. Talked about a sense of community and now have between 30-40 islands – an IBM continent!

Have been experimenting with shops of the future. They sell items already present in SL rather than creating their own. 3D shopping is the future!

They have 3 auditoria each holding 200 people. They use them for lectures and for their IBM alumni to meet up.

Hamish MacLeod (Edinburgh University)

Presentation

Hamish described “Holyrood Park“, a virtual campus for Edinburgh. He showed how scripting a skydiving experience in SL was an excellent way to learn programming.

Joanna Scott (Nature)

Presentation

Joanna described some of the projects being undertaken in Nature’s Second Nature sim. These included the M4 molecule maker which builds in-world models of chemical structures.

Gilly Salmon (Leicester University)

Presentation

Gilly described the SEAL project, Second Environment Advanced Learning, which aims to explore alternative ways of teaching and learning within the SL environment.

Stephen Downes (National Research Council Canada)
Presentation

Stephen, calling himself “technosceptic”, challenged the audience by asking why we allow virtual events to resemble real life, when we should be using VR to do things differently. He asked why so much attention was being paid to this stuff, where are the crowds, where is wikipedia in SL, where is OpenSource? Imagine if we had done the Internet that way, i.e. one company hosting all the Net. It taps into conservatism , helps people feel comfortable with the technology so they don’t have to do anything different. He said that VR should be exactly what SL isn’t – “distributed hardware and ownership, open source, not proprietary, non-commercial, diverse and democratic”. He was the only speaker to question the value of virtual environments such as SL, stating that it really hadn’t moved on from a MUD. This is so not Web 2.0 – Web 2.0 changes and empowers! Compare with MySpasce where they can really put their own content online and don’t need to simulate it. I can YouTube it or MySpace it.

SL should be distributed so we all own it, the hardware and the software. It should be shared so we can make it better, should be non-commercial at least for education, or a non-commercial alternative. Governance should be diverse and democratic.

I thought this was a good event. It allowed me to take part in an international conference from the comfort of my own study. I learned a lot, not only from the speakers, but also from the other delegates (both the real and virtual). My own knowledge of SL was extended – I now now how to get streamed video. I also got a free virtual tee shirt which fitted perfectly – how often can you say that of a tee shirt from a real conference!

Some other interesting and helpful summaries:

Kathryn Greenhill

John Kirriemuir

Shirley Williams

More screenshots

This is a excellent overview by Andy Powell of SL and how it is being used. Andy explains the basics of how to get into SL and how to find your way around. He also considers some of its strengths and weakness and how it is being used in education. Worth a look.